#ciscentrism

[aroworlds]

I thought Trans Day of Visibility a good time to mention that I have a post collecting my stories with trans aro protagonists. I often feel disconnected from the aro community in that the (albeit very limited!) representation we celebrate and bond over largely depicts cis aros. Characters who seldom encompass, because they are cis, much of how I experience being aromantic.

In order to be seen as aro, I must push my transness into the shadows. The reverse is true in trans-centred fiction, where acceptance--by ourselves and/or others--is often demonstrated via a character's experiences of romantic relationships and love. Time and time again, I must choose which part of me to celebrate and which part to ignore: I can only be transgender or aromantic in the stories about which my communities express delight.

So this is a list of aro stories about gender and trans stories about aromanticism, because we deserve recognition as trans and aro.

[our-queer-experience]

saying “when i was a little girl” partially because it’s true but also because so many people are only comfortable with TRANS masculinity if it operates the same way a cis man’s would and expect me to talk about my life as if i was always a boy and was treated that way as well.

[necrowyrm]

ACKNOWLEDGING THAT (TRANS) MEN PERPETUATE MISOGYNY AGAINST (TRANS) WOMEN IS NOT FUCKING DIVIDING THE COMMUNITY

ITS ALREADY DIVIDED

ITS THE FIRST STEP IN UNDIVIDING IT

[mergaliscious]

if your drawing hair tutorial doesn't go over curly and kinky hair, you're not teaching "how to draw hair," you're teaching how to draw straight hair.

if your rendering skin tutorial doesn't go over dark skin, you're not teaching "how to render skin," you're teaching how to render white skin.

if your sculpting and rigging human bodies tutorial doesn't go over fat bodies, you're not teaching "how to sculpt and rig people," you're teaching how to sculpt and rig thin people.

it's fine not to know everything about a subject and not to know how to do a specific thing, but don't pretend you can teach how to do an art technique in general if it only applies to models/characters/etc of a certain privileged status

[busket]

garden variety conservative transphobia is going to get worse but radical feminism is also going to get worse. if youre a cis women terfs are going to try to recruit you and make you believe that the reason your rights are at stake is because of trans people. they're going to tell you that all men are your violent oppressors and they're going to include trans women in that category. they're gonna tell you about women who are gender traitors and joined the enemy and they're going to point to trans men. don't believe them. trans people are not your enemy, we have no power over you, and we desperately need your support and your solidarity.

be aware of radfem pipelines and dog whistles too. be skeptical of anyone that talks about the divine feminine or correlates birthing, menstruating, or female reproductive organs with womanhood. be especially skeptical of people who use those biological things as reasons to why women are more spiritual, or more in tune with nature, or just that they're better than men (read: anyone they decide is a man)

radical feminism is an expected reactionary outcome from cis women who are being oppressed by conservatives, especially when all they practice is ciscentric, liberal, white feminism. they feel the need to be radicalized but don't have the experience and information to pinpoint the true source of their suffering. trans people are not your enemy, AMAB people are not your enemy, anyone who identifies as a man is not your enemy. we're all being crushed under the same stone

[find-me-in-hell]

theres a very obvious issue with saying someone can't be classed as androgynous because they're 'obviously male' or 'obviously female'. like genuinely do you hear yourself? 'he isn't androgynous because i can tell hes a man' ??? DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF??? 'she isn't androgynous because shes extremely feminine' my god you are all stupid.

you HAVE to discard the idea that someone is 'obviously' a binary gender. my god.

[patema-introverted]

https://www.tumblr.com/mousegirlheart/712995877228298240/mouse-yaoi-real

Idk it seems ciscentered, trans excluding to treat “male mice” like a coherent thing — rather than some construct we assign to them like how we assign it with amab people — and then further to conflate 2 male mice together as being yaoi and gay… it reinforces being “male” (amab) as a biological thing not something to do with gender and identity.

Okay I'm neither 1) trans or 2) the op of the post so I don't know why this was sent to me specifically? So take what I say with a grain of salt but I think it's important to recognize some things:

"Yaoi" has become more of a memed term on tumblr. This is the tumblr equivalent of a clickbait headline. I don't even know if the mice used in the study were partners (tho mice can be gay), it's just a tumblr post.

