#but can we all just stop arguing over whether bi people can be femme or butch or whether bi lesbian is a valid terminology

[mysticsapphicsblog]

why must people bicker over whether your existence is more valid than another - don't we have enough shit to be dealing with in the world that we don't need to argue online with people we've never met???

[charmanderxerneas]

sorry this is just me, person with abnormal gender experience, ranting ^^”

Let’s have a little ramble about gender and pronouns ^w^ ^w^ specifically: How annoying it can be when people assume things about you and your gender and pronouns instead of just asking.

For example:

-Assuming pronouns equate gender. “This person uses they/them pronouns so they Must be nonbinary. or This person uses she/her pronouns so they must be female” This is not always the case! people can have different pronouns that aren’t necessarily traditionally associated with how society sees their gender.

-Related to that last point, people like to make dumb discourse and argue about which pronouns are “acceptable” to use with which pronouns. Please know that if you see anyone arguing over whether or not “he/him lesbians are valid” “can you be a bi lesbian?” or “are neopronouns valid?” or some similar shit: that is a terf or a cop or some shit trying to provoke the community into bad faith arguments while distracting from actual issues! All it does is turn people against each other when at the end of the day: What labels someone uses doesn’t actually really harm anyone and only matters to the person themselves. They know themselves better than anyone else and therefore are the only person who can decide labels for themselves (or choose not to use labels for themselves at all! Relating to that…)

-It’s annoying that even within the queer community, some people try to force you into labels and boxes. Labels can be really important to some people, allowing them to put into words how they identify and it lets them take pride in that! That should be celebrated. But also: Some people don’t need labels at all and it’s annoying to assume all people need them! I’ll see people analyze nonbinary or trans people like “are they femme or masc presenting? are they gay or a lesbian or pan or bi or this or that? They’re nonbinary, so let’s categorize what type of nonbinary person they are-“ This can be so bothersome if you feel like you dont want to put any labels on yourself. Im not femme/masc/androgynous presenting or this or that: I am just existing and dont want to have to put effort into finding a label when We literally don’t think we fall into the traditional binary of what society thinks our gender should be and you’re going “Well lets see if i can categorize you anyways”. blehhhh. of course i do personally have some labels i do connect with but not everyone does and its annoying when people try to assign you categories that you arent already adopting for yourself.

-Obvious one: Assuming someone’s pronouns based on looks. like going: “Oh that person has long hair and dresses girly so I’ll assume she/her” when you didn’t ask the person how they wanna be called. Also: You can be trans and still dress however way you want, even if its not what society thinks your gender “should” be dressing as. If there’s a trans guy wearing a dress: you dont get to question if hes ‘really trans or not’ clothes and personal expression and appearance do NOT equal gender. Some of us just wanna fucking wear whatever clothes we want without even thinking about that kinda stuff… Just ask the person how they wanna be called!

-Stop thinking of nonbinary people as “woman lite” or “basically a women” or that we’re all just afab and androgynous looking and shit like that. People act so uncomfortable with things they think are “masculine” that they’re fucking hostile to people in their own community (I seen people be so nasty to amab nonbinary people… or nonbinary and trans people with ‘masculine’ traits…. or fat nonbinary people. or anyone who doesnt fall into their idea of “pretty”) its so clear you don’t actually respect nonbinary people if you are just thinking of them as “whatever gender I think they look like”. Same applies for other trans people: If their clothes or pronouns or ANYTHING makes it so you think about them as anything other than their preferred gender: You dont actually respect them

-Assuming the preference of pronouns based on how someone lists them out. I seen some people go “if someone’s bio says ‘she/they’, then you have to use she more than you use they!” SOMETIMES people will follow this rule, but don’t just assume that’s the case! Sometimes it’s just… someone with multiple pronouns with no real preference of how frequently you use them. For example: I use both he/him and she/her. If i put “she/he” in my bio and people started using she way way more than they use he for me: I would be sad because ideally itd be nice to use my pronouns interchangeably. Everyone is different so don’t assume what works for one person is universal! If you don’t know, just ask the person “Do you have any preference for how often I use which pronouns?” Because some people do list their most preferred ones first, but some people don’t!

-Maybe this one’s a hot take. I think it’s perfectly valid to get upset over people not respecting you and your identity and what you want to be called. But also please remember that 95% of people online are not checking ur bio before they address you on a post lol. I’ve seen people be bothered if someone says ‘they’ when they don’t know a persons gender… it IS offensive to use ‘they’ if the person doesnt use they/them pronouns and youre just trying to avoid using their actual pronouns: But guys not everyone online knows your pronouns. You can inform people of your pronouns if you feel like you need to! Just dont assume everyone reads ur bio lol. I have similar feelings about words like “dude” or “girl”… if you do not want to be called those: Thats absolutely fine and people should respect that, its shitty if they dont! but its also silly when people yell at people for not reading their bio and realizing they were a girl before saying “hey dude” or something like that.

