#Like every culture agrees that people have both 'masculine' and 'feminine' within them but on entry to the earth the vast majority of peopl

[sammygender]

the thing thats always missing in conversations about gender in general is the fact that 'cis', as an identity, is not a innate Thing Some People Are, but rather a state of acceptance society grooms us into from birth

[hellomynameisbisexual]

A Letter for Parents from a Parent

Dear Parent,

If you are reading this you are most likely trying to be a good parent in an extremely confusing situation and are probably getting lots of conflicting information. You are doing the right thing and can get through this.

I am not an “expert.” I am a father of five and a private music and martial arts teacher who deals with many kids. I grew up in a family with several bisexual individuals and I’ve dealt with these issues directly and indirectly all of my life.

Take a deep breath. Read slowly. You may need to read a little bit at a time and walk away to think. You may be reading this because you suspect, or have discovered, that your child is bisexual, or because your child or someone else has told you so. (Do not assume anything about your loved one based on someone else.) If your child has spoken to you, be understanding and provide a safe, accepting atmosphere. If your child has not, create an atmosphere in which he or she can do so when ready.

By bisexuality, I simply mean the physical and/or emotional attraction to both males and females. Most people who identify as bisexual consider it an independent sexual orientation, not a subset of other more widely-recognized categories. Don’t think of bisexuality as a little bit gay (homosexual) and a little bit straight (heterosexual) but as its own orientation with its own characteristics. People often ask why anyone would choose to be gay or bi (shorthand for bisexual). Most people do not feel that their sexual orientation is a choice; you probably don’t. Our best course of action is to respect the identity of our family and friends, assuming nothing.

I have no clue how many people experience bisexuality or identify as bisexuals. From what I’ve read experts don’t know either; estimates range from only a few to a whole lot of people. The fact is that scientists define bisexuality in many ways. Until they can agree on a definition, these studies are just good ways to spend grant money.

Some bi people are out and open about their sexuality, but many are in the closet (hiding their sexuality), mainly for fear of familial, spiritual and social rejection. Imagine how hard that must be. A bi person—especially a young one—often feels alone, but as a parent, you can help your child find safe ways to discover that he or she is not.

Some bi folks have an almost balanced attraction to the genders, while others prefer one gender and are only occasionally attracted to the other, or have a shifting preference. Some people shift their sexual identity and may have long periods where they identify as straight, bi, or gay. Other people drop labels altogether.

What you have done as a parent has not made your child bisexual, but what you do as a parent can contribute to how comfortable and healthy your child is. There isn’t a cure since it isn’t a disorder, but some people will assure you that it can be cured or is just a phase. That phase thing is confusing, because some people have felt some bisexual tendencies and then gone on to assume a completely homo- or heterosexual identity. This doesn’t mean that everyone who experiences bisexual feelings will. It only means some people experience bisexual feelings that they may or may never act on and identify as gay or straight. Other people live a perfectly happy life identifying as bisexual with feelings that they may or may never act on. Many bisexual men and women have happy monogamous relationships, while some bi people prefer more alternative relationship styles. There are no rules in this area, so I can’t tell you what to expect.

You may have some phases of your own. People finding out that their child is bisexual have been known to experience anger, disbelief, denial, grief – and pretty much every other unpleasant emotion – and some pleasant ones. I can’t tell you what you are feeling, will feel, or should feel. If at any time you or your child are uncomfortable with what you feel, talk to a friend or a professional. There are also support groups.

It may help a lot to talk to your child, who will know more about their feelings than all of the websites, books, and experts out there. You could even help each other through your mutual concerns. If you don’t know how your child feels, tell them so and ask. You may want to consider sharing with your child any bisexual feelings or experiences that you may have had.

As far as letting others—even another parent—know, your child should decide who will know and when, even if it puts you in an awkward situation. Ultimately each person must decide how out he or she wants to be and as loved ones we should respect that. Some people are out in a very “we’re here, we’re queer” way (queer has been adopted by many people with non-mainstream sexual or gender identities) and wear the t-shirt, while others are less expressive.

Sexuality differences also make for social safety issues. Like it or not, kids experiment, so you might consider ensuring that your child has a safe place to bring a date even if you have to stretch your own comfort level. Nobody wants a late night call from an angry parent who just found your child making out with theirs. Trust me: It is far worse when the children are the same sex and this was the first inkling that the other parent had. When straight kids are caught making out in the back seat of a car or in an empty gym, cops, teachers and security guards handle it with one approach; but when those kids are of the same sex, hurtful things are often said or done—sometimes even dangerous things. An ounce of prevention can save a lot of embarrassment and harm.

The scariest thing for me is the suicide rate among gay and bisexual young people. I watched one of my children die at birth and I will do anything to never see that happen again. If that means that I have to get over any of my own issues I will, and I have. Suicide is preventable. Be there for your kid even if you are confused. Don’t be silent because you are afraid that you might say the wrong thing. Bisexuals, especially young bisexual men from the age of fifteen to twenty-five years of age, take their own lives at an alarming rate. Don’t let it happen in your family.

As you look around, you may notice that bisexuality is not very visible in our culture. Given how many experience bisexuality or bisexual feelings at some time, you would expect more. But as a culture, we tend to think in terms of a hetero- and homosexual duality; bisexuality just doesn’t come up and isn’t considered in legal, educational, social and health areas. Some groups have also had specific political agendas to exclude bisexuals and have made an effort to institutionalize biphobia (fear of bisexuals) within our culture. This context has a lot to do with a person’s choice to be out about their bisexuality or to stay in the closet, which makes it rude and even harmful to “out” someone (inappropriately inform others about someone else’s sexual identity).

Another common misconception about bisexuals or any LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi, and transgender) individuals is the issue of promiscuity. Just because your child has a non-straight sexuality or gender identity does not make him or her any more promiscuous than straight kids. And yes, your son or daughter may know his or her sexual orientation and still be a virgin. Your child’s sexual orientation doesn’t matter: You need to talk to him or her about safer sex. If you haven’t, you should be researching that and talking to your child.

You may also be wondering about gender roles and gender identity. Simply put, “Is my son going to start acting like a girl?” “Is my daughter going to start acting like a boy? What should I do?” Do nothing yet, because you may be confused. Gender identity is how a person identifies their own gender and leads to what gender role they fill through behavior. Most bi people maintain their birth gender identity and the accompanying social gender role. People who are shifting their gender identity away from their birth gender and behaving according to the social roles of the non-birth gender are transgender; this is not linked to homo- or bisexuality. A transperson may be bi, gay or straight. But as a good parent, you may want to explain this detail to your child, because he or she might think there is a certain way they’re supposed to act, such as queeny (stereotypical Hollywood character idea of effeminate gay), butch (stereotypical masculine dyke image) or even androgynous (displaying gender role elements from both masculine and feminine social images—the classic rock star stereotype). Your child is allowed to be as feminine or masculine as he or she feels. And those feelings may change with time.

Bisexuality as an identity was identified by name in the 1800s, though we know that it has been around since Sappho and Alexander the Great. In the last few decades it has strengthened socially. There was an unfortunate time when there was tension between bisexuals and the gay and lesbian community. You will run across remnants, but those wounds continue to heal. In recent years, there has been a lot of growth toward community. There are now organizations, such as PFLAG, to help bisexuals and their families.

By reading this you are doing what every parent of every GLBT child should be doing: learning and trying. As long as you are willing to keep learning and trying, you will ultimately get it right. You will make mistakes, but you can fix them. Love your child, not your bisexual child. Love your child who is a person who feels and loves and hates and hurts and dreams and wonders, and who happens to be bisexual.

Sincerely,

Robert L. Barton

[ohjohnno]

Outrageous Fortune Reviewcap: S1E09 (”When The Blood Burns”)

I’ve been demurring on this one, partly because of real life shit (well, mostly that to be honest) but also because this episode isn’t all that good. It’s an episode entirely centering around Antony Starr’s characters, and I sure hope they paid him double, cos the range he needed for it was tremendous. But, unfortunately, one of those characters (Van) just isn’t all that interesting yet, and the other (Jethro) is ill-served by one of the dumbest and most unfortunate sideplots the show has yet had. So, without further ado, we’ll get this one out of the way, and I’ll try and keep it short. 

We open with a dual appearance from the two most irritating characters in the show: Tracy and Suzy Hong, their differences now thoroughly mended and united in enjoying themselves by tormenting Van.

Yeah, it’s as insufferable as it looks. An incensed Van finally snaps and threatens to quit; Mr. Hong overhears, but Van finally manages to stand up for himself and it pays off: Mr. Hong makes him manager of one of his local little stores, which seems to sell mostly cheap novelty junk. I’m not entirely sure why he does this, honestly, but it’s a mildly important character moment for Van, so okay, I guess?

Meanwhile, in the West household, things are getting a little crazy.

Cheryl and Kacey are promoting their new underwear business with a sorta quasi-striptease party, hosted by and for middle-aged women. It’s one of the aspects of the episode I like best, not because the women are sexy but more because they really aren’t; they’re a bunch of trashy fortysomething women, reminding the world that it isn’t just model-type people who like having sex, or who know how to have fun with it. Kacey makes this explicit with a little barb at the morbidly fascinated Pascalle, telling her they didn’t offer to use her as a model because they wanted to use “real women”, which is a nice reminder that toxic standards of femininity cut cruelly in both directions. So, yeah, good segment - made all the better by the horror of the younger girls who’ve been dragged along.

Van returns, utterly nonplussed at the scene before him, and they all retreat to the bedroom. Antony Starr’s comic acting here is great, actually - he follows the others to the room and finds them using his drugs with an indignant and confused response of “well... don’t!”, and it makes me laugh every time. Draska expresses some clear interest in him, which he once again ignores, as usual. The next scene is where the plot properly begins.

The gist of it is this: the Hongs’ local store has their goods transported from warehouse to shelf by Draska’s clan, the Doslics. Van discovers that there’s a discrepancy between the number of trading cards he was meant to be shipped and the number he actually received; he goes and politely asks the Doslics about it, and they do not take that well.

   I come from good people - HONEST people! Made strong by our troubles!

Naturally, they think he’s accusing them of thievery. Naturally, this makes Van pretty sure they really are committing thievery, and a raging Mr. Hong agrees. The two proceed to keep escalating tensions, and the rest of the Wests get caught in the crossfire; mama Doslic gets into a fight with Cheryl in a supermarket car park, Pascalle finds her old tyre-modelling photos all defaced with violent graffiti, and it’s all mildly funny but also kinda dull. Eventually, it turns out that Van’s mate Munter has been stealing the cards from the warehouse all along, using the keys Van gave him for safekeeping. This is not the last time Van will find himself victimized by the consequences of his own actions.

I’m blasting through *a lot* of this plot here really quickly, and that’s cos it just isn’t very interesting for the most part. It’s trying to be a farce, mostly, and it sometimes succeeds; Van’s initial confrontation with the Doslics is really quite funny, and his steadily increasing panic as the situation just goes more and more wrong isn’t bad either. But it’s all a bit too by-the-numbers and predictable, and in the end none of the stakes feel real; we all know that in an episode like this, the Hongs and the Doslics were never really gonna properly come to blows, and they don’t. Van confesses a lot of stuff to Draska in a couple of secret meetings, and while he’s initially paranoid about her loyalty, she proves herself by finding a way to fix the issue; she places all the blame for the break-ins on Eric (who was selling the stolen cards anyway, after buying them from Munter) and the two families come together to absolutely motherfucking whoop the guy’s ass, leaving him looking rather worse for wear. 

      ...next thing I know I’m getting the shit kicked out of me by half the West                                                   Auckland United Nations!

If I have a favorite moment in this plot, it’s probably near the beginning, when the elder Doslic is first bringing in what he believes to be the full shipment of cards. He’s ranting and raving, the whole time he does it, about how much he just damn well hates the “chinks” and their terrible language skills, not to mention their driving - all while speaking in a heavy Croatian accent himself and also, oh yeah, taking their money. This show really does get quite a lot of comedy out of the idea that solidarity between marginalized groups really just doesn’t exist.

The rest of it, though? I mean, it does contain a couple of important moments, I guess. Van, after initially lying to protect Munter and only making everything worse, is genuinely willing to offer himself up, blame himself entirely, and essentially sacrifice himself in order to save everyone’s hides, and only doesn’t end up doing it because Draska fixes it all before he has to. That’s a nice reminder that Van, at his core, really is a genuinely good person, and that his internal conflict as a character all comes from the tension between that and the toxic masculinity he’s had indoctrinated deep within him by his father and the culture he’s grown up in. Cheryl demonstrates where her loyalties lie and takes Van’s side without a second’s hesitation after mama Doslic shows up with complaints; for all her problems with Van, she really does love him unconditionally. But there’s also too much stuff that doesn’t come off, like Van’s boring interactions with a mildly delinquent kid who likes the trading cards, or Tracy’s ever-one-dimensional mistreatment of Van. 

Still, at least it’s better than Jethro’s plot.

Remember how Tracy knows now about Jethro’s little rape-by-deception thing a few episodes ago? Well, she still doesn’t seem to be thinking of it as rape, but she is trying to get him to apologize for it nonetheless. Jethro, meanwhile, wants to root her again, and he knows he can’t do that without apologizing. So Jethro’s plot this episode is several scenes in a row of him miserably failing to pull off a convincing apology, and... that’s it, really. Hugh’s back, being annoying as usual (though it’s intentional enough that it doesn’t bother me too much), and Loretta briefly shows up to mock him for how bad he is at apologizing (talk about the pot calling the kettle black!), but for the most part this is all really redundant and dull. The only interesting part comes in Loretta’s video shack, where Jethro straight up lies to Caroline’s face, right in front of Loretta, in order to make himself some free time to go and keep trying it with Tracy. Loretta, of course, is too sociopathic to feel sorry for her, and we all knew a couple of episodes ago that Jethro wasn’t gonna be able to maintain it with her as a regular relationship, but the beginnings of heartbreak on Caroline’s face as she begins to get an inkling, in her subconscious, of what’s going on is genuinely sad.

But the ending of this plot? It’s awful, and in a really unfortunate way. In the end, see, it turns out Tracy never really wanted an apology; she likes Jethro, doesn’t really care about the fact that he deceived her in such an intimate way, and wants it with him again. She decides he’s ready when... he just refuses to apologize one time, admitting he isn’t sorry because (and this is possibly the worst line of dialogue in the whole show, so brace yourselves): “why would I be, when it was the best fuck I’ve ever had?” 

Eugh.

So they start having an affair, and that’ll stay important. Meanwhile, Van’s plot ends similarly, in the superficial respect: Draska finally convinces him to have sex with her, as a celebration for the two of them getting out of that little escapade with everything intact, and it’s also the start of a relationship. Her toxicity, of course, has been evident the whole time from her unhealthy fixation on him, but if she demonstrated anything in this episode it was her intelligence and resourcefulness, so one suspects bad things on the horizon for Van. Nothing much happens with the rest of the characters - Loretta doesn’t do much other than the aforementioned mockery of Jethro and some mildly funny jabs at Pascalle’s choice of career, and Pascalle doesn’t do much other than get all horrified by what’s been done to her poster. On the whole, then, this is a disappointing episode, and maybe the worst one so far. Van will get good, I promise - the potential is all there already. But we’ve still gotta wait for now. Until next time.

[thesilverheroineproject]

The monomyth known as

the Hero’s Journey

has become widely popular. Unfortunately,

the original

was clearly intended for men and not women. In response, some feminists have created their own, female-centered version, called the Heroine’s Journey. Lucky for us storytellers, both can be abstracted into a structure that works for a wide array of stories.

I’ll take you through a tour of The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock. She created this journey to help real women through life’s hardships, but it has a lot to offer as a story structure. In honor of its feminist roots, I will refer to the central character as the heroine, with female pronouns. However, it applies to male characters just as well.

To show you how it might work in a story, I’m going to develop an ongoing example. I’ll name my heroine Mara. As we go through the steps of the structure, she’ll ride beside us.

Why Use the Heroine’s Journey?

Like other mythic structures, you should use the Heroine’s Journey if it fits the story you want to tell. The structure of the Heroine’s Journey is particularly well suited for:

Character arcs: The stages of the original framework correlate with how the heroine feels, not what she is doing. I’ve externalized this framework, but it’s still a strong choice for a story about an internal struggle.

Quests for identity: The heroine may battle dragons and claim treasure, but the real core of the story is her struggle to find herself.

Themes of privilege and oppression: The heroine taking the journey must triumph despite living in a society that undervalues who she is. You don’t have to include privilege and oppression in your story, but if you want it, this framework will help you bring it out.

Most of all, the Heroine’s Journey is about a heroine who must find balanceas she struggles between the sides of a duality.

Finding Your Duality

First, identify the duality that lives within your heroine. It might be obvious. If you have a half elf, half human caught between those races, that’s clearly your duality. It can also be abstract concepts – perhaps your heroine’s caught between membership in a group and following her individual path. Or between the excitement of travel and the comforts of home. Whatever it is, both sides must be essential to her wellbeing. If you use the light side and the dark side of the Force, you’ll need to portray the dark side as constructive when used in moderation.

The structure refers to one side of the duality as the feminine, and the other as the masculine. Your next step is to pick which side of your duality is which. Use your discretion, but in general:

The feminine is the side of the duality that your heroine identified with as a small child. However, society undervalues the feminine. The story begins as the heroine chooses to reject it.

The masculine is the side of the duality that your heroine adopts as she comes of age. Society prizes the masculine, but in many tales it has been poisoned, misinterpreted, or taken to such extremes that it has become harmful. The heroine sets out on her journey by embracing it.

Example

Mara is a war orphan who was raised by the Sali people. They’re a peaceful farming culture that meditates every day and values quiet and contemplation. However, they’re a minority in the nation they live in. Their culture and society will be Mara’s feminine. Though they raised her, Mara is actually descended from a warrior culture, called the Barock. Once nomads, they’re now the ruling class. They will be her masculine.

The Eight Stages of the Heroine’s Journey

Here’s an overview of the stages of the journey. I lightly modified the stages from Murdock’s original structure to create a version that was easier for writers to follow.

1. Shift from Feminine to Masculine

During stage one, the heroine rejects the feminine in favor of the masculine. She may still be tied to the feminine, but she increasingly resents that attachment.

The Mother

She could have any number of reasons for rejecting the feminine, but a unhappy relationship with a feminine role model, known as the mother, is chief among them. To the heroine, the mother represents the worst of the feminine end of her duality. She might be powerless, unhappy, flawed, or just interpreted that way. The mother is threatening to the heroine because she’s afraid of becoming her, just as Luke Skywalker fears becoming Darth Vader.

Alternatively, the mother may be intimidating in her strength and perfection, particularly if you decide to make the feminine more privileged than the masculine in your story. The heroine may reject her to avoid feeling inadequate next to her.

The Father

As she rejects the mother, the heroine will embrace a metaphorical father. The father represents whatever the heroine admires in the masculine. He may have a dark side, or be a despicable person altogether, but she isn’t aware of that yet. He opens to the door to a path that leads away from the mother, and makes the heroine feel like she could succeed on that path. In turn, she does her best to gain his attention and approval.