While, yes, gender and assigned genders at birth are more societal than biological, and biology isn't binary, and mice don't recognize gender, there is such a thing as a male animal. Like. Some animals are born with genitals that allow them to impregnate others of their species and without the genitals that allow them to be impregnated. Calling a mouse "male" isn't transphobic or ciscentered or whatever. Calling a mouse "male" isn't describing its gender identity (if it even had one??) it's just describing its reproductive organs.

I understand your concern but I think you're thinking too hard about a tumblr post.

[rdlain]

the 00's primordial-shitpost nerdstalgia game where everything no matter how minor kills the protag if it even barely touches him and has him explode into over-the-top 8-bit gore? With a suicide button on top of that? Are you sure you want that one representing the Trans Experience™️? Because on that I can agree 100% but probs not for the same reason you do🤭

I Wanna Be The Guy is blatantly a trans metaphor, it’s right there in the title! The Kid wants to be a The Guy!

The extreme difficulty is a metaphor for how much of a fucking pain it is to get approved for hormones and surgery, the cherries that fall unpredictably are metaphors for how people in your life you thought you could trust might suddenly turn on you and be transphobic, The Guy you have to kill and take the place of is a metaphor for ciscentric views of gender, Kraidgief is a metaphor for Kraidgief.

[genderkoolaid]

sorry for barbierocking but genuinely the deeper message of barbie is about being human, in all its imperfection and fucked-up-edness, and even choosing to be human. there's a scene where barbie is sitting in a park in the Real World and just taking in all the people living around her, the simple beauty of it, and then turns to see an old woman, very visibly aged, next to her and says in awe "you're beautiful." and then the ending of film really emphasizes this (in ways i'm not gonna spoil) but generally the parts of barbie i found actually meaningfully compelling were focused on humanity- and this doesn't ignore gender (since part of the fucked-up-edness of being human is living in a world with a patriarchy and misogyny, and still finding joy in being a human who has to live with that) but its part of a larger point about humanity. which is why its kind of annoying to see so much focus put on the in-movie discussion of the patriarchy because to me its really just a plot device- which isn't a bad thing! but like. by focusing so much on the very surface level use of feminism as part of the plot you miss the actually beautiful theme of humanity & womanhood as a part of being human & appreciation for humanity in full. once again sorry for barbierocking

just saw the barbie movie with my friend & really enjoyed it! however i already have seen some extremely Cis Straight Woman takes on it & its feminism lol

[battry-acid]

Hey dude I totally don’t know at all you should totally write a manifesto on trans/intersex wolverine ooooo you wanna write it so bad ooooooo

you tease me, tumblr user that i am definitely not friends with. we both know this is bait i simply cannot help but bite. << if you read this till the end you get a surprise :) >>

i could go on a big long rant and list every single instance in which logan defies gender norms in the comics, but i'm gonna try to be brief this time. my headcanon that logan is trans/intersex is so personal and deeply rooted in my mind that discussing it kinda feels like sharing the secrets of a close friend if that makes sense. like, it's his business, it ain't my right to share that information.

i know there are trans logan truthers out there. i have seen them in the wild. i know there are people who would agree with this headcanon, and i'm sure i'm not the only one who takes trans headcanons super personally as a trans person, projecting your experiences and feelings onto a character you really like. it's the same thing with ol' logan (and kurt is not spared of this treatment either).

with the intersex headcanon, i don't often see those enough (for any character, in any fandom, honestly) especially considering intersex people make up, like, 2% of the entire world population. i know of several canon intersex characters in media, but not headcanons.

the biggest reason many people have the trans logan headcanon is because of his clone x-23/laura having XX chromosomes due to the sample used by dr. kinney having a damaged Y, making her 'female'. this is going off of a ciscentric intersex-exclusionary idea of what biological sex is, though.

