#i thought about changing the flag to the trans one but gay fits better with the team galactic colour scheme

[team-galactic]

team gaylactic. thank you for not changing your pfp once gay pride month ended.

Here at Team Galactic, we PRIDE ourselves on being inclusive and open year-round!

[thehighpriestexx420]

For Trans Awareness Week: My experience/timeline of my gender & sexuality

(from straight cis girl, bisexual cis girl, pansexual trans man, to pansexual nonbinary transmasculine)

In middle school, when I was 11/12. I realized I was bisexual during this time and still thought I was a cis girl. Who just happened to be ok with the thought of getting a sex change if their crush turned out to be gay 🤷‍♂️

I realized I was bisexual (I had romantic experiences with girls before) when I thought a girl's eyes were pretty & developed somewhat of a crush. I printed out the bisexual flag and accidentally left a copy. My mom found it & questioned me. I casually told her that I was bisexual and was confused by her resistance and doubt to the idea. What was wrong with liking girls? I didn't see anything wrong with it.

She laid out alot of the cliches. "How do you know you like girls, are you sure?" ("I know I like them just like how I know I like guys", I told her 🙄) "It was just that Tila Tequila show that made you think that." "You're too young to know that."

When I was 14, I realized I was a trans guy! I came to the conclusion that girls didn't "want to be guys". Wanting to be a "guy" in my eyes meant being recognized by society as one, my interpersonal dynamics regarding me as one, & physically wanting a typical amab body (flat chest, deep voice, penis, etc.) I was in my early 20s in this picture.

I still liked feminine fashion and makeup. I figured I was like Jeffree Star in that aspect. But at that time I couldn't wear clothes that weren't masculine because I'd get mistaken for being a girl. Society and those around me trying to box me into this limiting expression and characterization of myself felt alienating, isolating, & lonely.

My dysphoria mostly came from other's perceptions of me - rather than what I would've thought about myself if society didn't put a gender label on every fucking thing. I would've still longed for the body parts I wanted but I don't think the depression and discomfort would've been half as bad.

Consequently, my body made me uncomfortable. I had the parts that people told me I had because I was a woman. There was a direct association.

The term "pansexual" started becoming more well-known and I vibed with the interpretation of "you're attracted to people regardless of gender/your attraction to people doesn't feel different based on gender" so I slapped that label on to me.

This is me at 28, just last year! I started giving fuck all (similar to the expression of my middle finger) to others' perceptions of me. If I like holographic clothes and fishnets with rhinestones, and you don't like that, well then I'm sorry I have better fashion sense than you 🤷‍♂️💅

I took testosterone for about 5 years at this point so the contrast of masculine & feminine features were like a bow on top of the gift that is me 😎

At this point, instead of just wanting the bumps in my tshirts to be gone regardless of any asthetic consequences (nipples not looking good due to the particular surgeon, etc.), I'd actually want to switch between having a flat chest and having boobies whenever I wanted to. Boobies are fun on me & others, what can I say.

& here's one of my most recent selfies! A couple years ago I came to the conclusion that above all else, I just feel like a person. If I had a gender I'd be a guy so I do still somewhat vibe with the sentiment. But I'm so much more than that. The label that currently fits me best is "gender non-conforming/ non-binary transmasculine". Regardless of whatever label someone may use, I welcome their attraction to me & validate it. If you're a lesbian and you happen to like my features while acknowledging that I'm not a woman & treating me as such, then your feelings are valid & don't invalidate my own identity.

My journey hasn't been easy for several reasons - not just due to my sexuality and gender. My mother & step dad didn't believe me when I came out as trans. Before I came out, and wanted to do things like get a shorter haircut, my mom would say things like "I won't have a dyke for a daughter." And then proceed to say "you know I didn't mean it like that."

One of the more overt instances of transphobia was when her bf randomly shouted "you're a girl!" to me.

A more covert form was when my mom & grandma would "compromise" on my name change. My birth name started with a "K" so I changed it to a more masc version also starting with a "K". They weren't used to my new name and my mom expressed feelings of resentment because she was the one who named me. So the "compromise" was just calling me "K"....a feminine ass sounding name. I asked them to stop and even stopped responding to the name. I eventually changed my name to "Colton" just so they didn't have an excuse to call me K anymore.

There were other instances of abuse and mental health emergencies that I won't go into detail about. I was recently asked what my proudest accomplishment was and I told them that it was not only making it this far but also being able to support myself. I've experienced homelessness so that adds on to what I've overcome.

But now, I'm at a place I couldn't fathom. Things aren't perfect but I have the tools, the want, the belief, and the will to make things better every day. I believe my life story is meant to serve as an example of hope. I've been destroyed & broke down to my atoms so I was forced to rebuild myself stronger and more in alignment with my true self. I have this wisdom to offer and I welcome requests for spiritual guidance.

The High Priestexx Tarot + Reiki Services is a buisness I've founded. It's success & ability to change people's lives for the better is also something I'm profoundly proud of. When you follow my blog & reblog my pinned post, you get a free one question tarot reading & free reiki healing session!

One way of celebrating Trans Awareness Week is by celebrating yourself with this free service & by celebrating me & my journey by increasing my visibility!

So that was my specific experience with my gender & sexuality! I hope that can broaden your mind as to what individual experiences can look like & help you feel less alone. Sending everyone much peace, love, & support! ✌️💖

[comicaurora]

Not Aurora-related, but I really like your answer in the recent OSPod about just clicking w/ the ace label but not having that same certainty about romantic orientations, because I think I'm that but in reverse-- it's only important to me that I'm aromantic.

So, thank you for putting it into words ^^ Have a nice Pride Month!

Ultimately we all gotta remember that labels are tools, not obligations. If a label helps you understand your wants and needs better, fuck yeah! If the label instead feels like a prison denying you growth and possibility, it's not helpful and you can drop it!

I think our growing awareness of the diversity of human sexuality and gender identity has sort of resulted in a feeling of "everyone has a special box they fit in with a flag and a community and a predictable suite of wants and needs". The problem is, almost nobody understands themselves down to the minutest perfect detail with no possibility of error, growth or change. What is an orientation, if not a broad-strokes categorization of "what kind of relationship would make this person most happy"? How bizarre is it to try and lock down a concept THAT complicated on the first try??

There's a joy in recognition of "oh, this is ME, I didn't know it was an option but there I am." In my experience it's a sense of sudden freedom - specifically the freedom to simply exist as one naturally and comfortably exists. But trying on labels that DON'T invoke that feeling can sometimes result in the exact opposite sensation; rather than giving oneself freedom, it feels like it's cutting off possibility. For instance, "am I gay? Then I guess I can never find men attractive, that's a shame…" is an indicator that this label may not be helpful to apply. Accuracy is not really the concern, but the "everyone has a box" mindset makes it SEEM like the concern. It's not about being comfortable or fulfilled, but about being accurately categorized.

Very personal anecdote on that note: I, like many people, spent some time questioning my gender. I have been tomboyish since pretty much day one, and was frequently bullied for unladylike activities as well as broadly battered by garden-variety middle-school misogyny. I was made to feel wrong for pursuing the interests I had while being female - whether that was sports, STEM, gaming, tree-climbing, wearing unfashionable pants, or a million other completely genderless things I happened to enjoy. It made it difficult for me to tell if I felt unhappy because I was being MADE unhappy, or if it was because I was fundamentally wrong about myself and could not be happy as I was. Eventually I concluded that every time I thought "maybe it would be better if I was a boy", it was in the specific context of "so I could do <thing I wanted to do>" or "so people would stop being shitty to me about <innocuous thing>". I realized I enjoyed being perceived as a girl and I enjoyed being capable of "manly" things. I liked being strong, gruff, loud, chivalrous, reliable - and I liked being pretty and having long beautiful hair and nice boobs. Admittedly it took me having an honest to god stress dream about growing a beard to finally shake the intrusive thought of "what if I'm wrong about everything and I really CAN'T be a girl while liking these things???" Internalized misogyny can fuck you up pretty hard, but in hindsight, the gut-wrenching disappointment I felt whenever I contemplated that possibility was a good sign that it didn't personally fit me. The trans friends I discussed this with affirmed my conclusion - "dread" is not the appropriate response to self-discovery in the pursuit of happiness. In my case I had simply been told "you can either be a girl OR you can do all this cool shit you like" and all I ever wanted was both - abandoning either one felt like giving up on something important to me. I did the gender questioning, concluded I was a cis woman, and then stopped thinking about it. And that was fine.

This is why I think the label "queer" is absolutely invaluable. I may not know exactly what my romantic orientation is and I don't know what exact subgender I could be classified as with "girl but in a dude way", but I know I'm sure as hell not what society assumed I should be. I don't know what box I fit in, but I'm dead certain where I DON'T fit. Who cares about the specifics? Nobody can know me better than I know myself, and demanding categorization I can't provide helps nobody and stresses everybody. The core desire of the queer community is to be able to exist in peace and pursue happiness. If a label helps you do that - an acknowledgement that you are known, seen, and not wrong or broken to exist as you do - then that's perfect. But if you don't NEED to categorize yourself in certain ways to be happy, you do not have to. Overlabeling can stress you out, and sometimes "oh no, what if I'm <thing> and I'll NEVER be able to be happy unless I COMMIT to that???" can be a very dangerous and intrusive headspace to spiral into. Things done in pursuit of personal fulfillment can NEVER be treated as obligations. It's okay to not be sure, and it's okay to NEVER be sure.

[nagisa-shiota-worthy-shit]

hihi could u maybe do something with karmagisa + transguy nagisa please if u have time..? love ur stuff, thank u (´ε｀ )

Absolutely, yes, I love this. I always get a little nervous writing about trans Nagisa, but it's just such a valid HC and I'm- I myself don't have gender struggles so I don't want to write about that, specifically. So! I wrote something I recognized myself doing when I was in high school: the fear of carrying around pride flags.

This is also the "gay Karma" post btw.

I hope you enjoy this!

------------------------------------------

Flags to be Proud of

(wordcount: 1164)

The sight of Karma Akabane walking through his front door with a rainbow flag over his shoulder was a little surprising to Nagisa. Sure, he was all too aware of how much his boyfriend loved flaunting around his sexuality, and he admired how open he was about that stuff, but it felt a little visually over the top. And it was concerning. Even if Hiromi Shiota knew about his and Karma’s relationship, she was less than approving of it.

The fact that Nagisa had a boyfriend, rather than a girlfriend, wasn’t the issue for her, however.

Luckily, his mother wasn’t home at that very minute, so it wasn’t like she would be seeing the walking festival that was Karma Akabane. So, he ended up awkwardly smiling at the sight, still a little at loss for words. Was he even supposed to say anything? If he was, Karma should probably be aware that it wouldn’t be happening.

Luckily, Karma spoke up. “You have to admit, I look good in rainbow.”

Nagisa raised an eyebrow at him. The rest of his outfit was pretty casual, normal Karma stuff. It involved a lot of black and not really any prints. The only really colourful thing about him was his bright red hair. Really, there wasn’t anything rainbow other than the flag. Nagisa didn’t think that counted as being ‘in rainbow.’

“isn’t there a more specific gay flag?” Nagisa questioned, not answering Karma’s question. “the green and blue one?”

“Technically, yes,” Karma answered. “But these colours fit me better and they’re general pride anyways.”

They made their way towards the living room, which was as eerily empty and clean as it usually was. Once they sat down, the smile on Karma’s face seemed to curl up even further, presenting an even more ominous and devilish look on his face. Some instinct told Nagisa to fear it, but the logical part of his brain reasoned with him that this wasn’t the truly evil smile Karma showed at times. Rather, this was a prideful, excited look. Karma just had a certain air around him most of the time.

Karma rummaged through his bag while Nagisa curiously watched his actions. Eventually, he fished something out and the sound of crinkling plastic could be heard throughout the room. Without a second warning, something was shoved into Nagisa’s hands, and a soft “tadaa” came from Karma.

Nagisa looked at the package in his hands. Through the see-through plastic layer, he could see pastel coloured fabric. There was blue, pink, and when he turned it around he saw white, too. The item was folded up. It took him a moment to realize what it was.

“I got you a flag as well,” Karma announced, waiting for Nagisa’s reaction.

That reaction hadn’t come yet. It didn’t appear to be coming. It was a little awkward how long it was taking for the reaction to come. Karma’s confused impatience was easy to read. He just kept eyeing the flag and shooting glances at his boyfriend’s face, waiting for something. When that didn’t come, he filled the silence in the air with his own voice.

“I got you the trans flag,” He explained, Nagisa noted that his talking speed was rather fast for his doing, “I mean I could have gotten one for your sexuality, but I figured, you know, you’re trans and… yes, you know. It’s, like, a way to show your pride, because this is who you are.”

Nagisa looked at the packaged flag in his hand once more, moving it slightly and causing the plastic to make its sound again. He tried to look happy, he really did, but something was gnawing at his insides. It was a feeling he knew. However, it wasn’t a feeling he thought he was supposed to feel at that moment, not while his boyfriend was still smiling at him. Karma must have noticed his lack of enthusiasm, because he spoke up again, more careful this time.

“Are you… not a fan of flags...or?”

