#all gender bathrooms

[esrah-rah-rasputin]

[ID: “the world if” utopia meme. Caption reads: “the world if public bathrooms were all-gender and only organized by the type of toilet the individual stalls actually had, including fully accessible stalls and sound-dampening walls on all stalls.” /End ID]

[brisingr-sword]

i feel like there’s been some sort of change recently because i swear to god i’m seeing all-gender bathrooms like everywhere (especially like, airports???) which is amazing! but i genuinely thought i was just seeing them because i had moved to a bigger city in a very very blue state and it was, yknow, a big city in a blue state, but i saw all gender bathrooms in TEXAS last week!

[loachfriend]

[ncfcatalyst]

“All Gender” and “Gender Neutral” Signage Removed on Academic Side of Campus

Students across campus were surprised on Apr. 27 to see that signs for various single-stall bathrooms across campus no longer read “gender-neutral” as they had for years. Messages began to appear on the school’s email forum, reporting that bathroom signage in the Jane Bancroft Cook Library, Heiser Natural Sciences Complex, Academic Center (ACE) and College Hall had all been altered to remove…

[yrsonpurpose]

red, white & royal blue script easter eggs

[jetsi]

Most fucked up chocolate i have ever seen

[bacchuschucklefuck]

one thing I really really appreciate abt riz gukgak as a character is that he is un-self-aware to the max. he inhabits his body so completely. the arc that would usually be run as "I'm different and unable to connect with my friends in this way that everyone seems to be able to do and so something's wrong with me and I don't like myself" when it comes to riz is actually like no! I have literally no problems or praises for myself personally. I don't stand outside of my own self and judge it. it's phrased as "other people will eventually find someone more important to them than you" rather than centering it on his self-perception. he doesn't know why he doesn't have the best social life on earth even though he's not afraid at all to talk to other people. every time he sees himself in someone else's actions or behaviour he gets startled by it. his latest epilogue is realizing seemingly for the first time that he's not just an agent of causes but an actual character. he's my hero and I want to be him when I grow up

[beranibear]

Things that make me happy in Melbourne (feat. cow in tree)

[utilitycaster]

[plant-dad-sulu]

So I go by Nick with most of my friends at this point and use any pronouns and theyre all very good about switching it up sometimes but one of my friends primarily refers to me as "he" which is cool i dont care but it didnt register to me as an issue until i met up with him and some of his straight friends a while back and on seeing me they all had identical looks on their faces like they were short circuiting and one even asked my friend "this is Nick?" At which point i realized they were probably expecting a cis man and not a fem person in a crop top with boobs and so on and now i eagerly await the day i meet more of his friends just to see it happen again because why have a gender if ur not gonna be funny about it

[puppmeo]

Nobody is required to explain their personal relationship with their identity with you. I, however, will talk nonstop if given the chance and will give you a wildly different answer every time

[yonderghostshistories]

Honestly, I respect Reece & Steve for including gender neutral bathrooms in the final episode of IN9 Series 9 , "Plodding On". I thought that was quite nice tbh 😊🫶

Imo, it shows that the world in this episode (and possibly the entire IN9 series if we are to assume all the episodes take place in the same universe) is probably more progressive and accepting than our irl world, ya'know?

Anyway uhh, rambling over, I just love this episode so much <33

[blood-choke]

hiiii… i wanted to ask more about this particular val scene where mc and her talk about that portrait and mc is a bit stuck on the word husband and wants val to know theyre not a man. can i ask what inspired that type of convo? i wanted to know if it’s something you’ll touch up on again? is this underlying feelings mc had before their entombment… worried that val sees them as a man just because mc is masc? cause i know that’s kind of broader discussion in the lesbian community iirc….. was that why you wanted to incorporate it? this ask has so many questions LOL but basically i wanted to say i was intrigued and it did made me think more on those type of dynamics (thinking back to those resources you rb’d a while ago that go more into depth about diff things in the lesbian community)

oh boy get ready for another long-winded answer from me!

a lot of the feelings mc has about their gender are inspired by Leslie Feinberg's work (mainly Stone Butch Blues)

Feinberg was someone who lived & passed as a man for years of hir life, and wrote a lot about the complexities of hir gender and what it was like being a "gender outlaw."

there was actually a scene in particular from sbb that kinda put the kernel of an idea in my mind that led to this narrative of the mc feeling overshadowed by Standard and anxious about being perceived as a man. it's towards the end of the book when Jess (sbb's protagonist) meets Ruth (a trans woman that Jess falls in love with)

Jess offers to help Ruth carry groceries up to her apartment, and Ruth takes this the wrong way & is offended, partly because she thinks Jess is a man.

One Saturday afternoon I found her clutching two huge bags of groceries and fumbling with the downstairs front-door lock. I pulled out my key.

“Here, let me.” She didn’t say thank you. She hurried ahead of me on the stairs.

“Can I help you carry those?” I offered.

“Do I look weak to you?” she asked.

I stopped on the stairs. “No. Where I come from it’s just a sign of respect, that’s all.”

She continued up the stairs. “Well, where I come from,” she called out, “men don’t reward women for pretending to be helpless.” Once I heard her apartment door close I kicked the stair in anger and frustration.

later, after they get to know each other better, they have this interaction:

I laughed and picked at my salad. “Do you know if I’m a man or a woman?”

