#heterosexuality was never an option

[rainbowxmisa]

heterosexuality was never an option

Original meme template by @mhuyo

[sapphicqueen]

Big Slay for the LGBTQIA+ community

[hitohitonika]

One Piece, the "cishet manly man" show that keeps providing the hottest twinks, jocks and dilfs.

[xilaaa]

Some MLP screenshot redraws I did back in the day lmao

[thearsonistofarland]

Hello all two Loop8 fans

[taohs]

IZUMI AND OLIVIER ARE BOTH BABES FR

EXACTLY!! i got so excited when i saw the two queens appear on screen together like AAAAAA :’) <33

[ratsofarsonunite]

@puddlestheduck1 @puddlestheduck1 @puddlestheduck1

MWUHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA INFINITE GAY.

[rexxmako]

younger me: did we marry him? :O me: who younger me: legolas :D me: me: *side glances at boromir* me: no

[laniidae-passerine]

but genuinely you can’t be doing the whole ‘oooooh two divorcees looking for emotional connection after heartbreak!’ and ‘I believe in romcommunism’ and ‘is it Ted that Rebecca is texting on banter???’ and ‘watch as they grow independence and self love but constantly with the feeling they’re intertwined in some lovely, chosen way’ just to go ‘actually they never get to together and Ted fucks off back home to the place that is now shaped by not great memories’. The fuck??? I’m bisexual, I was so there for the deeply unlikely TedTrent but I always thought TedBecca would happen because it makes more narrative sense. For two whole seasons they orbited around each other with this impending sense of collision, this hope they could find love in the strangest of conditions, in a stranger they’d never have chosen, only for that to be completely ignored??? This isn’t about ooooh heterosexual couple didn’t kiss (I will die on the bi4bi or at least Bi Ted hill fuck you) it’s about the fact that now, tons of moments are stupid as fuck! You played that with a hint of romance! You played that like something was going to happen! You wouldn’t shut up about Rebecca’s love life and Ted’s need to let go and have somebody else handle it all for him, they seemed made for each other from the start and you went ‘nah fuck it’????? WHAT IS THIS????

[britcision]

Hey by the way if I ever misgender you in cosplay it’s not because I think you have a gender underneath 9/10 times it’s because that’s the character’s gender and I forget not everyone wears pronouns like sweaters

(The other 1/10 time I remembered and am wildly flailing for anything that isn’t the character’s gender there is no winning)

[anotherpapercut]

theres this guy who works with me and does a monthly program where he shows a movie for free at a local indie theater. it's really cool and fun but he literally is only picking like extremely, shall we say, un-diverse movies and it's getting kind of irritating. one of the movies had 1 gay character who had the least lines of any of the main characters and 1 had implied gay characters (dead poets society) and 0 have had a single person of color in any of the supporting cast let alone the main cast

[jabeur]

whenever i'm with large groups of people i have at least one moment of Oh God. People Think I'm Either A Man Or A Woman. it's like getting shocked every time lmao party meme but it's they don't know i'm nonbinary

[writermuses]

[self-loving-vampire]

1- Demands like these are not a new thing. Trans people were (and in some cases still are) medically gatekept if they were not judged as likely to end up living a normal, "respectable", "passing", and extremely gender-conforming heterosexual life. Often these judgments were made based on race.

In fact, what the suggestion above is is a repeat of historical trends.

2- This all is still working from the assumption that being trans is a disease and transition is a sort of last resort to be avoided as much as possible in favor of the alternative of just doing nothing, or possibly doing conversion therapy. Somehow they never seem to demand very strict evidence in favor of that.

It is a very uneven sort of skepticism. Transition remains suspicious no matter how many times people say it helped them but conversion therapy and HRT bans are treated as neutral, even effective alternatives based on nothing.

3- History and hypocrisy aside, it's just bad if someone's rights and autonomy are contingent on stuff like employment, isn't it? Imagine if you were required to prove the correctness of all decisions about your body this way.

Want an abortion? Well, we can't be sure an abortion would actually make your life better unless we make sure you're likely to be employed and having whatever I define as a good sex life afterwards. Don't you remember that "I regret my abortion" campaign? Sure most people say they don't, but what if they're lying?

You're gay and want to have sex and get married to someone of the same gender? Well, we don't know if you actually want that or if it would be good for you, thus we must ban those options for your own good until we make sure gay people are just as employed and socially connected after coming out and if not they shouldn't be allowed these freedoms. Hope your family doesn't just kick you out of the house when they find out!

[fuck-comphet]

You know what comphet is like?

