#flag discourse is stupid

[l1ttles3am0th]

I thought I’d share my thoughts on this one, because DEAR LORD, is this a subject…

In my honest opinion, Flag Discourse is completely and utterly stupid, and half of it is just speaking over certain groups. There are real-world issues affecting queer folks that are leagues more important than if xyz flag is “problematic” or whatnot. Yes, there are some legitimately problematic flags, such as the Labrys, but I’m not talking about those. What I’m talking about is stuff like the debacles with the “toothpaste” flag, pan flag, etc.. Speaking of toothpaste, as a lesbian, WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER BEEN ALLOWED TO SPEAK ON THAT. OH MY GOD, were mlm spoken over to the high heavens on that one. (Fun fact: when I called out a bunch of twitter users for speaking over mlm about this discourse, they asked if I was mlm, which THEY WEREN’T EITHER.) In my honest opinion, I would much rather focus on the worsening discrimination against us worldwide than if a gay person’s flag “copies” my own.

[roobylavender]

[microwave noises]

[ichliebemeinkissen]

If your coining post isn't for everyone then? don't coin it?

I'm so sick of them having a mile long dni for just, random groups of people then going "no recoining or reclaiming!" people you don't like share experiences with you so sorry

[felixisfruity]

can we backtrack. does anyone remember abro . why is abro okay but im not :(

[dog-bonezzzz]

some of y'all should have never been given "people in real life: hi how are you" and "im not chronically online what does this mean" as phrases because you'll really just be saying it about anything that has to do with marginalized groups that you dont understand/don't think matters.

[con-clavi-con-jae]

Funny how the same people calling Con homophobic for doing a *hand gesture* (that 90% of the gay men I know use to refer to themselves) are also the ones calling a gay man a child predator for showing his underwear in a livestream that was marked as 18+ from the beginning.

I'm okay with people being uncomfortable with it, that's all within your right (especially if you actually were there). I was weirded out at first even though now I find it funny and don't really care. But slightly inappropriate content happening in a place that was supposed to be for adults is not the same as being a predator.

[douwatahima]

absolutely wild to me that jack is a character whose sole purpose in the show is to show up, try to drive a wedge between ed and stede, ultimately fail, and then get hit be a cannonball and die, and for some reason this fandom still feels the need to have major discourse about him like once every couple of months. like, i'm no jack apologist, but go off king! way to live in your hater's heads rent free!

[the-final-sif]

the situation w karl now is so funny considering your rb on dreamupdates 😭😭 anon was right we're both delusional

I've seen a random account on twitter claim random discord screenshots are Karl, and tbh I cannot believe people are taking a random account posting screenshots that don't even have dates on them nor attached context as legitimate and 100% true, unaltered and presented fully in context. I could've made those in about 15 minutes if I wasn't trying very hard. Like they intentionally removed the timestamps and claimed it was for "privacy" and to conceal the person's timezone. You can just. Change the date on your computer or w/e.

"There's no reason to fabricate these" Drama, clout, boredom, smearing someone, etc. There's no reason to believe these are real and not someone taking the piss.

Like, take one screenshot where he says "That's the worst video ever taken". Let's suppose that's a real screenshot for a moment, within the screenshot there's absolutely nothing that indicates what he's actually talking about. It's literally JUST that. The burner account CLAIMS that Karl said it was about one of Dream's singing tiktoks, but there's nothing even remotely presented that indicates that. Literally JUST "That's the worst video ever taken". He could literally be talking about any video.

Again, there's no verification that any of these are real, and some of them don't even make sense???

Like, okay, what would Karl not wanting to Paris have to do with anything? Like, maybe he didn't want to travel to Paris, maybe he was exhausted from flights, maybe he didn't want to deal with the jetlag. Maybe he said that sarcastically as a joke. The message before that was someone joking about him going to france being bad. There's again, no timestamps or context. He's within his rights to not want to go to Paris. It has nothing to do with anything else.

Also claiming that Karl was planning to intentionally distract people, because he "knew this would come out" by streaming with Sapnap or spamming tweets about other stuff? I- What? If he knew a mod was going to leak stuff, why would he not remove that mod? Why would he keep saying stuff in the chat with that mod in that? How would he even gets a heads up that the mod in question intended to leak stuff? Without knowing who it was?

I have no idea if these messages are real, again, this is something that takes literally seconds to fabricate, there's no confirmation any of this is actually coming from one of Karl's mods, there's absolutely no context included in any of the messages for if he might be being sarcastic or even talking about totally different topics. No context for dates/times other than "Today" which is honestly pretty sus because either it implies that Karl went and said this all in one day, like randomly he decided to shittalk people in his mod chat, talked about it, knew someone would leak his messages and just thought that was all well and fine. And that's assuming any of these are even real in the first place. Which is a pretty huge assumption.

Anyways, I'm begging people to stop taking discord screenshots from random fucking people as gospel. Some of you are legitimately falling for what is stupider than Infowars shit, "oh my secret sources in the government totally told me this is real". Next y'all are gonna come up and tell me that you found out that Karl or Dream or whoever is funded by Soros and you found the contacts posted on 4chan I stg.

Don't spread things you can't verify. Don't take fucking discord screenshots from a burner account at face value. Do we need to talk about fucking hypixel ss again?

[mallowsweetie]

I think its so funny how people clutch their pearls when others use a label they havent heard of before. Like instead of asking "hey what does this mean?" or even looking it up, they're all like

"HOW DARE YOU MAKE UP A NEW WORD OR PHRASE THAT DEFINES YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ME????"

and then when said person defends themselves or simply says like "its my life this is how i identify get over it."