He offers an escape from the mother, but at the same time he might rub in that the heroine is tied to the lowly feminine. He could praise her strength and brilliance as he tells her the feminine makes her weak and stupid. This will only spur her harder to prove herself in his eyes.

As a result of this dynamic, the heroine discards the feminine, and any part of herself tied to it.

Example

Mara has no memory of before she came to live with the Sali. She is content to live with them until she turns twelve, and is allowed to go into town to trade at the market. There she learns that everyone thinks of the Sali as cowards, because they hide behind their walls when the swarm comes, instead of helping to protect everyone. She also meets the Barock. They look like her, and they appear powerful and confident. She’s curious about them; the older warriors humor her by showing her how to handle their weapons.

But her Sali guardian doesn’t approve of the way Mara has begun to prize possessions she gained in the marketplace, or how she runs off to the market when she has nothing to trade. He forbids her from going to the market for a month, instead mandating regular meditation. This only makes her more determined to leave the Sali and join the Barock.

2. The Road of Trials

In stage two, the heroine sets off on a journey, departing the ordinary of the feminine and fully embracing the masculine. This might mean she actually leaves home, sword in hand, or it could just mean that she abandons sewing classes and goes fishing instead.

Regardless, she has something to prove to herself and others. In her new journey, she is surrounded by masculine allies. They still think she is less, or at least not one of them. In her heart, she believes they’re right. But that doesn’t mean she’ll give up. She’s fixated on showing everyone that they’re wrong.

For that, she needs big victories. She wants something to show others, like a trophy or treasure. In pursuit of her prize she will face threshold guardianswho try to deter her, and battle real or metaphorical monsters.

In her enthusiastic pursuit of the masculine, she forgets to stay in touch with her inner self. All her actions are designed to make her look better to her masculine allies; she never does anything because she simply wants to do it. She’s always compensating for the feminine lurking within her.

Example

At sixteen Mara finally comes of age. She forgoes the Sali coming of age ceremony, and abruptly leaves to join a band of Barock warriors. She wants to help them protect others against the swarm. The group agreed to take her, but not all of them think it was wise. They’ve been training with weapons their entire lives, and their skill is superior to hers.

So she trains day and night. Whenever there is a fight, she is out in front; no one can call her a coward. The mark of a great Barock warrior is the stinger of a swarm queen. She’s determined to capture one of her own.

3. The Illusion of Success

By stage three, the heroine has faced great trials and emerged victorious. She feels the thrill of success, and her confidence is bolstered by the applause of others. She has built an impressive, masculine reputation.

But that does not dull her appetite for adventure and victory in masculine pursuits. On the contrary, as soon as she finds success on one quest, she immediately sets out on another. Her victories are never enough, so she tries to do more and more to distract herself. She must maintain the outside validation and applause that makes her feel justified as a person.

Somewhere inside, she begins to realize that something is missing from her life. She feels stretched thin. She looks in the mirror, and isn’t sure she knows the person looking back. Even her victories seem empty. She counsels the great and powerful, but does not feel great and powerful herself.

Example

Mara collects her first queen stinger, and then another, and yet more. In her twentieth year, she destroys an entire swarm with a fire trap, and is hailed as the savior of the town. The Barock remark that she is remarkable despite her Sali upbringing, and she’s given a pass to watch as the High Council deliberates.

But the stingers and praise feel small and trivial to her. They were too long in coming and too hard won. Mara spends her spare time pouring over her battle maps, devising new strategies to try against the swarm. She never stops to rest, because she doesn’t know what she would do with herself if she did. She is nothing without her endless hunt of the swarm.

4. The Descent

In stage four, tragedy strikes. It could be a cataclysm that shakes the world, or a private matter that no one else knows of. Regardless, she is suddenly made aware of what’s really important to her. When her allies come to usher her along on the next adventure, she turns them down.

They tell her she is a coward. Or perhaps that she is selfish, impulsive, or whatever despised quality the masculine attributes to the feminine. But she doesn’t hear them. She is already far away, undergoing her own inner turmoil.

She begins a period of voluntary isolation, descending into a metaphorical cave. There time passes slowly. It’s dark; there are no sights or sounds to distract her. There she searches for herself.

She may have to sift through a maelstrom of emotions. Anger, remorse, and grief may all set upon her. She might be afraid to follow her thoughts and feelings to their conclusion, but she knows she must.

Example

Mara and her warriors are battling against a large swarm that is precariously close to a village. A lookout catches sight of the queen in the distance. There is just the barest of openings to pursue her. Mara takes it, leading a group after the queen.

She succeeds, but on her return, Mara finds her departure opened a breach in the defense. As a result, a nearby Sali settlement was overrun, killing everyone inside. The old memories of being in the Sali come back to her and she weeps over the fallen. She tells her warriors to move on, but she stays to bury every one of them. The Barock think she’s lost her nerve, but they eventually leave. She continues her work alone.

5. Meeting With the Goddess

The heroine begins stage five in her darkest hour. But she is rewarded for her struggle when she encounters the goddess.

The goddess symbolizes the true nature of the feminine, and the best of what the heroine left behind. The goddess imparts a great truth to the heroine about herself and the feminine.

When the heroine parts with the goddess, she feels reborn.

Example

Mara spends weeks burying the fallen. She leaves the destroyed settlement, but does not return to the Barock. Instead she wanders aimlessly.

Then Mara sees an old Sali city, abandoned since the invasion of the Barock long ago. She goes there and walks through what’s left of the ancient Sali temples and streets. Everything is familiar from her childhood, yet greater than it. She is filled with nostalgia and wonder. She remembers the happy days in her Sali settlement, and begins to miss it.

She is perplexed by how open the city is. It has no walls to block out the swarm. The only thing marking the city borders are enormous braziers. She can only conclude that before the Barock came, the Sali did not struggle against the swarm like they do now.

6. Reconciliation With the Feminine

In stage 6, the heroine heads back to the familiar surroundings she left behind. She finds and nurtures her inner child, the part of her left from before she rejected the feminine. She may seek to bond with the mother, and to gain new understanding about her.

She spends her time on simple tasks of a feminine nature. She receives no glory for her toil. Former allies find her and try to convince her to return to the way she was before her descent. Even the mother or others of the feminine may not welcome her back, remembering her rejection of them with bitterness.

But she continues her humble work. She maintains hope that if she continues down the path that feels right to her, she will be redeemed. She waits patiently for improvement.

Example

Mara returns to the settlement she was raised in. They tell her she is not a member of the Sali, because she did not undergo the coming of age rite of their people. But she refuses to go. She sits on their steps and fasts until they allow her to work the land beside them. She speaks with childhood friends, but they hesitate to socialize with her.

Her Barock warriors find her there. They tell her to get herself together and come back with them. She refuses. They warn her there is a swarm that is coming soon. She says she has other, more important work. Slowly, the Sali begin to trust her again. She undergoes the coming of age ceremony she missed.

7. Reincorporation of the Masculine

In stage seven, a crisis erupts in the realm of the feminine. In dealing with this crisis, the heroine once again faces the masculine side of herself, ready to emerge and dominate. She now understands the inner need that the masculine fulfills, and why she lost herself in it before. She recognizes that while the masculine was not her true goal, it was an important part of her journey.

And she refuses to let it take control. Instead, she channels her masculine impulses to positive ends. She solves the crisis with serenity and grace. When it is over, she asks for no rewards.

Example

There is a weakness in the wall around the Sali settlement. When the swarm comes it breaks and they leak through. Mara does not have her sword, so she grabs a staff and runs out to fight them. She blocks the opening in the wall, allowing the Sali to fall back and reach safety. She is tempted to continuing fighting, to see if she can outlast the swarm. But the Sali call her to retreat behind the next wall. They will survive without the crops the swarm will destroy. She listens, and retreats.8. The Union

By stage 8, the heroine has found balance between the feminine and the masculine. But she is not finished until she helps others find that balance as well. She uses her synergy of the feminine and masculine to bring everyone, on either side, together. If they are embattled by a great enemy, her leadership guides them to victory.

If it fits your story, this is also the time to discard your duality altogether. The heroine could reveal that it is false, arbitrary, or destructive.

Example

With permission from the Sali leaders, Mara acquires a new set of weapons. They are not flashy, but functional. However, she does not think that simply cutting down the swarm is the answer. The Sali traditionally burn a special incense when the swarm comes, but only inside because it’s not allowed elsewhere. She thinks this incense repels the swarm, and that is how the Sali used to survive before the Barock came. Mara convinces the Barock leaders of the town to try it.

The Sali gather the ingredients for the incense in large quantities, and prepare bonfires. Because there are no large and protected braziers to burn it in, Barock warriors must protect the fires from the swarm when it comes, or the creatures might put them out too quickly to have an effect. The swarm comes, grouping together and rushing at the fires. The warriors stay firm. Soon, the whole area is filled with the fumes from the incense. The swarm weakens and retreats. The town is completely undamaged.

The town leaders mandate the construction of large braziers immediately afterwards. The Sali and Barock design and build them together.

The Union With the Hero’s Journey

If you’re a structure-phile who’s been wondering this whole time whether your story could be both a hero’s and a heroine’s journey, your answer is “yes!” Mara just did it.

Here’s how the stages of these two structures match up:

Heroine’s JourneyHero’s Journey

Shift From Feminine to MasculineOrdinary World; Call to Adventure

The Road of TrialsCrossing the Threshold; Tests, Allies & Enemies

The Illusion of SuccessThe Approach

The DescentThe Ordeal

Meeting With the GoddessThe Reward

Reconciliation With the FeminineThe Road Back

Reincorporation of the MasculineThe Resurrection

The UnionThe Return with the Elixir

Because the hero’s journey focuses on external struggle, and the heroine’s journey focuses on internal struggle, they have a lot to offer each other.

Applying the Structure to Your Story

It’s important to remember that the Heroine’s and Hero’s Journeys aren’t recipes that should be followed precisely. Don’t add a literal goddess to your scifi story just because the Heroine’s Journey has a goddess stage. Instead, find a world-appropriate story element that symbolizes truth, and use that. It’s these larger, more general concepts that make the structures strong. Use them to find meaning and inspiration for your story, and bring them out. If breaking the rules of the journey makes your story feel stronger to you, do it.

[comicteaparty]

May 16th-May 22nd, 2020 Creator Babble Archive

The archive for the Creator Babble chat that occurred from May 16th, 2020 to May 22nd, 2020.  The chat focused on the following question:

What are you trying to show or tell with your story that you find to be underrepresented?

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

-Mind control/mind reading where both people are okay with it. I like themes of trust -"Superpowers" without secret identities. Because researchers aren't always evil goddamnit! -Portraying people who hurt others not as card-carrying megalomaniac villains but as pitiful and broken people. I haven't gotten to this part of my story yet but I hope I can do it well when I do. -Queer characters but they never say that they are or talk about it in any way. Yes I know I'm probably the only one who wants this

Also, maybe the idea that you don't need to "do anything" with your life for it to be worthwhile? But I'm not sure that I believe this myself

Deo101 [Millennium]

Mostly I'm trying to write about love, and I hardly think that's underrepresented! But, I'm also trying to show a bit of my own personal disabled experience, and I find that the kinds of things I've experienced are hardly represented at all. so, I think I'm trying to show a sort of hope and positivity for things that I think are usually pitied and viewed negatively, which I wish were done more.

chalcara [Nyx+Nyssa]

I just wanted a good ol' classic Eddings-style fantasy romp, but with characters that would usually be cast in the "evil" role, without going the "misunderstood" route.

Plus I wanted to write about shitty family (born, found and married) and that you do NOT have to forgive them in the slightest to move on and better your life.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

Hmm... One of the main things I want to express with Whispers of the Past is that after past traumas, you may not be the same, but eventually, you can be okay again—even if your "okay" of now, is very different than your "okay" of the past. Normalcy isn't a constant. It shifts with time and becomes something new. A new stasis. A new peace. A new normal. I don't know if I've ever seen another story show this in this way. Another underrepresented theme in WotP is that of the hero choosing mundanity over the amazing. When the quest is over, and all is said and done, and the big baddie has been vanquished, the hero doesn't become ruler, or claim bountiful riches, or sail across the sea to find new lands. No, the hero returns to a world that is familiar and unremarkable. The hero would rather just be an average person.

shadowhood (SunnyxRain)

-Fanfiction. I’m very surprised there hasn’t been a webcomic talking about what it’s like to create fanfiction! But overall the culture involved around it and being a creator. -The relationship and hardships of having a stepparent/being one. Particularly stepdad/stepdaughter relationships -Anger as a reaction to trauma. I see a lot of trauma portrayed as mostly sad, but I want a story where the heroes feel anger, where it’s seen as both a motivator and a detriment -The hardships of dating as someone who’s both touch aversive and on the grey spectrum. Not everyone would be as wonderful or understanding, but it’s important to be around people who are and will stand by you.(edited)

eliushi [a winged tale]

This is why I gravitate towards all these stories made by independent creators I think. So many personal and poignant messages. I’m with you there on the queer characters Eightfish. I want a society where it’s fine to be what you wish and respected to be who you want to be. I think having more positive ways of showing how we can reach that sort of openness can be helpful. In AWT I further explore: - characters in STEM fields and approaches to research design - informed consent and what that means - how to live even when things are falling apart around you, when things are falling apart within you - navigating through crushes, confessions and friendships!

Wow the beginning sounds like the objectives at a science lecture and you won’t be wrong thinking so

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

For my Hybrid Dolls comic, there are several things I want to explore: - Psychological trauma and the effects or damage it can give, without proper treatment. -Writing queer characters without them needing a self discovery episode. But I know some identities are better to be upfront? But in the story, they simply live normal or exciting lives - Narcissism in a relative that one doesn't have to forgive. Being treated as invisible or judged by age, birthright. - Other Concepts of love explored. Attraction that isn't conventional romance. - Friendship bonds between girls, and my own take on an eccentric quirky girl lead. - Being unapologetically feminine, girls who doesn't need to feel like being 'one of the guys' I'm aiming for more character variety in historical fiction, instead of yet another story of a girl 'defying gender norms' by raised as a boy/disguises trope in other similar comics. So the women in my story, use their wits and charm.(edited)

DanitheCarutor

I complain about this all the time, so I'm just going to do a quick overview since I'm sure everyone is sick of it. - Abusers can be smart, popular, generous, charismatic and subtle. I'm kind of sick of them always being portrayed as really obvious, and sometimes really stupid, while there are people like that it's not very practical for them all to be like that. - General mental health stuff. More open representation of it, that it may be something you'll live with for the rest of your life and how that's okay. - Trauma, how it can change you, make you lose sight of the person you were and make you lose interest in things you used to enjoy. (this is coupled with mental health) - Non-romantic relationships with a queer cast. While this is showing up more in fantastical indie works, not very common in slice-of-life type of comics. I can only imagine this is because readers would find it boring or too mundane (can't tell you all how many people tell me my comic is boring. Lol), but being a person totally sick of romance in everything I wanted to do something focusing on family, friendship and the relationships we have with ourselves. - You don't always heal completely. I've already mentioned this, but I want to put a focus on how someone who's been through a lot of shit doesn't alway heal completely, and that's okay. I see in a lot of media where people just overcome their issues, and they live happily ever after with everything all perfect, I want something along the lines of "we still got a long way to go, but we're doing better and we're happier than before". - Not having labels for everything. This sounds like hipster trash, but I don't see the point in putting labels for every character. Like, I put labels for them, mostly during Pride, but it feels pointless in the comic. Apollo is happy to say he's a gay man, but with Julian they're not interested in categorising themselves, all they want is to be comfortable and I don't see nothing wrong with that.(edited)

LadyLazuli (Phantomarine)

For me, it’s the importance of communication and empathy, and the dangers of its absence. And it’s something I’ve had to think about a lot recently, being more active on social media Everyone’s got their reasons/methods for cutting people off, but I’ve never been a huge fan of a point-blank communication cut unless it’s absolutely warranted. And I’m not a fan of instant demonization when someone messes up or does something I don’t agree with. People are people. We’re all different and we all mess up and we all can change. Keeping lines of communication open is essential for allowing that change, or else we all get locked into little echo chambers where anyone outside is automatically The Worst.™ In a world where everything has gone to hell - and may go further yet - how can things heal when no one is even listening to each other? Where the other side is automatically at fault no matter what? It’s something I grew up struggling to understand (maybe because I grew up outside Washington DC, lol), and really affects me to this day. And if you do end up protecting yourself with silence, how can you still allow other perspectives to be gleaned? I don’t quite have the perfect formula for it. But unless someone is genuinely trying to cause harm, I try to at least attempt to understand where they might coming from - whether I accept it or not. Otherwise it’s so easy to see a lot of people as monsters. It’s a complicated topic for sure, especially nowadays. But yeah. Something like that

Miranda

Hmm that’s an excellent question. Well, a big thing is the varying effects of trauma and ways to handle it. Mainly how burying the past and ignoring traumatic events can affect someone. Also that villains can be people we relate to that just take an extreme way of reaching a goal that most people can understand And how shared experiences can bring people closer (not a unique one) I also want to portray queer characters that are not solely defined by their queerness and don’t have to announce it to everyone.

Tuyetnhi (Only In Your Dreams!)

- Having some talks about the implications of asking what you wish for and the potential consequences that comes with it. - Having more unappologic Vietnamese things happening in the comic. Giving representation to some common things that most Vietnamese Americans (or Asian Americans) can face in terms of relationships, roles, etc. Also since er i'm also directly affected by this, how does the Mixed-Asian Identity plays about it too.(edited)

hmmm I think another thing is that I want to bring up that men who express themselves in a more feminine form is valid and there's no shame that comes with it (positive masculinity hell yaaaa). Also same about expressing characters who are also queer but aren't defined about it either. it's just what they are along with their other interests and goals.(edited)

sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead)

wow, this is a great question! I'm trying to be better about interacting here so I'll give it a shot. My comic is a historical fantasy set somewhat in Interwar Europe/WWII Europe and partially in a fantasy world based on the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. -War stories/histories that aren't about the actual experience of combat: most memoirs and diaries of soldiers I read doing research are about the day-to-day activities, meals, sleeping habits, and random thoughts instead of fight descriptions. It really bothers me when people zero in on in-depth battle maps and obsess over what kind of rifle was used by whom when, when I think it's much more interesting and important to look at the mindset of who was fighting, why they were fighting, and what emotional effect it had on everyone involved (including civilians!) -Asexuality, especially asexuality in history, bc it tends to "disappear" in the historical record as people who may have been ace before that label was widely used tend to not self-identify as it. I'm ace, people in the past were ace, it's a history I'd like to talk about more! -gryphons, they're cool monsters and I think they should be used much more than they are haha

eliushi [a winged tale]

I agree sierrabravo. I find it’s the personal, down to earth, close perspective accounts in historical records that resonate the most with me. Gryphons are also awesome!