“No,” Ruth said. “That’s why I know so much about you.”

I sighed. “Did you think I was a man when you first met me?" She nodded. "Yes. At first I thought you were a straight man. Then I thought you were gay. It’s been a shock for me to realize that even I make assumptions about sex and gender that aren’t true. I thought I was liberated from all of that.”

I smiled. “I didn’t want you to think I was a man. I wanted you to see how much more complicated I am. I wanted you to like what you saw.”

i think the inspiration here is quite obvious, hahaha. i figure anyone that's read sbb can sense the similar through-line here in my work. though the conversation between mc and Valentina has a much different tone.

there's another scene later as well after something happens to Jess and she has to have her jaw wired shut. she's working at a new job and is unable to speak, and she's also passing as a man at this job. she overhears some of her female coworkers talking about her and they refer to her as a "creep" and speculate that she's always watching one of them. Jess overhears all of this and then walks out of the job, goes home and pulls the wires out of her mouth herself:

After I was sure I’d gotten the last piece of wire out of my gums, I rinsed my mouth with whiskey and then drank the rest of it so I could sleep without remembering how Marija’s words had stripped me of my humanity.

butches & gnc women still face this kind of dehumanization; compared or likened to men in a derogatory way, accused of being "heteropatriarchal," the predatory stereotype of the fat ugly lesbian, and on the other side they're also hypersexualized, especially online and in queer spaces. butchphobia is a specific kind of misogyny that hits from all sides, even from the people that are supposed to be a part of your community. and this attitude especially effects trans women and women of color, who are already experiencing all of these things due to transmisogyny and racism.

i also really wanted to use this to touch on the kind of gender essentialism that we see in a lot of these cis feminist discussions - to these women at this job, Jess had committed no real crime other than being quiet and being the “wrong” kind of man. something about this scene has always stuck with me and really bothered me, but it's hard to put into words; on one hand i can admit i have probably been one of those women who made some kind of similar remark about a man i barely knew, but i've also been someone on the receiving end, too, because of the way i look. the mc in blood choke is put into this box, but they can't fit in, as someone who has been on both sides and doesn't really understand where they belong because of it; how can she stand beside Valentina or Hana or Clear when they might see her as a perpetrator, someone who can't be trusted? how does this mindset harm both the women and the men of the council and everyone in between? how can we break this cycle?

one of the films i mentioned recently when talking about the character designs was The Same Difference, which is specifically about the Black lesbian community and the discrimination within that community based upon gender roles (though this is not something limited to just the Black lesbian community)

a lot of the women in that doc talk about the boxes they're put in as AG or stud lesbians - they can't have their hair long, they can't wear makeup, they can't do this or that, they have to be aggressive and hard or else they're not real studs. they discuss stud on stud (or butch4butch) and how other lesbians look down on those types of lesbians, as well as the disdain for bisexual women for "betraying" the community. it explores the way misogyny and the patriarchy still oppress these women and forces them into this restrictive gender role despite their refusal to adhere to the other role originally assigned to them, and the way racism specifically intersects and exacerbates it for Black lesbians. there's a stud that's an exotic dancer and wears a weave, and a lot of other studs have a problem with this because a weave is "a female thing." another section follows a pregnant stud, and how the community shuns her for that, because she "dresses like a man and acts like a man" so why is she getting pregnant when she should be "the man"?

mc doesn't remember how they felt before entombment, but waking up they feel this need to prove themselves - both in that they are hard and aggressive like a butch should be, but also in that they want to be this person for Valentina or Clear or Hana (or all of them) that is safe and comforting. but they aren't sure how to do that when the world perceives them as this one specific thing - as a husband, as Standard, as a man, specifically this man who hurt Valentina.

of course we've already seen this to not be true of the companions with the last chapter as the mc learns more and spends more time with everyone. but this is kind of the foundation of where this whole idea came from. it started with my novel & i chose vampires for that story & this one because there is a long history of lesbian vampirism (and also because it's sexy) but there's this "curse" that both Hana & Valerie talk about in their respective stories, the first one being the racism she's had to face, the transphobia, along with this alienation and perception of lesbians as predatory and conniving and aggressive, as vampires, which i just think really lends itself to expanding upon these issues lesbians & trans women face both in general and within the community.

anyways if you want to read more i suggest Stone Butch Blues, which you can get for free on Leslie Feinberg's website, as well as S/he, by Minnie Bruce Pratt, available on the internet archive, Gender Failure by Ivan E. Coyote & Rae Spoon also on the internet archive, and you can rent The Same Difference for $10 on vimeo.

[fr3sh-c0rn]

Transphobes are so confusing, man. "What makes you a man or woman if gender roles, appearance, or sex (etc) have nothing to do with it?" like bestie what makes you a woman (or any other gender identity) is the fact you identify as such what's not clicking

[pawbeanies]

was hiding in one of the work bathrooms waiting out my lunch break bc someone came in while i was peeing and they were brushing their teeth by the sink and i was like ohhh this is a social situation ive never been in and i have no clue how to navigate it i will just wait here until they are done . ok . BUT then my break was going to end and they were still there so i like went ok i have to wash my hands and get out there so i did and why was Person Brushing Teeth In The Spooky Basement Departments Bathroom like so pretty .?!? i like froze i felt like this

[sucrecube9]

Ive gotten SICK of the freaks at school