#disc horse

[falloutboyyaoi]

Hot take apparently but i do not think trans men should feel bad for being men. I love being a man! Being a man does not make me evil or dirty or violent! Being a man is not an inherently bad trait! I love all of my fellow trans men <3

[frenzyarts]

Mood board for when my posts get big:

[takashi0]

"What you consume in fiction defines who you are."

If that were true you would’ve actually internalized the lessons from the Children’s media you watch and learn to actually be decent people.

[horsefigureoftheday]

[mordcore]

*as a tomboy/butch/gnc/intersex woman*: youre not a real woman

"ok youre right im not a woman im trans now": you'll always be a woman

[spoekelse]

Mfers will hear about the “ROGD uniquely affecting poor innocent young girls” argument transphobes make and then claim transandrophobia (or whatever you want to call it) isn’t real

Or even worse, that it is real, but it’s really proof trans people assigned female at birth are being “protected” by society and are therefore benefitting from the oppression of transfems

As if infantilisation isn’t harmful, and as if this isn’t literally preventing people from transitioning, therefore leading to them dying. If this is a benefit, where? Where’s the benefit?

Sure, transfems are harmed by the transphobia being cultivated here, nobody is denying that. They’re being harmed by the assumption that there are no trans men, only trans women. In their minds, only confused girlies and male predators.

This fear of transness being a social contagion that spreads within female social groups makes any transmasc the vector of a dangerous disease, who must be shunned by society, in addition to the other obvious harm. It was bad enough when people thought I was a lesbian- now they really, really don’t want me around their daughters.

It’s a fear of maleness or masculinity that creeps into racism and transmisogyny, and this fear is behind tiktok transvestigation pages.

Infantilisation is always bad. It’s not a “lesser” form of oppression- and even if it was, there’s no sense in comparing oppression. Transandrophobia is one side of the polyhedron that is transphobia as a whole. Its existent doesn’t negate transmisogyny or intersexism/endosexism/perisexism. Disabled people face infantilisation the most, and are extremely frequently abused and denied agency. The same goes for elderly people and yes, even children. It’s never good.

[leahdrawsstuff]

I get people not liking Toradora or even not wanting to finish it, but the way it’s become VERY popular online to openly bash it or call it the worst anime romcom is very…… weird

the thing is… Toradora is not a shoujo. the story isn’t meant to be fluffy and perfect. Taiga as a character is EXTREMELY flawed. And I think she’s a little too flawed for the average romcom anime watcher.

Firstly, no I am not defending how she likes to hit Ryuuji, and that behavior in a real life person obviously wouldn’t be ok, but Winry of Fullmetal Alchemist regularly throws a wrench at Ed’s head for comedic effect and I very rarely see that being held against her character. I don’t like it either, but it’s a fairly weak criticism of Taiga specifically since slapstick was pretty par for the course in early 2000s anime comedy.

But other than that, she’s basically just… annoying and mean. And pretty quickly you learn that this is because she’s a spoiled brat who simultaneously lacks both parental guidance and attention. And they address this head on, and she eventually acknowledges this and tries to change it. The way her story arc is handled is actually pretty interesting. Just because the female protagonist isn’t an uwu perfect shy nice girl doesn’t mean it’s a bad love story

I feel like I have way more to say on this but in conclusion if you really couldn’t stand Taiga then Toradora isn’t for you, and that’s ok, but that does not make it objectively bad. There are absolutely aspects of it worth criticizing, but there are also a lot of really interesting story elements with complex exploration of both romantic and familial relationships. It’s definitely worth a watch if you can handle a 16 year old girl being an asshole

[horce-divorce]

So the OP hits like a ton of bricks to begin with, but I wanted to provide the context for the final comment, which was the thing that made me go "holy shit you hit the nail on the head." drawing that parallel between healthcare and climate change, the 'personal responsibility' angle, and how you could probably make the same connection w so much in America (the individualism!!!!!! fuck!!!!). Wow. Reddit user lhswr2014 you're so right and you should FUCKING say it

[cilil]

I think the reason why a lot of Silmarillion discourse feels rather frustrating is because it entirely misses the point.

The point was never "this character did nothing wrong ever" or "this character did everything wrong every time they breathed". The point of the Silmarillion is that it shows a flawed world with flawed characters in it, but that - as @ruiniel kindly added - there are still good and beautiful things to be found even in an imperfect world.

Simply put: Nuance exists.

[frenzyarts]

I love being an evil man hating lesbian *holds out my hand* get in the misandry bounce house with me

[yokelfelonking]

If you want to understand the world, there's two things you need to understand:

1.) A large number of people never emotionally or socially matured past junior high.

2.) These people drive absolutely all public discourse.

[takashi0]

The phenomen of antis being exposed for being terrible people strikes again!

You know, I have to remind myself that somebody getting busted for being a creep isn't something we should celebrate, since it means some poor soul's been grievously hurt.