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

I feel like there's two separate answers for Super Galaxy Knights Deluxe R (http://sgkdr.webcomic.ws/comics/) The first is what SGKDR represents compared to other webcomics. To me, a major thing I wanted to show with Super Galaxy Knights was a new style of creating webcomics. Animation is underrepresented as a storytelling style, sure, but the main thing I thought was underrepresented in the webcomic space was a "seasonal" method of storytelling. Like, most webcomics I see are either "each page is its own thing" or "it's one big long story, with chapters mostly there to split up different scenes/locations". I very rarely see webcomics build to a major climax in the story, then a resolution, then introduce a brand new conflict. The second is what SGKDR represents compared to other action series (specifically shonen manga/anime, as that's what SGKDR riffs off of the most). I can only think of one shonen story with a female lead, I can't think of any with an explicitly LGBTQ+ protagonist (i only know of one implied one), romance is usually handled very poorly (characters usually get paired with the protagonist due to being female and in the same room, with very little actual relationship building), there aren't many varieties of character motivations besides "pursuit of power/status" of some kind, power scaling usually gets way out of whack, and I... I dunno, I love those kinds of stories, but it just gets tiring after a while. So, I wrote my own that had all the things I wanted in it.

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

@sierrabravo (Hans Vogel is Dead) I totally agree with the difficulty and importance of talking about ace representation in a historical setting! It's extremely difficult to talk about when asexuality was so unknown at the time. I'm eager to see how you handle it!

eliushi [a winged tale]

@snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights) can you speak about

I very rarely see webcomics build to a major climax in the story, then a resolution, then introduce a brand new conflict.

I find slice of life/ some really long mangas with continuous streams of antagonists/web novel like formats use this too but unsure if that’s what you were referring to?

I am also looking forward to more ace representation in the webcomic world

snuffysam (Super Galaxy Knights)

Yeah that format is the sort of thing I was talking about. It's out there, but I don't see it very often.

eliushi [a winged tale]

Ah gotcha! Thanks! I recall some slice of life high school ones I’ve read years ago that have that sort of narrative structure (which feels like the story can continue forever).

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

There's a recurring trope in SF/F where the robot/AI/golem learns that it wants to have free will and make its own decisions. Or there's a biological species that are assumed to be "natural servants", and inevitably you get to the reveal that they're not actually any different from humans in terms of wanting self-determination and independence. If you think of this as a metaphor for relationships between different groups of humans, then yeah, that's the obvious outcome! But one of the great things about SFF is that you can write things that aren't just "direct metaphors for real-world issues, with spaceships and dragons thrown in for flavor." So in But I'm A Cat Person, I wanted to write something about, what if there's a group of beings who really aren't going to develop free will or self-determination? What's the reasonable, ethical way to deal with that? ...also: there's a ton of nonbinary characters in webcomics these days, but at least I can say BICP did it before it was cool.(edited)

Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn)

Leif & Thorn, meanwhile, has a regular old "character forced into servitude, who definitely has independent thoughts and desires that are being controlled" situation. And there's no "Master has given Dobby a sock" loophole they can exploit for a quick fix, so they have to keep up a long-term process of double-talk and rule-bending, to communicate Leif's actual feelings without getting him in trouble. The "realistic language barriers with no convenient universal-translator to get around them" situation -- which, in this comic, is one of the biggest Underrepresented Things I wanted to explore -- makes it that much harder...

Capitania do Azar

I gotta commend you on that, @Erin Ptah (BICP | Leif & Thorn) because you're out there serving my bilingual needs

kayotics

Ingress Adventuring Company is all about the hero after they've finished saving the world, which I think is pretty underrepresented. It's not a quiet contemplative story, since there's still a lot of fun questing stuff going on, but I'm trying to make it clear that this all takes place after the main character has done his big saving the world quest and is still trying to figure out his place after supposedly settling down.

Eightfish (Puppeteer)

I love that Kay

Toivo feels like he has so much history behind him

sssfrs (JOE IS DEAD)

I'm trying to represent orthodox/religious jews because I almost never see my community represented in media. There are orthodox Jewish characters that will be appearing in Joe is dead. In future comics I want to try to plan the story more around including more religious Jewish characters because there still aren't that many in my current project

Also mental illnesses, like trauma and intellectual disability I want to represent my own experiences with it

There isn't as much of a distinct lack of that in media but it's good to have in stories(edited)

Also androgynous lesbians

Nutty (Court of Roses)

With Court of Roses, I'm trying to tell a fantasy story that's for older audiences but proving that Mature Fantasy doesn't have to be ultra gritty. People have each other to depend on, the world isn't bleak, and not every noble is greedy, peasant is starving, etc. I know a lot of fantasy likes to take from realistic Medieval Europe, but the freeing part about making my own world is that it doesn't HAVE to be like that. Their religion is different, more accepting, and again, people are more focused on looking out for each other and having a good time.

Mature themes are still present, such as murder, banditry/pillaging, alcohol, traumatic experiences, etc. but my goal isn't to present them in a darker fashion.(edited)

keii’ii (Heart of Keol)

I wanted to make something influenced by my culture (Korean) without heavily drawing from the mythology. Mythology is just one facet of a culture, yet a lot of people who haven't read it expect HoK to be all about Korean mythology just because it wears a metaphorical hanbok. No. It reflects the traditional aesthetics, but more importantly, the cultural values and the unspoken rules of the society, regardless of whether I agree with them or not. Related to that is body language. I don't want my non-American characters using American body language, such as shrugging, or American ways of using eye contact, etc. I want to show them using (mostly) Korean gestures, sitting, standing and walking like Koreans. I always feel like there's a huge missed opportunity when friggin' aliens use American body language in sci-fi! I understand why people do that -- it makes the work more clear/accessible to English-speaking audience. But in HoK I'm taking the other path. It's a challenge for sure, but I would not have it any other way.

On a more thematic level, I really wanted to explore deeply hurtful experiences that happen in genuinely caring relationships. It's not about good guys vs bad guys, it's not about a nice person being hurt by someone who just doesn't care. Those stories certainly are valid, just not what I wanted to do with HoK. This story is about people who love each other, but don't always know how to communicate their love or needs.

Joichi [Hybrid Dolls]

I am also looking forward to more ace representation in the webcomic world

@eliushi [a winged tale] I agree, the ace rep is a challenge I would like to take on, I'm also curious how it will work in historical times? Even tho I'm ace,I'm still learning new innovative things(edited)

eliushi [a winged tale]

It’ll be important to dig deeper and research into what things were like if you want to capture the authenticity of the period you’re writing in! I’m sure there are personal accounts or documentation of these lived experiences.

Capitania do Azar

I see all these beautiful answers and I almost struggle to find something other than those to say I guess for O Sarilho https://www.sarilho.net/en/ I wanted to write a weird love letter to where I live and how I see my country (tho I'm glad I got other places I love in it too). To my knowledge, we don't get much like that, or at least that's not from a city perspective which is not what I'm trying to go for, at all. There's a lot of tiny cultural things that I want to touch that may be invisible for people who are not from here, but I'm glad that I'm including them for those three readers in the back. Linked to this, in a way, is the fact that I get really tired of those white/gray Sci-fi stories where everything is super clean and super white and technology is absolutely overwhelming and organised. I want Sci-fis in the woods too. And finally, there's something about the way violence is portrayed a lot of times that almost makes you feel like human life just is that cheap. I really don't want to go that road, I'm doing my best to tell a story about war in which death still leaves a toll and violence affects everyone involved

TL;DR I WANTED TO PAINT MY HOUSE

Cronaj (Whispers of the Past)

And finally, there's something about the way violence is portrayed a lot of times that almost makes you feel like human life just is that cheap. I really don't want to go that road, I'm doing my best to tell a story about war in which death still leaves a toll and violence affects everyone involved

@Capitania do Azar This is so beautiful (and tragic). This is something I also hope to express in my work. Super underrepresented message surprisingly.

eliushi [a winged tale]

I enjoy exploring sci-fi beyond the current conventions and absolutely love your setting shizamura!(edited)

Capitania do Azar

Thank u I really love Sci-fi but I don't appreciate that it has become associated with a very specific aesthetic because tbh I find it very limiting

DanitheCarutor

@Capitania do Azar That is actually really refreshing! Horror and action are so packed with glamorized death and violence, you can get really desensitized. The only stories I've ever seen that take those things seriously are war movies based on real life events, like Saving Private Ryan, (which my grandpa, a Korean War vet, said was the most accurate portrayal of what war was like.) and even then you get flicks that totally glamorize the whole thing. I really admire you wanting to put that sense of gravity onto the violence and death in your work, also I love when creators want to tackle war in all it's "too close to home", upsetting realism.

Capitania do Azar

I really love Saving Private Ryan, it is a very nice portrayal with a great message: nobody wants to be here

DanitheCarutor

Yes! I love Saving Private Ryan too, it was nice seeing a movie that didn't make war look like some fantastical bs.

[a-cai-jpg]

frailty, thy name is woman! (HAH)

So the other day, I was ambushed by a group of tiny puppies.

I was in the park, breathing some fresh air and sunshine for the first time in a long, long time. I sat on a grassy hill--notebook just recently closed and resting in my lap--staring blankly at the amphitheater beneath me and suddenly, I hear barking to my right and felt something nudge my thigh.

Not gonna lie, I almost screamed and whacked the puppy in the face.

They were three beagles(?), bounding around the hill because, according to their owners who respectfully stood 6 feet away from me, they hadn't left the house in a week. 

(same.)

Anyways, before they came to say hi, I was listening to a sad, acoustic playlist and writing down notes about women.

(it's not weird if u don't make it weird)

That morning, I had woken up thinking about women's issues. 

Sexism is not exactly the social issue I'm most preoccupied by. It's prominent in every aspect of life, but because I've been fortunate enough to be sheltered from most of it, the sexism I experience is very subtle and difficult to pinpoint. I grew up in a primarily female household with a lot of strong personalities, and only recently did I begin to take note of the almost indiscernible power dynamic between the men and the women.

So, most of my life, I've just been kind of cruising along, with this vaguely gender-less persona that only started to shift some time in university.

A friend once asked, "How do you know that you're a woman?"

I think this was during the same time I was taking a philosophy course about theories of sexual differences, and so all my thoughts were kind of meta and hypothetical. My initial thought was, uh what do you mean like of course I know I'm a woman that's what I've checked on all the forms. But then I thought about it and I was like. Bruh. 

Bruh.

The reply I gave her, I feel like, was unsatisfactory and very personal. I didn't want to fall back onto gender norms, because that was so obviously a cop-out. Furthermore, I feel like I didn't experience a lot of the stereotypical "what it means to be a woman." AND, the definition of "adult human being" was too inadequate.

So, how do I know that I'm a woman?

At the time, I gave her a pretty sloppy answer about internalized misogyny, and I'm not going to pretend I have a better answer now, but I think I've broken it down to two main points.

Number one: I know I'm a woman because I'm constantly in competition with other women. I view women as my primary competitors. Very rarely do I see masculine-presenting individuals as competition, even though technically, all of us are competing for resources, prestige, or whatever it is we seek. Sure, you can play a probability game and say it's all statistics, but I think there's an aspect of misogyny as well.

Number two, I know I'm a woman because I feel anger and indignation on behalf of other women, internalizing it as a personal offense, even when I myself have not undergone the same struggle.

It's the same criteria I think of when I ask myself how I know I'm Asian American. But, in the racial aspect, there's a third criteria, which is the reflexive self. I feel that other people see me as Asian American, and therefore, I am Asian American. For some bizarre reason, I didn't experience the same reflexive self when I thought about my gender.

I think it was this lack of a reflexive self and vaguely gender-less upbringing that pushed me to declare, very loudly, in the middle of a science classroom in highschool that, "I am not a feminist."

(I could self-psychoanalyze and come up with a million reasons why my upbringing was gender-less. It could have to do with the fact that my primary caretakers were women, so there was no other for me to reference, and thereby, no juxtaposition between women and men. It could have to do with early, internalized misogyny that caused me to push away things that identified me specifically as a "girl." It could also be that I'm incredibly not self-aware.)

(I stand by the statement that contrast is necessary for identification, though.)

Anyways.

I remember when I said those words, my best friend looked at me with exasperation and a classmate looked at me with disgust. For good reason.

At the time, the word "feminist," to me, had a lot of negative connotations. I equated it with the "feminazi." I didn't buy into sexist ideals, but neither did I understand the angry, seemingly unnecessary reversal of gender roles that "feminazis"  were proclaiming.

And my friend patiently explained to me that no, you don't have to be a feminazi to be a feminist. 

But see, even that in itself is anti-feminist, isn't it?

We were, again, drawing lines for what it means to be an acceptable woman--an acceptable feminist--and what it means to be an unacceptable woman.

Why is there a negative connotation to the term "feminazi"? Why is there a negative connotation to the term "feminist"? Isn't the term "feminazi" in itself misogynistic?

I think it has to do with the fact that the general culture is uncomfortable with women stepping beyond what their gender roles have prescribed them. The culture has moved in a direction where it is acceptable and almost expected for women to be feminists, but being a "feminazi" is still frowned up.

This might seem very obvious to some, but I actually haven't thought about the term "feminazi" in a long while. So, to make sure I actually knew what a "feminazi" was, I pulled up the Wikipedia article. Here are a few words used to describe a feminazi:

a committed feminist or a strong-willed woman

radical feminists

see as many abortions as possible

militants

quest for power

belief that men aren't necessary

well-intentioned but misguided people who call themselves feminists

the term came to be widely used for feminism as a whole

marginalize any feminist as a hardline, uncompromising manhater

hate men

dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant

an extremist, power-hungry minority

I've never met anyone who fits that description, though [Limbaugh] lavishes it on me among many others

bossy, hating men and femininity

hyper-vigilant to perceived sexism

vindictive

puritanical

The term was apparently, popularized by a dude named Rush Limbaugh, and I'll be damned if I let a man determine what kind of feminist I am.

Maybe I am biased because a militant women's group seeking to overpower the patriarchy sounds pretty lit and like good material for a new Netflix show, but like.

Tell me again why it's not okay to be a feminazi.

(my primary reactions to the list above are: "i wonder why," "sounds ok to me lol," and "who the fuck are you to say")

ANYWAYS.

"Feminazis," according to Mr. Limbaugh (who even is this guy) is an unacceptable way to be a feminist.

He is a man governing what it means to be a feminist (again, who the fuck are you), but let's be real, there are many women out there who draw similar lines, maybe for others, maybe for themselves. The popular "Am I not a good feminist if I __________" questions in themselves are anti-feminist. Once again, it is a show of how women are policing themselves and each other.

I'm not big on philosophy because I can't understand most of it, but Foucault made the assertion that policing and discipline in a modern society lies with the self, or an invisible, anonymous power embedded in society.

(Ok, I'm going to be honest, I didn't want to read through 30 pages of feminist theory and I barely understood the four pages that I did read, so if I'm wrong, don't hate me.)

In other words, men and women become the gender police for themselves. Even as women gain more rights and freedom, they continue to police themselves in a new way, like asking themselves what it means to be a good feminist.

(Bartky introduces the argument that there needs to be an upheaval of social norms to end the policing.)

(And okay, so, the more I read Bartky's Foucault, Femininity, and Patriarchal Power, the more excited I get, so I'm gOiNg To StOp mYsElf hERe.)

I ask myself this question often too.

Am I not a good feminist if I express vague disapproval at someone who switches boyfriends every other day?

Am I not a good feminist if I am grateful for men opening doors for me or offering to grab my suitcase for me on the plane? (I'm 5'2 okay, I have to stand on the seat sometimes, it's embarrassing.)

See, I appreciate chivalry and I don't think chivalry is dead because what does that even mean, but I also recognize that chivalry isn't the same thing as gender equality or liberation for women (or dare I say, liberation of gender?). But, gender equality doesn't mean that women and men do all of the same things and are assumed to be able to do all of the same things. Because we, as humans, have varying abilities, don't we?

The question of what the fuck is gender equality plagued me for an entire semester and bothers me even now but I just kind of stomp on it and make it go away. The easy answer to it, for me, is a fair division of labor agreed upon by both parties, ensuring there is no abuse of power within the relationship.

But that statement in itself is problematic because it introduces a possibility of stasis, of complacency that might revert to a new abuse of power.

(It's also not one that every feminist agrees on.)

But let's return to the question of what it means to be a woman.

I wrote that contrast is necessary for identification, but I fear the statement implies that women are defined in opposition to men, which is false. Like, non-men = women. And, since gender is a spectrum, that obviously is not true. But, since gender is a spectrum, is it necessary for us to identify ourselves? 

At the end of my notes, I scribbled a series of questions.

Why does it matter to me what gender people are?

Why does it matter to me what gender I am?

Is there a correlation between sexuality and gender? Especially since we are all on a spectrum for both? Are we socialized to choose? Is this or is this not evolutionarily favorable?

(I see now that the flaw in me writing blog posts is that I can't actually have a conversation about this and that's frustrating.)

(Also, I recognize that I live in an immense amount of privilege to be asking these questions and not, I don't know, fearing for my life.)

I briefly entertained the idea that women are essentially the oppressed party in the larger narrative of gender. But there are two problems with this statement. One, women are definitely not the only oppressed party. Two, everyone ultimately suffers when there is an accepted narrative.

But, the undeniable fact is that there is a common reality that people who identify as women live. It has nothing to do with anatomy, organs, chromosomes, hormone levels, brain structure, or sexuality. It is an experience that is placed upon us by the patriarchal society, regardless of whether or not we recognize it, based on how we present ourselves.

This is how the reflexive self began to develop, in Calc B, freshman year of college.

I try to talk about gender as removed from sex as possible, because I get terribly confused when I talk about them in conjunction with each other, but also because I do think there is a difference between the feminine experience and the female experience. I just don’t really understand it.

I wrote in my notes somewhere: Gender is a spectrum. You are your own individual, gender be damned.

I don't proclaim myself an expert on this matter. These are words that chased their own tails in my mind as I tried to understand how to function in an infuriating society that constantly made me angry.

The other day, I saw a Facebook post from a stranger who was talking about how their boyfriend didn't believe women were being oppressed because even though women get paid less, men pay for dates. And this led me to think about the wage disparity and how people always tell me, well, no, it doesn't exist. It's the woman's fault for not asking for a higher wage.

And I’m just kind of like, ???

A student of mine came to me one morning, a little disappointed and a little annoyed, because he had been shut down by a fellow classmate when he made a comment about the wage gap not being an actual thing.

(the thing about talking to students is that it's a lot easier to forgive ignorance and to actually have a conversation without getting angry.)

He said that he wished the classmate, a girl, wouldn't just be all angry about it and call him dumb.

I didn't know how to respond to that then, aside from agreeing that it is necessary to have actual dialogue around important issues and asking a few questions so he could critically think about gender issues in the U.S. 

But, I thought about it the morning before I got ambushed by the dogs, and I wish I asked him to think about why people get so angry talking about these matters.