“No, no!” Nagisa shook his head quickly, “I mean I don’t want to sound ungrateful, I-I just-”

The rest of that sentence never came. They just sat there staring at each other, with Nagisa feeling immensely bad. He’d ruined the moment. Karma was just trying to do something nice for him, and he ruined it. What a great boyfriend he was.

He moved his hands, all too aware of the flag still in his hands. It felt cold, yet also very hot at the same time. His cheeks were feeling kind of hot too. Most likely, he was rather red in the face at that moment.

“You know you can tell me if something’s up, right?” Karma’s voice sounded a lot softer now.

He analyzed the look on Karma’s face. It looked soft, too, as far as Karma was capable of soft. It appeared like he was genuinely trying. The attempt made Nagisa smile a little, because his boyfriend did make him very happy, however, that smile disappeared within a second when his mind returned to the situation. Once again, that feeling was taking over.

Fear.

The flag scared him. The openness of carrying around his gender identity like that made him afraid. People weren’t always the most accepting when they found out Nagisa was trans. He wasn’t born in a male’s body. He’d learned to ignore most of the hate he’d get because of it. With time he’d found out he’d much rather be around the people who loved and accepted him for who he was than try to please people who will never be happy with him. He didn’t need to like the people who wanted him to change.

Carrying a flag like that, it felt like asking for attention. It felt like inviting more people to question his gender, as if he didn’t need to deal with that on the daily already. He wanted to be proud and show who he really was, however, the thought alone of his mother finding the flag brought him down instantly. There was no saying how she’d react to the piece of fabric. He’d have to hide it every time she was in the house, and hope she wouldn’t go through his stuff. There was enough fear around the idea of her finding his binder.

“I’m not sure if I’m ready to be loud and proud about it,” Nagisa heard himself whisper, “I know who I am and I- no one can stop that but-”

Karma grabbed his hands. It wasn’t a strong grip, but it felt caring and sincere. Nagisa looked up at him. He’d moved close to him, making sure to keep eye contact, making Nagisa feel acknowledged, somehow only now sure that this was all about him, for him. The look in Karma’s eyes was now determined, and the next words he spoke fit that feeling very well.

“It’s okay if you’re not ready, I’ll just be proud of you for you.”

[searedwood]

30 Day Gay Journal Prompts

This is specifically designed for Pride Month and self celebration, but this can be for literally any other use. Except hate. No hate allowed.

Day 1- Write your preferred name(s), pronouns, nice nouns (nouns you like to be referred to as), and bad nouns (nouns you don't like to be referred to as).

Day 2- Record your triggers, from really bad to not as bad to getting over it. Add any specifications or notes if you feel like you need them. This is so you can identify what makes you uncomfortable or panicked, which will help you be able to identify and avoid a situation in which you may feel threatened, uncomfortable, or panicked.

Day 3- Make a list of signs that you are having a panic attack. This will help you be able to communicate to close friends or family members what may happen in an event you become panicked. This will also help you identify when you're having a panic attack, which will help you be able to calm down. Additionally, record some ways that will help stop the panic attack. For me, some ways of calming down are to go outside, my stuffie, breathing and grounding exercises, comfort music, and puns or jokes.

Day 4- Take some time and think about what makes you happy and relaxed. Write down your comfort music, comfort videos, and comfort characters. If you have a comfort game or movie, include that as well. This is to help you identify a source of calm, relaxation, and happiness that you can easily fall back on if you are uncomfortable or scared.

Day 5- Do some research on LGBTQIA+ labels, flags, and symbols. Write down your gender identity and what it means for you. Write down your sexual and romantic orientations as well, and what they mean for you. Additionally, draw little Pride Flags and symbols beside each label. I drew the genderfaunet flag on the inside cover of my journal, along with corresponding flowers that represent what I see in my identity, as well as what I hope to integrate into myself (Snowdrop - rebirth, Chrysanthemum - truth, Rose leaves - hope, Lilacs - growth/progress, Yarrow - healing, and Narcissus - self love)

Day 6- Write down the titles of your favorite LGBTQIA+ books, movies, TV shows, and games, or titles you want to see/read/play. Do a little digging and find out what titles sound interesting. Supporting LGBTQIA+ creators is a wonderful way to celebrate Pride.

Day 7- Journaling doesn't have to be just writing. Try drawing some LGBTQIA+ inspired art, whether it's just a few doodles, a flag or two, or a beautiful painting. Dedicate this entry to expressing yourself and your identity in a way without words.

Day 8- Write gay poetry. You may not think yourself talented or particularly good at writing poems, but that doesn't mean you should keep yourself from doing it, even for a day. Poetry is a wonderful way to bend language to your will and express yourself in a way that only you have to understand. Write a poem expressing your experience in the LGBTQIA+ community, or a poem detailing your first gay crush. Whatever you feel on your heart today, put it into beautifully unique words.

Day 9- Write about the moment you realized you weren't straight or binary. Alternatively, write about the moment you learned what the LGBTQIA+ community was. Describe your feelings and thoughts in the moment, and reflect over how they have changed and evolved over time.

Day 10- Take a moment and think about where you would be if LGBTQIA+ rights have existed all along, without the need for reform laws or protests. Write down who you think you would be, how you would live, and how easy it would be to do things you can't right now. At the same time, think about the disadvantages. Consider the lack of a fight for freedom and how that may influence your opinion or thoughts.

Day 11- Write a letter to your younger self. Tell your younger self about who you are and who you've become. Give them words of encouragement about the journey ahead. Remind your younger self that no matter what happens, you turn out to be a wonderful and beautiful person.

Day 12- Write a letter to your older self. Detail your present experience as a member/ally of the LGBTQIA+ community. Present your ideas about where the community will be moving forward and how much progress society as a whole will make. Ask yourself some questions, like "How do you celebrate your identity?" Later in the future, you can come back to this letter and respond.

Day 13- Learn some phrases or words of Polari. Polari is a critically endangered language invented by young gay men living in Britain. It was also used by circus men and theatre kids. Few LGBTQIA+ people now know of the language, so there's no better time to try to revive it.

Day 14- Do some research on Pride history. Record interesting or important events that marked the history of the LGBTQIA+ community. What happened at the first Pride Parade? Who was the first advocate for gay and lesbian marriage? What was the LGBTQIA+ community like before it was acceptable to be openly queer?

Day 15- Write a letter to those that are anti-LGBTQIA+. Explain why queer rights are humans rights. Tell them that love is love. Or, if you're feeling like letting loose that anger, just tell them off. This letter is for your eyes only, so don't be afraid to get mean if it makes you feel better.

Day 16- Take a moment and think about how you wish to represent yourself. Do you want to wear skirts and dresses? Do you prefer baggy pants and a puffy jacket? Do you like wearing makeup? How do you style your hair? Record how you currently dress and look and how you wish you could dress and look. Write about how your wishes reflect your identity.

Day 17- Write some ways you can improve on the way you treat yourself. Are you hard on yourself because you just can't make the right grade? Do you obsess over how you don't fit in to your family's standards of gender and sexuality? Give yourself some love and think about how you can be nicer to yourself. Remind yourself that school grades aren't more important than your own needs. Remember that if you are in an unhealthy relationship with friends or family, it isn't your fault.

Day 18- Write about what really makes you feel like yourself. You know better than anyone what your authentic self is. So what is it? What makes you feel really... you?

Day 19- If someone described you, what would they say? This can be anything from physical appearance to personality. This can help you think about how you present yourself to others. Do you want more people to know exactly what gender you identify as? Do you not want people to know what pronouns you prefer?

Day 20- Do some research on neopronouns. If you don't use any, perhaps you'll find a set or three you feel comfortable with (if not, that's fine!) If you can't do your own research, try making up your own set! I sometimes feel semi-feminine, like just a little teaspoon of femininity, but I don't really like she/her pronouns. So, I made for myself a set that sounds similar but isn't quite there. Xe/Xer/Xers/Xerself. The 'x' is pronounced like the 's' in 'measure.' A good way to make sure you know how to use a set of neopronouns in a sentence is to use this example I got from pronouny: Today I went to the park with xer. Xe brought xer frisbee. At least, I think it was xers. By the end of the day, xe was throwing the frisbee to xerself.

Day 21- Have you heard the phrase "black sheep of the herd"? It refers to someone that doesn't really fit in to their social group. In what ways are you the black sheep? Is it because of your identity or orientation? How can you help others to see you aren't different and shouldn't be alienated? How can you encourage people to welcome LGBTQIA+ people to the herd?

Day 22- Imagine you are teaching a class of young children about LGBTQIA+, gender, and sexual/romantic orientations. What would you say? How would you encourage them to be open minded and to explore their own identities?

Day 23- With great Pride comes great hardships. There are many obstacles and difficulties when it comes to finding your true self and figuring out your identity and orientation. What hardships have you overcome? What have you learned from them?

Day 24- One of your friends comes to you about having questions about gender identity. They are questioning their own identity and seek your help and support. List some ways you would help your friend feel supported and loved while also helping them discover their identity.

Day 25- List three things you would do if you weren't afraid. (For me, these would easily be: attending Pride Parades, advocating for queer rights, and coming out)

Day 26- Take your favorite or least favorite LGBTQIA+ ship and rewrite a scene as if they were together, or list some of your favorite queer ships.

Day 27- Discover some gender-neutral terms for things like family members, romantic partners, or honorifics (Mister, Miss, Mx.). If you can't find any you find interesting or comfortable, try creating some of your own. My pibling (parent+sibling) calls me their nibling or nibkid (NB term for sibling's child).

Day 28- Have you ever wanted to write a story? Record an idea or two, or three or four, for LGBTQIA+ stories. They can be anything from lesbian princesses to a coming-of-age trans story. Maybe you'll end up planning out your best seller!

Day 29- Think about what rights aren't granted to LGBTQIA+ people. What are they? Do they directly affect you as well? How do these lack of rights make you feel? What can you do to help advocate for these rights?

Day 30- The last day of Pride Month doesn't mean it's the last day of acceptance and love. How can you spread Pride throughout the year? How can you keep and open mind and heart and advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights? Maybe set a list of goals for yourself, things you want to keep up through the year.

[saywhatjessie]

TRC Exchange

This is my gift for @richardcampbells who requested so primo Gansey content! 3.7k [Ao3]

Gansey did not remember being this twitchy in high school.

It was difficult to remember ‘high school’ as this thing that had happened to him only a short year ago and not something in his distant past. He’d experienced so many things in the years of high school and also in the gap year since, it was hard to hold the memory of Aglionby as something associated with himself. He had felt quite different then.

Quite less twitchy.

Blue would probably take offense to the word twitchy. He didn’t think it was a slur of any kind, but it still felt like a word she would not-so-gently correct. Fidgety, she might say. Hyper.

Not that he was hyper, he just couldn’t seem to stop picking at the corner of his folder. Or playing with the zipper tag on his schoolbag. He had to admit, he did feel rather high-strung.

To be so far away from her – Blue – when they’d so recently been so close. Closer than close. It was mildly unbearable.

And not only her, but Henry who had been with them on their gap year road trip around the world. Adam, who was following his own academic pursuits but had been a real grounding presence in his Aglionby days. Ronan, who he missed like a limb and who’d worried him while he’d been away and potentially worried him more now that he was close but still extremely far.

Georgetown was not so far. Ronan came to the area every week for mass with his brothers.

It was enough distance for Gansey to feel it in the marrow of his bones.

He tapped his pen distractedly against his laptop, waiting for class to start and contemplating if he should send Ronan another text. Just to make sure he was coping. He couldn’t remember ever tapping his pen at Aglionby.

“Okay, class, welcome to BBH 251, colloquially known as ‘Straight Talks.’”

Gansey sat up straighter, taking a firmer grip on his pen to sublimate the urge to fidget.

“You can all put your laptops away, this isn’t that type of class.”

Gansey startled, blinking for a good few seconds before shutting his laptop and sliding it back into his bag. He wasn’t sure what kind of class didn’t require taking notes. His pulse jumped a bit in his neck, some predecessor to an inappropriate sense of dread.

“This class is about exploring intersectional identity, putting focus on privilege and invisible identities.”

And now the dread made more sense. Gansey was always far too aware of his privilege.

It would be absolutely heinous to have to get up in the front of this room and list out all the ways society valued him more than them. Looking around the room there were women, there were people of color. Students with pride flags on their bags and their hair dyed outrageous colors. There were students who looked like Adam had when he’d first come to Aglionby: hollow cheeked and broken down in a way that could only be reached by withstanding poverty. How was he supposed to come out to this class as a straight, white, wealthy son of a Republican career politician?

“The class is called straight talks because what we learn in this class, we carry over into other classes. We reach out to other classes and introduce ourselves with our full intersectional identities.”

The horrors continued abound. Gansey would have to do this around the entire university.

“I’ll start.”

Their instructor introduced herself as a white, cis woman. She was a lesbian athlete in her mid-fifties. She talked about the difficulties of being a lesbian athlete, how she suffered ageism in the gay community, and the stereotypes that come with it.

Braver souls than Gansey came forward and asked what cis meant. The teacher calmly explained that it simply meant “not trans”. Gansey hadn’t known there was a word for that. He hadn’t thought about the need for one. And that made him feel worse than anything. Because anything that wasn’t “other” was “normal”. What a terribly privileged thing he was.

“And now, to present more examples from your peers, I’ve asked some of my students from last semester to show you what a straight talk might look like. Ryann, do you want to start?”