i'm still totally down for the base concept of 'laura and logan having different gender identities means that at least one of them is trans since they have basically the same DNA' though, but i think both logan and laura are intersex. i think part of the reason it was so hard to clone wolverine is because of his unique DNA. it isn't contradictory for them to have different gender identities or different biology. i think we should stop looking for a reason to label laura Girl and logan Boy and just accept that they can be neither, both, in and out of the between, anything, it just requires so much less hassle. why is their biology so important anyway? that doesn't change their characters.

there's also just...general biological fuckery happening in the weapon x program as pointed out by 1random-starfish because this is superhero comics we're talking about where they're trying to explain how characters get superpowers. this shit doesn't make biological sense and that's okay. it doesn't need to make sense. transphobes and interphobes are constantly saying that our existences "don't make sense" and why should we ever even slightly cater to their beliefs? we make sense to ourselves and that's all that matters. trans and intersex logan makes sense to me.

another argument brought up in defence of trans logan is the fact that he's a short king. as a short king, i approve of this. but there's little emphasis on the fact that he is naturally extremely hairy, both him and sabretooth are super hairy, like way more so than most other characters (besides the ones that are covered in fur like kurt and hank) and that's pretty significant to me. i'm also hairy as fuck. almost all of my intersex friends are hairy too. obviously how much hair a trans and/or intersex person has will vary, but like i said, this trans/intersex logan headcanon is super personal, so i'm projecting personal attributes onto him, damn it.

as i said in a previous post, though i don't feel it's incredibly important to disclose, logan likely has POTS or CAH or something similar to those conditions. i don't think medicine can or should define what logan is. but just to give a reference for how i interpret his appearance, some of those attributes are similar to the ones logan has in my brain. fat, hairy, short, often experiencing fatigue/vertigo/disturbed sleep/etc (worsened by him having PTSD), adrenal issues (paired with PTSD), breast tissue, facial hair, decreased bone density (which was strengthened by his skeleton being bonded with adamantium), etc. he was also allegedly a very sickly child.

onto how i portray logan in my art. some artists prefer to give him top surgery, not just for the "who cares it's a headcanon i do what i want" reasoning but also because there's evidence that logan could experience a permanent surgery like that if enough effort was put in. i, however, am one of the no-op logan truthers. not only do not all transmasc people get top surgery but it doesn't always feel required due to diversity of body types. it's why there's so many different kinds of top surgery, there's so many different ways a chest can look. i don't always draw logan's chest the same way consistently, and like, who cares. the only reason i bring this up is because i personally will never draw logan with any kind of scars, top surgery or otherwise, because of my understanding of how his healing factor works.

regardless of any reasoning i may have for these headcanons, it's just what i feel is right. i draw stuff how i want to. i think about these characters how i want to. the little version of logan that lives in my brain told me he is trans and intersex so that's how i'm gonna portray him. anyway,

[punishedgwyndolin]

you can condemn the terfs harassing her (which btw I haven’t seen, I’ve literally only seen transbians complaining about her comment but whatever I’ll genuinely take your word for it) without also insisting that she was right. Like literally just “ok yeah her comment is bad but she still doesn’t deserve to be harassed” is a thing that’s possible to say, you never had to add that you agree with her comment

listen, you are interpreting her with the least amount of grace possible, as you are doing me. im a lesbian and bear no grudge against the concept of lesbianism. i can believe that while also saying that there are real problems and shitty norms surrounding peoples perception of lesbianism on the website, plenty of which are ciscentric or transmisogynistic, and those norms should be challenged instead of excused and made room for. bi people joking about making the world bi will not harm you or anyone else

[velvetvexations]

Here's every extreme kink ask. CW for gender play, drugging, and gore!

So, basically every kink I have is centered around my kink for humiliating and degrading others and I can be sold on any kink that doesn’t set off my anxieties as long as they’re connected to those. But of course that’s not enough, I also get off on the idea of institutional power dynamics that favor me. Dangerous game to play if I ever focus on where I’m privileged, but thankfully I mainly focus on trans supremacy or I combine it with misogyny kink for transmasc supremacy. (Imperative that I never come across transfem supremacy. Nothing against it, I’m just a dom who hates being penetrated so that kink has nothing to offer me plus pokes at the “a woman SA’d me” trauma). I have to make my own porn cause a lot of trans supremacy is transfem supremacy and a lot of misogyny kink is aggressively ciscentric. But at least the TRF portrayal of trans men being sadistic predators who use our male privilege and our AGAB to our advantage against poor innocent women gives me inspo for porn. But a lot of times I wish someone else would make my smut for me for once.