I think the reason why it's so difficult to have these conversations is because--

God, imagine the privilege of not having to have these conversations and not feeling angry and humiliated because you are pulling out this vulnerable bit of you that's been attacked by Society and trying to make someone who is implicitly attacking you understand.

That's not a comfortable feeling, and adults can't even manage it so how is a teenager expected to?

The same feeling rises within myself when I talk about race and when I talk about gender. Some of it is internalized racism and misogyny, but a whole lot of it is not wanting to be vulnerable, and that in itself is a little fucked up (and maybe, misogynistic?). 

See, when I feel very strongly about a matter, I expect strong, rigorous, academic debate. I want to break down the logic in every sentence and refute facts and opinions with Better Facts and Opinions, complete with citations, and I don’t want to fall back on anecdotes even though I end up resorting to it anyways.

(I am also the annoying person who would do the Hamilton thing and be like i have the honor to be your obedient servant, A DOT CAI.)

But, so often, we don't have the luxury to do that. And also, very often, we are utterly consumed by the larger narrative that facts end up not meaning very much to us.

We are all part of an accepted narrative, and that, along with the social norms that come with it, is the enemy.

Men are not the enemy in feminism, which is why men need to calm the fuck down and get behind the feminist movement. Men are also suffering from this accepted narrative and gender policing that lauds toxic masculinity.

I'm not saying there's a right way to be a feminist, but I strongly believe there's a wrong way to be a feminist. I think being a feminist means you support gender equality, regardless of what gender someone identifies as. I think being a feminist means you want everyone to embrace their true selves. I think being a feminist means you stand with every individual, and so I think being a feminist should be the default for a human being.

But if a person identifies as a feminist and draws rules and regulations for how to be one, then that is anti-feminist.

(Come at me, feminist philosophers, I'm very zen and I'm willing to listen to you tell me about how society needs to see an utter deconstruction of feminism and masculinity.)

Be you, my friend. Be you and let other people be themselves. It's not like they're hurting you by being trans or gay or bi. 

Like jeez, why is that so hard.

(stop hating on Irene 'cause she's a feminist, she's fucking beautiful and i will fight you.)

I don't know, I love women. They are inspiring and beautiful, and the term "woman," as much as I've broken it down, actually matters because society has forced it to matter. And weirdly enough, as difficult as it is for me to truly identify with woman at times, I like being one and I'm proud to be a feminist.

But it's also a little scary to be a woman. There are the general things a woman has to worry about, like walking around at night or traveling alone or going to a bar alone or doing anything alone to be completely honest. But there are also the other concerns, like what does a family dynamic look like with my personality and my ideals? How do I navigate a patriarchal society in terms of work and relationships? Which values do I give up to make sure I can actually go somewhere? When do I tell a friend to shut the fuck up because he’s mansplaining? How do I respond to defensiveness without getting defensive myself? How do I ensure that my daughter lives in a safer, more equitable world? How do I ensure that my son doesn't turn out to be a misogynist? Like? Help?

(sos i drank too my caffeine and now my hands are shaking)

Feminist theory, crudely put, falls into two categories (fuck i’m literally dragging things out of my ass, i don’t actually know if this is true lol), with one firmly asserting that a feminist revolution is rejecting the societal definition of femininity and the other embracing femininity. 

(idk if there are only two camps, but these two perspectives definitely exist in feminist theory ok)

I definitely fall in the latter, because I can’t wrap my head around the rejection of femininity. Like, is that not misogynistic? Camosy’s Behind the Abortion Wars uses a similar argument to proclaim abortion as inherently sexist. It strips females of what has traditionally given them power, rendering them...males. Or some version of a male.

(i’m sold on camosy’s argument. don’t misunderstand, i’m definitely pro-choice, but i have thoughts.)

See, all of this is very complicated. Sometimes I see quotes about feminist theory and it’s so intellectually exhilarating that I just have to file it away and think about it on a day where I’m wired on caffeine. But even on those days, I feel like my brain falls short on trying to understand this very meta gender theory thing.

So, obviously, I don’t hope to convince you to believe in my ideal, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. But, if you have read this far, I leave you with the same thing I said a number of paragraphs back.

BE YOU AND LET OTHER PEOPLE BE THEMSELVES.

Recognize when you are causing harm, explicitly or not.

Recognize when other people are causing harm, explicitly or not, and engage them in conversation.

(these are actually goals and guidelines for me because i have no backbone and generally just fume in silence.)

(between me brainstorming this and me actually writing this, a number of different things have come to my attention)

(one of them is the erasure of non-masculine stories in history) (and yes that's obvious, but i also watched a bunch of TedEd videos about women so it's just very salient in my mind right now)

(another is the nth room south korea scandal, and i don't even know where to begin with that)

(Disclaimer: I don’t actually know what I’m talking about but I welcome counterarguments. I also realize putting a disclaimer at the end is really dumb, but I don’t want to interrupt my non-existent narrative flow. I feel like my take on gender is too simple and not nuanced enough, but honestly, I just don’t really get gender at times? So I really shouldn’t be talking about gender theory. Yet. Here we are.)

I LOVE WOMEN.

So here is a song from a woman that I recently found and fell in love with:

陳粒 - 无所求必满载而归 它让你受折磨 觉得痛 觉得渴 [life] makes you suffer, makes you hurt, makes you thirsty 觉得无路走 无处躲 makes you feel like there's nowhere to go, nowhere tohide 无所求也求不得 even if you want nothing, you can't even have that 当我昏昏欲睡 摇摇欲坠 but when i'm about to sleep, about to fall 却学会 放下错与对 是与非 i learned to put down right and wrong, yes and no 无所求必满载而归 if i want nothing, then i'll receive everything

(on a side note, i've done nothing but read a chinese, boys love light novel. i have read three chinese novels in my life, and all three were boys love. this doesn't seem right.)

(but also, my chinese literacy is basically at that of a fifth grader, if even, so i think it's fitting that i read some trash novels.)

(but this one talks about the psychology of sexuality and gender, and i'm all for genre novels spreading ideas about bEiNg YoUrSeLf.)

(GAH.)

[hotelconcierge]

THE GENDER NULLARY

Trigger warning for everything that follows: the coddled, over-sensitive, “triggered” millennial crybaby does not exist. Hold your applause—the COSTMC is an oxymoron because coddling does not sensitize, it scleroses. Have you met these people? They can’t feel an emotion without an audience and a week to rehearse. The performative offense of this group results from high emotional tolerance, not low; sad-rage is heroin to everything else’s Motrin, and no matter how vast the safe space, some kids are gonna hang at the outskirts hoping to score.

Of course, even the phoniest opportunist has a few real triggers—the type that precludes rage because you’re numb in the fetal position. And of course, there are many uncoddled e.g. traumatized people who are genuinely vulnerable to the many, many instances of genuine cruelty and callousness.

Every community with a code of conduct is a safe space to some extent. My lawyer advises no comment on whether safe spaces are good or bad in principle, because it depends: who is being included, who is being excluded, where will they go, and who is enforcing the rules.

My concern is the way these debates are settled. And when the excluded protest against political correctness—that human resources plot to merge all safe spaces under one state capitalist thumb—they ditch culture war bushido and strike at whomever can be hurt the most.

What you have to understand is that the PC debate is a farce. When the public demands a witch for the stake, the NYTimes selects David Brooks,

perhaps the most balding, white, sanctimonious chump at a newspaper full of balding, white, sanctimonious chumps. Here are four critiques; don’t read any of them unless you still find it exciting to watch a strawman burn.

What’s more interesting is that while Brooks criticizes upper-middle-class culture for being “laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class,” his article is nothing but illegible cultural signifiers. Which, duh, he’s writing for the Times. Brooks thus renders himself irrelevant (which was the point): his critics focus on his blunder of political correctness (the high school grad intimidated by a chicken pomodoro) and dismiss him as classist accordingly.

Lesson: Anyone who opposes political correctness from within will lose and be humiliated. Even without the unforced error, Brooks could have been dismissed as rich and white. His archives could have been mined for hypocrisy. Even a charged non sequitur would have crushed his argument: “So it’s no big deal that it’s legal to murder transpeople in all fifty states? No, I’m David Brooks, better focus on political correctness!” Of course, plenty of non-bourgeois oppose PC, but you’ll never hear that point of view in the Times because, yikes—internalized racism.

The result is that the anti-PC viewpoint is only taken seriously when it refuses the framework of PC. I don’t mean “taken seriously” like there is a meaningful debate. But when an internet troll calls you, say, “a fucking spic faggot,” you can’t reply “hah, well that just shows your heteronormative, colonialist assumptions!” without looking like a wimp. You have to reply with equal bile, which smells of hatred, maybe fear. And it’s no fun to be on the receiving end of hatred, but it’s better than being treated—like Mr. Brooks—with contempt.

Trolls, like catcallers, flashers, and school shooters, are men who ran the numbers and found: being hated > being invisible > being humiliated in the official channels. The first two go back to chimps, the third variable is society-dependent, and wowza does ours fuck it up. Men want to become masculine, citation needed, and when society shit-talks the honest path to manhood then it is inevitable that those foolish enough to listen will turn to the black market. And once that’s your game...

This blog is far from politically correct, but I try to mock only the deserving— bureaucrats, demagogues, cowards, and conformists—and for behavior, for the things people can change rather than those they can’t. But people tend to be insecure about the things they can’t change, and it just so happens that in America insecurity is always wound up in sex. Every debate about safe spaces thus devolves into a debate about gender: a catalog of body dysmorphisms, a who’s who of racial castrations, cuckold, bitch, cunt, whore, freak. You’d think everyone would be against this level of discourse, but gun control means one thing on Park Avenue and another thing entirely in Wichita. The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the popular and unpopular from being unpopular. Calls for PC go nowhere because cruelty is the best weapon some people have.

Idiot [unemployed, probably no friends]: “So you’re sympathizing with racist, misogynist trolls. Wow. Just—I can’t even.” I didn’t say anything about sympathy. I said that a society gets what it pays for. IMHO, most shock-value trolling is both ineffective—it strengthens the case for Big Brother—and morally disgusting. But it’s a symptom, not the disease. Like oxycodone, trolling is recourse for people with nothing better to do, and like The Opioid Epidemic, the hand-wringing has less to do with fixing the problem than with making it so consumers don’t have to look at something ugly.

The content of trolling is thus extremely not the issue, but even so, I’ll take the bait. To accuse someone of failing at gender is the worst sort of punching-down. It’s not just hateful, it’s lazy, it’s bullying the foreign kid to make up for getting your ass beat at home. And it’s dumb. Forget about the moral argument—my critique is that the gender police are not even wrong.

Judith Butler (Gender Trouble), who coined the term “performative gender,” the antecedent to “sexuality is a spectrum,” has reached Antichrist status in some circles and in fact received a personal diss from Pope Benedict XVI. She’s good, and if you wanna throw down you gotta throw down with the best. So: Does Butler write like a pedant getting paid by the syllable? Does she open each topic with a chain of passive-aggressive rhetorical questions? Does she have the worst fanbase this side of Harris and Klebold? Does she have a point?

Hemlock time. How do you define gender? “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate with sex.” Okay—what’s sex? “Aren’t you a doctor or something? XY and XX.” I’m flattered by the appeal to authority, but weren’t you the guy complaining when the CDC lowered the normal testosterone range? How do you feel about androgen insensitivity syndrome?

You can deny your eyes and insist that having an SRY gene makes Eden Atwood male, but from a medical perspective Eden is estrogenized, at risk for osteoporosis, and going down in the chart as an F.

“Look, fella, I know a dime-piece when I see one.” So modify your definition: hormone levels, fertility, waist-hip ratio, empathizing over systematizing, long bathroom lines, 10 Things I Hate About You...The first problem is that all of these traits exist on, sorry, a spectrum, from menopausal women to full-figured men. The choice of which traits to include—and where to draw the cut-offs—and if the division is binary or quaternary or nullary—is just like, your opinion, man (woman/they/them). The bigger problem is that now you’re defining sex as gender.

This reduces your original statement to, “Gender is a set of behaviors and attributes that correlate.” Which is true. And as far as stereotypes go, gendered ones ain’t bad, maybe even necessary to function, the guy wearing a V-neck probably does like shaving his pubes. But they are still stereotypes, man-made, imperfect, and punishing to those who do not conform. I’m no cultural relativist, some people suck and deserve cold and swift judgment, but is the presence or absence of armpit hair really the hill you want to die on?

There’s a practical argument to be made against fractalized gender: it’s confusing. With 3^^^3 possible sex-gender-orientation combos, how are kids supposed to know how to grow up? Aren’t imperfect gender roles better than 24-year-old otherkin? I hear you, guy wearing a Harley-Davidson jacket and listening to Mötley Crüe, but Tumblr semantics are a consequence of twenty-teen spirit, not the cause. If we weren’t arguing about the gender binary (and before we were) we’d be arguing about the range of femininity or masculinity; the crusade would be for pixie cuts and stick-and-poke tattoos to be considered as feminine as Brazilian butt lifts. Don’t be fooled by words—do you really want society to have one idealized template per gender? How would that ideal be decided? Majority rule?

There’s a hilarious overlap between the people who get mad about preferred pronouns and those who call for a return to “traditional masculinity.” The idealization of some Hollywood-ified tradition isn’t the problem; if you want to roleplay a fursona, go ahead. No, what’s pathetic is the begging. Rather than be a man, in spite of the system, you demand validation from the system for aspiring to be a man. Being against identity politics is the new identity politics. That’s why right-wing culture warriors are so into the idea of crybaby millennials—it’s comforting to believe that you’re actually strong (since you don’t drink from plastic water bottles) and that anyone getting laid is actually xeno-estrogenized. Even if this was true, obsessing over it, masturbating to it, using it as an excuse for self-pity and inaction—that makes you a  _ _ _ _. Four-letters. Multiple choice. Maybe hangman will teach you something.

The foundationalist reasoning of identity politics tends to assume that an identity must first be in place in order for political interests to be elaborated and, subsequently, political action to be taken. (Gender Trouble)

My beliefs are no doubt way south of Ms. Butler’s on the political compass, but we agree about one thing: that ain’t a nice way to go out.

But this is precisely the way in which the laundry-is-a-social-construct movement has failed. I have held off on criticizing them because it’s too easy, when you mock Rachel Dolezal for being “transracial” you get to pretend your own self-image is meaningful, but no, all identities are power poses in front of the bedroom mirror, meaningful only insofar as they help you with the rest of the day. “Well, SCIENCE says that—” You sure you want to play that game? Again, I respect anyone who has the courage to defy their assigned caste. I have no purity objections to a transhumanist society where the tap water runs ecstasy and you can get augmented genitals at Starbucks. I don’t even mind Bushwick. The problem with the mad libs youth isn’t the slew of labels—intersectional, nonbinary, pansexual, curious kinkster, ethically polyamorous, empath, casual baby witch (mostly crystals, auras/energy)—the problem is, what are you going to do with them? And there’s a patriarchy-approved answer: buy shit and beg for validation.

If gender is performative, if identity is not necessary for political action to be taken, if the possibilities are infinite once freed from the bounds of phallogocentrism, then why is it that so many cultural subversives sound exactly the same? You know the stereotype. Bondage. Anxiety. Smoking when drunk. Circlejerks of praise for completing the most basic of tasks. Very, very bad poetry. Expensive fashion draped across waif-like models. Guilty pleasures: junk food, liquor, and problematic TV. Hated roommates. Emoji marxism. Twitter. “today i feel cute enough for a selfie, might delete it later.” “didn’t get out of bed until 2 i’m trash lol” “wow, some casual racism at work today. i’ll just laugh and someday burst because i hate confrontation. but whatever.” I’m not saying these traits describe anyone real, although they might. I’m saying: why is this the stereotype?

Discussion questions: When people type in lower case, what emotion do they hope to convey to the reader? The alt-right often asks if “liking feminine traps” is “gay”—is there anything more heterosexual than wishing you had a weaker male friend to validate your penis? Would trans rights even be an issue if the majority were FtM? How many modern protests can be summarized as “consumers demand product”? Who would win, every chafed masculinist and joyless academic or one flamboyant 19th century playwright? As Oscar Wilde put it: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”

Choose:

HYPOCRISY’S BAD, BUT YOU’RE WORSE

THE FALSE NEGATIVES

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Wait, why do people have trans headcanons about Tobias? I love reading about trans headcanons. Soooooooo tell me about trans guy Tobias. 😃😃😃 And link me to trans girl Tobias headcanons if you know where to find them!

Right, so, a lot of people read Tobias’ discomfort in his human body as gender dysphoria, or at least a pretty good sci-fi analogue, which I think is really cool!  I generally don’t write trans Tobias myself because...actually tbh I think I’ve never written a fic where Tobias took his shirt off and/or anything else that would make anatomy a real issue, so you’re totally within your rights to headcanon whatever you like.  My somewhat disinterested grasp on gender makes me a bad candidate to write trans stuff because.  Like.  Listen.  You can use whatever pronouns you want with me and I will absolutely not give a damn.  I’ve gone by five different first names falling everywhere from feminine to androgynous to masculine (some people call me Gabe), I’ve been called sir, miss, ma’am, and you there, and honestly: I don’t care.  So like...I am not writing gender dysphoria stuff because I don’t have a good handle on gender in the first place.  

As far as the trans girl Tobias headcanons go, I don’t have any of them on deck to be linked because it’s not my jam, but I’m sure someone will step up to the plate here.  I did read a really excellent fic one time where Tobias acquired Rachel and she and Rachel went to the mall on a date and it was pretty cute, but also it is lost to the depths of my AO3 history.

Regarding trans boy Tobias, on the other hand, I feel it a little more.  Hear me out here.

Tobias is literally flat out tortured by bullies at school (MM4), which, listen, I went to a really small parochial school where their handle on the concept of trans-ness was dubious at best.  First gym class, Tobias is basically screwed, even though his uncle probably doesn’t give enough of a damn to say what he can or can’t put on his paperwork.

Tobias mentions several times that his uncle doesn’t care about him, but was can all basically agree that he’s probably also abusive as well as being neglectful.  More to the point, though, Tobias says that his aunt cared more when he was younger (before he came out maybe?) and that she mostly used him as free labor once he was older.  So in this situation I headcanon that the majority of the time, Tobias’ uncle doesn’t give a shit what Tobias calls himself and is therefore a nominal improvement on his aunt, who still calls him Tabitha and yells at him every time he cuts his hair off.  Tobias at some point tells Rachel offhand that, yeah, his uncle hit him from time to time, but at least he usually called him “kid” or whatever, and Rachel almost gets on a goddamn plane to go beat the shit out of his aunt.  (I firmly headcanon that in any universe, Tobias spends minimum one hour a month talking Rachel and eventually Ax out of hunting down his extended family.)

The Animorphs all know he’s trans and are ready to Fight about it.  This is generally the reason that I prefer trans boy Tobias rather than trans girl Tobias, because I like AUs that fit reasonably well into canon and in order for Tobias to be a trans girl, he would have to be in the closet with literally every single person he knows.  He would be lying constantly to the Animorphs about who he is.  And honestly his life is so terrible that I can’t stand to put him through that, and moreover: don’t come here with your The Animorphs Don’t Really Trust Each Other nonsense.  Get out of my house with that.  I will talk for days about the breakdown of team dynamics toward the end of the war, but these kids would fucking die for each other, don’t come at me with your Jake Is Transphobic shit.  I’ll deck you, straight up.