Suddenly they're chronically online

but whats more chronically online than being bothered by how other people label themselves and their relationship? Like clearly you're unhappy if thats all you can think of to do in your spare time.

[serfuzzypushover]

hope i’m not a bother but whats the first flag in your pfp? it’s very pretty!

not a bother at all!! its the sappho lesbian flag Σ:3

[transinfected]

I will say, the funniest thing to come out of inane pride flag and identity discourse is just like. I've seen this community accept a few newly designed flags because the creators behind the originals were like, openly racist or bigoted toward other sexualities, etc. (the pink lesbian flag and the original bigender flag come to mind.) and because of this there's now like, a bar in my head of what someone has to do before their flag gets abandoned and replaced with something else to represent that facet of the community.

So when I see people going like "hey just so you know the creator of [popular flag that has been around for a decade or more a this point] is problematic :/" and people ask "omg what'd they do." and the answer is "they support contradictory labels and kink at pride." I'm just like.... that's it?

[genderdryad]

Do you have any redesigns or different version of the gay flag that you like? I like seeing all the different concepts even if I think the discourse around it is stupid

There's only 2 that I personally like, which is this one by dueling-jesters (which isn't very different to the original), and this one by papercunts. :)

[x-v4mp3y3lin3r-x]

"transandrophobia/transmisandry are bad words because those things aren't real. misandry isn't real." you guys understand that words just describe things, right? they don't have to be "real." Unicorns aren't real. Vampires aren't real. If you ask any bigot, "transgender" isn't real! It doesn't fucking matter if you think something is real!

[aropride]

i nerfed this post bc of the stupid addition but you can reblog the new version here

going to start saying people "obviously aren't in a romantic relationship, they have something deeper and more intimate going on" to confuse and upset alloromantics

(ID: a banner with an aro pride flag in the background, with small text above and below large text dripping in green goo reading, "this post is about hating the hierarchical system of relationships". the top text reads "idc abt blorbotags go wild but" and the bottom text reads "& if you're mad about it you've probably been poisoned by ace discourse brainworms. and are also proving my point." end ID)

[obi-troll-kenobi]

I can't take most tesblr discourse seriously. After all nothing changes the fact that you're yelling at a stupid Bethesda game.

[comicaurora]

I'm sorry that the terfs made their way onto your blog but it does feel good to see you support trans people. Thank you for that

Always.

I think, charitably, that the discourse going down on that post is an extrapolation and over-focus on one element of the point I was making: that for me, determining with certainty that I was cis was a rather fraught process. I was presented with many alternatives, but underlying their imposition on me was the oddly regressive idea that the things I liked, the principles I valued, the parts of myself I was proud of were not permitted of women. My whole life I got smacked with the background radiation that I couldn't like being strong because women aren't allowed to be stronger than men. I couldn't like being loud and boistrous because women aren't allowed to take up space. I couldn't be a math geek because women aren't smart. It was all deeply regressive misogyny from day one, but I started getting hit with it slathered in a fresh coat of paint - all those assumptions still held to be true, but now there was the out that I could do all those things if I just wasn't a woman.

Concluding that the underlying bioessentialist premise was wrong was very important. Absolutely none of those statements were true, and were only ever maintained by cultural saturation, goalpost-readjustment when they were actively disproven, and the occasional bout of lying with statistics to pretend they weren't just Shit All The Way Down. The core premise that certain things were only permitted of or possible for men was bullshit, and I didn't need to surrender the gender I liked best in order to play in the spaces I wanted to. I could simply exist the way I was already existing. I didn't need anything else.

The misinterpretation is the assumption that this being true of me means this is everybody's relationship with gender. I turned out to be cis, so for me, feeling that holding onto my assigned gender wasn't allowed was distressing - just another invocation of the same bioessentialist bullshit I'd been dealing with since the preschool playground. This is because misgendering is fundamentally denying that a person has the right to express themself the way they want. When aimed at me, it says I'm not performing traditional femininity well enough to deserve my pronouns. The same disrespect is the root of misgendering when aimed at trans people. "Perform your gender to my satisfaction or I will confiscate it."

The problem is, bioessentialism is 100% ingrained into the terf playbook, which is why, for instance, all their shitty talking points about trans athletes eventually boil down to "no woman can ever defeat a man in any contest because we are simply naturally weak and stupid and there is nothing we can do about it" and quite frankly nothing disgusts me more than the defeatist acceptance of the very lie that feminism is dedicated to overcoming. Instead of accepting that the paradigm of bioessentialism is a false dichotomy right from the jump, they embrace and weaponize it against the people whose existence proves the dichotomy is a lie. If gender essentialism is fundamentally false, then it is nobody's fucking business what anybody does with their gender. If the lines don't exist, nobody needs to enforce them. And yet there the terfs go, hunting down people whose lives are none of their business and trying to argue that they represent some great and terrible evil, some downfall of society made flesh, something that makes it totally correct and normal for them to spend so much time thinking about strangers' genitalia. They want this to be a noble crusade so badly they won't even examine what flag they're flying.

I love and support the trans people in my life and will always, always stand on the side of your right to exist, but alongside that, terf rhetoric especially disgusts and infuriates me because it is, at its heart, utter cowardice. The world told them they were weak and stupid and inferior and they fucking believed it. And now they think Fighting The Good Fight For Women means turning around and using the same paradigmatic weapon that hurt them to hurt the people whose existence outside the binary proves the weapon is a lie. They're the same shithead schoolyard bullies who made me believe my entire existence was foundationally wrong for years of my life and I will never, ever side with them or the shitty, cowardly rhetoric that contributed to the loneliest years of my life.

Figure out who you are and do it on purpose. Find the real source of the misery in your life and try fighting that instead of the other crabs in the bucket. Trans rights.