Ryann didn’t look particularly bothered either way, but started on what was obviously a well rehearsed speech.

He was genderfluid, which meant he changed his pronouns regularly, but he told them all that at this moment he was a he so please refer to him as such. He was of Māori descent. He talked about what it was like to be underrepresented and constantly likened to Taika Waititi just because he was the only Māori person anyone ever heard of, if they’d heard of it at all. He suffered from EDS, which meant he had what was usually referred to as an invisible disability. In other words: people assumed he was abled when they looked at him since he didn’t need a wheelchair. At least not yet.

This wasn’t at all about Gansey, but he still found himself sinking slightly in his seat, the shame he felt by the simple fact that he had none of these additional social obstacles to deal with making him feel absolutely wretched and helpless.

The next speaker helped some. She was white and cis and able-bodied. But she spoke of growing up in poverty in the American south, constantly living in fear because she was bisexual and a woman. She discussed how she’d known more girls who’d experienced sexual violence than she could fit on two hands.

Gansey felt a little like crying. Actually, a lot like crying. But he was a Gansey and he would never show such unmeasured behaviour in company. And this was not about him. He would not make it about him.

The last person was agender. They were mixed race: what races, they weren’t even sure because they were adopted. They grew up in a wealthy family but lived in a community where they didn’t feel deserving of that station. Feeling undeserving was something, at least, Gansey understood.

They were also demisexual.

“So, demisexuality is on the spectrum of asexuality,” the person – Storm – explained, in a practiced-sounding way, but not like Gansey thought they were tired of explaining: they still sounded as if they cared deeply about this label. “Everyone’s heard of the Kinsey scale?” Most everyone nodded, Gansey maybe too enthusiastically. He’d read a lot of history when he’d realized Adam was bisexual. “Asexuality has that same kind of scale, ranging from sex-repulsed asexual to sex-positive gray-asexual. Asexuality is differentiated by the lack of feeling of sexual attraction. sex-repulsed asexuals don’t feel sexual attraction and don’t want sex in any way. People can still be asexual but have sex anyway for stress relief or for their partner: they don’t feel the attraction but don’t mind the act itself. Gray-asexual people can feel sexual attraction but only sometimes. It’s all very relative and, obviously, I don’t speak for everyone blah blah blah. Following?”

There were grumbles of assent from the assembled class and Gansey nodded distractedly.

What Storm (and that was another thing: Ronan would absolutely love the names nonbinary people chose for themselves when Gansey told him) what Storm was talking about with gray-asexuality sounded just like normal people. Not everyone experiences sexual attraction ALL the time. Then wouldn’t everyone want to have sex with everyone else all the time? That sounded extremely distracting, who would have the time?

And not everyone was in the mood all the time either. He was working to be really open-minded, but this didn’t sound real. 

“Demisexuality,” Storm continued, “Is on that spectrum. The important qualifier is that demisexual people can feel sexual attraction but only if they establish an emotional bond with someone first.”

And just like that, something in Gansey’s head snapped.

He shot his hand up.

Their professor waved him off. “We’re not doing questions right now,”

“That’s okay.” Storm said, smiling at him. Something in their eyes glinted in what Gansey thought might be recognition, even though they’d never met. “What’s up?” They asked, nodding at Gansey.

Gansey had no idea what was up. He hadn’t raised his hand with any kind of plan.

“Hello. My name is Gansey,” he introduced himself, because his mother always said that was a good jumping off point. “Demi is from the Latin word dimidius meaning partially or half.”

That probably wasn’t the right direction to start with, judging by the muttering and eye rolling from his classmates. Gansey felt his neck heat up but Storm looked amused.

“Are you calling me half-sexual?”

“No,” Gansey shook his head, trying to come off better. “I guess I just wondered how the leap was made from demi meaning half to demi meaning… what you said.”

“Mr. Gansey–” the teacher started again, looking a little put-out. Gansey guessed he’d probably said something wrong. Something offensive. Something condescending. He was good at that.

But Storm waved her off again. “I don’t know, man, I didn’t invent the word. I just learned it, same as you’re learning it now.” Their eyes flashed again on the words ‘same as you’. “I learned the word and I remembered every teacher I’d had a crush on growing up after they’d established a connection with me. I remembered the weird sex dreams I’d had about literally every one of my friends. I remembered how any time someone talked about having sex with a stranger I thought they were kidding because how could you feel that way about someone you didn’t know?”

Gansey’s hand gripped the seat of his chair, each statement from Storm triggering his own memories. How he’d never had a crush on a girl – a serious, Want To Do Anything About It crush – until Blue. How confused he’d been when Adam said he had more experience with girls, because he hadn’t, really. How Helen’s advances on poor unsuspecting men felt false, because how could she want to sleep with all of them? She’d just met them.

And he remembered the weird sex dreams he’d had about Adam and Ronan, even though he was straight.

At least… he’d thought he was straight?

Storm smiled at him in a soft, almost pitying way. “Any other questions?”

Gansey shook his head. “No, thank you. Please continue.”

It seemed this class may teach him more than he’d counted on.

His first order of business was to call Blue.

Both because he needed to speak with her about this new word he’d just learned and also because he had a scheduled call with her and also because he missed her fiercely.

“Have you heard this word ‘demisexuality’?” Gansey asked by way of hello.

He could almost hear Blue blink in surprise. “No. Where have you heard the word demisexuality?”

“I’m taking this Bio-Behavioral Health class. It’s usually reserved for at the very earliest second semester students but I spoke to my advisor about my apprehension regarding achieving the required credits for gen eds and she suggested combining requirements through some classes that might cover both. This class counts for gym and science.”

“So you’re not taking a gym class?” Blue hummed, mournfully. “No pictures of sunkissed Gansey rowing in the early morning?”

Gansey’s ears heated up and he cleared his throat. “Any photos you’d like I’ll take for you, Jane.”

Blue hummed again, self-satisfied.

Gansey cleared his throat again. “So this class explores identity and marginalization–”

Blue cut him off with a barked laugh. “Oh, man, I would love to watch this class react to you .”

“Yes, Jane, it was not very comfortable for me, aware as I am of my privilege.” He tried not to sound petulant but he was and it did. “But there was a student named Storm who introduced me to this new word. Demisexuality, I mean.”

“Okay,” Blue said. There was rustling on the other side and Gansey pictured her getting comfortable, sitting in the chair next to the table in the phone/sewing/cat room. She had her own cell phone by now – a fight that spanned weeks and several countries of their road trip – but she refused to use it to speak to Gansey himself, only saving it for calling her mother while she was away or to speak to Adam on the phone his own boyfriend had bullied him into accepting. He assumed she’d cave and use it to speak to him when she was away at school herself (her semester didn’t start until October) but for now they were relying on old habits. “So tell me about demisexuality.”

He began to talk through it with her, repeating some of what Storm said and drawing new conclusions and going so far as to pull a webpage on the subject up on his phone as he spoke, switching between reading off of it and putting the phone to his ear to hear her reply. He knew she could have looked this up herself, but he appreciated she was letting him tell her about it. Teaching her was the easiest way for him to learn himself.

She cut to it pretty quick. “Is that what you think you are?”

Gansey blinked, expecting the question, he supposed, but not expecting how it would make him feel.

“I thought I was straight,” he answered. Because it was true. Even if it was becoming less true by the moment. 

There was a rustling that Gansey recognized as a shrug. “Everyone thinks they’re straight until they don’t.”

Gansey blinked again.

“Thank you, Jane.”

Blue hummed. “I’m gonna let you sit with this. Call me back with any updates?”

Gansey hummed back. They hung up.

Gansey appreciated she wanted to let him sit with this – it was a kindness and potentially a necessity. He didn’t know how to do this, he’d never had a sexual identity crisis before.

So he called Ronan.

Who didn’t answer, of course, so he was forced to sit with his sexual identity crisis.

  He sat with it for two hours until Ronan sent him a text. “Dick.”

Gansey called him.

Ronan answered. “Jesus Mary, Gansey, what ?”

“I think I had a crush on you when we first met.”

Ronan choked and immediately hung up.

Gansey swore, growling, before hitting redial.

“Gansey, I swear to Christ,” Ronan pleaded.

“Shut up!” Gansey swore. “Please shut up. I am so stressed out right now, Ronan.”

Ronan, for his part, shut up. It was an angry and embarrassed silence, but considering what Gansey had just confronted him with that was understandable.

“I learned something in one of my classes today and Jane thinks it might apply to me.” Blue had said no such thing, but something told Gansey that Ronan would take information like this more seriously if it came from sensible Blue. “There is apparently a sexual orientation previously unbeknownst to me that describes feelings of attraction only when there’s an established emotional connection.”

Ronan was silent for a few breaths before he said “Okay?”

“So we were very close when he first met and I felt an immediate connection to you and I didn’t know how to process that outside of friendship because I’d never felt it before but now with this new term sort of recontualizing things, I think it may have been a crush.”

Ronan made a sort of squawk in his throat, reacting similarly to the first time Gansey had said the word “crush” but, thankfully, not hanging up the phone.

“Gansey… I don’t know what you want me to do with this.”

Gansey opened his mouth then shut it again. He wasn’t sure what he wanted from Ronan either. He didn’t know how to ask “Do you think I had a crush?” or “Do you think I’m not straight?” or “How do I restructure myself, how do I think of myself, if I’m not straight like I always thought?”

But that was an emotional burden he had no business troubling Ronan with. Gansey’s feelings weren’t Ronan’s responsibility. He had other things going on.

“Nothing,” he answered, quickly, attempting to brush off the entire conversation. “Just a thought to mull over. I thought I’d share. But, you’re right, you have other things to do–”

Ronan sighed so loud and dramatically, he cut off Gansey’s prepared polite change of topic right in its tracks.

“Gansey, it’s okay if you’re not straight. It would be fucking cool, actually. That means none of us are straight. High five for a perfect queer score or whatever the shit.”

Gansey’s mouth twitched.

“And if you had a crush on me that’s cool too.” He cleared his throat, his next statement coming out as a growl to cover embarrassment. “I had a crush on you in the beginning, too. So it’s whatever.”

Gansey grinned. “Oh, you did?”

“We are never bringing this up again,” Ronan told him firmly. “But yeah, man, you’re like the portrait of well tended youth. But you drove a fast and shitty car and smiled like a dork. I was sixteen, what do you want?”

Gansey’s grin softened. “Well, now I feel indecorous. You’ve had time to think about this. I have nothing prepared to tell you why you were crushworthy.”

“I don’t want to hear it!” Ronan said, quickly. “Tell me about the crush you had on Parrish, instead.”

Gansey sat up straight, very much feeling like he’d received a rowing oar to the face. “Did I have a crush on Parrish?”

Ronan snorted, cruel yet fond. “Of fucking course you had a crush on Parrish. Everyone with eyes and a brain has had a crush on Parrish.”

Gansey frowned but remembered again the inappropriate sex dreams. Then he blushed. Then he conceded. “I suppose you make valid points.”

Ronan laughed. “Did you get butterflies the first time he helped you fix the Pig?”

Gansey hummed, getting a little lost in the memory, before jerking back. “Oh. Have I been a little stupid about this?”

Ronan snorted again, the sound 100% joy this time. “Yeah, man. But that’s okay. No one can know everything.”

When Gansey was slated to present his own “straight talk” to the class weeks later, he was prepared. Not ready. Not comfortable. But prepared.

“Hello,” Gansey started, his politician’s-son smile on. “My name is Richard Campbell Gansey III, but I go by Gansey. The legacy in my family, so aptly captured by my name, has never been something I was comfortable with.”

Gansey watched a few faces around the room nod. Expressing that they saw him, they understood what he was saying, and they accepted it.

It gave him the strength to continue. He smiled a bit more easily this time.

“It feels overly boastful to list the ways for which I have privilege in this world – it was something I was never brought up to put a name to for fear of coming off ungracious or pompous. But putting a name to something is the first step to breaking down the social structures that put people like me so far ahead simply by the state in which I was born. So just because it makes me uncomfortable, doesn’t mean I shouldn’t say it. I only ask that as I go down my list, you all don’t hate me too much.”

That got a few laughs. Gansey sighed a bit in relief before steeling himself.

“I’m white. White Anglo Saxon Protestant, which is rather ironic as I’m deathly allergic to wasps.” Another laugh. Gansey took another breath. “I come from a wealthy family: what some call old Virginia money. I’ve never wanted for anything. I am cis, I am male, I am able-bodied – save my poor eyesight and previously mentioned bee and wasp allergy. Access to care for eyes and allergy has never been a problem, though, because of the aforementioned wealth. I’ve been able to go through my life relatively normally because of the wealth and despite what otherwise might be debilitating conditions.”

The bee allergy had killed him, once, but Gansey wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to get into that in this setting.

“I have a girlfriend, so I am straight passing,” Gansey continued, swallowing. “And, until very recently, I thought I was straight.”

He lifted his eyes to the class, hoping some of them were remembering his questions to Storm on the first day. Storm themself wasn’t there but Gansey pictured them in his mind as he continued.

“Learning about demisexuality has opened some things up for me,” he confessed. “I spoke to my girlfriend and to some friends from high school who are queer themselves and who I only recently realized I had had crushes on. They all think it’s extremely funny, telling me I was terrible at hiding it. And they’re all very excited to realize this gives us a perfect record of queerness in the friend group.”