BOOK 23 SPOILERS: The Ellimist shows Elfangor the future so that Elfangor knows to write his letter to his son and Tobias has to work really hard not to burst into tears in front of Visser Three about it.  Relatedly, Loren is a disabled woman who married an alien, I am 100% sure that Tobias coming out to her would be 0% of a problem.  “I’m so glad you trusted me with this and I want you to be happy, but also we are at war so maybe this is not the best time to have a heart-to-heart.”

Listen...Andalite culture is such a hidebound train wreck that I have no idea off the top of my head if they would be fine with the trans thing.  I have some strict-ish headcanons about how marriage works (literally intended for reproduction, as in: usually arranged, often a friendly formality that only lasts as long as there’s a child to raise, and structured so as to match couples based on their ability to parent together and their genetic compatibility), but nothing hard and fast about sex or gender.  Except that I will have my tragic gay aliens and therefore: same-gender love matches exist.  But even if Andalites aren’t down with the concept of the gender spectrum, Ax will have known Tobias for most of a year before Tobias’ biological sex becomes an issue that even exists in the physical world, and I’m pretty sure he could be talked around.

I feel like the morphing thing has great potential for transgender usage, which I guaran-damn-tee you the Andalites have not thought of (I have a lot to say about how the Andalites seem...pretty uncreative with the morphing thing).  In a happier world, after the war Tobias admits publically that he’s trans and that it’s part of the reason he’s uncomfortable in his human form, and Frolis maneuvers himself a new human body that looks a lot like his old one with a few major exceptions.  A feather, or a silhouette of a hawk in flight, becomes a familiar Trans Pride mark, with people carrying flags and wearing tattoos at marches.  Rachel has never been more delighted with the world, and picks up a new crusade.  She only gets arrested a few times.

Oh, also let me take this moment to give you a few other headcanons about queer Animorphs.

Jake: actually Jake is straight because I have never seen someone who is so obviously a Straight Ally Doing His Very Best but in like every aspect of his life.  He’s doing a good job and he’s the first person Marco comes out to.

Marco: B I S E X U A L as fuck and dtf basically anyone.  This is straight up canon, literally any given Marco book includes him commenting on at least one person’s attractiveness.  I think the only Animorph who does not routinely get hit on is Tobias and I’m willing to ascribe that to Marco’s very understandable fear of death by acute grizzly bear.

Cassie: li’l bit bisexual, li’l bit gnc, lot bit too busy to care.  I feel like Cassie is also demisexual because...she’s so much about the person.  Whenever she talks about Jake and why she’s attracted to him, sure, she’ll talk about his eyes or his smile, but it’s usually about how his real smiles are rare and therefore special, or about how he seems so confident and adaptable under the gun, or about how much he cares about his causes.  Thus: demi Cassie.

Rachel: listen I don’t know because I feel like Rachel probably wouldn’t bother to take the time to have an identity crisis ever, she would just be like “update everyone I’m also into girls” and move on with her life.  People would ask her what her sexuality was and she would give them a disdainful look and say “not your fucking concern” and go on about her day.  Rachel goes to her deathbed without ever giving a single fuck about anything, up to and including what she should or should not call herself.  (Oh but obviously Melissa Chapman is a lesbian and has been in love with Rachel since they were kids)

Ax: cinnamon buns are Ax’s One True Love and while I do feel like he’s probably pansexual and kind of blithely disinterested in the human parameters of gender, I also feel like he’s the kind of person to tell people out loud and in public that his sexuality is Cinnabon.  He learns this kind of joke from Marco and the others all immediately despair of them both.  Jake just.  Washes his hands of this whole situation.  He’s out.  He’s done.  Ax is beyond help.

Tobias: even in universes where I write Tobias as a cis boy, please assume that he is definitely bisexual and also likes to wear eyeliner.  It is the only makeup he can successfully apply except for lipstick (lipstick is pretty idiot-proof as long as you can match colors), but his winged eyeliner is so good that Rachel sometimes has him do hers.

[tuyet-mai]

A breakdown of Ed Sheeran’s “New Man” and why it’s problematic:

[TL;DR at the bottom of the post.]

     So yesterday, as I was on Spotify instead of doing work, I realized I hadn’t listened to the new Ed Sheeran album Divide in it’s entirety yet. Turns out, it’s pretty awesome (and if you haven’t listened to it yet, you should go do that)! Unfortunately though, it does have its problematic moments -- the track New Man being the primary representative. 

Before we go into detail though, let’s give the characters of the song names so that they’re simple to discern from each other:

Let ex-boyfriend be X, girl be G, and New Man be N. 

Also, excuse my ADHD. My meds wore off towards the end.

Ok! Now on to the fun bit!

So why is this song problematic, anyways?

I have a couple of different perspectives on this point that we’ll detail momentarily, but to be concise:

X is obsessed with the relationship between G and N, using a mix of manipulation tactics and fallacies to try and convince G to leave him. 

X incessantly shames N for basically existing; he also shames G for choosing to do things/be around people X disapproves of.

X enforcing gender stereotypes. 

G asking X for sex. Also, G cheating on N. 

N wears closed shoes without socks. 

Pop culture influences real life, and overall, these are not healthy behaviors. 

Give me a moment to mentally choke a bitch out compose myself.

Just...

What the actual fuck? 

   Now,  I’m sure there are multiple people reading this post and thinking “silly OP, X is justified because N is a piece of shit,” but here’s the thing: 

THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT X IS TRYING TO GET YOU TO BELIEVE. 

     And by “you,” I mean G, ‘cause New Man is basically a request for G to take X back rather than offering sympathy to G or caring about her as a whole individual. 

[explosion noises]

Let’s take it verse by verse to identify how X does this.

Verse 1: 

I heard he spent five hundred pounds on jeans Goes to the gym at least six times a week Wears boat shoes with no socks on his feet And I hear he's on a new diet and watches what he eats He's got his eyebrows plucked and his arsehole bleached Owns every single Ministry CD Tribal tattoos and he don't know what it means But I heard he makes you happy, so that's fine by me But still, I'm just keepin' it real Still lookin' at your Instagram and I'll be creepin' a lil' I'll be tryin' not to double tap, from way back 'Cause I know that's where the trouble's at Let me remind you of the days when You used to hold my hand And when we sipped champagne out of cider cans I guess if you were Lois Lane, I wasn't Superman Just a young boy tryin' to be loved So let me give it to ya 

Did you catch it? Here’s verse one rewritten:

“I don’t like N because [insert stereotype about masculinity] and he’s different compared to me”

“But if that’s what makes you happy, it’s ‘ fine,’ [insert eye roll]”

“But actually, it’s not fine, because I miss you (I’m stalking you) and I’m better because we did fun shit even though I was poor and I’m not [masculinity stereotype]”

“Poor me, I deserve love; let me love you”

Essentially, X is saying that because N plucks his eyebrows, has money to spend on something he wants (even if it’s a dumb purchase), and behaves a certain way, it makes him a dumb jock/fuccboi/undesirable/have certain other traits. Therefore, X is desirable (a nice guy), and G should take him back. 

Because obviously, as a man, if you keep up with your appearance, like one specific band(s), have an aesthetic/meaningless tattoo, and try to take care of your body, you’re a shitty person (sarcasm). To this last point though, I would like to note that if the tattoo has a cultural implication that N is not part of, it’s a dick move to have gotten it. We’re going off X’s assumptions though, so... 

Also, closed shoes without socks is unacceptable regardless of who you are; shape up, N.

CHORUS

I don't wanna know about your new man 'Cause if it was meant to be You wouldn't be callin' me up tryin' to 'Cause I'm positive that he don't wanna know about me I don't wanna know about your new man We'll get there eventually I know you're missin' all this kind of love But I'm positive that he don't wanna know about me

Rewritten:

“I don’t want to know about your new man because you’re calling me up for sex (so obviously I’m better and he doesn’t matter).”

“I also KNOW that you’re missing this kind of love (so please come back) and we’ll eventually be able to laugh at him together.”

“Also, he doesn’t wanna know about me (because he’s too big of a dickbag to care obviously).”

Thoughts on the chorus:

On G’s part: dick move. Nobody should call up someone who’s trying to get over them. It just plays with their emotions and gives them false hope (or in this case, it makes X go batshit crazy)

On X’s part: he needs to get over himself. He doesn’t seem care about G or her situation other than wanting her back. He also can’t KNOW what G is feeling or missing unless she’s specifically told him.  

Verse 2

Your new man rents a house in the 'burb And wears a man bag on his shoulder, but I call it a purse Every year, he goes to Málaga with all the fellas Drinks beer, but has a six pack, I'm kinda jealous He wears sunglasses indoors, in winter, at nighttime And every time a rap song comes on, he makes a gang sign Says "Chune, bwoydem light up the room!" But enough about him, girl, let's talk about you You were the type of girl who sat beside the water readin' Eatin' a packet of crisps, but you will never find you cheatin' Now you're eatin' kale, hittin' the gym Keepin' up with Kylie and Kim In the back of the club, kissin' a boy that ain't him Okay, you need to be alone And if you wanna talk about it, you can call my phone I just thought I would tell you, 'cause you oughta know You're still a young girl tryin' to be loved So let me give it to ya

Rewritten:

[Implied stereotype about people who live in the suburbs]

[Implied jab at masculinity]

“I’m uncomfortable with myself and jealous that he can keep that figure”

[Stereotype]

[Stereotype about “type” of femininity]

[Cheat-shaming, even though he has no idea what G&N’s relationship is about]

“Even though you behave this way you’re still this [type of] girl somewhere inside.”

“Poor, silly, you. Let me love you because I’m not [stereotype] therefore my love is better.”

A few points with this verse:

This reminds me so much of the people who say the: “I’m not racist, but...” bullshit. X is passive-aggressively shaming N and G through the entire song by implying “N isn’t a fuccboi but... N is a fuccboi -- and if you like fuccbois (G), then I guess that’s what you like (but I’m judging you for it because (stereotype))”

I’m not one to advocate cheating if that’s the case, but neither I nor X have ANY IDEA what G and N have agreed to in their relationship. Maybe G found out she’s polyamorous. Maybe N is polyamorous. Maybe they’re fine with having multiple partners. We don’t know, and neither does X! G shouldn’t be shamed. 

Again, what is with this guy and shaming people for taking care of themselves? G is doing well for her body! Also, maybe she realized she liked that show (ironically, or unironically: it doesn’t matter).

STOP WITH THE GENDER JABS, CHRIST ON A STICK! That is not okay! N is in no way required to conform to society’s or X’s expectations of masculinity/style/etc.

Another thing: People change! Even if G’s behavior/aesthetic/style/gender identity was a certain way with X, that doesn’t mean she’s locked into those things for the rest of her life! Nor does it express her as a full individual! Crazy concept: you can be chill/humble, take care of yourself, and eat crisps every now and then!  

X does get points for the ‘gang signs for every rap song’ line though; that’s unnecessary and ignorant. 

Bridge

Baby, I'm not tryin' to ruin your week But you act so differently When you're with him, I know you're lonely Please remember you're still free To make the choice and leave Don't call me up, you need to show me

Rewritten:

“Baby I’m not trying to ruin your week but...”

[goes on to do/say some dumb shit]

“You act so different, therefore you must be lonely!”

“So please come back to me, but DON’T call me! I demand you show me (see: make it up to me cause I’m too good for that)”

Thoughts:

Again... one aspect of a person in one instant is not representative of the entire individual. X is not owed anything from G. 

Summary & Societal Implications

X is fucking insane and doesn’t care about G as a whole person. He loves the idea of who she was before. 

X continually shames N and G to manipulate G into coming back to him. 

There’s a lot of details being assumed. 

     Also, if you haven’t sorted this out by now: this is a terrible portrayal of romance for people to relate to/internalize. It normalizes creepy/arrogant/ manipulative behavior as well as gender stereotypes. None of those things are healthy within or after a relationship. 

     If X loves G, he should be her friend and comfort her/help her situation instead of acting all high and mighty/implying something along the lines “I told you this was silly; now come back to me.” If he loves her, and she is not happy with N, he should help her exit the situation without requiring personal gain in return. Unconditional love does not necessitate reciprocal behavior. 

TL;DR

New Man has a great beat, but sends an overall terrible message. It also enforces gender stereotypes. Also, X is creepy as fuck and should leave both of them alone, even if G called him, solely because he’s a passive-aggressive, manipulative fuck.

[hindsight222]

Worship begins in respect.

I feel that the definition of worship has a become lost on the masses. Worship is not blindly following and agreeing with someone or something, humiliating yourself or others, or harming yourself or others. Worship does not require you to go broke. Worship, at its very root, is respect. When ancient man saw the moon and the sun, they worshiped them as gods for they gave both light in darkness and sunshine to grow food. Ancient man regarded all things that added to their existence with some sort of great respect. (When I say “ancient man,” I mean all ancient cultures that predate modern religion around the world). There was respect of love, fertility, lightning, rain, crops and even war. Nowadays I think that our curiosity as an ever-evolving species, has strayed us away from respect. Why worship the moon? Why not study it? Question it? Understand it? Land on it. Claim it as our own. Colonize it. Our healthy curiosity causes us to smudge the line of respect. We don’t need to worship rain anymore, of course, however, in shifting our worship to curiosity of all things, we have caused harm to so many things that we once respected a lot more. Our earth should be the MOST respected — we live on it! Our oxygen should be highly regarded as important — we breathe it! Unfortunately, us humans have done a considerable amount of damage to our world, our oceans, our air quality. The damage does not just affect us, but every other living creature that has to live on this planet with us. Even if you take the spirituality out of worship, look at how much respect and reverence still remains. I’m having restraint and compassion for whatever we set our curiosity on, we can still have respect for life. Respecting & Worshiping Others. When a man opens the door for a woman, he is not worshiping her, he is respecting her femininity. Her returned gratefulness is her respecting his masculinity, and also knowing that he didn’t have to do that. I don’t know how others were raised, but I grew up knowing that no one uses foul language around my grandmothers and grand-aunties, no matter how “grown” you were. That was simply not done. You respected them as elders of the family, as Mothers, as queens that love you with all of the positivity in their heart, so you left that foolishness outside. When a pastor walks up to the pulpit and you stand up in church, you’re not worshiping the pastor, you are respecting the fact that this is the person that is going to attempt to deliver some love and positivity to the whole room, to try to relieve someone’s anxiety and pain the best way they know how. That is honorable. That is something to be respected. When the judge walks in the courtroom and you stand up, you’re not worshiping this judge, you’re not bowing to “massa;” you’re respecting the person that has put in enough years of interpretation of the legal system, that s/he is now able to deliver sentences, fines and essentially effect your freedoms. You and your freedom absolutely should respected in return at all times. We know our legal system does not always do a good job at this.. which trickles down to general distaste and disrespect for the “justice system” from those that it oppresses, but I digress. When a bride stands at the back of the church and everyone stands up, that is respecting the union that is about to happen. The reason you came was to watch these two become one family, you stand in respect of that. Traditions and manners have often been regarded as unnecessary. It doesn’t take much to turn on the news and see someone horribly disrespecting or, worse, harming someone else. The lack of the respect and civility will eventually reside in disrespect and an uncivilized society. Now the big one. God. I am a proud Christian so this will be according to my perspective. I also love studying other religions, so I will also do my best to be respectful to all readers. Where do I start? Okay, we have disrespected, chastised and executed followers of Christ, followers of Islam, followers of Judaism, and SO many of those that dare to have their own religion and gods. Who is anyone to tell another what can comfort their heart? Disrespectful and just wrong. On television shows, internet jokes, YouTube parodies, I see so many people make jokes at Christians’ expense. There are bands with names, plenty of lyrics that disrespect Christianity, or make light of it. Costumes that I won’t even go into. How messed up is it to be enjoying a TV program or listening to some music and then hear your faith disrespected? I believe God created the universe, planets, everything, my family and even me — I can’t just sing along to that! I can’t just act like I didn’t hear it. If you heard someone wildly disrespect your Mother specifically, you’d have an issue. Christians, like other religions, get a bad wrap because of extremists, but should still have their faith respected. All faiths can respect one another without accepting the same truths. I feel for the Muslim community very much. My father taught me the Muslim faith when he was married to a Muslim woman when I was younger. I got to spend a summer with them and learned so much. I got to wake up early and eat with them for Ramadan, I got to wear the headpiece and learn the prayers and movements. My Christian Baptist Mother allowed me to do this because she knew that I had always been curious about other people in general. I was also a pretty spiritual kid; me and Jesus were tight. She allowed me to explore my spirituality and I’m so grateful. I think Islamic culture is so beautiful! Have you ever seen a Mosque?! Come on now. Just beauty and details everywhere. Anyways, I just want to say that with all the stigma and stereotypes surrounded by your faith and tensions being so awful in America, I really do feel for followers of the Muslim life. I hope it’s not disrespectful to say I pray for the families, especially those that have experienced the extreme violence lately. When I was younger, I was told that all streams, no matter how shallow, have water. I may be quoting that wrong, but what I always took from it was that everyone has something in them that is true, that you can learn from. A lot of religions, both old and new, have very similar stories, and ask people to do the same things: be respectful to yourself and your surroundings, feel good inside and do good outside, be mindful, be grateful and be fruitful. There is no reason to disrespect anyone else for following those rules out of a different book, so to speak. Worship is different to different people. Think of someone or something that you respect the most. (God? Loyalty?) to worship is to just continue to build on respect. Egyptians built great pyramids to exhibit their respect and worship of their gods and royalty. Native Americans considered certain grounds sacred, built fixtures and sculptures. Some African cultures look at their elder and storytellers as royalty as they their lips hold the history of their people. Muslims do not pray without clean limbs. We Christians write songs, poems, do praise dances to worship God. If you’re Baptist, like me, you might even get a little loud with your praise, as if to shout your worship right up to heaven. It’s not necessary if it’s not your thing though. Your relationship to your Creator is your own. What’s Not Worship.