But I still have to marvel at the fact that somehow always ALWAYS Xenoblade of all things that manages to expose this thing the most. With Uzaki probably being the runner up. People complaining about "anime coomerbait" is pretty much always the "start suspecting me NOW" red flag, but with Xenoblade seems to attract them like a magnet and it's just incredibly astounding.

[horsefigureoftheday]

I am no horse expert, nor a horse figurine connoisseur, but I am here to speak of my love for those horse figures that they sell at Tractor Supply. Not sure if you're familiar with them, but Tractor Supply sells a whole line of "farm animal" figures (horses, cows/bulls, pigs, etc) and I used to love them. I had a lot of them as a kid.

What made those figures special/memorable to me, as opposed to most "toys" I had, was that they were (sort of) anatomically correct. By that, I mean that the stallions [the bulls too] had their... parts. It's a small detail, but that little bit of realism always stuck with me.

I googled it and apparently the brand of the figure was "Schleich." I'm not sure if that's a brand that everyone in the "horse figure community" knows, I am probably just preaching to the choir here haha.

I needed to rave about the horse figures that I loved so, so, so much as a kid. To this day, I still have to stop myself from buying one or two of the little figures whenever I make it into a Tractor Supply, haha, they left that big of an impression on me. :) :)

I agree, it was really funny, but unfortunately people refused to be normal about it so they've majorly downgraded that part of their models' anatomy in the last few years 😔

[sag-dab-sar]

⚧️ The Gods & Gender ⚧️

Discussing Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminism and the views of the Gods is not "speaking for the Gods,"—it is looking at facts and information and drawing completely reasonable conclusions that squarely put the foundations of trans-exclusion in opposition to the Gods.

(definitely not audio proof read, sorry for the dyslexia)

🌿Aphrodite & Venus🌿

Aphroditos (or Aphroditus) is Aphrodite with male characteristics including a penis and/or beard.

A cult of Aphrodite included a bearded Aphrodite at Amathus, Cyprus on a high cliff temple. [Wikipedia citing Macrobius, Saturnalia III]

Her relationship with bisexuality (referring to being dual sex not sexual orientation in this paper), androgyny, and transvestism is also documented in Cyprus:

— Aphrodite in the Theogony by William Sale in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association Vol. 92 X

(Sorry for the shitty screenshot JSTOR did not want to work with me)

This worship of Aphrodite with a penis was also seen as equal to Venus:

There's also a statue of Venus on Cyprus, that's bearded, shaped and dressed like a woman, with scepter and male genitals, and they conceive her as both male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditus, and Laevius says: Worshiping, then, the nurturing god Venus, whether she is male or female, just as the Moon is a nurturing goddess. In his Atthis Philochorus, too, states that she is the Moon and that men sacrifice to her in women's dress, women in men's, because she is held to be both male and female." — Macrobius (c. 400s AD), Saturnalia 3.8.2

🌿Hermaphroditus🌿

There is also the "intersex child of Aphrodite & Hermes" named Hermaphroditus.

I have seen many use Hermaphtoditus as an excuse to wipe away the Goddess Aphrodite with a penis that the ancients worshipped. Which doesn't even make sense because I hate to break it to you— Hemaphroditus also opposes TERF ideology by its nature. A God existing as bisexed/dual-sex/bigender (however you'd like to word it) negates the idea that the Gods somehow support the ridged biological essentialism and gender binary that TERF ideology necessitates.

There are different accounts of Hermaphtoditus' creation but one, Ovids, tells of him merging with a nymph and then asking his parents to make the water transformative causing men to have thr effeminate bodies like women:

Her prayer found gods to hear; both bodies merged in one, both blended in one form and face. As when a gardener sets a graft and sees growth seal the join and both mature together, thus, when in the fast embrace their limbs were knit, they two were two no more, nor man, nor woman--one body then that neither seemed and both. So when he saw the waters of the pool, where he had dived a man, had rendered him half woman and his limbs now weak and soft, raising his hands, Hermaphroditus cried, his voice unmanned, ‘Dear father [Hermes] and dear mother [Aphrodite], both of whose names I bear, grant me, your child, that whoso in these waters bathes a man emerge half woman, weakened instantly.’ Both parents hears; both, moved to gratify their bi-sexed son, his purpose to ensure, drugged the bright water with that power impure." — Ovid, Metamorphoses 4. 28 ff (trans. Melville) (Roman epic C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.)

🌿More on Aphroditos vs Hermaphroditus read @theoi-crow's excellent post about them here.

Also some lovely statues:

Marble copy statue from a fresco at Herculaneum, Italy. X (left)

Statue from Pergamum, Turkey. X (center)

Statue from Nymph Sanctuary in Lacori, Italy X (right)

Statue from Pompeii, Italy X

🌿Inana & Ishtar🌿

From a hymn to Inana

To open up roads and paths, a place of peace for the journey, a companion for the weak, are yours, Inana. To keep paths and ways in good order, to shatter earth and to make it firm are yours, Inana. To destroy, to build up, to tear out and to settle are yours, Inana. To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inana. Desirability and arousal, goods and property are yours, Inana. Gain, profit, great wealth and greater wealth are yours, Inana. Gaining wealth and having success in wealth, financial loss and reduced wealth are yours, Inana. Observation (1 ms. has instead: Everything), choice, offering, inspection and approval are yours, Inana. Assigning virility, dignity, guardian angels, protective deities and cult centres are yours, Inana. — A Hymn to Inana (Inana-C) ETCSL 4.07.3 in Lines 115-131.