You can inform people thats not something you wanna be called without being mean lol. Not that its not valid if you genuinely feel upset over peoples small mistakes or Not reading your pronouns before addressing you: But it really helps no one to be passive aggressive (only makes people feel worse and more bitter towards you for messing up!) Some people are shitty and intentionally misgender. but some people are allies just genuinely making a mistake and will go “oh my bad” if you just communicate.

Really just: communication is key for everything haha. Don’t assume things about other people. Ask people how they wanna be called. Lets all be kinder to each other today. sorry im always ranting annoyingly besties. im incoherent its 1:30 am

[vaspider]

Pete Buttigieg is not the fucking point.

Truly amazed at the people whose big takeaway from that thread is "you hate Pete Buttigieg" like buddy did you not... read... all of it?

I genuinely don't give a shit about Pete himself. If you think this is about Democratic self-devouring or whatever the fuck, please mentally substitute Ellen or George Takei or Rachel Maddow or your favorite Other Respectable Gay. I hear some dude named Rubin is even a conservative who is getting turned on for adopting a baby? I don't know who he is and I don't care (do not tell me, I do not care) but if it makes you feel better, substitute any of those names.

I think the ones that actually make me sad are the people who keep insisting that 70% of people support gay marriage, and that I'm just 'acting out my trauma', and we won't see things turn against us, we're perfectly safe now, how dare I say that cishets won't put themselves out for us when it counts, it's different now.

Honey, 99% of people want tomorrow to go on pretty much like today, and what they'll support when it doesn't cost them anything has nothing to do with what they'll support when it does. Those of us telling you 'we were abandoned before, and we were the ones who took care of us then' aren't telling you because we're incorrigibly bitter misanthropes. I am annoyingly hopeful, actually, and in love with humanity and the beauty of life. Seriously, I have to write poems about it because I love the universe and all of humanity so fucking much. One of the things I love about humanity is its fragility and its uncertainty. I love the ways in which we fail.

And humans, over and over again, turn our eyes away from tragedy.

If you are lucky enough to have cishet friends and family who will put themselves out for you when it really matters, that is fucking fantastic. That's not nearly universal, and I'm afraid that you're going to find out sooner rather than later that it's far less universal for you than you'd like to believe.

At the end of the day, you can believe me or not about all of this. You can say that I'm just a bitter old transfag, an angry old dyke, a traumatized old queer if it lets you sleep better at night, if it allows you to just close your eyes and say 'this is all going to be fine, because 70% of people support marriage equality!' and get some rest. I can't make you pay attention.

And the thing is? I'd love to be wrong. I would absolutely love for every cishet who has ever said "one of them" or said "well, I mean, I just don't want to see it, they can do whatever they want in private" or whatever to turn out to be the raddest fucking ally the world has ever seen. I know it can happen! My in-laws went from being Baptist homophobes to getting weekly chatty update phone calls from the two trans women refugees from Latin America who they housed and helped get their papers sorted and who are now living in New York and call them Mom and Dad. Like, truly, it can fucking happen!

But you can't count on that from the vast majority of people, because when it comes down to it, most people want tomorrow to go on pretty much like today. You're much more likely to be able to count on someone with a dog in the hunt.

More than that, though, the point of that essay -- which, when people miss it, they miss it so hard that it feels deliberate, honestly -- is that all of our bullshit infighting doesn't mean dick. I've been saying that for years, begging people to think inclusively about our community, begging people to stop all the bullshit infighting because I could see this shit fucking coming, you didn't need to be Cassandra to see it coming but sometimes I felt like I was screaming until my throat was horse, the fucking tsunami is coming, it's coming, motherfuckers, can't you see the way the water is pulling back?

And here we are, and all the arguing about whether bi lesbians are "valid" doesn't matter, and everyone's attempt to gatekeep butch and femme doesn't matter, and everyone's arguments about whether neopronouns are bad doesn't fucking matter because we are all just fags, dykes and trannies to them, they do not care for one fucking second about any of this. None of them care for one second about our infighting. No one is going to stop and ask you what your orientation is so they can call you the right slur when they're gaybashing you, kids. They. Don't. Care.