Celebrity and pop culture are ruining the line between fame and blasphemy. To respect the talent and beauty or whatever of a famous person is fine, to admire it is even good too. To support, be a fan of and be inspired by celebrities is all okay. What is not okay is to worship these people as gods. Celebrities are just famous PEOPLE. Just like you and I. You even put too much pressure on the famous people by overly loving them and wanting them to be a role model for your children, agree with what you believe in politically, and literally scrutinize every move they make! These famous people exhaust themselves to death to try to live up to an impossible standard because the masses don’t know how to RESPECT boundaries, within self or others. You shouldn’t love celebrities too much and wanna know everything about their lives simply because you like their songs or movies. You’re disrespecting their right to be a flawed human like you are. You’re disrespecting yourself by obsessing over the life of someone else. And you’re disrespecting GOD by giving that much energy over to someone who He made just like you! God loves you and made you special and you turn around give your self-love and self-worth over to someone else who is human just like you. God wants you to love Him and yourself. You gotta respect yourself too. Respect yourself. Respect yourself. You don’t need to worship yourself either. Comparing yourself to others to show how superior you are is... well it’s just silly, first of all. Second, it’s disrespectful. If you were born with fair skin or pretty feet or great hair, you can’t help that; you had NOTHING to do with it. If someone else was born with a learning disability, big ears, or something like psoriasis, THEY had nothing to do with that. If you’re the fastest person on your track team, that’s good for you, but that doesn’t mean everyone else on the team is just crappy. It means you’re the best, today. People that overly exalt themselves and brag on their talents, cause others to wish for their downfall. People that are humble about their many accomplishments, make others wanna exalt them for him/her and can’t wait to share in more of their victories. Don’t gas yourself up from your own headlines. Respect yourself.

Take care of yourself. Remember yourself. Pay attention to yourself. Who else is gonna be thinking about you, if you are never thinking about you? You can’t get mad at people for not considering you, if you don’t speak up for yourself when you should, if you don’t take care of yourself when you need care. It won’t even be intentional that you get disrespected or counted out, sometimes. You can’t forget about you and expect everyone around you to pick up the slack in your own self-love. Many of us are having a hard time with our own as well. Love. I think worship and love get confused, too. So many are obsessed with and even worship their partners, but they do not love them. If you’re obsessed with your lover, you need to take a step back. Being their biggest supporter, admirer, and genuinely just loving them so much, that is great. But can you imagine if someone just straight up told you “I’m obsessed with you.” That is terrifying! Men that are obsessed with their woman so much that they have to know where she is and what she is doing at all times, even hitting her when she steps out of line, do not love their woman. Women that are so controlling over a man that they don’t want him to have friends or do anything without her, don’t love him. That’s a human being. Human beings need friendship, love, community, alone time, freedom. If you wouldn’t want another human being trying to control those things in your life, think about if you’re obsessing over those things in someone else’s life that is not your young child. Then there are some women that lose themselves in a man so much that they end up disrespecting themselves in order to worship him. This is a sin against God, and, sis, it’s a sin against yourself. Willpower. Boundaries. As a “free spirit,” BOY do I struggle with those two words. I don’t like saying “no” to myself. Jackie Kennedy said that. I don’t remember the exact quote, guys, but she said it. I really don’t like stopping my joy. I struggle with depression and anxiety so much so that when I’m doing something that I like, that distracts me, I don’t want to stop. That doesn’t make it right, and it’s also single-minded. I’ve found that there is joy and great reward in having willpower. It goes without saying that you absolutely need boundaries in life, but typically that’s with others. 

In order to respect oneself, I feel that you have to set boundaries on everything. That sounds mechanical which is not my intent. I mean that you should pay attention to yourself in order to continue to enjoy your whole life the way you want to. If you love cheese, but know it can gum up your arteries, then you have to set boundaries on how often you indulge so that you can continue to indulge for as long as possible. I like alcohol, but if I want my liver to like me for the rest of my life, I have to set boundaries. Paying attention to the things you like, the things you need, and effects of those things all make it possible for you to set more reasonable boundaries for yourself. Love for yourself is rooted in respect, just like worship is rooted in the ultimate amount of respect that you can induce.

[hasansonsuzceliktas]

Between The Two “Divine” Powers: Order and Chaos

I recently had a conversation with a client who owns a mid-sized company. He talked about how he brought himself to the verge of a panic attack because of the current chaos in the markets. Even though there’s nothing wrong with his business, he can’t stop himself thinking about the potential problems. He loses sleep over it, and he’s constantly short of breath. I think nowadays, many of us experience similar circumstances on different scales, especially when we cannot define our situation and put a label on it. Canadian psychologist, writer, and academic Jordan Peterson says that people’s experience of existence is determined according to the games played between the two “divine” powers: Order and Chaos. (Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999.) Order and Chaos Order is what we know, what we are familiar with. It’s a world where my actions and directions, as well as those of others, and their consequences can be predicted. It’s a world where there are no threats, facts are significant, and the buses, trains, and planes are always on time. It’s a world where I always achieve my goals and my home, job, health, money, loved ones, and country are safe. It’s a place where I know the meaning of facts, behaviors, words, and my existence, a place where I feel peaceful. On the other hand, it’s a place that facilitates repetition, and there is no room for the new. There are no new opportunities or possibilities, and there’s no excitement or any other kind of feelings. Basically, it’s a stagnant place. It’s the world of rules, order, and authority, the masculine Yang, the father principle. Chaos, meanwhile, is the unfamiliar. It’s a world where I do not recognize, and I cannot predict its directions, limits, and possibilities. People and facts are different than I expect, and behaviors have unpredictable outcomes. It’s the unknown, and because of this, it contains infinite possibilities. It seems dark, but light is born from within. It’s a place where I do not feel safe and lack direction, not knowing my next step and what it will cause. I do not know what will happen to me. It’s a place where I do not know the meaning of facts, behaviors, and experiences, where anything is possible. It is a scary place, indeed. On the other hand, though, it’s a place where all new possibilities, all creations, all excitement, all feelings, adventure and opportunities, and all kinds of miraculous solutions exist. It’s the feminine Yin, the mother principle. A Human Adventure Human beings venture between these two dynamic powers. This summarizes the struggle of human civilizations for tens of thousands of years. It seems like humanity tries to make the world an orderly one where formulas are set and the facts are comprehendible and predictable. It tries to feed off of this world, which is essentially chaotic, unknown, and undefined, with unlimited possibilities that can occur at any time. There are no clear explanations regarding the spontaneous facts that come from the force that lies beneath all scientific, political, economic, cultural, and social evolutions and revolutions. Even culture tries to create a safe and predictable ground for human relations by defining a common map of meanings through acceptable behavior. That’s why withdrawing from disorder, misdirection, and the unknown and moving toward order, the defined, and the known is more or less written in the genetic code of humanity and engraved into our nervous system. This is why we choose leaders who promise us order, direction, and protection, and we willingly hand authority over to them. Paper Islands There’s no problem here, especially when things are okay. But the problem is this: How much can we invest in the continuity of this order? How long can we wait for the continuity of this order? Although we assume we brought order into our world and made it stable and constant, we perhaps have achieved nothing more than the establishment of tiny islands of order within a vast sea of the unknown. Moreover, these islands are made of paper, and they tend to unfold in the sea of chaos and return us over and over to an unpredictable, changing, undefined life and the ambiguity, uncertainty, and ineffability of the world. Our first reaction to this situation would generally be to take refuge in more order and more authority. We want our team’s lack of motivation to be unraveled in one training session. We want social peace to be ensured through military action. We want a new CEO to solve a company’s problems miraculously by taking decisions that do not make us feel uncertain or disturbed. We want a new political leader to come in and save our country. We like statements that give meaning to the chaos we exist in. Thinking that unknown dark forces are mocking us gives meaning to the meaningless, and it defines the chaos that we cannot comprehend. It is easier to get angry with an imaginary enemy that we cannot see rather than not know how to react, let alone what we are reacting to. Such solutions sometimes ease us for a short period. It creates a feeling that we’ve temporarily returned to order. However, even when this order is really established once again, it’s still just a paper island floating in the middle of a wet sea of chaos, so we soon face the same problem again. This time, we hang on to order much more, though, and we deny the unknown much more as well. We gradually transform into autocratic leaders, executives, societies, companies, parents, and partners. The Third Divine Force Jordan Peterson says that due to taking so much refuge in order, “…the creative researching process that enables the society to move forward, is interrupted.” He then adds that “the limitation of this adaptation capacity…increases the possibility of chaos, dramatically.” So, when people take this road, they invite greater chaos through their own actions, creating this disorder themselves. This change that requires adaptation, which we have discussed time and time again, is now a kind of change where the existing knowledge and order is no longer sufficient. It requires us to consciously escape that order and control in order to reach a better place. We need to question our existing definitions, perceptions, approaches, and meanings to take a step toward all the possibilities presented by the unknown, gradually and cautiously stepping away from the familiar. Peterson defines the third divine force, together with chaos and order, as the “human” that expands the limits of order by dancing between these two forces and giving meaning to their own lives by using these two forces. Change can only occur through questioning our values, thoughts, habits, actions, and identities, or in other words, our existing orders that no longer serve a purpose and keep us within our current dilemma. Furthermore, this can only happen by agreeing to let go of some of these. This is an utterly disturbing process that includes a feeling of loss. No progress is possible through any other means, though, because we would continue living with temporary solutions like authoritative pressure, both from within and from the outside, and our problems will keep coming back to us again and again. This is exactly why the problems of many companies or the complicated issues of countries and societies can never be resolved with solutions that constantly try to restore the familiar order. Technical solutions that try to bring premature, conventional and proven orders to complicated unidentified problems with limited control and ambiguity will be futile in the long run. Dancing with Order and Chaos Plunging into chaos completely would not work either, however. Feeling that the process of change itself is following a certain order, seeing the direction of change, and keeping it in front of our eyes, can be hard, even if we accept some losses in the process of change. We can, however, fundamentally know we are secure and headed to a place better than our current one, and this makes this disturbing process more bearable for us. That’s why being a leader is a critical task. Being a leader means walking the narrow, critical line between the familiar and the unknown efficiently and being able to assure the people that walk with you as well. Two Tools to Handle Chaos One very important way to do this is to add meaning to the state you are in, to accept the chaos as part of an ongoing dance within order and chaos. After experiencing the whole process we’ve been talking about within in our session, my client said: “Yes, I feel utter chaos. I fear that the order I created, my paper ship, will shatter. It fills my entire mind. I can’t see anything other than chaos, but I notice that this is because I cannot see the bigger picture, where chaos is also a part of it.” On saying this, he exhales the breath he’s been holding in for the very first time. His shoulders and his face relax, and it looks as if he feels the sofa he’s sitting on and the floor he steps on for the very first time. “Great,” I say, “Perhaps, you can remind this to yourself every time you feel fear and anxiety and repeat it to yourself.” The second important way of handling chaos and effectively using the opportunities it offers is this: Create practices, exercises, and rituals that will bring order to our own inner chaos, because this will keep us on the path, and apply them no matter what. My client likes this idea, so I ask him, “What other practices would be useful for you?” He thinks for a while before saying, “Dost, I have made a whole bunch of paper ships until now. Some did take in water and unfold, but I made a new one every time. I can do it again. If this one unfolds too, I can make others.” As my client’s body relaxes, a great poem by Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu came to mind: I made a tiny paper ship. It would merely hold five kisses, Or perhaps ten. My sister said This ship would sink in ten kisses. Are you adding fifteen kisses? My mom said, “Don’t throw it into the sea.” Go straight to the pool. Are you going Straight to the sea? But it got wet and sank immediately. I’ll make another ship, so what? And this time instead of kisses It will have a few glorious curses. I’ll make a few more ships. Thank Heavens. Read the full article

[faithfulnews]

Yes, Churches Need Women Who Teach, Lead and Preach

Editor’s Note: This piece originally ran in March of last year. In light of the controversy surrounding Bible teacher, pastor, author and spoken word poet Hosanna Wong’s appearance at an SBC pastor’s conference, we’re running it again this week.    

There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding women lately. From Hollywood and #MeToo to Christians and #ChurchToo, women are demanding their voices be heard … and many are listening. Women everywhere are echoing Oprah’s famous line—“A new day is on the horizon!”—from her empowerment speech during Golden Globes.

But naturally, just like everything else in culture, not everyone agrees—particularly when it comes to women’s role in the Church. After John Piper came out with a response stating women should not pastor (or teach), Twitter users took it as an opportunity to promote, encourage and affirm the women who have impacted them in their faith and in their theology. Names of women rolled in for hours and with reason. Historically, women have been crucial aspects of the Church’s growth and spiritual formation. It’s apparent women belong in leadership.

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Here are five reasons why:

1) Women were foundational to the spreading of Jesus’ message.

Not only was “the woman at the well” the first evangelist to Samaria, and the women at the tomb the first witnesses and proclaimers of Jesus’s resurrection, but Mary of Bethany was affirmed by Jesus as “doing the right thing” in “sitting at Jesus’ feet.” In antiquity, “sitting at the feet” literally meant “being a disciple.” Even Paul, during his ministry made mention of several leading women in his salutation to the Roman Church (Romans 16). Among these were Junia the apostle and Phoebe, Paul’s emissary and the translator of the letter. We also know of several house-church leaders like Chloe and Nympha (1 Corinthians 1:11, Colossians 4:15), and Priscilla, who also taught Apollos “the more accurate way” about Jesus.

If women were crucial in leading Jesus’s movement in the very beginning, why wouldn’t they be as crucial in doing so now?

2) Women are gifted for ministry in the Church.

Nowhere in the New Testament are the Spirit���s gifts gender-specific. In fact, Joel the Prophet spoke concerning Pentecost, “In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy … Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.” Since we are living post-Pentecost, we can be sure God has poured out His Spirit on all flesh—both men and women. This also includes young, old and people in every ethnic group. The Holy Spirit has gifted the Church with the ministries and offices that it needs for its mission, as well as for the purpose of building one another up.

In 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses both “brothers and sisters” when speaking of the gifts, claiming some will perform miracles, some will prophesy, some will be teachers, others evangelists and even others pastors. These are gifts distributed by the Spirit to both men and women, as God sees fit.

Shouldn’t women use the gifts given to them by God to lead the Church, for its uplifting and edification?

3) Women bear God’s image, too.

In the creation narrative, men and women were both given an equal responsibility to bear God’s image, have dominion/”rule” over creation, and be fruitful. In both genders being “made in the image of God,” we understand that the fullness of God’s personhood is expressed in not only in masculinity, but also in femininity. We were created to be reflections of God—to speak and act for Him in our distinctions.

God affirms this when He uses female-specific imagery when relating to His people—like a bear to her cubs (Hosea 13:8), an eagle hovering over her young (Deuteronomy 32:11), a mother comforting and weaning her child (Isaiah 66:13, Psalm 131:2), a nursing woman (Isaiah 49:15) and a woman in labor (Psalm 131:2). Even Jesus compares Himself to a mother hen (Matthew 23:37).

If God is reflected in both masculine and feminine terms when nurturing His people, shouldn’t both genders be reflected in leadership—when nurturing members of the Church?  

This leads to the next point:

4) Women need women advocates.

It’s no surprise that men and women are different—each having different experiences and different needs. Because of this, we need a diversity of voices in leadership who can guide and pastor men and women and speak to their particular situations. Diversity in leadership is tantamount to authentic discipleship and foundational for healthy relationships and growth within a community of people.

When making important decisions in the Church, female perspectives are necessary to speak into issues that men cannot relate to and don’t have firsthand experience in. No one knows the needs of women better than women. Shouldn’t leadership in the Church reflect the diversity of its members?

Particularly in our current culture, with sexual abuse stories being exposed within the Church, it’s more important than ever for women to be represented when it comes to making decisions in leadership on behalf of the community.

5) When women are empowered, society as a whole flourishes.

We know that on a global scale, women are among the most oppressed people. In certain countries, many women have no rights in society, are sold like cattle for a bride price, forced into sex slavery and in some places, not even allowed to show their face in public. However, organizations like UN Women and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), among others, have reported on studies that show how much of a vital contribution—and even complete shift in society—women make when they are educated and empowered.

UN Women found that increased educational attainment for women and girls accounts for about 50 percent of the economic growth in OECD countries over the past 50 years. Over half of this is due to girls having had access to higher levels of education and achieving greater equality in the number of years spent in education between men and women. Similarly, a study using data from 219 countries found that, for every additional year of education for women, the child mortality rate decreased by 9.5 percent.

These are only a couple statistics among hundreds that prove that women’s equality is necessary for human flourishing. When women are empowered, everyone wins.

If this is true on a grand and global scale, wouldn’t it be true for the overall health and growth of the Church? If women are celebrated, empowered and given freedom to exercise their gifts in leadership as God intends, imagine what it could do for the global Church—God’s kingdom on Earth as He intended—a glorious, united and beautifully vibrant people.

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[anthonywashrosado]

Our Need for Intersectionality within the Hip Hop Movement

A couple of mornings ago I was in Florida tuning into The Breakfast Club for a semblance of home. Conversations on The Breakfast Club relay ways in which Hip Hop’s Movement and Culture relate to the individual, our community, and our world. In addition to sharing personal stories, politics of the music industry and artist development are examined and reviewed with influential innovators.

There have been golden episodes of TBC that filled me with hope. Interviews with leading revolutionaries Trevor Noah, Angela Rye, SZA, Kendrick Lamar, the cast of Insecure, DJ Khaled,Cardi B.and more have blessed millions of listeners with insight, enlightenment, inspiration, and laughs. Although I am forced to swallow my pride whenever Angela Yee is cut off by her male co-hosts, I tune into TBC in order to tap into sentiments similar to those of Johanna Valdes:

“It sucks that even though when people are highly problematic on The Breakfast Club and Power 105.1, I still have to engage because it's Black media and it's New York and it sounds like home. It just still has the parts of home that still hurt the most (usually misogyny and homophobia and classism).”

Johanna’s ventilation vibrate on a high frequency. Remy Ma was TBC’s guest this morning and I was eager to hear her speak of her creative process, as well as her journey making music. Half an hour into this episode I was packing my suitcase and heard words from Remy that brought a sharp chill down my spine, paralyzing my body to a halt.

“But I just... Me, as a female I get it when females do certain things but--”

She was responding to an earlier statement regarding men who gossip. My heart pounded as I turned my head toward Remy’s waving hands and matter of fact tone, thinking of the audience receiving this:

“--I hang around a lot of guys, so when I see guys doing certain things that the guys I grew up around and that I hang around don’t do, I just be so confused. Like, why?”

She threw her hands up, extending the “whyyyyy?”. I knew exactly where this tired rhetoric was going. I immediately felt solidarity with fellow femme identifying listeners as we all prepared ourselves for the internalized misogyny that would spur the seemingly unending perpetuation of femmephobia and attack on women and girls. Charlemagne responded,

“But you grew up around a lot of murderers and killers and shooters.” Remy attests,

“You’re right. You’re right. Absolutely, I did. I’m not going to lie to you. I didn’t have any, like, nice guys around me. They was real cool, but I tell you one thing: They was 100. They wasn’t acting like

girls. They wasn’t doing anything that was not manly; that wasn’t stand up; that you couldn’t, you know, hold your nuts on. That’s just the people that I grew up around. So when I move around today and I see a lot of the ways these guys be moving, it’s very female-ish.”

At this point Remy’s tone has transitioned from a high pitch of confusion to the somber note of a lecturing professor. Angela agrees with a “Mhm”. Charlemagne nods with focused eyes as if this information is new and righteous. Remy continues,

“Very woman-like.”

Angela, the most informed and considerately conscious host on TBC, quickly switches the topic to Love & Hip Hop. As their talk delves further into mind-numbing discourse, I felt that final blow alongside all femme identifying women, trans people, and men listening.