More laughs. Students’ faces were very open and friendly. Some were still a bit disdainful – there would be some fights he couldn’t win, some people he would never be able to win over because they had suffered too much by people just like him – but there were people in this class who didn’t visibly hate him. Gansey grinned fully.

“I expect this discovery of identity will continue: probably until I die.” (Again) “And it was challenging to have to restructure my self-perception, but a bit thrilling, too. I thank you all for sharing so much of yourselves with me. I hope I can go forward in this life and take advantage of my outrageous privilege to do right by you.”

He glanced over at the professor, who looked rather stoic, but nodded once, eyes shining in something that looked a little like surprise and a little more like pride.

Gansey looked back to the class and nodded. “Thank you.”

He hoped he could answer questions – from the class and from himself – whenever they came.

[lovelybrittxo]

where do I even start?

I’m literally only writing this for myself since typing a whole novel out on the computer is way easier than writing this in a physical journal which is what I normally do. I come to Tumblr though when I have way too much to say and don't know how to say it. I just need to get it off my chest before I blow up. so here it goes...

shall we start at the beginning? I grew up in a decently religious household. my mom, sister and I went to church almost every Sunday with all our aunts and uncles. don't get me wrong, I still believe in God and whatnot and I wouldn't change my upbringing in the church for anything. but it may have suppressed my views on the world. something my aunt said to me a few years ago has stuck to brain ever since and I can't seem to shake it. she told me that she actually believes that being gay is a sin and that you can love the sinner but not the sin. so like, she believes if you're gay, you can be gay but don't act upon it/the sin. she believes, for example, that being trans is a mental illness. like, I just can't wrap my head around that. and honestly, she spoke with so much conviction and “sense” that she actually had me fooled to think the same way for a hot second. and then to learn that my other “cool” aunt also believes this... kinda sad. both of those aunts have literally talked down upon family (and our family is very tight knit) and people they love... what would they do if they ever found out about me?

ive felt a lot of feelings ever since I was young. mostly towards males... but also towards females. I just thought the female part was me wanting to be like them or be their friend and just have them like me and accept me as a chill person to be around. but fast forward to a couple years ago. I was bombarded (in a good way) by social media flaunting (in a good way lol) different sexualities and things. its hard to describe but that “world” was just becoming more prominent to me I guess.

I started to try and put my religious upbringing in the background so I could focus on trying to figure out who I really was. ive been doing this for at least a couple years now. and although im still trying to really figure it out, right now half way through 2020, I think im getting closer to an answer. and guess what has helped me the most? tiktok lmao! no but for real, the internet is an amazing place for discovery in any form. after I started to get into real communities online (like kpop and penpaling) i’ve never felt more connected to the internet and it allowed me to try and find real personal help... if that makes any sense. i’ve just tried to put myself out there and not just google my feelings but piece together a map from asking real people over the Internet here and there to try and figure out who I am.

sometime last year (or maybe earlier) I found a YouTube video of a popular creator retelling her coming out story. I just randomly commented on the video about how I had been feeling, not to get a reply but just to comment. but then I actually got a real reply (not from the creator but still a nice person). they said something along the lines of me basically being bicurious. I had never in my life heard of such a word and I had thought that this person was just making it up. one google search later I found out it was a real thing. although at the time of first looking it up I was still very confused about the word... still kinda am? lol. however, just a couple weeks ago I had seen a post somewhere (an ad I think selling pride flags) saying there was an official bicurious flag. I was in shock. I thought it was a scam, but its not, it’s real (I just don't think it’s talked about very often cause it doesn't seem like a solid sexuality that you can claim your entire life). but anyway.

now what i’m gonna say next I don't want to come off in the wrong way (you nonexistent person reading this lol), but I feel like dating a trans person brought me into that “world” a bit more. like, i had literally never met anyone who was trans before him or anyone who was gay or used a they/them pronoun... never. but in his world, all of that was common and normal. and this is where I don't want to come off wrongly... I don't wanna make it seem like because I dated a trans person i’m qualified to be included in the LGBT community now or to talk about LGBT stuff or whatever. I just think because I dated him, it opened up my shallow world a bit. especially because he’s open about it (on a side note I always loved looking at his huge trans flag above his bed. that was the first flag I had really ever memorized because of him. besides the rainbow one obviously lol). like, his best friend uses they/them pronouns, and although i’ve always been aware of that, i’ve only ever seen things about it through YouTube videos and whatnot. I had never had to actually use those pronouns for anyone I knew in real life until I met his best friend. like, everything I knew about that “world” had only been through online researching/consuming. i’d never experienced it in real life before.

I remember one night we talked about it a little. I knew he was bisexual and so I asked him if he’d ever dated a guy. he asked me if I would ever date a girl and i just said that I had always thought about it and that my tinder profile was set to find both genders. then we talked about pride since it was at the beginning of quarantine and we didn't know if parades were still gonna happen or not yet. he said I could always go as an ally because I told him I felt ashamed and like I shouldn't be allowed to attend a pride parade. (of course he reassured me I can go and he wasn't shocked about me liking both genders at all...he just said ‘nice’ lol)

I still have a little inkling in the back of my mind that I still shouldn't be able to attend though. honestly because I don't know what I would be attending as. I feel like an imposter. I don't want people thinking that im doing all this for attention or just because I dated one person in the LGBT community. i’ve been struggling with this for so long... but it just so happens that now at 27 years old im coming to terms with who I am. I just feel like because I didn't figure it out earlier that I’m not “worthy” of being included. I feel like such an outsider because no one’s “invited” me in yet lol because im still trying to figure it out.

and on the same note, I don't feel like i’m worthy because I still really don't have a solid answer. at the moment I just use bicurious because ive never dated a girl before. the trans guy ive been talking about has been the only person i’ve ever been romantically involved with. im serious. I made it 26 years without being with anyone in any type of way. I feel like I don't have the right to call myself bisexual. however, I feel a tiny bit more confident in using that label maybe after I do end up dating a girl in the future and not feel guilty about using it because that same guy calls himself bisexual but told me right out one day that he’s way more attracted to girls than guys and im in the same situation but opposite. the only difference at this point in time is that he’s dated both and I haven't. but thennnn on the other hand, do I even need to label myself at all right now??

even if I did wanna come out, I don't wanna do it until I really have a solid answer about my identity. i just feel like such a fraud or something because im trying to figure it out so late. and like, im going so over the top with my support this year because I feel like I should fit in and maybe im trying too hard? again, I just don't want people thinking its because I dated one trans guy and all of a sudden im huge into the LGBT community. it’s not like that. all of this is just helping me bring out my true self. ugh this is the part where it gets confusing to put into words. i’m aware and I have pure intentions. im just trying to figure out myself after a long time of trying to figure out myself lol

some days the research is overwhelming. there's so many facts and opinions and different people’s stories and labels. as crazy as it sounds I just want someone who’s been gay their whole life to come up and tell me “yup, your bisexual no doubt” lol or something like that. I guess I just want to be validated in my exploration. and i’ve seen random tiktok comments saying stuff like that, that validates me, but the difference is that their comments aren’t directed specifically to me. they don't know me personally. it’s hard to have a random social media comment resonate with me. honestly, and this may sound selfish and not right, but when I was talking to the guy I was seeing, I almost wish he just told me straight out what I was that day. but instead he said I could go to Pride as an ally. and that was probably just him being respectful and not forcing me to be anything, but it almost had the opposite effect on me. by saying I was an ally it felt like he was giving me that permanent label even after telling him I like guys and girls.... ya know?

something recently happened to me that really stuck with me and I was so happy. I have a penpal who is very southern Texas raised religious. she knows the Bible better than I do. I had posted a Pride doodle I did on my Instagram at the beginning of this month and she was the only one who personally responded with an encouraging and supportive dm. if she can support whole heartedly the LGBT community and still love God, then why can't I?? and that's when I trulyyyy knew that I was right and my aunt’s were wrong and I wasn't going insane lol

I wanted to buy a bicurious or pride flag recently. but then was torn when I saw the ally flag (which I also didn't know existed until recently) and the bisexual flag. I know they're just flags but it feels so solid?? like you buy one when you know what you are.... and I don't yet. so I ended up not buying one at all :/

again, there was no purpose to this post because I know no one is going to read it but I just had to type it out into the world so I didn't have to bottle it up anymore.

[quinnzscale]

Not that anyone asked, but I’ve been seeing makeup discourse going around lately and I kind of wanted to share my experience and relationship with makeup and how it has colored my relationship with my gender identity and presentation.

When I was a kid, I did a lot of theater, so I was introduced to makeup early, but it was expected from everyone. That said, it was very clear that most of the boys were expected to do the bare minimum of stage makeup, and the girls were expected to do a “beauty” look, given that most of the shows being done were quite old and gender-specific. Honestly, I never quite liked it, but I was solidly in my tomboy “all girly things are inherently bad” phase, proudly hating pink and gladly avoiding the romantic leads because I just wasn’t like other girls (oh, yeah, I was that middle schooler). I always wanted to play boy roles because I thought they fit me far better.

I didn’t know what a trans person was until I was about 12, and saw Chaz Bono on tv. I asked some questions and my parents were always willing to answer, which I count myself very lucky for. But it was the first I had heard that anyone could be a different gender than the one assigned at birth, and the first I’d heard of medical transitions.

A few years later, I recall breaking down in tears because I could never play my favorite characters, and I told my dad that I wanted to be a boy. My dad told me that it was a very superficial reason to change your body and I don’t think either of us realized the red flag that was for my future gender experimentation.

When I was 14, I came out as bisexual. I also started wearing makeup a little more, albeit in a very “emo-phase” way, black eyeliner like a raccoon to match my black beanie, side bangs and fingerless gloves. I was introduced to it by a cast mate in a show and I loved how my eyes looked. The more I experimented with makeup, the more I fell into a more feminine role, as that’s the way I thought it should be. If I’m the kind of girl who wakes up early to do makeup, I should also be doing my hair and dressing feminine and cute. But it was always a role.

When I was sixteen, I started dating a boy. I leaned into wearing dresses and lipstick, I leaned into a perfect girlfriend persona, I became what everyone wanted me to be. I thought I was happy. Until I spent time with myself. Until I spoke with my dad. Until I realized I didn’t love my boyfriend.

When I was eighteen, I came out as a lesbian. I became very vocal about it, but oddly, I found myself still in my dresses and flowy tops, long tresses and skirts. I even doubted that other people would know I was gay. I remember having a conversation with a close friend and she told me “no, you’re a classic femme. Don’t worry about it.” So I said “oh, that must be what I am.” And I became that. But I was still playing to other people’s perceptions. I started to become more concerned with “natural makeup,” not being too flashy but still gorgeous. Leaning into classic makeup and dress because this is what I was supposed to be.

When I was twenty, I met this boy in college. We became close friends, and eventually ended up sleeping together a couple times. My attraction to him put me in a state of crisis. I didn’t think I liked guys, but here I was. Did I only say lesbian because I thought it would make the breakup easier?

By this point I had started getting a lot more adventurous and experimental with makeup. I considered it an art form for myself. I wasn’t wearing it for society, or because I thought I needed it. In fact, I went to class quite often bare-faced and thought nothing of it.

I ended up thinking a lot about my gender and sexuality, as I felt less and less comfortable with being called a woman or a girl and more and more leaning towards masculine looks, and quietly stopped calling myself a lesbian, and defaulting to gay. But I always did my makeup the way I wanted to.

Then COVID hit.

Spending this much time with myself made me reevaluate everything. I began to feel as uncomfortable as I was before but now I was able to identify it as dysphoria. I worried that makeup was what made me feel this way, but after a few weeks of bare face, it occurred to me it was not my issue. It was my long hair, my feminine clothes.

I am twenty-one, and I came out as a non-binary person just last month. I have cut my hair and I am in the process of revamping my wardrobe to make me feel more comfortable. I love makeup as much as I did before, but I feel more free about it, despite feeling like I have to remind people that makeup isn’t inherently feminine. I definitely understand that women have been forced into these roles, being expected to wear makeup. As someone who grew up AFAB, I spent a lot of my teenage years being hyper aware of it.

People express themselves in different ways, and makeup is never a must. No one should ever have to wear it if they don’t want to. Makeup is my expression but I’m not wearing it to live up to the expectations of a world who sees me as a woman. It’s part of my existence as an enby, and no one can take that from me. But I make my own post and don’t comment on those women sharing the trauma associated with makeup culture. Because their experiences are valid, the culture surrounding makeup is often shitty, and hopping in to say “well, I wear makeup because I like it and not to adhere to society” undermines the point of these posts.

[natsspammityspamspamham]

Dino Watches Anime (Oct 26)

Recently Completed!

Tokyo Godfathers

Score: 10/10

There’s a reason why I gave this such a rare high rating. When I was watching it, I was internally like, “*excitement noises* I have not been this excited over an anime in such a long time, let alone for an anime movie. EVERYONE SHUT UP SO I CAN WATCH THIS EVEN IF I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEY’RE SAYING.”

It’s not often that you come across really good movies, let alone masterpieces like this movie. The art is so good, the story made me feel like it was Christmas in October, and the characters really made me connect. 