We're fist bumping, I don't like trans supremacy either because it's all just like. It feels like futa lol. I need sexually aggressive trans women doms combined with detrans where they ARE perverted fakegirls pretending to be a woman for a fetish but they AREN'T detransitioning, they're going to continue to do it and abuse their social cache as a poor oppressed minority, like sitting in on therapy circles at sexual assault survivor's meetings and having a visible erection, and when people complain it's like, oh my God, that's just her anatomy, you transphobe!

Can you believe that anon thought I present myself as an innocent person with nothing but good vibes?

My deepest darkest secret kink is mostly a secret because literally how the fuck would I ever explain it. I, a trans guy, am deeply deeply into misgendering/transphobia kink - but for MTF, not FTM. Make it make sense, because I sure fucking can’t. (Is this the kink cultural appropriation the TRFs were mad about lol)

thank fucking God I need someone else to be into it so I HAVE SOME FUCKING CONTENT!

Far and away my most messed up kink is amputation. like YES reduce me to a torso with tits and holes, unable to run, unable to push you away, unable to ever give myself any pleasure ever again. just a literal fleshlight reliant on you for everything.

yeah I can see the appeal in that

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about someone getting me hooked on drugs, and then making me do more and more fucked up and degrading things to get those drugs. There’s just something insanely hot about the sort of desperation that slams you face first into rock bottom and then hands you a shovel, you know?

forced drug addiction kink is spectacular

kink confession. two specific drawings in the 1992 little golden book of disney's little mermaid is what awoke some of my sexuality, specifically tentacle lust and snuff/necro kink. i have distinct memories of reading it as a child, eating a poptart, staring very intently at ursula using her tentacles to physically restrain ariel after her pet eels manipulated her away from safety, and wondering why i felt so funny about reading that part of the book, and why i liked thinking about ursula transforming ariel into a human and then holding her underneath the water so she drowned. and eventually that turned in to me imagining what one might do with a very pretty dead body they could do whatever they wanted to. i looked for an archive of the specific book so i could share what titillated a nine year old budding sadomasochist so much. it's truly so tame, the human mind is amazing.

It's very tame, but I love that for you anon. I'm obsessed with how people get kinks and so much of it is while still developing.

[ghostcrows]

I guess it's just gotten old but the funny thing is, the contrast is insane... on here saying that I feel exhausted by contradictorily ciscentric idpol "trans inclusive radical feminism" type shit is like the same thing as saying I'm an open misogynist dudebro TMRA then I talk to anyone else off this site and I'm having to be a "whiteknight" because I told a guy not to make jokes about women belonging in the fucking kitchen in 2024....it's like holy shit the whiplash

[a-polite-melody]

Honestly you guys are like. Pretty great at not falling into that trap (blaming transfems etc.) in a way that I'm constantly pleased to see. I know at least some people who post about transandrophobia (I'm not even counting TIRFs) might be transmisogynyistic towards trans women and certainly you'll have seen much more of the community than me but I saw someone recently say the transandrophobia crowd has "an accountability problem" and I was just like for WHAT? And if people are just talking about TIRFs, that's gross and incorrect in so many ways.

Oh hey, thanks! I try my best!

As for the “accountability problem”, I would be a lot more willing to take that seriously if there weren’t so many accusations from the people telling us to take accountability of transmisogyny which boil down to “not just the words transandrophobia/transmisandry but the idea trans men/mascs face a unique intersection of transphobia and misogyny that isn’t described adequately by ‘just transphobia’ or by calling it ‘misdirected transmisogyny’ is transmisogyny.”

Because you combine those two things and you get a two pronged attack which basically just tells transmascs to shut up again. It doesn’t matter how much your work doesn’t blame transfems and is focused on the ciscentric systems at play, just talking about your oppression at all in a way that emphasizes your experiences is itself the transmisogyny.