I expected Charlemagne to support Remy’s statements. This is a man who is obtaining cultural capital through interviews with varying sources emboldening his perspective on the “transgender lifestyle”. Charlemagne is akin to straight and straight-passing men who demonstrate their masculinity via defamation of gender non-conforming peoples. While transwomen are being killed every day, The Breakfast Club have the privilege of sittin in their studio and laughing while, you know, Lil Duval states he would kill his sexual partner if he found out they were trans. Their uproar translated to the TBC community: whether lie or not, a human being’s inability to reveal their gender identity is of more value than that human’s right to live.

Do you see how dangerous that is?

While I appreciate Angela’s proactivity to cease Remy’s misogynist and femmephobic hyperbole, her reaction mirrored my sixth grade science teacher’s decision to sweep homophobia under the rug by instructing us to open chapter four after I had been called a faggot during his lesson.

Miles from my family, I turned to facebook and posted my feelings. Responses from fellow TBC subscribers eased my mind. Candace Simpson vented,

“It hurts me when my fellow black cis sisters engage in those sorts of gender-essentialist games. We never had womanhood in this country. Ever. And even when we did, it was conditional. I wish we could really take seriously that transphobic rhetoric hurts us too. Think about how people called Serena a man. Black women get those ‘insults’ so much more than white women. As a tall woman, I’ve had my womanhood questioned. I wish we could get it together because this really does come home to bite us in the ass.”

Initially, I planned on visiting Angela at her juice spotin Brooklyn. She is able to thwart any exchange from deleterious to productive. I invariably look forward to her questions. I admire her entrepreneurship. As a Brooklyn native I felt she might want to listen to me. “Yet”, I thought to myself, “if the camera is hardly on Angela during TBC’s aired recordings and her profound questions are constantly interrupted by basic macho prose, then what power would she have to respond to the hate so boldly spewed internationally? ...And would she be targeted for speaking out against hate she and her co-hosts permitted on TBC?”

Angela’s decision to slyly swat away comments that assure continuous degradation of women within the workforce and social spheres is one that is just as venomous as instigating hate. Remy’s internalized misogyny was ignored, as well as the fact that she spat in the wind.

This spit slapped the faces of women who have struggled with stereotypical heteronormative expectations of womanhood for generations... then hit all of her femme identifying male and trans fans...

and finally landed on her L’Aveugle shades.

Although she may wipe her glasses off, the brunt of her conclusion is detrimental to the sustainability of her fan base. There are many ironic and sad parts of Remy’s foot-in-mouth moment. First and foremost...

Remy, come meet me on any day and I will humbly show you a man who is thriving for his community. I will come to you with utmost respect and kindness. I will provide for you receipts at which to prove how I have fostered my upward mobility within a society whose legislative and socially oppressive systems hinder non-white low class individuals from reaching their potential. I am a queer femme identifying Afro-Boricua housing rights activist, curator, and choreographer. My older brother is also queer and a self made entrepreneur, mother agent, and photographer who I assisted in helping raise our three younger siblings. My mom had he at 16 and me at 18. He and I are both very comfortable with our masculine and feminine energies.

My brother is 100. I am 100. I am confident many of your femme identifying male fans are 100.

We need clarity on your definitions so as not to misinterpret your words: Remy, what does it mean to act like a “girlyman”?

Doe it mean that that one is considerate; emotionally intellectual; secure in their feelings; able to express their self?

Or does it mean that one is fragile; dim-witted; easily moldable; unable to make their own decisions?

What does it mean to act “woman-like”?

Does it mean that one provides; nurtures; has agency in creating the circumstances for the life they want; preserves the human species?

Or, Remy, does it mean that one is worth less than the masculinity present within a cis-gendered man; to blame for any verbal and physical abuse they receive in these streets; wired to gossip.

If so...

Remy Remy Remy... You and TBC just dug us a bit deeper into a pit of anti-women based media, hate, crimes, and legislation...

Now I’M confused cause y’all over there laughing and got me sitting in Miami on a sunny 86 degree day tapping at the keys on my laptop, over here like... Why? Whyyyy? Why can’t y’all just have a discussion with the Gender Unicorn?

Fact:Gender performance, gender identity, the sex you were assigned at birth, sexual attraction, and emotional attraction are different. Neither one of these dictates the other.

Remy, your remarks regarding your perception of how others should perform their gender have weight. I wish they didn’t, but they do. I understand that you were alluding to men who gossip. However your proclamation was toxic because it implies that women inherently gossip and/or it is okay for women to gossip but not men. Although your words intended to illustrate your mindset on men gossiping, their effect was of severe detriment to TBC supporters. They maintain the stereotype that women are loose with their tongues. They validate aggressors who traumatize, attack, and slaughter gender non-conforming people.

Remy, I also grew up with machismos in and out of jail. I too had men in my life like those you explain. They tried their hardest to make a man of me. What they, and you, won’t realize is that my manhood and my gender performance are defined by me. Not them. Not you. Me.

True, Remy, your intention was to express your distaste for men who gossip. This implies that gossiping is a trait ingrained in women.

Remy, what is missing from your eurocentrically washed frame of mind is the herstory and history of our African and Indigenous American ancestors. Arawak Tainos across the Caribbean were amongst countless tribes who lived in matriarchal societies. All spectrums of gender identity and performance existed then, as they still do today.

Remy, in order to insure the longevity of your career you need an ardent and viable fan base that know you got their backs. No matter your intent, your actions impacted more people than you can imagine. Believe it or not, your fans include gender non conforming and/or femme identifying people.

Why do we hurt one another even though we are all being hurt by the same oppressor?

I escaped New York in part to get away from femme phobia, only to arrive to North Miami and experience femmephobia from men and women of color.

Where is the intersectionality? Why can’t I escape society motivating society to drink basic-heteronormative flavored kool aid?

Red dye #40 is not good for you.

Deductive reasoning reveals if a person is discriminatory of an identity they too claim, then they endure self-inflicted prejudice. Remy, if you loved yourself then you wouldn’t have to nonchalantly spread hate internationally. Just because people around you were laughing, does not mean it wasn’t enmity. I hope you take time to learn to love yourself more. I hope you will make time to reach out to we who secure your artistic career’s existence. We need your lucidity.

We are waiting.

Revolutionary Ru Paul preaches, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the world are you going to love somebody else?”

[ecotone99]

[SF] Matilda and Pandora’s Box- re-mixed for publication

It would seem that Matilda had forgotten where her duties lay when it came to boundaries, as she was often forgot to take off her lab coat when she was at home. Such quirkiness was personal traits in her instance, and she grew taller each time she brought the coat the success it so often desired. Lifetimes ago...she were nothing more than a feral child: exiled from society for the protection of the public. Now: Matilda held her smile firm as an odd poker face, as the occasions arose frequently to bask in her own well deserved success, as a public servant. From criminal to scientist. Matilda liked the ring it held, and knew her ancestors couldn’t argue that she wasn’t trying to make the most of the Genocide that were unending. Some thought her life tragic, but she’d be left making odd remark of her luck in being considered interesting, as it were a political statement that now held her safe. Americans loved tall tales, and her true and morbid story brought rotten turkey tastes to their frothing mouths. They would make tradition of asking her endless questions and ending disagreements that it didn’t matter since it were so post date to the original offenses. Matilda avoided reporting to anybody and everybody on her own territory, a captain with no base, blind always searching for her lost love, ruling nobody. She held her chin high as she stepped forward and cast colors behind her as she drummed her funeral hymns. She had the curse of a leader with an unending mission. She reminded few men of her name and admired those who asked and stood at attention just in case. She wore her smile to mask her scars, and hid behind a kind name as they began to understand why a name as masculine as Sir can occasionally shift moods of unexpected situations. She’d glady tell nosey elder women stitching: that no grandchildren were expected if they didn't stand down on their issues about her less feminine wardrobe and appearance. Such pressure would remain constant in her community, as though her only reason for existence were to produce heirs to a throne that were burnt down many moons ago. Matilda found the smell of smouldering ashes held curses and forcing herself to pick an Indigenous Warrior to carry on the burdens of her existence. Needing only to ensure her bloodlines remained active.

She had once destroyed an entire reservation with her toxic relationship, and it had almost proved fatal at the hand of her domestic abuser. She ran away from the pressure and barely escaping with her life, as she fled back to the West coast. She had given up on trying to live in two-worlds when neither environments had accepted her in the first place. Matilda knew she were a recluse, and it were a topic of public discussion: her bachelorette status, and the judgements cast by elder Indigenous Warriors who craved grandchildren: after hearing she were still without. It was difficult to express how daunting and unsexy one feels: when they have elders bragging aboot hypothetical pairings, as though Matilda were a wild animal: being breed intentionally...penciled in the books to be reared by their grandsons. It were her genome that brought these women to her side, as they only wanted to see the eyes of their own grandchildren. Matilda wore here number on her sleeve in protest for what they done to them: archived forever as Federal US Property number: five-six-two...six-one-four-six: her “half-blood” status well known within the community. Being a Indigenous Warrior Princess means her overiaries were expected to barter for extra dowlery (cattle, hides, labour) when...and if that particular Redwood bridge were to be crossed. These types of Traditional concepts were outdated and Matilda hated them, but the reality was she had to consider all these aspects anyways...because her race was nearing extinction. It was to all due to these vast cultural extremities and pressures that Matilda stood still single left in limbo, in love with a man too lost to care, and a man with no culture, and genuinely: too bored to object.

When it came to general public knowledge of cultural practices Matilda knew that the dead-eyed savages avoided learning their own culture, and she fell wiser than to ever expect anything from them after some time. Matilda had once attempted to explain her sadness to her precoreational duties, as a an Indigenous Warrior Princess. This fell on deaf ears to the Viking she missed dearly, and with his lack of empathy she knew they could never be together: not only that but his heart seemed to make Matilda sicked with grief and homesickeness somehow. Matilda told him of her experiences as a youth and her best friend growing up playing endless rounds of hoop and net. She had confided that her besties name was Buckles, and he was the sole reason Matilda still managed to smile everyday. He died shortly after reaching adulthood, as he was murdered in his sleep, stabbed to death on the Reservation. Matilda told him how Buckles had been on his last home visit before being he was to be deployed to the battlefront on the oiled desert across the sea. It was this devastating loss that held Matilda hostage as she continued to fight the darkness that had followed her from Hades alone now. It was this loss that would derail a student athlete upon a path filled with violence and self-destruction for a duration of time unknown: warped by the laws that trauma imposed on her mind. Matilda lived in a situation where science and basketball were often two seperate groups of individuals, and they held such differniciations in the dichotomy of personalities...until holding up either masks became exhausting. It would appear this was a social grave Matilda had managed to dig herself into: so that fact left her with little room to object.

A pretence: growing up Matilda and Buckles were a pair to a trio: as the third of the squad was a soft-spoken fellow Indigenous Warrior known simply as: AJ. He was gentle and kind, as he was notorious for his comfortable sincerity and surrounding himself with female friends as companions: his sexuality was without title, and assumedly more female. In the Indigenous Warrior culture Matilda had been raised to understand that there is a difference between the genetic build-up of male/female structure and the emotional/psychological aspects. The latter is called Two-Spirited: which just means the person has an invisible personality trying to express dominance, expressed through hyper-masculinity or hyper-flamboyant demeanors every second of every day. It were as though it could be seen as a cup, which is overflowing with energy until the two-spirited person to decides themselves which person they feel most comfortable presenting that day. It was often questioned to AJ and if he were a Two-Spirited individual, but he was so nice that it never seemed to matter. As a late teen Matilda had found that AJ had been murdered at drunken house event on the Reservation and the culprits were none other than the dead-eyed savages that had visited the sovereign lands for the night. This knowledge destroyed Buckles and he began to spiral as he drank his sorrow away with the poison of Hera, and Matilda lost control of any sort understanding of how to help Buckles. Nothing could have prepared either of them for what they learned next. Following the funeral,services and criminal investigation: it was discovered that AJ had been sexually assaulted on the night of his murder, and that the assault had occurred to his body after he had died. That image and action was all that Matilda knew of the dead-eyed savages that roamed her land aimlessly.To this knowledge Matilda knew she could never trust an American and as she stood frozen in horror as to her disgust in the local invaders. It would be years of drinking the anger away for both Matilda and Buckles before they both landed back on their feet together: she a scientist and he a soldier. It wouldn’t be until soon after that they had weakened their own capabilities with their grief and both agreed they were ready to let go of the contention held for the dead-eyed savages who unwelcomingly stood tenant on their land. It was this story that held both Matilda and Buckles hostage for far too long, as they knew justice for AJ would never be served. It was this great loss to the community that would further devastate an entire Nation, when Buckles was murdered less than half a decade later. Matilda was now left alone, unprotected once more with no one who cared enough to remind her that she and her smile were more than just an object.

With what little knowledge Matilda had procured on the dead-eyed savages first hand: it wasn’t really a surprise that she were an agoraphobic. It would take traveling overseas: before Matilda manifested the understanding that it was not people she feared. It was apparently only the dead-eyed savages that had conquered her land that she feared, as they had proven to live upto their cruel and ruthless representation. She feared the many stories of horror that she was gifted by her fellow Indigenous Warriors. It would seem the dead-eyed savages often made sport of raping women and children on sovereign lands and then returning to the their protected land: now ruled by the perverted Boar. The sovereign laws didn’t pertain to these dead-eyed savages. They were called people, as they didn’t have prisoner of war numbers like Matilda and her family: now chained to the land. The settlers used that advantage to discredit and defile anything and everything as they pleased, and passed on their traditions of violent rape and child molestation: to their grandsons, as they proudly carried on their torches: flickering with endless static comprised of red, white and mother fuckin blue. Matilda had managed to hold her head low in regard to her half-white side until the Viking demanded to know the entirety of her genome and she fell for his charm in odd sincerity. It was this pairing that also brought her name up for public ridicule with her Indigenous Warriors, as she was still a crowned Princess and her genome belonged to the world, and her body slowly losing rights with each breath that lay wasted. She felt her humanization trickling away from her own grasp, and she had seen no real solution in sight as the white men now condemned women and doctors to life and prison sentences for utilizing legal medical abortion practices. The idea of dictation of procreations wasn’t glamorous in the slightest, and Matilda had only been able to void such contracts with aid of her Kness and his ability to pick her up and carry her away. It were now a death sentence to have sex with any American in her culture: a safety precaution meant only for her Peoples, as she lived in fear of the lengths these hick-ass-bitches would go to ensure a woman were forced to carry to term. Matilda often worried that the seemingly fake rules: that only applied to the Indigenous Warriors is what was making them sick, but now watched as the land began ripping straight down its spine. Throwing their women and children into a fire built by lies and corruption. The obsession with blood-quantum ruled their lives for generations, and the end result seemed to be annihilation either way. Scientifically speaking the Indigenous Warriors couldn’t continue up the bloodlines for another three generations without potentially embedding inbreeding precisions. She were grossed out by the deformed beasts known as the Habsburgs: a family with crest that openly bore a head split in two by such unnatural thoughts. Hard pass. Matilda was not aboot that, but talking of such taboo topics of understanding with Indigenous Warrior elders often lead to public arguments and Matilda being belittled for being “childish”. It wouldn’t be until after Matilda met the Viking that these elders would finally begin allowing her to speak on the matter, as they were left taken aback she had found a Viking: feeling threatened that they may no longer have a say on her actions.

Matilda avoided these conversations at dramatic lengths and paced back and forth between the two worlds. She hadn’t told the Viking of her empty threats to these elders, and snarled at their need to control everything around them as they avoided looking at themselves. These were none of the Vikings affairs for the simple fact that Matilda had a culture, and he had none as a dead-eyed savage….the two could never be together. It took two years of Matilda following the Viking and projecting the largest presence of burden to him: until she finally left his side to continue her task of cultural preservation. It took two years before Matilda saw that he held potential to ruin her emotionally beyond repair with his ignorance and cultural insensitivity. She left him sitting in a Basketball gym: brewing in his anger and self-loathing. The Viking would be the one Matilda would call her husband for the next half-decade without hesitation, as a shitty habit. Feeling tensed by his absence, but in a sense that she felt annoyed that he was lost somewhere and his ability to burden others with his ignorance was worrisome. They were an old wedded pair that bickered and constantly picked at the other, and without one another... each could be seen as a handful. She often thought about him whenever romantic music hit her ear, and giggled to herself at her memories of the Vikings failed attempts to initiate flirting. She admired his ability to say what was on his mind, and often caught herself looking for his grey hair and blue eyes amongst the dead-eyed savages. It would seem that just meeting him had given her guilt to her own past, and she often worried he saw her…not as a person, but only as a character created only to exist for his amusement. It had gotten so bad that Matilda was forced to move away if only to remind herself that she were real once more. With no claim to her heart and no culture to call his own: the Viking was finally left with only her absence and no room to object.

Matilda was left with nothing more than the understanding that her elders were weakened by sickness and conquered once and for all, and that she was held responsible for their actions at all times. They spoke of her obligation to preserve their race as though it were a beacon of hope in a time where there were no way to end the finalization of the Indigenous Warrior Genocide. Matilda wasn’t egotistical in terms of needing to fulfill her royal duties firsthand, and had even tried to donate her eggs at some point. She felt awful being stingy when there were couples...straight and two-spirited alike who longed for their own children. Now that science had caught up to Matilda she knew how to make her contributions in more way than one, and that, even if she decided to continue on her life as a single Indigenous Warrior Princess that is was not up to these elders to dictate her...even if she had signed a binary contract as a young girl. She knew she could always object.

These elders were the yet somehow the same that had opened pandora's box when they assimilated their children instead of running in the first place or asking for help. Matilda knew that it would never happen again, as she now told white-men to their faces that she were tired of being fetishized and her trauma as a surviving raped infant being the one thing that Americans avoided since it was a dead-eyed savage who had penetrated her as a one and half year old. It felt as though she was brought to this world and raped within her first two years being told it was a curse for her fathers absence at her arrival. Her bastard status often mocked by the Indigenous American Warriors who new her second father(grand-uncle) was now dead too, having his own body self-destruct from leukemia. This lead Indigenous Warriors to make her the butt of every joke, as they told anyone who would listen how she was the worst Princess out of all the Indigenous Warriors. She doubted there were many that would object.