It’s like when everyone was obsessing over twilight when it first came out and all the girls were like “team edward or jacob?”

So when they asked you “team edward or jacob” you had to pick one, because everyone was picking one, and there was no secret third option of liking bella (or actually probably more alice or rosalie who am I kiding)

And because “team bella or alice or rosalie” were just not options you never actually considered them even if you did in fact find them infinitely more attractive than edward and jacob combined

But everyone is asking you “are you team edward or jacob” so you pick whichever you think is the most conventionally attractive (jacob, duh) and spend the next decade thinking that you are in fact attracted to jacob and that there is no alternative for you

When in reality you couldn’t care less about jacob you just wanted alice and rosalie go have more screen time 😭

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

first of all, this is all legit, and not bait, though i have a feeling it may come off that way, this did happen to me. please don't publish if tumblr sends it off anon.

i'm a lesbian with gender dysphoria, and while i haven't had much sexual experience, i would consider myself a stone top. in the last year and a half i began reading "terf"/radical feminist writings and reading "terf" tumblr blogs fairly actively, largely out of frustration with misogyny i was experiencing IRL. though i never engaged with the community i did stop identifying as genderfluid and started understanding my dysphoria as stemming from the trauma of being bullied by other girls for having a high-androgen DSD, and using different pronouns/transition thoughts as unhealthy coping mechanisms. i'm happy with this, but i also don't know if i'm attracted to women anymore.

i've always been attracted to women in a way that's stereotypically guy-like; i find feminine women very attractive and not so much fellow(?) butches, want to penetrate with a strap on, don't like bush much, cursory interest in BDSM/daddy kink. i read/watched het erotica and porn sometimes and identified with the man. what i read problematized pretty much every aspect of that- femininity as a cage, penetration as violence/straps as disidentification w the female body, infantilization of women, bdsm as abuse etc. also, desisting making me more conscious of dysphoria/knowledge of how extensive sexual dimorphism is putting me off both women with larger breasts and hips AND smaller breasts and hips/unrealistically masculine body types as well. so a lot of what turned me on before isn't arousing anymore, or i feel guilty about it, and i haven't been able to find butch4butch stuff which is much healthier very interesting.

i consider my sexuality healthier now on a political level but my ability to get aroused/jerk off has plummeted (used to be i could jork it sunrise to sunset) and thinking about being in a relationship w another woman makes me feel uneasy and weird, especially since a lot of what i read emphasized reciprocative cunnilingus/tribbing (which i don't like) as the healthiest sex options. i also think about both my dysphoria and my sexuality issues 100x more than i did before, even though i was promised the opposite (freedom from dysphoria and feeling happier as a lesbian), and it's stressing me out day-to-day. i'm aware based on your general ethos that you probably think i'm a terrible person right now, but i figured it'd be useful to seek the opinion of someone who radically disagrees with what i've read on what i could/should do next, since i admittedly miss being at peace with my sexuality.

thanks for reading.

hi there anon,

it's a bummer that you'd think I would assume you're a terrible person based on everything you've told me here. I generally try not to consider people terrible unless they're actively being shitheads or hurting other people, which doesn't sound at all like you're describing. from what you've told me, you've been up to your eyes in some information that's made you feel deeply uncomfortable in your sexuality and now you're seeking out a new perspective to help you make sense of that hurt. that describes most of the people who send me questions!

it's so striking to me that much of what you're describing is very reminiscent of what's recounted in The Persistent Desire, an anthology of writings on butch/femme identities edited by femme historian and archivist Joan Nestle that was released in 1992. in various essays and interviews countless butches and femmes recount their discomfort with the feminist turn against butch and femme identities that too place in the 70s, when both roles were declared problematic recreations of heterosexuality and summarily decried as politically "incorrect" for lesbians. it's shocking to me how much what you've described echoes these accounts experienced by lesbians half a century ago - the disowning of women who are "excessively" feminine or masculine, the demonizing of penetrative sex, general insistence that there are "correct" sex acts that every lesbian is supposed to enjoy, and the deep discomfort and insecurity that this causes among people who don't fit into the very rigid standards of proper lesbian identity set forth.

here's a link to a PDF, if that's interesting to you at all. it's very long, so feel free not to read it straight through; it's a great project to skim and an incredible way to get in touch with the lesbians who came before us. their accounts of their lives are so wildly different from the boundaries of "good" queer representation that feel so universal today; in discussing their own lives many of these women speak very bluntly about their experiences with abuse, drugs, sex work, and violence. it's a great glimpse into the lives and history of a lot of very ordinary lesbians just living their lives, and I'm very grateful it's been preserved.