I know the subtitles used a whole lot of gay slurs and things like that, but Hana (the trans character in this tale) is treated well if we get past that huge hurdle. She truly owns up to herself. She doesn’t care what she’s called. She gets mad at people who misgender her. She gets mad if she’s forced to go to a men’s facility. She wants people to call her “an old hag” rather than “an old coot”. She just wants to be a mother even if she isn’t “biologically a woman” who can bear children. So when she comes across this kid, she thinks, “I will finally be a mother!” These are issues that real people face. These are issues that cisgendered people take for granted.

Madhouse really knocked it out of the park. Satoshi Kon is one of the biggest creators and directors in anime history. He’s known for horror and psychological works like Perfect Blue, Paprika, and Millennium Actress. I never expected him to be this good at making a movie that could move my soul like this. The characters were so far from perfect, yet I wanted the best for each of them. The way it handled everything was masterful. The dialogue worked so well and was witty, the voice actors (despite the main three not being in anything else for the most part) were so good at giving life to their characters, and the art blew me away in 2019 even though this was released in 2003. The only thing I didn’t quite like as much was the score during some parts of the movie, but it was subjectively good and just wasn’t to my taste (the Noragami soundtrack wasn’t a fav of mine either). 

Just... watch the movie. If you can watch it around Christmas. It’s good for you.

Saiunkoku Monogatari

Score: 7.4/10 

Yes, I binge-watched all 39 episodes in two days, what’s it to ya?! In reality, I just boosted the speed of the video.

Me throughout this show: Why do you all have triangle heads? What’s with that?

Okay, it’s the art style, and a lot of shoujo anime go with the concept that it looks good. Once you get over the art hurdle making me believe this was created in the early 2000s despite it being 3 years younger than Tokyo Godfathers, this turns out to be a really nice show. I just can’t believe they’re BOTH from Madhouse. 

Remember Snow White with the Red Hair? Remember Akatsuki no Yona? If you liked those shows, you’re going to like this one... except it relies more on the political plot. It’s mostly about a woman wanting to pursue her dreams of being a politician in a male-dominated world. She’s entasked with helping this mess of a king to get his act together, and as much as I can try to prove that it’s surprisingly progressive (given the art and genre), I think that’d be spoiling it a little. The only character that actually bothered me was the prince who was voiced by Tomokazu Seki who honestly was a bit annoying and sounded so fake for me. However, this anime made me appreciate Hikaru Midorikawa’s voice as well as Houko Kuwashima who I’ve only heard voicing dead moms and only a few good characters here and there. Seriously, both of their voices are great. Toshiyuki Morikawa sounds good too, but we already knew that. I don’t like the OP or ED (or a whole lot of the music), but that’s the case for a lot of these 2005-era anime. Just like a lot of the anime on MAL, I do think this is an underrated show, but it does have its pitfalls if you’re just craving for a quick shoujo without any politics.

Full Metal Panic: Second Raid

Score: 7/10

I binge-watched this entire season while my parents were out for dinner and something else. It only took me a couple of hours because I boosted the speed.

I wanted to get a gif specifically from this season, so this one will have to do. So much wasted potential will this character (who’s one of two twins). I know they were trying to play the whole “twincest” thing, but I’m personally not a fan. They provided some cool fight scenes even at a certain cringe cost. The fact that Kyoto Animation animated this bumped the art from a 3 to an 8. It’s crazy how much the quality jumped after a new studio took over. Unfortunately, they didn’t take care of the next season. I know the main ship in the series is pretty clear, but this season made it closer to canon (too bad it took around 13 years to make the next season).

Kara no Kyoukai (movies: 5, 6, 7)

Score:  Part Five: 7.5/10 Part Six: 5.8/10 Part Seven: 8.2/10

Not gonna lie, I watched the first four movies over a year ago and retained nothing. I had to read the Wikia to assist me and to begin with, I watched this to get into the “Type-Moon” universe (which consists of this and the Fate nonsense stuff), Yuki Kajiura’s score, and Maaya Sakamoto and Kenichi Suzumura voicing a couple. The score would probably change if I’d watched them regularly, but I digress because I watched movies 5-7 in one afternoon. Ufotable was pretty good at animating this and the voice acting worked really well. Yuki Kajiura’s music didn’t hit well at first when I was first watching the first few movies over a year ago because it wasn’t what I envisioned the score being, but once you get into the mood and mindset, it adds so much to the story. Although, I still really didn’t like part six. I thought it was a complete flop because I just want to get rid of anyone who believes i*cest is an okay thing. This isn’t Alabama. Go home. Not else to say here because this took so much commitment that I doubt anyone would watch it.

Paranoia Agent

Score: 8.6/10

With spoopy month coming to a close (already?!) I watched this anime earlier this month, but I forgot to write about it. That’s partly because there’s so much to unpack here. This was a thriller, psychological, horror anime by Satoshi Kon. That’s right, the first anime above was also done with him in the director’s seat. This anime was smart. There’s a reason why Robin Williams likes it! It was scary in the best of ways. It revealed a part of society that we see all the time but don’t talk about (especially in Japanese society where emotions are better kept concealed). Just the opening alone made me feel uneasy. The OP and ED were simplistic yet worked. I binge-watched the whole series because it was that gripping. 

It was a little confusing at times, but that’s also because that’s just a common thing with horror anime. That suspense keeps us going. It keeps us on the edge of our seats. Who’s going to be the next victim of Shounen Bat? Episode 8 came out of nowhere for me, and I liked it. There were several scenes that sent shivers down my spine in the best way possible. It isn’t always “scary”, but it gives suspense.

Aoi Bungaku

This one is going to be reviewed a little differently. Since it has specific arcs, I’m going to review them as such!

Ningen Shikkaku: 8.2/10

We start off with a bang. Osamu Dazai was a man of suffering. This story really shows that. In this story, we see a man who’s desperate to know what makes him human. We see this through the eyes of a fictional character, but I personally view this as a semi-autobiography.

The art was chilling. The voice acting from Masato Sakai was surprisingly good. A lot of the time, voice acting from live-action actors just aren’t that great. Every time you think this character will get back on his feet, he falls deeper and deeper. It truly did make me wonder what made me human.

Sakura no Mori no Mankai no Shita: 3.9/10

That moment when the only thing that saves this arc is Nana Mizuki’s singing. Seriously, her jazz songs were awesome. Can’t say that about the rest. I mean, the art is good, but it’s Madhouse so most of their stuff is already good. The story wasn’t that original. Mind you, this was probably during a period where foreign influence was strong, and I haven’t read the original story, but... this is basically Salome (the opera) with some differences. Both have a crazy woman with a fixation over lifeless decapitated heads. Both have men that are captivated with her beauty so they give her what she wants because of that reason alone, they both murder religious people (monk/shrine maiden and a prophet), and both eventually realize that women can be crazy when they demand a lifeless head because you know, that’s just a red flag. Above all, it suffers from tonal shifts. You can’t have a woman turning moe then demand you bring her another head to play with. You can’t have Masato Sakai playing another main character that doesn’t fit him! Seriously, he doesn’t have the voice of a brute and just couldn’t do it. Overall, this arc was a mess, and I’m glad it was one of the shorter ones.

Kokoro: 7.6/10

This looked like a masterpiece compared to the last arc. I haven’t read Kokoro, but this made me go, “Huh, I don’t remember this happening.” That’s because they chose a certain part of the book (near the end apparently) and just went off that and created its own anime-original episode. Despite that, it was pretty good! There were some screaming discrepancies which did hurt its impression (because it made it feel out of place to the point where even I, as an uneducated anime viewer, could clearly see).

(I think this is from Kokoro but I might be wrong)

Hashire, Melos!: 8.9/10

Would you look at that? It’s the best arc of the series. Hashire, Melos was great. It had me going from beginning to end, and it’s the only arc that doesn’t have Masato Sakai playing the lead character. The art, the pacing, the storytelling, the story, the sound, the voice acting, and the art direction complemented each other so well. It made me far more interested in the original. 

The Spider’s Thread: 6.6/10

If you look really close, you’ll notice that the creator of Bleach took over character design for this! It was okay. I found that it was a little cliche and lacklustre. Mamo is around so much that you probably have to do more than that to keep my attention, and this had the art going for it too. It just wasn’t that interesting. A heartless murderer is sent to hell after being executed. Moral of the story: Don’t be an asshole. Alright. Nice. I do understand that Ryuunosuke Akutagawa was one of the main establishers of the whole “Japanese Short Story” thing, but after seeing it so many times, I just didn’t get that same chill.

Hell Screen: 6.9/10 

Another Akutagawa short story! This one had far more of an impact because this one hit closer to Akutagawa’s heart. Knowing the history of this piece of writing, you can see his desperation to stay relevant and true to his craft. It’s about a painter who wants to paint the town but finds out the city isn’t the bright light he sees in his mind. Everything goes ablaze. The art for this is stunning. I probably would’ve enjoyed this story more if it was placed in the middle of the series run rather than being the last story. 

Recently Started

Africa no Salaryman

The animation for this is terrible. There is no way around it. However, at least it’s funny. Still, close to being on the chopping block. It has the papa lion who’s played by Akio Ohtsuka, the straight-man middle lizard played by Kenjirou Tsuda, and the scumbag toucan played by Hiro Shimono. Yes, they all play Hero Academia villains. The jokes are pretty good for me.

Given

Oh, would you look at that? It’s a music anime. *inhales* Music anime is a double-edged sword for me. I like having music interpreted and portrayed through one of my favourite mediums, but I don’t like them playing off music as some sort of easy gimmick and a joke. It’s like a shonen montage. “Let’s just have this guy train for two minutes and become a demigod”. But when you put an instrument into someone’s hand and demand the same, it sends me to another plane of angriness.  So far, the romance is kind of cute... but Mafuyu kind of annoys me since his role in the BL dynamic is so clear just by his voice. Same with Uchida. You can only play so many thugs a season. Kyou? Good. Chika? Good. This guy? Good, but don’t do them all back-to-back! I don’t like the BL dynamic being so basic. However, my mind can be changed if done right.

Shinsekai Yori

Very interesting premise, their eyes are cute, and I’m a sucker for these so I’m gonna stick with it.

[starswallowingsea]

Growing Up Trans and AlloAro

Or whatever the hell this essay turned out to be. Under the cut because this got long (like 1340 words long). 

---

When I was younger, I never quite fit with the word “girl,” but I thought it was just because I didn’t like playing with dolls like other girls my age. I spent my first two years of school playing spies on the playground and sticking my tongue to frozen poles (and yes, it is painful but I somehow managed to not get in trouble for it). 

I would sit in our office--soon to be my baby brother’s room--and build towers out of his foam blocks and make stories for people that lived in cities I built on SimCity on our old desktop. Even with my girl friends, I would get confused about why they were talking about liking boys and getting crushes. 

I remember sitting in my friend’s basement during a freezing winter in North Dakota and she was shocked when I told her I had never seen Drake and Josh before and then grabbing her Magic 8ball and asking it if she would fall in love with Drake. 

I moved to Wisconsin a year later and had a hard time making friends. I thought we would just move again so I only talked with a handful of people in our already small school district. We would play dolls and teacher and I would get bored most days, wanting to play with the boys and make up stories. 

It was around the time that he left that I knew I was different from the other kids. They were starting to date each other as early as 3rd grade. We would tease our friends about who they were dating but I never understood why they dated in the first place. For the first few years, I would deflect questions about crushes by saying I still liked someone from my old school, but that only worked for so long. 

In 8th grade I started questioning my sexuality for the first time. I wasn’t really sure who I liked, because I didn’t really like anyone at that point. There was one kid I thought was attractive and always used him as my scapegoat when asked about crushes so nobody would know. I did like him, but it felt different than I knew my cishet peers thought about their crushes, just based on the way they talked about them. I thought I was asexual, because the internet in 2014 didn’t like to talk about aromanticism, much less than it does now anyway. 

So I joined tumblr in like, 2015, the summer between 8th grade and freshman year of high school and posted about asexuality, being nonbinary, toontown rewritten, all the stuff that 14-15yos are into. For a while I identified as heteroromantic asexual, and then nonbinary asexual quoiromantic, and then aromantic asexual and nonbinary? Or maybe I was really cis? 

And it went like that, back and forth between a few labels. I never felt like I could tell anybody, because I went to a small school and heard all the comments people made about the LGBTQ community and what my parents said about trans people and the messages preached at church. 

When I was about 16, I realized I wasn’t ace at all. I thought maybe I was a nonbinary aro lesbian, or maybe bisexual. Tumblr in 2016/17 was very against having attraction to men at all in the circles I found myself in and I pushed those feelings down so I wouldn’t make people uncomfortable. I forced myself to be attracted to women when I really wasn’t at all. Every other post about bisexuality was talking about how beautiful women were and how disgusting men were. I never felt comfortable talking about my attraction to men in public, or even in private. I felt even more uncomfortable talking about maybe being bisexual and aromantic. At this point, alloaros were practically unheard of and there weren’t a ton of trans aces, so finding someone to talk to about my identity was hard, to say the least. I just simply was alloaro, but that word didn’t exist yet and I couldn’t find anyone else who was aromantic and not asexual. 