Matilda missed her second father deeply, and it would seem that it showed, as her joy still gave others hope. She would spend her life crediting the decorated veteran and his expectations of her during times of success, and avoided her forest without him. He was the only Indigenous Warrior who ever went out of his way to defend her from the masses who questioned her aloof smile. He had given her permission to travel to the stars as a kid after she had quipped that she believed that she could do it after seeing a skyboat explode. He hadn’t mentioned the difficulty of the rigorous process, or how few women of colour were allowed to go to space: the two responses she’d get endlessly after his passing. It was her bond to this old Indigenous Warrior that kept breath in her lungs, and tears in her eyes. Without her second father she had become weary from the doubt cast upon her from the dead-eyed savages and even from her fellow Indigenous Warriors. She had no way to tell the world how she endlessly hurt, or what it meant to be an Indigenous Warrior Princess that was seen only as a joke. She lived off of memories of days where her papa had walked by her without speaking: raised her chin whenever she held bad posture, or the small roses he left on her bedside table on occasion. He commanded her to understand her importance to the world, as he spent her childhood fighting her battles...simply so she could smile in peace. He corrected strangers who attempted to parent her, and warded them off as he informed them “she’s fine, and let her read” whenever they noticed she avoided human contact at all costs: reading any book she could find. He had watched her dance in front of the masses wearing her Traditional Princess attire and never mentioned that the dead-eyed savages had once kidnapped him and forced him to assimilate under their legally enforced dogma. Instead he quietly stood by Matildas side and showed her the places of their ancestors in the Redwood trees and gave her the best years of Christmas a kid could ever ask for. He taught her the importance of accountability and honesty and would argue with her when she questioned what was considered just. He let her wear boys clothes and encouraged her competitive behavior no matter how extreme it were. It bothered Matilda when people called her by her Yurok name, as they made fun of her for being named sir. It was only her papa who could get others to say her name right, or throw witty commentary about how Matilda could beat their sons, as she were mighty in spirit. She’d work tirelessly to prove there were no room in her world to question her talents or object.

To these memories Matilda knew that these dead-eyed savages were weak whenever they doubted her, and often took advantage of how little they thought of her by succeeding. Her papa had said to mind her own business whenever she invested in others who had no say in her life, and would say so few words that Matilda had been forced to listen intently. Matilda couldn’t have ever understood the link between them: was the generations that the US and dead-eyed savages had actively worked to try and keep them from existing and yet they both had. Matilda now lived in her papas shadow and worked towards her goals to operate the false star that orbited the Earth she loved dearly. She now lived if only to tell the world what had happened when her elders had learned English and began praising the false God...that not even they worshipped anymore. She ran in spite of them and knew one that there could be a day in the potential future when she might tell the Viking of her complex culture, and that without him she felt in her heart that she wasn’t supposed to stop running. The only way to fight off her heartbreak was to remain in motion, and cry endlessly in the evenings. To this new challenge of healing: Matilda felt her weakening heart beat as it struggled to remain active.

As she returned to retreat: she found imbalance in her steps. She watched as all the men in fleece zip-up vest and khakis began to question each step she took, annoyed to share their lunch table with a wench and her magic vagina. She got accustomed to the men speaking over her, and interrupting themselves as they demeaned her intelligence and barked orders for her to showcase her intelligence until they were bored and went back to speaking over her. She’d lean back in her chair, as they demanded to know how she’d earned a prized lunch seat in their Valley made of Silicon. These valley men were nothing more than mean shallow valley girls in matching threads evidently. How cute. Smirking to herself, as she knew that she’d beat them at their own games. Matilda had hit the books, applied herself to a few applications here and there, masturbated frequently to increase her serotonin and adrenaline levels, and held a firm exercise routine. Nothing unique to that of any other male currently sitting at her lunch table. Matilda had cracked the code... so to speak. Her role as a scientist working under the Blue Crest of Hope: now left marginal room for the data to fluctuate, or even get twisted...until finally: there was no room for these white men to object.

submitted by /u/spacecaptainbrooks03 [link] [comments] via Blogger http://bit.ly/2WqAhWB

[republicstandard]

Archbishop can’t stand a Transgender God Picking Preferred Pronouns

You don’t need the Archbishop of Canterbury to deliver a fatwa on God’s genitals. Even the Koran-burning pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church doesn’t believe God actually has gonads. God is Spirit, says the Bible. God also has smoke streaming out of his nostrils, says the Bible. Not even a hyper-literalist reader of the Bible imagines God puffing through a luxuriant bowl of Bold Kentucky flake.

Handel didn’t think God actually has a glottis when, in Messiah, he sets music to words from Isaiah declaring: “for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it”. When Michelangelo painted The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, he wasn’t Googling for Bible verses on the color of God’s beard. In Rembrandt’s painting of The Prodigal Son, the father’s hands are gnarled with the stiffness of old age. God isn’t suffering from arthritis, is he?

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Archbishop Justin Welby -who at some stage surely must have studied theology- knows the word “anthropomorphism”; attributing human characteristics to God. Seven-year-old Talitha in my Sunday School will shyly but sweetly explain to Archbishop Welby why she doesn’t think God has a face, hands, feet, eyes, ears, or backside to sit on his throne, even though the Bible ascribes human body parts to God.

So why is Welby setting up a straw man and knocking it down with the breath of his nostrils? Is it because in the latest YouGov survey 36% still think of God as male and only 1% imagine God as female? Do the respondents believe God has male, female or inter-sex genitalia? Or are the respondents simply using the language of anthropomorphism to describe how they picture God?

The church fathers weren’t stupid. They didn’t think God has gonads just because the Bible depicts him as male. “No thoughtless person may raise a false accusation against us, as though we believed God to be male … when we speak of Him we use a masculine word—let him understand that it is not sex which is expressed…. For the Deity is not male, but His name is of the masculine gender,” writes Arnobius in the third century (Against the Heathen, 3.8).

Welby and his feminist bishops know this. What infuriates them is not that many Christians think God is anatomically or ontologically male; what incenses them is the indefatigable persistence of masculine anthropomorphic language for God. They can’t understand why more people aren’t resisting the language of so-called toxic masculinity and pathological patriarchy.

By inventing the mythical bogeyman of patriarchy, feminism has succeeded in emasculating Western men. It has yet to succeed in castrating the biblical God—by poisoning with its hermeneutic of suspicion every masculine title for God—Father, Lord, King, Son of God or Son of Man. This is the equivalent of a tarantula crawling up the cassocks of feminist clergy in the Church of England.

Unsurprisingly, Welby hacks at God’s gonads with his feminist machete when asked what it means to describe God as the father at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, earlier this week. He agrees that all “human language about God is inadequate and to some degree metaphorical”. Our Father, who art in heaven, is not a father in the human sense and should not even be seen as a male figure, he thunders. Human language is inadequate to describe God, he warns.

How many straw men is Welby trying to knock down with one ping-pong ball? Only a duff Christian would regard God as a father in “exactly the same way” as a human father or would consider God gendered in the biological sense, or would regard language as adequate to describe an ineffable mystery. This is one reason we use symbols in liturgy and in everyday relationships because we know that language is limited even in communicating our love for one another.

Or has the Archbishop, who is in the business of the Word, has lost confidence in language as the vehicle of revelation? Is he parroting the feminist twaddle of his women clerics? A couple of months ago, Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester, provoked a blizzard of social media abuse when said she didn’t want young people “hear us constantly refer to God as He”. Last week, A Voice for Men re-published the column I’d written on her intemperate ejaculation. A little bird told me Welby was most likely defending this feminist Hermione against the Rebel Priest who must not be named.

Yes, Justin, God is transgender, in the sense that God is beyond gender, i.e. as God is transcendent. But one of the foundational doctrines of Christianity is special revelation: God has chosen to reveal himself in history and if his interventions were not announced, explained, interpreted, and recorded in human language, we would be lost in the mists of speculation.

As sinners we dare not approach a holy God; as finite beings, we cannot figure out an infinite God—unless God condescends to become incarnate (flesh) in our world and limit himself to our language. Otherwise, we’d be like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there.

“By revelation is meant, then, not some vague, inarticulate awareness of God projected out of the human consciousness, but an intelligible, articulate revealing of God by God whom we are enabled to apprehend through the creative power of his Word addressed to us, yet a revealing of God by God which is actualized within … the medium of our human thought and speech” writes T. F. Torrance.

God has chosen to reveal himself through exclusively masculine titles for God. “He” is God’s preferred pronoun for God’s preferred gender. “God never reveals himself with a feminine title in Scripture,” writes Joshua D. Jones in Elijah Men Eat Meat (full disclosure—I had the privilege of writing a blurb for the book). Jones agrees that there are a number of metaphors for God “that have feminine connotations—but that is quite a different thing”. Jesus calls God “Father” 174 times in the gospels. Not once does Jesus call God “Mother”.

Feminists blast biblical language as “patriarchal” and culturally conditioned. Their argument fails, as in the cultures in which the Bible was written people worshipped both female and male deities. Feminine titles for the deity were the norm, not the exception. St Paul’s listeners would have felt at home if he’d referred to God as “she” when preaching in Ephesus where the cult of Artemis (Diana) was situated.

Welby, however, has a quasi-Oedipal tension with the idea of God as Father. “So, what does it mean for me to call God father, having had a rather confusing experience of fathers?” asks Welby. Theologically, his response is as shallow as a puddle: “It means that here is one that is perfect, that loves me unconditionally, that reaches out to me and knows me better than I know myself and yet still loves me profoundly.”

This is the jargon of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It is not a biblical apologia for God as “Father”. The Bible calls God “Father” not because it wants to promote patriarchy but because the fatherhood of God is inextricably linked to Israel’s salvation history. God’s fatherhood is basic to the theme of Israel as the elect “son” of God. By denigrating God as father, Welby is downgrading Israel as God’s elect “son”.

In the Old Testament God is called “father” 14 times. What is remarkable is that each time the Old Testament calls God “father” it has to do almost exclusively with the Exodus and the new Exodus—the first Exodus from slavery in Egypt and the new Exodus that the prophets were hoping for—the new Exodus that would ultimately usher in a new heavens and a new earth.

When Jesus teaches us to call God “our Father” he is not referring to a cuddly relationship with God you find inscribed in a quote on a Father’s Day mug. Jesus is drawing on Exodus language to alert his disciples that the new exodus is about to be inaugurated. As God delivered Israel from slavery in the first Exodus, God is delivering us from slavery to sin through the new exodus brought about by Jesus.

Welby doesn’t get the basic plot and so loses his way before reaching the climax. When we come to Jesus in the gospels, God’s fatherhood and God’s sonship are rooted not only in his election of Israel but in his divine being since “Father” and “Son” designate the first and second persons of the Trinity in relation to one another. “In God fatherhood is not extrinsic to the being of God. In him ‘Father’ is not a title; it designates and specifies God’s personal/hypostatic reality as Father who eternally begets his Son,” notes a Lutheran Church report.

“Since the Arian crisis of the fourth century, the church has insisted that the names ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ perfectly and truly correspond to the reality of the first and second persons of the Trinity. God is not merely called ‘Father’ and ‘Son’; God is Father and God is Son. The trinitarian theology of the Scriptures confessed in the creeds of the ecumenical councils requires that God be named ‘Father’ and ‘Son’,” states the report.

Our society mocks and despises fatherhood, sonship and anything that smacks of masculinity. David Blankenhorn in Fatherless America called fatherlessness “the most harmful demographic trend of this generation” and “the engine driving our most urgent social problems”. He predicted that the “primary fault line” dividing us into two groups would not be race or religion but patrimony. One group will consist of those who grew up with fathers; the other group will consist of those who did not.

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The least Welby could do in response to the question at St Martin-in-the-Fields was to exhort men to be good fathers on earth in imitation of “our Father in heaven”; explain the theology of revelation, and invite his listeners to consider the Father’s plan of salvation in Jesus the Son. Instead, like Esau, Welby despises his birthright and sells it for a mess of feminist pottage.

The ultimate irony is that Archbishop Justin Welby, Champion of Transgender Rights, says God is transgender, but won’t let God choose neither his gender nor his preferred pronoun.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine https://ift.tt/2S7zgNk via IFTTT

[imreviewblog]

Six Facts About Gender

In the past few months there have been an increasing number of attacks on the legitimacy of transgender and gender non-conforming people coming from both the left and the right. Most of these attacks stem from either a flawed understanding of gender, misrepresentation of evidence, or deliberate obtuseness. The responses to these attacks have generally failed to address these underlying problems.

Gender and gender expression are complicated, but not nearly so much as critics would like to claim. They are also not inherently contradictory, nor anti-feminist. Indeed, they can be liberating for everyone. Here are the things you need to know about gender and gender identity in this blizzard of misinformation.

1. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t invalidate it

Many of the most recent attacks by right wing outlets can be summarized as, “This gender theory stuff doesn’t fit my worldview; I totally can’t wrap my head around it, so it must be wrong.” However, an inability to understand something doesn’t make it wrong.

I can’t explain the physics of black holes. Our family dog will never understand the internal combustion engine either. Unlike members of the right wing media though, I’m not out there picking fights with Stephen Hawking, and my dog still likes to go for a ride in the car. The fact that transgender people seem to exist throughout human history is enough to demonstrate that gender, and transgender people, are a reality.

This brings me to my second point.

2. It is not a fad: gender non-conforming people have been around for millennia

There is extensive archaeological evidence that transgender and gender non-conforming people have existed for millennia. In Eastern Europe, 5000 year old graves were found with female skeletons buried with male warrior accoutrements. There are records of Norse women going Viking (raiding). Joan of Arc was burned for wearing men’s clothing. The Kama Sutra describes a third sex, and the Bible talks of “self-made eunuchs.” The kathoey of Thailand have a place within Buddhist writings. Other cultures have long traditions of gender non-conforming individuals, such as the hijra of Hinduism and India, the fa’a’fa’fine of the Pacific Islands, and two-spirits in Native American culture.

The reason we see more of it now is a combination of greater cultural awareness of such people, and because of changing cultural norms which allow transgender people to be more visible. For a reducto ad absurdum example, there are a lot more out gay people in California than there are in Iran or Saudi Arabia, because the difference in how they are treated. Similarly, people are much more likely to identify as LGBT in socially tolerant US states than in conservative ones.

The most cutting edge of cultural change right now is coming in the form of gender fluid and non-binary people. This is the part that conservatives have the hardest time with, but is actually just an extension of something a lot of people already do subconsciously already.

3. Gender fluid expression is something a lot of straight cisgender people do (to a degree) already

Women in American society can (and do) express their gender in ways that that can change from day to day, if not hour to hour. They can put on a business suit to feel commanding and strong at work or an interview, both of which are stereotyped as masculine traits. Or mix a jacket with a dress to keep it at a business level, but more feminine. Other times they can dress in ways that make them feel attractive, which often means much more stereotypically feminine attire.

Alternately, there are times when gender expression is completely irrelevant or gender neutral. Most every mom I know has had days when everyone in the house has the flu, and their gender expression is, “screw it I’m wearing tennis shoes, sweat pants, and a sweat shirt to the drug store for more Pedialyte.”

Women in our culture have much greater room to express their gender than men do, but this bolsters the underlying point. Given the option, straight cisgender people will change their gender expression to fit how they want to feel about themselves in that moment, whether it is sexy, strong, or comfortable. While these feelings may be tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, they are deeply ingrained into how we see ourselves.

Gender-fluid people simply take this day-to-day and moment-to-moment variance in expression we see in cisgender people, and expand upon it. Thus, this is not something new, but an evolution due to increased cultural space for such expression.

So, is how we see ourselves based on nature or nurture? Conservative pundits like to ask this as a black or white, yes or no, one or the other question. The truth is more complicated, but not by much.

4. Gender has components of both nature and nurture

Demonstrating that gender has components that are social constructs is relatively easy. The colors pink and blue are not intrinsically gendered; they are merely frequencies of light. Dresses and skirts are not either; they are simply bits of fabric any human being can drape over themselves. (The fact that some people are willing to defend the morality of hurting or killing someone for wearing the “wrong” bit of fabric says a lot more about us than it does the fabric.)

At the same time, people seem to have an innate gender identity, whether female, male, or somewhere in between. Anecdotally, we can see this in Dr. John Money’s failed experiment with David Remer, who was raised as a girl but never identified as such. The guevodoces of the Caribbean similarly appear female until puberty and are raised as such as a result of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. However, at puberty their genitals descend, and are treated as male thereafter. While usually infertile, guevodoces almost universally identify as male, despite their upbringing.

A recent meta-study at Boston University looked at the peer reviewed evidence, and concluded that gender identity has biological origins, though the exact biological mechanisms remain unknown. This conclusion is not uncommon; it is effectively the same conclusion we have reached about sexual orientation and autism; namely that these have biological origins which are not fully understood.

These examples effectively contradict the notion that gender, and gender identity, are purely social construct as well. However, neither is it purely biological; there are components that are cultural. Both are significant, and observing transgender children helps square this circle. Transgender children often assert from a very early age what their gender is, and choose cultural artifacts (e.g. using a towel to make a dress) to express how they see themselves.

Thus, gender has interacting biological and social components.

5. How you were raised does not determine the reality of your gender identity

One line of argument that tries to further segregate transgender people is that they are not “real” women or men because they do not have the exact same experiences as most cisgender people. This is dangerous in the sense that it invalidates the lived experiences of a threatened minority group, while othering them and opening the door for “separate but equal” legal marginalization. It’s also wrong on a number of levels.

Transgender people are held to a double (read impossible) standard for asserting the validity of their gender identities. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but no one questioned whether he was a “real” boy when he asserted gender identity. The same is true for the guevodoces. In this, we can see that when someone asserts a gender other than the one they were raised in, it is only treated as valid if the individual’s eventual identity is cisgender.

Similarly, many transgender children are now socially transitioning at an early enough age that they will likely have almost no memory of having lived in a different gender role. Even in my case, as a “late” transitioner (mid-30’s), when I die I will likely have spent more than half my life being treated as a woman. On top of that, there’s the issue that male privilege is not monolithic.

Finally, the argument that you’re only a “real” woman if you have menstruated, are fertile, or have had children is reductionist and vaguely creepy, in a Handmaiden’s Tale kind of way. There are cisgender women who never have a period, are infertile, or choose not to have children and don’t have to defend the validity of their gender identity and expression.

6. Transgender people do not intrinsically reinforce gender stereotypes

Transgender people, by definition, go directly against societal norms for how a person should dress or act based on their assigned gender. Virtually every Circuit Court in the US has agreed with this interpretation of what it is to be transgender. However, the argument made by anti-transgender conservatives attempting to appeal to women and feminists is that when transgender people transition, they do so by adopting cultural norms and stereotypes of their target gender, thus reinforcing them.

Both cisgender and transgender people change their gender expression to match how they feel about their gender, and themselves, at any given moment. However, transgender people have traditionally had even less space to express their gender than others.

In the past, transgender people (particularly transgender women) were not allowed to medically transition unless they looked, sounded, and acted in a stereotypically feminine manner. In recent years, people who are visibly gender non-conforming have been at a much higher risk of violence than those who blend in. Religious conservatives have urged violence against transgender people; and the easiest way to avoid this is to adopt an appearance and mannerisms which blend in.

As such, if transgender people have done anything to reinforce stereotypes, it is a result of a patriarchal culture which we have no control over which severely punishes anyone who is seen to violate these stereotypes.

The final nail in the coffin of this flawed argument is that as medical culture reduced gatekeeping, and our culture is making more room for diverse gender expressions, gender non-conforming transgender people are becoming more common. This is perhaps one of the most gender transgressive developments in our culture today, and is a direct result of the work of transgender activists to begin opening this space up.

Far from reinforcing the gender binary and gender stereotypes the transgender movement is actively working against it.

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2qIw7Hc