This shows:

Inana has the power to change a person's gender/sex .... which means people can change gender/sex

This is listed among other normal things such as journeys, wealth, settlements so on. Suggesting that it wasn't super special, it was a part of Sumerian society that Inana was given power over.

This was written by Enheduanna High Priestess of Nanna, Ur's city God, and Inana. Inana was a popular Sumerian deity and Enhenduanna's father, Sargon of Akkad's, personal deity was Ištar. One of Enhenduanna's goals as a priestess was to conflate the popular Sumerian deity Inana with her father's Akkadian personal Goddess Ištar. Then raise Inana (and thus her father's personal Goddess Ištar) to an extremely high place in cosmology and explain just how much control she had in society— including over sex/gender.

Also from @sisterofiris's post on Inana's queer priests here.

🌿Nanaya🌿

In later times Inana/Ištar was equated with Nanaya but in earlier times they were worshipped side by side as separate deities. While Inana's hymn gives her rule of gender, a Nanaya hymn has her directly declaring she has breasts in Dadumu and a beard in Babylon. Leick also mentions here that Ištar was worshipped in both genders.

—Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology by Gwendolyn Leick. Page 125.

🌿Asūšunamir with Ereškigal🌿

In Ištar's Descent (not Inana's) Ea's plan to distract Ereškigal and get her to bring Inana back to life is to make a beautiful being. Ea makes an incredibly beautifully brilliant being that's mere aesthetic presence will make Ereškigal happy and let her defenses down. And Asūšunamir's beauty works..... and he is an eunuch, an effeminate male, potentially queer from the ancient's eyes. And yet he is so beautiful he distracts a Goddess.

— The Ancient Near East and Anyhology of Texts and Pictures, edited by Pritchard. Ishtar Descent translation by E.A Speiser. Page 80.

🌿Eštan / Ištanu🌿

The Anatolians (Hittite in particular) loved to both mix deities and keep them entirely dependent like 8 solar deities and 50 storm Gods. But sometimes Hittite, Hurrian, Hattic, Indo-European, Mesopotamian all meld together making the identification of gender ambiguous or even interchangeable.

Eštan is one example (who has numerous equatings):

—A Handbook of Gods and Goddesses of The Ancient Near East by Frayne & Stuckey. Page 105

You can also learn more about the Ištanu and the Sun Goddess of Arinna and her gender from @sisterofiris in a post here.

__

I'm sure there are more! But this was my quick round up and sources I could put together. To all the trans & non-binary polytheists out there, you aren't abnormal and the Gods see you for who you truly are.

Edit: Want some more? Learn about the feminine qualities of Apollo

[probablyasocialecologist]

It’s only when people start guilelessly claiming that this film contains ideas that are new, or subversive, or potentially change-making, that it feels necessary to point out that while movies from major studios can be a lot of things—inspiring, heartbreaking, terrifying, too long, too quiet, and really boring, to name a few—their ability to change the world has limits. While representation of certain groups has been proven meaningful to an extent (for example, seeing gay people on TV was undeniably huge for little gay me), each “groundbreaking first” also represents a tipping point wherein the depiction of a certain identity has been deemed worthwhile, in a money-making way. Someone, somewhere decided that gross gay people would pay gross gay dollars to see themselves on-screen, and normal straight people wouldn’t be too grossed out to show up—and now we get Brokeback Mountain and But I’m a Cheerleader’ and, wonderfully, Pariah, and unsettlingly, “The Ultimatum: Queer Love.” But this calculus degrades when it comes to ideas, which are harder to quantify because they can’t buy movie tickets. And it grinds to a halt when it comes to the idea of anti-capitalism. Clearly, subversive aesthetics can become “zeitgeisty” enough to put on the big screen, but I’m hard-pressed to believe it will ever be profitable to genuinely encourage social change. Mattel wouldn’t let Barbie “critique capitalism” unless the projections said that Barbie critiquing capitalism would pay. When corporations allow their subsidiaries to invest in anything, they do so with a risk calculation already undertaken. Not to foment change, but to court modern values just enough to turn the profit that helps them, ultimately, ensure nothing ever meaningfully changes. These companies don’t do anything that doesn’t pad their bottom line. And why would they? As we speed toward a climate apocalypse, they’re only incentivized to insulate themselves from the effects with as many layers of cash as possible. And at the end of the day, pink dollars spend just the same as green ones.

[whereserpentswalk]

"They couldn't make blazing saddles today." My brother in Christ you'd be the one calling it woke blm propaganda.