That’s how I lived for another 2 years, as a nonbinary aro lesbian (or maybe bisexual). This was around the same time as I got involved in truscum/tucute discourse. I’ve always been minimally dysphoric about my body and got attacked for it by truscum and it would take me another 2 years to realize that I was actually a trans man. Because I started associating trans men with truscum and I didn’t want to be like them because they were always the nastiest people I had ever come across (I’ve obviously since outgrown this view point and am comfortable identifying as a man now). 

Another two years later and I’m outside a Thiesen’s with my parents picking up stuff for my graduation party that was happening later. My feet hit the pavement and I get a thought that said “maybe I’m a guy.” I stopped for a second and kept walking in, thinking about that, trying out he/him pronouns with myself and decided before we checked out that I was a trans guy. 

It took a while to get used to thinking about myself that way and I still use they/them pronouns. A few days after solidifying my gender identity, I realized I was aro and bisexual (or maybe gay). Labeling my sexuality came much easier, realizing I was a man. I’m still aromantic and that’s one thing that’s been pretty constant in my life. I never really got crushes in the typical way and I still don’t, even though you all see me reblogging yearning posts. I think that’s a byproduct of wanting to touch people in non-romantic and non-sexual ways in our society where touches have a lot of baggage with them. 

I came out as bisexual and aromantic to my roommates in September. It came up in casual conversation and I felt comfortable enough to tell them, since they were all from the city and city-folk tend to be more accepting of queer identities (not to rag on rural folk, since I am one, but rural Wisconsin is not the place you want to grow up trans and queer). One of them came out as straight in October on coming out day and I forced myself back into the closet on coming out as trans. We had a falling out with her earlier this semester and she moved out. 

Literally the night she moved out, I came out to the other two roommates as trans and they took it very well! They call me by my preferred name when we’re around people I’m out to and they even bought me a trans flag that we have hanging in the common room of our dorm (and at least one person has told me they say “trans rights!” whenever they pass by as soon as they found out it was mine). I’m still working on being socially out at college and need to call gender inclusive housing at some point, but I keep putting that off. 

And recently I’ve decided I’m trans, aro, and queer. I still use the word bisexual, but really thinking about what genders I’m attracted to is super complicated and the word bisexual doesn’t convey that to most people. And queer just fits better some days. 

I don’t really have a tl;dr for this, but if I had to pick something from this to hammer home, it would be that it’s okay to change labels and question your identity. It’s okay to change labels frequently or once every few years if you feel like they’ve changed! It’s never too late to figure out who you are and there will always be people who will accept you for who you are. 

Also tumblr is the worst place to try and figure out your identity, but sometimes its all people have and I want my blog to be a safe space for people questioning their identities. 

[itcameuponamidnightqueer]

2019 is over and i have feelings

it’s the end of the year and this is mostly filled with rambling half-thoughts, but that’s what you do at the end of the year—you reflect and ramble until it almost turns into something. this is under a read more only because i don’t like clogging up people’s dashes with really long posts, so you know, skip or read at your own leisure.

i don’t really ever do any kind of reflecting that doesn’t come out in the form of fanfiction. i have some feelings, i write a few thousand words about them, i throw them out into the world, and that’s it. i’ll reread my own stuff but i never really think again about what prompted me to write them because it’s over. the feelings are done but the words are memories and that’s all i need, usually.

but 2019 was a tough year in ways that i can’t express in fic, so i’ll just throw out a few thousand personal words and be done with it.

in september of 2018, my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and i don’t think i’ve really been happy since. most of it isn’t being sad about the diagnosis—maybe a lot of it is and i just need a whole heap of therapy to unpack that—but rather how much the cancer changed. it was very advanced when they caught it and she’s made almost a complete recovery in just over a year, and given how shitty everything was to start, this is the best way a bad situation could have ended. not that it’s over, but you know.

it shifted our family completely. i don’t think it brought us closer, maybe my sister or my parents feel differently, but i don’t. morgie turned inward for maybe the first time in her life and kept us at arm’s length in the beginning. she told us very clearly that she didn’t want the cancer to take over her whole life—she wanted us to act normal and talk about normal things as if this was just a temporary snag.

i’ve had epilepsy since i was fifteen months old. i know what it feels like to do that same thing, to minimize and downplay the experience of a chronic condition. because my epilepsy has, gratefully, been very manageable. i can count on one hand the number of seizures i remember having. i have an annual checkup with a neurologist, she confirms the dosage of my meds, and i say goodbye. that’s it, no problem, see you next year.

(it could be so much worse, they say. you’re very lucky, you hear for twenty nine years.

i am not lucky.)

morgan’s cancer kind of opened the flood gates, i think, and a whole heap of shit came spilling out. you know how you see those posts on here about ADHD or autism and a few captions down the line someone is always like, “wait, you mean not everyone [is like this] or [does that]?” i feel like i’m just coming to realize that about my childhood.

not everyone takes days off of school to go to the children’s hospital—for an EEG, or an MRI, or to get blood drawn, etc. “normal” seven-year-olds probably aren’t managing their own prescriptions. my condition is less severe than many others’ but that doesn’t mean it’s normal. it’s certainly not. i’ve always understood “it’s manageable” to mean “it’s not traumatic”, and only now am i realizing that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.

and all of a sudden, this thing that i’ve been living with for so long, that i thought i had under control, is rearing back with a vengeance. and because i have been taught to be grateful for the “best” of a bad situation, because its mildness has turned it into something we don’t talk about, i draw inward and it festers and rots into shame. i’ve been operating like this since i was a kid and i think maybe i’ve finally hit capacity.

on top of that, i’ve been going through a bit of an identity crisis. i seem to do that every few years—five years ago as ace, four years ago as nonbinary—and i guess it’s time for another one. tbh it’s kind of been scraping at the back of my brain ever since i realized i was nonbinary, because even that didn’t feel like enough, but i didn’t know what would. 

i’ve said it in a few posts over the years (probably somewhere in both of the linked ones), but i personally really like labels. i spend so much of my time with myself (physically, sure, but i mean emotionally) and very rarely ever share things out loud, so how can i know who i am if i don’t find the right words? gay was good to start. ace fit in later, and then eventually it was just queer. and it will probably stay queer, but there are different parts of my queerness that i haven’t named yet, and the ambiguity is making me itch.

i’ve had this post sitting in my likes for about a week now—i identify with it too much to ignore, but it scares me too much to reblog it, and also i don’t want to until i can explain my feelings and fears. transness feels like something i’ve been hiding from for a while—not in a repulsive way. more like that “i’m in this photo and i don’t like it” meme. that thread encapsulates a lot of what i’ve been thinking about and struggling with for a few months: that i don’t feel trans ~enough, but i also don’t feel not-trans. 

everything i’ve been thinking about feels like i’m quibbling with myself over something really small, like how much of a difference would it really make to think of myself as trans...instead of? along with? being nonbinary; why is this a detail i’ve been obsessing over. everything i said in the nb post is still true, except my concept of gender has changed a little since i wrote it. i don’t feel like a woman and i don’t feel like a man, except i also don’t think gender means anything, even when presented as two binary options, so what do i really know? how do i know i’m not a man if i think “man” means nothing?

and i really am thinking about it in the smallest of terms—headcanon-ing characters as trans, feeling drawn to the trans flag over any others. it’s really dumb, that this is what’s triggering a bit of gay panic. what does it matter, i keep asking myself. i’ve seen posts over the years breaking down the stripes of each flag, pointing out that nb/genderqueer identities are already represented, and i wish that were enough but it’s not. it’s so dumb, i keep thinking, to see myself in the whole of the trans flag when i don’t think i belong to the whole transgender experience. and even that sounds dumb, when i hear it—of course there isn’t one whole transgender experience. i hear it, but i haven’t yet listened.

anyway. all of this and a lot of other things have been broiling and rotting inside of me for my whole life probably. i’ve literally never said any of this out loud, to friends or family or strangers. i’ve worn that like a badge since high school—isn’t it admirable, how i can talk and laugh and live without dumping my problems on anyone else. isn’t it better to be accommodating, to keep your burdens from weighing other people down? only you don’t realize until later how tiresome it is to be heavy. 

now that i have all of my fics moved over to AO3, i’ve been thinking about all that i’ve written over the years. it’s just shy of 730k. that’s more than the first five harry potter novels combined, and i’ve never told anyone in my life about it. that’s twelve years and so much of me to keep to myself. but i’ve done it because that’s kind of what i learned to do—my epilepsy was my first and most guarded secret and along the way i guess i learned to do that with everything. it doesn’t help that so many of my interests have been things that are either solitary or a source of “shame”. most of my friends i know through various social media sites. i’ve had this tumblr for nine years and the only people who know about it are other tumblr users.  there is so much more of me than a few hundred thousand words hanging around this garbage dump. 

i don’t know if there are any conclusions here. 2019 was rough, for even more reasons than i’ve barfed into this post. i’m not sure if i’ve learned anything from it; i don’t feel wiser or anything. i feel tired and mostly sad. i wish i could snap my fingers and resolve everything, but if i could do that, i’d already have done it. on top of everything, these are probably my last few months in chicago for a while, but that’s a whole other mountain of feelings to unpack.

anyway, i’m going into 2020 determined to get over myself, maybe find a therapist and a good masseuse.  

happy new year.

[theinsanecrayonbox]

Digging your tabletop pride icons! I like the filter effect they have! :-) Do you by any chance have a textpost of the characters and their sexual orientations/gender identities? I recognise some of your characters, but not all of them, and there are pride flags I've never seen before, so I'd like to learn more. :-)

well thank you. it was just a bit of photoshop work.

i do not have a list of that made up yet...so lets do that now lol

let me preface this though with two points.; 1) i am 1 of 2 females who play regularly in my dnd group of 6 (sometimes 7) people, the other is Dixon. so i am usually the only female in the party itself. i have only ever played 2 (and a half) male characters in the 6/7 years i’ve been playing; every other male character i do in my tabletop group arts are story characters, not player characters. i am also 1 of 2 (sometimes 3) people in the group under 40. romance isn’t really a big part of our storytelling...no matter how hard i try to put it back in there ^^; 2) i identify as quoisexual myself, so all my characters have that to some degree in them just because i’m the player and you bleed into your characters that way. i also use goggle as a helpful tool to learn about all the different identities, so my knowledge and interpretation is fallible.

ok so list now;

Paige-Cupioromantic, meaning does not feel attraction, but desires that type of relationship i went with this, because Paige....well...is Paige lol. as one player once said “it feels wrong trying to date her, because she acts so young and innocent” and to be fair, she isn’t really out here looking at people as romantic partners. she wants friends, she loves her friends. also you know, mortal embodiment of an eldritch horror terror, so...

Cizma-Fraysexual, meaning has strong attraction until a relationship is formed and then the attraction fades she’s the opposite of Paige, and this is mostly based on her “relationship” with InkShade honestly; she believes she’s madly in love with him, but he refuses her, so she pursues him more. i think if he gave into hr advances and reciprocated, she’d realized her feelings weren’t what she thought they were. i admit, this one’s new to me so my interpretation could be very wrong, but that’s how i feel it fits Cizma.

Ada-Quoisexual, meaning has trouble distinguishing between romantic and sexual attraction as i said above, my default is this, so if i don’t know a character’s leanings it’s their too (yes jelena is my icon and is this too fyi). BUT in fairness, it suits Ada because of how she was raised; she has very little idea how to properly people here. and she is developing some sort of a relationship with Til. also, her first dice bag was my pride bag with this flag.

Gauzra-Lithoromantic, meaning has desires of attraction, but does not want them reciprocated again, kind of supposed to be in opposite to Ada, and seeing as i still don’t know Gauzra’s personality this could change...but from my interpretation of her right now, this feels right. plus the flag goes with her color scheme.

Rosalba-Demisexual, meaning does not feel attraction until a strong bond is formed at the time i was playing Ro, this was how i identified primarily, but it still suits her i think. if you met Rico after meeting her, you would never know WHY they were a couple, but those two kinda fought against two life times to be together (three if you count the accent into godhood). Ro’s also never been good at getting close to people, but once she did, you’re stuck with her.

K’nessan-Nonbinary, meaning does not identify with a binary gender scale; Marsic, meaning is attracted to masculine qualities ok, ok, *technically* since Ness is a hermaphrodite they should be inter-sexed BUT they do prefer the gender neutral pronouns (followed by the masc; never use “it/that’ or you will die)...and their color scheme matches the flag, so... ^^; i also included in the list the Marsic because Ness does have a preference for male partners

Nemo-Asexual, meaning has no desires for attraction Nemo is nothing but a hero, so that pretty much screamed ace to me...plus it matched her color scheme

Mekala-Aromantic, meaning has no desire for attraction i wasn’t really sure about her, since you know 2 failed campaigns in a row didn’t give her much room to grow, but i could see this working. she’s not really looking for anything, more searching her past. 

Jass-Bisexual, meaning attracted to both males and females Jass is my sabretooth, so my sabretooth headcanons are canon for her lol. we only saw her have a relationship with fantasy!Deadpool in the game she was played, but hey

Tesla-Electio Aroace, meaning has no desire for attraction, whether sexual, romantic, or tertiary  i admit, this one is completely new to me, so my interpretation could be very wrong, but the idea that this is one that is uninterested in any form of attraction suits my viral android very well. again, she has gone on record saying that “the biological imperative for emotions is distractive” (more or less) which is especially funny since she was played in a valentines game where the goal was to let Cupid infect a town with horniness to make babies; Tesla was the only one unaffected and actively trying to stop that. so yeah.

