#i know youre a c*mboy. i know you are.

[canthelps]

open to: f/m/nb 21+ plot: henry and your muse are friends/acquaintences, and they are aware of what he does (he’s a of/c@mboy/occasional escort) and they have hired him to be their fake boyfriend at a family wedding. hijinks ensue.

“you know, your great aunt keeps commenting on my ‘rear end’, so i think this means i’m doing a good job” henry said with a wink as he leant against the bar, waiting for his drink. “and another old lady said I look very dashing in my tux. you better be careful, looks like you have some competition to be the apple of my eye”

[the-resurrection-3d]

bigfrilly replied to your post “I genuinely love how we're always in the shadow of Captain America's...”

Trans headcanons and nsfw are fantastic! There is of course a line between respectful depictions and fetishization, but that line can be super blurry, especially when the artist is trans. A cis person drawing exclusively rcdart or moho proportions is gross, but a trans person who does is potentially just depicting people who look like them. e.g. I depict a lot of transmasc people with large chests because I'm transmasc and have a large chest.

idk, i think it's a very case by case thing, but i love nsfw trans stuff

meloscav

I love seeing trans headcanons and trans nsfw work! It becomes an issue when its done like fucking rcdart or using slurs (f*mboy, c*ntboy, f*ta, tr*nny etc) or like. Being actively transphobic (demasculinizing trans men or defeminizing trans women) I think we need to normalize everyone being able to make sfw and nsfw art, writing etc of ALL kinds of characters.

This raises an interesting question, though: how much does it actually matter if the author is trans? This isn’t just a hypothetical death of the author question, but kind of a more practical one. If we stick with fanfic (even though this argument started over drawings), most people don’t check ao3 profiles, and not just because most profiles have zero information on them. A lot of the audience doesn’t care about who the author actually is, so an average consumer is really just going to see two different artists drawing transmasc people in a similar fashion, without necessarily realizing that one is cis and one isn’t. 

I know ao3 has its own versions of #ownvoices tags, but they don’t seem to be used that much. Should we try and encourage more trans authors to use them? If so, wouldn’t the lack of vetting become an issue? Just a few weeks ago, I found a twitter thread on a prominent f/f erotica writer being outed as a cis man pretending to be a lesbian to sext his lesbian followers. And that’s definitely not the first time stuff like that has happened. See also the Hamilton AIDs debacle. 

But I think this is more an issue (depending on your pov) with the almost unprecedented amount of control authors have over their own paratext on ao3 -- it’s great for authors, but also hinders discussion on genuinely problematic works because almost everything has to be taken off-site. There’s a good and long thread on potential compromises re: calling out racism in fanworks on the work itself, and perhaps I’ll go find it. 

So really, the question more becomes: is the harm of fetishizing coming from the author, or the work itself?

Finley is right, though - I’m really over this meme that you can’t be attracted to people outside your demographic. As Angela Carter argues, porn actually has a powerful humanizing potential, it’s just also the orphan little sister of the [gets shot]