now, as for what you're actually gonna do: hey. listen. first of all, if you haven't given up reading this stuff yet, you've gotta. you simply cannot keep internalizing stuff that makes you overanalyze your own sexuality so hard that you feel uncomfortable about being attracted to women. that's not "healthy," that's conversion therapy lite. there are other places to talk about feminism without being made to feel ashamed of yourself.

listen: there's nothing unhealthy about anything that you described about yourself. being a stone butch, being attracted to certain looks and aesthetics, watching porn, wanting to use a strap and roleplay during sex and not being interested in other sexual activities - all of those thing are completely normal and, yes, healthy. certainly healthier than feeling the need to repress your sexuality so hard that thinking about being with a woman doesn't feel right!

should we run through that list?

femininity as cage - sure, okay, femininity isn't for everyone, and there are parts of it that suck. that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with women who like to wear dresses or put on makeup or shave or whatever, or anyone who's attracted to those women. genuinely I cannot think of anything less interesting or important to feminist organizing than getting hung up about what people want to wear. it's clothes, dude. it's fucking clothes. pick a more important hill to die on, I implore you.

penetration is not the same thing as violence. there's just nothing to debate about that one; it's patently absurd to pretend that every act of penetrative sex is rape and you'd have to fundamentally misunderstand how consent works to believe that.

straps are not about "disidentification with the female body," they're about augmenting a sexual experience. a strap-on is not more problematic than a vibrator or a massage oils or a pillow used to prop up a body part. unless those are also bad? are those bad? are pillows disidentifying from the female body also? I'm not up to date on this.

straight up I don't even know which part of your whole deal the infantilization of women is supposed to address, but a thing that I've always found interesting about a lot of radical feminists who are deeply distrustful of sex is the way that many of them seem to assume that women can't be trusted to understand their own sexual desires and need to be taught what's appropriate. seems kind of condescending to me, personally.

BDSM isn't the same thing as abuse. abuse, crucially, is not a situation that people can safe word out of or negotiate the constraints of. it's kind of like how, you know, I purposefully pay people to shove needles in my skin when I want a tattoo, but I wouldn't be stoked about it if somebody just ran up to me in public and started stabbing me without any warning or conversation. context is crucial. there can certainly be abusive people within BDSM spaces, but that's true of people of literally every sexual proclivity on earth, and certainly not an innate feature of BDSM. it's just make believe, dude. it's dress up. it's sex LARPing.

also, psst, hey. that thing about being attracted to women in a "guy-like" way? no such thing. men are humans, dude; they experience attraction in as many different ways as anyone else. for every dude interested in the same stuff as you there are men yearning for hairy women, muscular women, masculine women, women who will dominate them, women who would rather be eaten out then penetrated, and so on. to say nothing of the men who aren't into women at all! and, as is obvious from your own experience, men don't have a monopoly on those kinds of feelings, anyway! there are no men or women feelings, dude; it's all just people having feelings and fighting for their lives trying to figure out what they're into to.

I want to particularly talk about that last bit, where you mentioned not enjoying or wanting to engage in cunnilingus or tribbing. that's totally fine! people like different shit in all kinds of combinations - I'm personally a huge fan of getting eaten out and scratched up or bitten, but I don't do penetration and I've genuinely never met anyone who actually liked tribbing - and there are absolutely people out there who will, to paraphrase the poet Tinashe, perfectly match your freak.

(have you heard about the perpetual, critical shortage of tops that the queer community faces? you'd be a godsend, just saying.)

also, actually, hey I wanted to circle back to another thing as well: it's deeply alarming to me that whatever radfem stuff you've been reading has you feeling "put off" of women with wide hips and large breasts as well as women with small breasts and hips. what is wrong with either of those? both of those are just ways that women naturally look. women just look a wide variety of ways, and it's sad that that's upsetting you now. just thinking about this, conceptually, is giving me hives.

having been up to your eyes in all of this, I can definitely understand why you'd feel the urge to overanalyze you own gender and sexuality to the point of completely talking yourself out of identifying with anything that feels good for you. as I said, that's actually not healthy in any way, and as a sex educator I can't say that I think anyone genuinely invested in your well-being would want that for you.

entirely aside from their feelings on trans people, which I obviously disagree with pretty vehemently, one of the things about radfems that's most endlessly vexing to me is the insistence that such an extremely narrow range of sexual behaviors are appropriate. seems like a miserable way to live, and I sincerely hope you can detangle yourself from the morass of shame it's landed you in. you deserve better.