Theo-Pansexual, meaning is attracted to any gender yeah, Theo’s just out there doing and being anything

Sean-Bisexual, meaning attracted to both males and females; he however has a stronger male preference i admit, one reason why Sean is bi and not just gay is for the “half and half” joke...but yeah, he started the game with a boyfriend, he would kill everyone for his boyfriend, he woudl die for his boyfriend.

Vitanya-Gynosexual, meaning attracted to feminine qualities still learning new things as we do this, but since Vita has had little development (but will be getting more) i’m kinda aiming to have her be a bit more into girls...we’ll see how that pans out

Lokaj-Androsexual, meaning attracted to masculine qualities originally i had him as something else, but when i saw that description i liked it better, since he ended up with Arkos and all

Arkos-Transgender, meaning identifies with a different physical gender than the one assigned at birth; Gay, meaning attracted to men going more off the latest version here than my previous one for this. but yeah, he’s just straight up trans here, not intersexed, and his tribe is cool with it. plus being a tribe means not enough money to get magic to physically change anything...but he’s ok with that. in his tribe it’s less what you have and more how to act.

Rikkar-Bisexual, meaning attracted to both males and females mainly because he did have a fiance...even though they weren’t super into the idea, they weren’t against it either...but he’s far more into Ark

Tarn-Lesbian, meaning attracted to women she has been a loud raging lesbian since day one, and nothing will ever change that. not even one continuity having her in a forced, bested in trial by combat, marriage to Starlord basically. she will only go for a dude if he’s a dragon...and he’s gotta be a hot dragon...and even then it win’t lasting dude.

Reyzah-Abrosexual, meaning one’s attraction is constantly changing or fluid Reyzah started as a knock-off tarn honestly and never got to thrive too much. but compared to her siblings, she was always the one learning and trying to figure herself out, so this fits well.

Margus-gay, meaning attracted to men Margus, similarly to his sister, started off as quiet nervous gay, and by the end of the adventure he had himself a doppleganger husband and confidence to boot, so yeah, my baby boy grew up good. admittedly a lot of his self-confidence issues were more from his half-orc heritage, BUT that fed into the “no one would wanna date me cause i suck” mentality. so yeah.

Nikkos-Asexual, meaning feels no desire for attraction he’s Margus’ twins, and was always intended to be some sort of ace. the joke being the Ironbrood kids are a full set; likes girls, likes guys, figuring things out, likes doughnuts. i waffled over making him a more defined type though...but since i’ve only played him for like one session as a background character, i’m not sure where he’s at. so general ace is fine. he loves and supports his siblings, and is best uncle to Margus’ kids anyways, so s’all good.

Jelena-Quoisexual, meaning has trouble distinguishing between romantic and sexual attraction i know i said up in Ada’s that Jelena was this too, but here i am saying it again since she’s my actual icon and not in the reffed to image set. i haven’t played her, so this could change...but i’m very self projecting on her during quarantine to begin with, so yeah she’s quoi until proven otherwise ^^;

so hope you found this informative...and that my information isn’t too terribly off ^^;;;

[butchharrydalton]

I'm A Nonbinary Girl.

Tw: mention of transphobia and depression

Hey guys, obligatory coming out post for wrath month.

I want to be honest with all of you and say I'm a nonbinary girl.

I'm autistic, so I already feel some disconnect with my assigned sex because a lot of gender is social. Most of you already know that sense of gender is internal, so it would make sense that I'd feel this way when my brain is already non normative. A lot of autistic AFAB people like myself have shared similar feelings in their testimonies in the book Aspergirls by Rudy Simone.

I'm not sure if I always felt nonbinary. When I was really young, I loved being a girl. I wanted to be a princess and wear only dresses, and I didn't mind fitting into that box. For a while, I never thought about my gender. I was just a girl. 

When I was 12, I realized that I liked girls. I had been bullied when I was younger, before I came out, because people perceived me as queer. I was terrified. I'd only recently learned that being gay was acceptable and not something to be feared, and I didn't know how to think of myself. My whole life I'd fit into gender norms and now I was the one thing girls weren't supposed to be.

I learned more about queer culture, about how people perceived women who love other women, and the summer before seventh grade I made a choice. I chopped off my hair and went into school with a pixie cut. Being seen as queer was my choice this time.

And I realized that I loved being seen this way. I loved being androgynous yet still feminine. I loved looking pretty but looking butchy too. It was the first real time I'd stepped out of gender norms.

In eighth grade and late seventh grade, I learned about nonbinary genders. I had never thought before that it was possible to have multiple genders, have none, or maybe even have one in between or even completely outside boy or girl. I met out nonbinary people there and unlearned a lot of really toxic and transphobic myths. 

At first, I didn't really think their labels applied to me. But when I tried to picture my gender identity at the end of the year, if only out of curiosity, I saw it as a rectangle filled with mostly pink with a little purple on the bottom. A girl, but not quite. 

That summer, my parents signed me up for a music camp. It wasn't just an ordinary music camp. It was specifically for girls and gender nonconforming people, and we learned how to play rock music in assigned bands. On the first day, we got lanyards with our name on it, and the leaders of the camp told us we had to choose pronoun buttons. 

i don't know why, but I panicked. What was I supposed to pick? I felt uncomfortable using just she, but felt like a faker if I chose they. I ended up getting both buttons. It felt right for a few days until I turned it back into the staff when it stopped feeling right.

But that should've been the end of it. 

i still had feelings that I was mostly a girl, but not quite. On occasions, I would see myself as fully female. I would be okay with only she, and knowing I was a woman. On other days, I felt more androgynous. 

In ninth grade, the feelings kicked in again. This time, I had real dysphoria for the first time. During the first semester I tried to make my voice sound deeper and I wore clothes that made my chest less obvious. I didn't like my curves, or my femininity. I tied my hair up in hopes that I would look more masculine.

i thought for a while I might be a trans boy or genderfluid. Sometimes, being a girl was alright. But others, I couldn't stand it. Even then, I got those feelings. You know the ones. Almost a girl. But not exactly. 

During winter break that year, I was really depressed. I wanted so badly not to be a girl anymore, but I didn't come out or commit to a label because I worried that I was faking. That I was only doing harm to actual trans and nonbinary people. That I was being cringy and that I was a girl looking for attention by feigning being trans.

My dysphoria faded, but when kids at my school asked for my pronouns I told them any would work. Sometimes my dysphoria would come back. Later that year, I realized I liked the label genderfluid best, and began to love my masculinity and my femininity. Strangely enough, I felt that I almost became more feminine because I hadn't really embraced that in a long time. On my masculine days, sometimes wearing a dress gave me the best feeling.

I came out to a couple friends, and began to look at more genderfluid pride posts. At the local queer pride dance, I made a button for myself. The genderfluid pride flag was the pattern. 

At that dance, I encountered a demigirl. I'd met them before at a different event. They wore dresses and had long hair, but they used gender neutral pronouns. I liked the idea of that. Being femne, but not necessarily female.

I never did come out as genderfluid to more than a few people. Over the summer, before tenth grade, I decided again that being a girl was fine. I was cis, I told myself. 

But someone in my family came out, or attempted to come out, as nonbinary. This person was not me. Some of my family reacted pretty badly, and told them not to use labels and that they were really cis and looking for attention. They thought nonbinary people were special snowflakes who just wanted to be better than everybody.They thought the whole concept of a third gender was too far.  

I got really depressed again. I told myself that since I'd introduced that person to the possibility, it was my fault they were nonbinary and that it was my fault they had dysphoria. I should've been mad at some of my family members for being transphobic instead.

 I got through it, and the start of the second semester was a lot better. A few months later, I started using they/them pronouns. I liked it. It felt right. I only really stopped because I got insecure, and the whole faking worry came back. Apparently I seemed pretty androgynous, because some boy called me an it on the bus. I told him I was a girl, but to be honest, I didn't mind.

At the end of the year, I was pretty much sure of what label I would use. Nonbinary girl. I'd first heard of it when Rebecca Sugar came out, and I was surprised that was something you could identify as. 

i chose the label I did because I feel that I am a girl, but mostly. Like I'm a woman and another identity at once. My nonbinary identity is less pronounced than my feminine one but it's definitely there. You could probably call me bigender if you wanted to. There are times I fully feel like a cis woman, but most of the time nonbinary girl fits. I guess that technically makes me fluid or flux. I don't want too many labels, though, so nonbinary girl is fine. I don't like being called just nonbinary because femininity is still a core part of me.

I'm now 16 and headed to my junior year of high school. I don't plan on coming out to my family, but I will switch my pronouns from just she to both she and they. 

I am a nonbinary girl. I am a lesbian. 

This might change later, or I might decide I don't like to identify like this anymore. But this is who I feel that I am. I've spent so long feeling guilty, worrying that I was a trender, and being anxious about which label that I ignored my truth.

It's taken years to find, but here it is. 

I'm a Nonbinary Girl. 

[moomooblackshep]

My dysphoria

Well... I'm 26 and so very fucking trans. Ftm. Pre everything. Fuck. It finally makes sense. For the longest time I've always identified as a crossdresser when much younger and then gay as a teen. As gay I've been out to most of my friends, took a while to come out to the family. I hate the word lesbian because it's a label that just doesn't fit and now this. I've only told my closest friends about the trans thing right now. Hopefully I can tell my mom about it later on when I finish my schooling again. Be warned this is long to whoever reads this.