So now here we are, and people are acting like the point of the essay is that I wanted to call one particular dude a fag, rather than that it doesn't matter how perfectly primed you are to fit into Respectable WASP Society, it is your queerness which is objectionable. It is your gayness. It is your transness. It is your bisexuality, your asexuality, your lesbianism. You will never be granted rights and respectability. You have to defend your rights, and stop giving a shit about respectability as a metric of whether or not someone deserves them.

I mean, for fuck's sake, some Iowa voters tried to withdraw their caucus support once they realized that Pete was gay. It literally fucking happened. There's video. Someone they supported above all the other candidates in the Iowa primary was immediately disqualified for them to the point where they tried to retract their support the minute they found out he was gay.

That's the fucking point. I don't care who you use as your Proxy Respectable Gay.

Pete Buttigieg is not the fucking point.

[voxofthevoid]

Taking It Up The Ass Isn’t Character Growth - A Rant

So, in response to an ask a while back, I said I had a rant brewing on fandom and sex positions, and well, a lot of you wanted to see it, so here you go. You literally asked for it.

Disclaimer: This is going to talk a lot about top/bottom roles in slash fic and fandom attitude towards them and is heavily filtered through the lens of my own tastes and experiences with fandom. I’d also like to be upfront that I am 100% in favor of people writing whatever fictional content they want, and it’s not what fandom does with characters that bothers me but rather how that translates into attitudes towards real, live people. Also, this is the essay version of a slow burn AU because I regurgitate my entire fandom history before getting to the point. Beware.

I discovered fan-fiction around a decade ago, had no clue what the hell it was, got hooked and dived deeper. I started participating in fandom circa 2013, and I was fairly young and also completely inexperienced both sexually and romantically. The fandom in question was Hannibal and my ship of choice was Hannibal/Will. It was/is a very chill fandom in general, but we had our drama. And chief among the contentious topics was—you guessed it—the top/bottom debate. I can’t actually remember any other topic that was discussed and argued for so ardently in that fandom, at least in those days. Even after I drifted away, I came across a few posts on the matter.

Generally, you had two camps—people who supported strict roles and those who were in favor of switching*. And because we’re a society plagued by illogical assumptions, the strict role camp mostly had people who thought Mr. Big Bad Cannibal in the Fancy Suits wouldn’t take it up the ass because he’s older, more experienced, more mentally stable, and of course, more ‘dominant’ in personality. Yes, that sentence is chock full of problematic shit. I am aware. Lots of people were aware and argued strongly against attributing top/bottom roles to personality. I don’t remember anyone arguing as enthusiastically for Top Will, but those voices were also there. But the general idea was that assigning strict top/bottom roles to a male/male couple was casting them in a heterosexual mold and thus, the progressive option was to make them switch. Strict roles also garnered comparisons to “yaoi” and uke/seme stereotypes, which was of course bad and fetishizing and we, the Western media fans, of course had to do better. Stealth racism is fun to untangle.

Anyway, I lapped up the woke juice. Partly because I was a baby queer from Buttfuck Nowhere, Asia, who had zero exposure to LGBT+ communities and what queer folks did with each other. Partly because it was the stance taken by most of my favorite writers so it seemed like a good position to emulate.

Emulate it I did. Most discussions I had about this happened in private with the handful of close friends I had in fandom. Where it really showed was in my writing. I made sure to write switching—maybe not in every fic, but then I alternated between fics. Thing is though, I did have a preference. I liked Top Will. I created and consumed a ton of Top Hannibal, and sometimes it was okay, sometimes it was not, but I couldn’t pinpoint why it made me uncomfortable. Back then, I thought I was a cis questioning/bi girl and once again, the impression I got was that not being MLM, having a preference was automatic fetishization. So I tried my best to justify my preferences, to my friends at least. I think what I said was that fandom was skewed towards Top Hannibal, and I liked the opposite because I’m a contrary fuck. Which I am, to be fair, but this was just me desperately trying to figure shit out without being offensive.

That’s the line I touted all the way until 2018, which was when I fucked off to grad school in A City, finally freed of Buttfuck Nowhere and able to actually date. At this point, I was settled in my sexuality (girls only) and questioning my gender (non-binary or trans guy). I had also tentatively figured out during undergrad that I’m an exclusive top and a Dom. Actual attempts at dating cemented that, yes, those are my preferences, about as flexible as a steel rod. Cue motherfucking epiphany over my fanfic tastes.