And then what exactly is the accountability that these people want to see? What would it look like? Not us continuing to talk about our oppression, because then there’s still ‘transmisogyny’ (in the form of ‘cantering transmascs in transmasc issues’) going on so there ‘hasn’t been accountability’.

Like. If someone brings to my attention actual transmisogyny going on in these discussions because they want me to take a stand against the transmisogyny happening, and that’s the accountability they want, that’s one thing. But uh. I don’t know. It just feels like this isn’t that. Y’know what I mean?

[oskarthefeatherlessbiped]

I have a theory about what makes many people in the trans community be so against the term transandrophobia/misia, antitransmasculinity, etc. (not countin transmisandry, because of it's association with the mra movement, the one by anti feminist cisgender men) as terms of description of antitransmasculine oppression. Gonna use the term antitransmasculinity for descriptor of antitransmasculine oppression cause I'm more familiar with this term, so I hope you don't mind.

I feel like this happens because antitransmasculinity deniers view it as the polar opposite of transmisogyny. Which is not.

Transmisogyny is a descriptor for the intersection between transphobia an' misogyny & the antitransfeminine bigotry trans women n other transfeminine people face. Antitransmasculinity was never supposed to be the polar opposite of transmisogyny, but to be somethin like anti blackness or exorsexism.

Anti blackness is the section of racism against black people. It's not the polar opposite of anti asian or anti native racism. Same thing is with exorsexism; it ain't the polar opposite of anythin, it's just the descriptor of what non-binary people face.

This is basically what antitransmasculinity is. It's the transphobia that's specifically meant to fuck with trans men n other transmasculine people. Not the polar opposite of transmisogyny. Like misandry was supposed to be. This is basically why transmisandry is not one of the best terms for describe antitransmasculine oppression; it's format is the polar opposite of transmisogyny, an' resembles misandry n the anti feminist men.

N I feel like antitransmasculinity deniers, as they view the terms transandrophobia & antitransmasculinity as polar opposites of transmisogyny, have quite binary/ciscentric views of what transgender issues looks like an' they're unconsciously lettin it show, tbh.

They forget (or purposively ignore?) that the men in the trans community are also gender deviants an' are also oppressed based off their gender (cause the “trans” an' the “man” on a trans man's gender are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they're intertwined n cannot be separated, just like any other trans identity), like any other trans person, n that shows that they have a lot of cisnormativity/cisassimilationism on their feminism that they need to deconstruct.

I agree except for the whole using not the term transmisandry, as it’s still a helpful word that trans men and masc can use and should be able to use without the negative connotations of the word misandry (which I also feel like needs to be disassociated from its association with cis mra’s and could be used to describe the experiences of other men who are minorities) . But yeah, I do agree that that anti trans masculinity does and can intersect with any forms of transphobia, and that people don’t want to acknowledge that because it breaks their cis feminist worldview.

[dianight]

I've come to hate the word pegging not only because of the circles it gets used on but mainly because there already exists a word (expression) for it and it's "anal sex". "Anal sex act in which a woman penetrates a man's anus with a strap-on dildo" like, not only are the wikipedia sources from a 2022 book it's such an unimaginative thing too. Too heterosexual, too ciscentric, just the right amount of subversive (which is to say, pretty much none) for the most boring people to latch onto it.

But I guess if your whole conception of sex is piv (I saw a pretty good post about this recently, how mutual masturbation/oral sex and other such acts considered "foreplay" (lmao) never get counted as sex itself) then a woman not being a bottom and a man not being a top is going to be such a novel and exciting idea.

Ultimately what bothers me is the idea that topping = masculine = superior = dominant and bottoming = feminine = inferior = submissive being so prevalent even in places where you would expect better. There was a brasilian Miku fucking an argentinian Miku and it's like. Do you see what I see, do you get what I mean?

It's boring, it's insipid, it's tremendously misogynistic, it's unoriginal. Maybe I'm reading too much into it? I don't feel like that's ever the case.