And see, over these years, I was engaging intermittently with fandom. I dutifully wrote switch couples. I also continued to have rigid tastes and continued to explain it away as being a contrary fuck—to be fair, until Steve/Bucky, my preference did seem to be the opposite of the larger fandom preference. But correlation, as we know, isn’t causation. Until Steve/Bucky, I continued to write versatile couples because I honestly didn’t have the guts to just say I liked it just one way. I do now but even then, I feel compelled to add that it’s because I want to see my own taste reflected in fic, so I write/read the character I relate to as a top, it's not that deep etc. Would I be as forthright if I didn’t have that reason? Would I have such strict preferences in fic if I didn’t have strict preferences IRL? The latter’s a mystery, but the former isn’t—I wouldn’t be because fandom is still entrenched in the same ideas that got me to this point to begin with.

In every fandom I’ve been in, I’ve seen some version of this debate go around. Sometimes, it’s one party saying “why would you write Character X as a bottom, he’s so Reason A” and a reblog chain that insults the OP and/or extols the virtues of switching. Sometimes, it’s a general-ish message that says they don’t understand why people have strict preferences when we all know real gay couples switch. Sometimes, it’s blanket statements that accuse anyone with preferences of fetishizing. Sometimes, it’s the same reasoning that gets you “Character Y is a top because of Reason B” transposed on versatile couples except this takes the form of “they switch because they’re equals.”

Ya’ll, I’m fucking tired.

I have long since lost count of the number of stories I’ve seen where an exclusive top learning bottom and liking it is character growth. Where a character who prefers to bottom taking a turn on top is empowering.

Isolated, these are fine. But I’ve seen enough of such stories that it’s distinctly discomfiting and a major squick. Sometimes a trigger, if I'm too immersed in the story. I’m not going to try and burn an author at the stake because they pissed me off. I am just going to close that window and quietly handle my shit. People can write whatever they want. But this one theme hits too close to home, as you can see from this 1.6k rant.

My friend (also my ex-girlfriend) and I had an all-out bitching session about this the other day. Both of us are kinky fuckers who have rigid, complementary roles we prefer and we have both had our grueling days of struggling to reconcile our sexual tastes with our ideologies precisely because of how these things are frowned upon in conservative and progressive circles. Seeing that in fandom, of all places, is both insulting and exhausting. Topping and bottoming aren’t personality traits. Neither is D/s. It’s sexual preference and power play. It really does not have to be that deep. I am not exorcising childhood trauma using the bodies of women. My partners, former and current, have not been brainwashed by the patriarchy. We will not become better, more complete individuals once I magically stop being a stone top and my partners embrace the joys of a strap-on.

I have, with my own two eyes, seen someone say that in a really committed relationship, of course the couple will switch.

Bullshit.

It’s transparent bullshit. This does not get attributed to cisgender M/F couples. Even when the automatic assumptions of woman = bottom and man = top get addressed, switching isn't presented as the default. No one’s saying “oh, if you really love your husband, you’ll peg him”. I do know butch/femme sapphic couples get their own share of shit. Because it’s all heteronormativity, right? Can’t have any other reason for top/bottom roles.

You have two extremes with “so who’s the woman” on one end and “it’s woke only if they switch” on the other, and as far as I’m concerned, they’re equally damaging. There shouldn’t be a pressure, however subtle, to conform your taste in fiction to some arbitrary idea of progressiveness. People are going to like whatever they want anyway; all this does is create an atmosphere where those likes can’t always be freely expressed without a lot of mental gymnastics. We’re seeing so many versions of this in the pushback against so-called problematic content, but smaller, subtler versions exist too.

Fictional characters aren’t real. They can be whatever you want them to be. And yes, other people will often want them to be the exact opposite of your ideas, but that’s just how things work. Meanwhile, the people behind these usernames? They’re real. No one should be throwing real people under the bus to ‘protect’ characters that don’t exist. Hannibal Lecter doesn’t care whether he gets fucked or dismembered in Author B’s fanfiction, but the discourse that surrounds the dick up his ass? That does affect flesh and blood people.

I am not claiming that this is the only attitude in fandom. Middlegrounds do exist. Plenty of people abide by fic and let fic and there are folks who pipe up to say not every RL queer couple switches. But it’s often the extremes that reach most people. That was certainly my experience, and I’m not the only one.

I don’t really know how to end this post. It is 100% a rant and one that’s been building up for a while. Bottom line is that people’s sexual behavior varies wildly and whenever you attack sexual tastes in fanfic by saying it’s unrealistic - or worse because let’s be real, that’s a very tame word choice - please remember that there’s likely someone out there who practices it.

* I’m using switch and versatile synonymously in this post. It’s mostly concerned with top/bottom debates. A lot of what I’m saying is also echoed in portrayals of and discussions surrounding D/s dynamics, but I’m not addressing that as much for now.