The community has been very visible lately, YouTubers are also getting in on that band wagon. Media over all is so vocal about it now. Also, my mother used to watch a lot of trans surgeries for a solid year and would make me watch it with her. Those were disturbing but dear God like a train wreck I couldn't look away. It wasn't the surgeries that made me realize but they did open up my mind about researching and just looking into what trans is. Looking back there are many red flags. My dysphoria was generally supressed. I remember when I was young, around 10, I considered myself a crossdresser. I was new to the internet then since we just immigrated to Canada and I couldn't stop reading psychology books, journals, articles, anything I can get my hands on to put a label on what I am. I didnt make sense so I settled for something that seemed the closest thing I could find, crossdresser. I internalized that and moved on. We also didn't have much money at the time so I started wearing my brothers clothes and it felt right. Prior to moving into a new country my clothes consisted of dress like uniforms for school and shorts and t-shirt for home/play clothes. My classmates here then started asking me why I dress in boy clothes and I always said I was a crossdresser. They'll have a look on their face but I wasn't making a big deal out of it so they didn't either. I was also the kid that's good at art and I used to give them away a lot when done which people always wanted for some reason. I was also pretty calm and just took a lot of things at face value so people knew they could tell me whatever and I won't freak out, it apparently helped because I was told a hella amount of secrets. Graduation came and yearbooks were signed. Some even said I was the coolest crossdresser they knew and that hopefully everything worked out for me. Then highschool hit and suddenly the whole gay thing cropped up. I realized I didn't like boys early on. It was weird. Everyone tells me that I should and that I have to but I knew I didn't like boys like that at all. When I was younger still, by the pics probably as young as three maybe five, I had a playmate that everyone and their grandmother keep saying that he's my boyfriend. As far as I remember I've always denied it. I had mostly boy playmates but the few girls around I always took special care to make them feel included or give them attention. I didn't understand them. I didn't know why they liked only certain games like the dancing, skip rope, the make up or why they prefer dresses or various things I can't even remember now. I always chalked it up to my two older brothers will beat anyone up that doesn't include me in their games or are mean to me. It was a small enclosed neighborhood. My brothers were in the older crowd and knew everyone being 7 and 9 years older than I was. It still didn't make it any less confusing to me tho. I questioned a lot of things but no one would give me answers or they'll just ignore me. It didn't help that my mother always said disparaging things towards gays. Things about religion and how shameful it is. I don't want to get into it but I ended up internalizing it. We're also Catholic so the Catholic values of how we are in God's image, we should treat everyone as how we would treat ourselves and how God loves us clashed horribly with what she was saying sometimes. I was confused for a while but I tried to rationalize it myself and came up with "he's (the gay man my mom criticized and the only gay person I knew growing up) happy, he seemed comfortable with himself, he's not hurting anyone, he seems like a good person. So I said to myself that if he's all that then it's okay. It's his life and it's his choices. But even when it's okay for him to be gay I knew I wasn't allowed to be gay because of the homopobia my family was showing. I was probably around 7-8 at the point when this all went down. This is also why I stay away from church now. The hypocrisy is something that gets to me but I have my faith and I just try to live as "good" as I can while still being human. I'm probably missing a lot of the stuff because I don't remember much of my childhood. Anyways, that's the internal homophobia and why I couldn't be comfortable with it until later on in my life. By the time highschool rolled around I've immersed myself into the internet and have accepted my love for the female form. Also porn and Anime was a great motivation for an asian teen. Went to an all girls school for highschool, met my best friend in grade nine and proceeded to date her the following year. We lasted all of highschool but I knew I wasn't the best gf at the time or ever. We broke up because she was moving on to better things and I was lost and not going anywhere, I wasn't gonna hold her back to not experience stuff, so we split amicably. We're kind of friends still and adulting sucks. On that note, my dysphoria. In all honesty I never took it as that because my mental and emotional coping mechanisms are suppression and distraction. Anyways, as a kid I always envied the boys. They're always portrayed as being stronger, bigger, the hero, they seemed to have more freedom. As a kid I wanted that. Everyone treated me like such a delicate girl when I didn't feel like a girl at all much less delicate. I was a crybaby sure but that was because my brothers teased me relentlessly and the only time they'll stop at all is if I cry. I wasn't allowed a lot of freedom for expressing myself either because it was met with indifference or anger from my family so I had to figure a lot of things out by myself. Mom isn't the most affectionate or vocal person about feelings either so it's just been me for a long while. Looking back it was a steady progression and the feeling of helplessness that I can't change my sex. It permeated my entire being so I supressed and distracted myself and accepted that I can't do anything about it. Until I was 10 I tollerated the dress ups mom used to put me in, the expectations of being a girl was just another duty I had to uphold as the "youngest daughter" even the long hair was a point of annoyance for me. It was grown past my butt and I hated every second of it. I used to bug mom to get shorter hair, to have a cut like the guys and she gave in once when I caught her on a good day and she cut it to my shoulders. I was happy. It was a step in the right direction. Now if only I can get pants and a dick I'd be happier. Fast forward to puberty and lord was that a thrilling ride. Labelled myself as crossdresser in elementary and now Im gay leaning to Butch lesbian in highschool. Fuck I hated that but again it was another thing I had to tollerated because I couldn't change my sex. I knew transexuals existed mostly I thought that only applied to effeminated men. Aka gay men crossdressing. It didn't connect in my brain that women can be transexuals too. I thought they were just butch/ stud women. I was sheltered and very big on the internal homopobia okay. Now, highschool brought more insecurities. My chest grew like what it does during puberty. I wasn't happy about that. I was a chubby kid but fuck that was such a bad time. I hated them. I strapped them down as much as I can with tape or ace bandages, we had med kits everywhere, when that didn't work I'd wear something to try and flatten them or super baggy clothes. Also I had smaller bras than what I needed so it made them smaller. Had to hunch to hide them. I couldn't figure out why girls bought lingerie for them or why the hell they show it off. I forget a lot that people don't feel what I feel and that I'm not normal. Even with me wanting my chest to be gone but mostly be more male type I also wanted bigger shoulders, a few more inches in height (I'm 5'6), a deeper voice, my jaw and cheeks to be chiseled like the males I see in media. Yeah that was a trip into a rabbit hole. When I was younger I wanted to be like the guys in anime with the body builder like body, the voice, the heroism, the super powers because it's anime and surprisingly how they get the loyal girl. I learned all the chivalry because I always see myself as the guy in the relationship. Flowers, compliments, do nice things even if I don't say my feelings, open a door, pull out a chair, make a girl laugh. Then being a bit older still made me want all those things but now I have certain preference for girls, I wanted to be tall dark and handsome. It's more about being debonair with chivalry thrown in together and having adventures with my partner. It just became more age appropriate as time went on. It was all so confusing but I took the idea and ran with it. I couldn't change my sex? Fine. I'll suppress the need to cry and the depression until I can be free to be myself. Also known as me living by myself. I was terrified of what my family will say and how they'll react. They tried hard to make me girly during highschool and I just repeatedly said no. I never said I was a boy but I saw the need for them to turn me into this girl that I've never felt I was. I hated it. Then I fixated on the aspects I can change. My hair, the way I dressed. How I presented myself. I didn't change my pronouns or name because while I didn't like it it was negligible in the whole. There wasn't much to change to begin with since I already dressed as a male most of the time. Crossdresser in elementary remember. Wasn't much of a shock to the family really, just more annoyance cuz I took my brothers clothes. I sound like I hate everything but aside from a few things that I just glaze my eyes over now I'm pretty laid back and chill. It's just the way I present myself that really gets to me. Ive never given a fuck on why or how others percieved me aside from my family. 15/16 was a rough time. Suicidal thoughts started and escalated. I started self medicating in that I took up smoking cigarettes and weed to dissociate from everything. For a while it worked. Suicide was very close to happening, had it all planned out but when I came home mom was weirdly home. Once we were in Canada my brothers disappeared mostly because of college/uni and work. Mom was the same, she had three jobs at one point to cover all our expenses and Dad hasn't been in the picture for a long while. But yeah, mom was home in a rare off day. We somehow watched a documentary or a show that had suicide in it and she started talking about it. Could've knocked me over when she said that she wouldn't know what to do if she ever found us, mostly me, like that. How she would be devastated and everything. Things like that. It fucking threw me for a damn loop. But I was fucked up and that night I just kept writing and writing and writing until the sun was up and I had to go to school. When I came home no one was there again and I just broke down. My emotional instability, my hopelessness that I can't have the body/sex I want and need, my loneliness, thinking that my family doesn't love me just finally broke me. So I cracked. I cried and I screamed and I just fucking let go. At one point the neighbours even knocked on the door to see wtf was happening. Wiped my face, plastered a smile and said I was practicing for drama class and sorry that I bothered them. I had drama anyways with a play that year so when the neighbours brought it up with mom it was a solid excuse. After that the supressing habit became so strong that for example when I glance at my chest it just disappears from my mind that I even looked at them. There are days where I'm 100% okay with them ( or any part of my body that I can't deal with)for several minutes and I'll look at them and inspect them then later on I'm back to trying to find something to strap them down because the anxiety and panic is back that I don't have the right body. Once the break down was over I couldn't function for days. The dysphoria and depression just consumed me so I figured I needed to do what I needed to do. I cut myself off from that part of me emotionally and mentally. I hid it and I ran. I distracted myself with bad relationships,bad friends, the drug habit kicked up and I even became entangled in the crowd I never wanted to be in. I was a mess and as long as there was something else to worry about I didn't have to deal with myself. It worked for a long ass while but I was never happy. I've never felt joy after that breakdown. I had some contentment but that was it. The lows were manageable because once it starts I pick up a new thing to distract myself. Adult me discovered binders, bought a bunch of them with my first credit card. I was 18/19 and in college. I couldn't wait for it. Finally! I get to have a flat chest. They came and I couldn't be happier. I wore them every day from the time after I shower to just before I slept. Sometimes my mom would wake me to go to the store and I'll throw it on before my clothes. For a solid two years I wore it like my second skin. I went out to my first drink with my second brother with it on. Went to a gay club and picked up someone with it on. Worked in it even though that was a bad time. I was confident as hell. I was finally a step closer to myself. I was mistaken for a guy more often than not and that was fantastic. Then the inevitable happened. I lost them when my mom raided my room with no warning to clean it because it wasn't up to her standards and took all my laundry. I was frantic in looking for them. I was desperate. I kept asking mom where they are. I only ever got one of them back but I went into such a depressive state that shame and guilt and self doubt/hate came crashing back down on me and I couldn't wear it anymore. I went on a drinking bender at that point and I moved out at 20. 21 and I became an alcoholic for the next year. The truth that I'm stuck in this body slapped me so hard I slipped. I dropped out of college, drank from morning till night, was even drunk when I was at work. I just slipped. It was so easy but in the end I had to pick myself up. My family didn't notice much. Just that I was never home and mom and I had a blow out because she expects me home when no one is even home. When there's no food in the house because I didn't know how to cook at the time. She also kept pushing if I was gay and i admitted it. I was never gonna be ready so I just sucked it up and said it even though it felt wrong. Let me be clear as a transman man I'm not gay but right now I'm still seen as a cis woman. Im pre everything so I will, for now, say I'm gay. However, I'm a man trapped in the body of a woman and there is not much I can do until I start transitioning. After that horrible dip in my emotional instability I stopped binding. I just picked up shitty girlfriends after shitty girlfriends. Girls who were selfish and immature and made it all about them without giving back to me. I got stressed over that instead of my body and managing them is more doable than my body. Don't get me wrong I could've dropped them any time since I knew what I was getting into. My need to run from my dysphoria intensified my so called "need" to have them around. Did I love them? No. They were a means to an end and a way to distract myself. Have I ever loved any of them? I did love my first girlfriend but I never gave her what she deserved. When she broke up with me I was sad but I knew that she needed to grow into the person she wanted to be. I wanted her to find happiness even though it wasn't with me. So I let her go. Not completely tho. We're ish friends and I'd rather have that than nothing at all. At 24 I went back to school to finally graduate college. I picked up another shitty girlfriend for 7 months and 2 months after I ended my last relationship. My best friends just laughed and shook their heads at me because they can't believe I'm doing it again after I'm trying to get my shit together. But that was the last relationship I went into. The trans community started being more visible then. Acceptance for LGBT+ was at an all time high. Mom and I were okay. Things were looking up. Me being single was terrifying because I slowly started to unpack all my issues. I had supportive friends who won't leave me, my family is okay with me, I lived alone for a while but came back to mom's because her house is closer to the school and they've been trying to get me to move back in for the last four years. At 25 I just started unpacking and unpacking and unpacking and dear God the amount of issues I had to resolve with myself was a fucking lot. But the biggest is my dysphoria so I researched and read and watched a ton of vids to finally come to the conclusion that I'm trans. I'm trans not because I hate my body but because I believe I'm in the wrong one. It's terrifying to know that because there's no immediate remedy. I'm trapped and the process to switch is long, expensive and not permanent in a way I won't ever have the biological markers without outside influence. Having biological kids will be an issue too but I've always thought that I would never give birth to one, I've always assumed that I would adopt or somehow one of my friends will make me the guardian for theirs if they ever pass away. I've never felt compelled to have one of my own. A family yes but I would love any child in my family whether it's biological or someone else's. At 26, just had my birthday last month, I'm contemplating transitioning in the next year or so. I still have issues to work through but I think when I talk to a psychiatrist or counselor I would be okay. It's a lot to consider and I need to be sure it's the right way for me. In all honesty I'm pretty sure I'll transition. I've waited long enough I can wait a little longer to make an informed decision.

To whoever is reading this just know that it was hard and difficult journey for me but if you can accept the situation even just a little, enough to get you through until you can deal with it financially, emotionally and mentally it gets easier. Self hate is a very heavy burden to carry I wish it could be easier but youre a stronger person for it in the end. It helps to focus on other things to build your life. Finish school, have a good job, maybe a relationship because if you focus too much on the dysphoria once it's taken care of you will still have life in general to deal with and it's good to have the ideal life you want ready for you because you built it and you changing your body is the last piece to make it perfect.

[christinamirabilis]

1: did you ever think you were straight?  I kind of just assumed I was, because that was the default, but I never felt attracted to men, I had to force myself to have crushes on boys and to participate in talk about guys.  Mostly, I just thought there was something seriously wrong with me, but it never occurred to me that it might simply be that I was gay.

2: what’s your favorite element of gay culture?  I actually don’t... actually, I do know!  I recently learned that a huge proportion of our community volunteer (and this percentage is even higher for trans people), and while it’s sad that we’ve always needed to do this because nobody else cares about us, I find it beautiful that we love each other enough to do that, strangers or not.  It’s beautiful to me that we have always been at the forefront of social change, fighting alongside civil rights activists, feminist activists, workers’ rights activists... it’s an honour to belong to a culture that has always had hope for humanity and the courage to fight for a better world.

3: are you femme, butch, or neither?  I identify with femme, but I wouldn’t say I’m especially femme.  I’m pretty relaxed about it.

4: do you prefer to date femmes or butches?  I tend to be more attracted to femme girls than butch girls, but my girlfriend doesn’t really identify with either, she’s not very feminine, but neither is she terribly masculine.

5: what’s the worst part about being a lesbian?  I used to say that it was the fact that there were no men around the house to open jars for me, but my super strong amazing girlfriend can open jars!  So it’s definitely periods, ugh.

6: what’s the best part of being a lesbian?  Everything!!  But largely the fact that we (my girlfriend and I) can wear each other’s clothes, we always have pads or tampons if the other needs to borrow some, we always have conditioner or lip balm or hair ties or moisturiser or everything, if the other needs to borrow it.  We understand the struggle of being a woman in this patriarchal world.  She’s soft and warm and we fit into each other’s arms perfectly and she always smells nice.

7: how long were you questioning for?  I mean, I spent my entire adolescence questioning what was “wrong” with me.  It might have occurred to me in brief flashes that I might be gay, but I always suppressed that before the thought even had time to register with me, so it mostly floated in my subconscious.  I didn’t start wondering if I might be gay until Nic came to my residential treatment place in 2009, and she was the first person I had met who was happy being a lesbian.  It still took me a few years of wondering if I was gay or bisexual, or if I was broken regardless of gender, and incapable of romantic love.  I decided just before I started university in 2013 to take the plunge and come out, and not long after that I had my first non-cis-man kiss, and it was pretty incredible - and I finally felt right.

8: what’s the most annoying thing straight people do?  Where do I start???

I could keep going for hours.

9: what do you look for in a girl?  Someone who is kind, who is a nerd and loves learning for the sake of learning, who knows how to communicate, who values honesty, who has compassion for the suffering of others, who has a great sense of humour.  Lucky, I got all that and more in my girlfriend!

10: If you had to marry someone you know right now, who would you choose? Megs

11: do you have a crush right now? Yeah, on Megs.

12: do you fall in love easily? Hmm, I mean.  As much as I hate to admit it, I’m kind of a romantic sop.  But no, I don’t give my heart out easily, but when I fall, I fall hard!

13: is there anyone in your life right now you think you’ll date in the future? Only Megs!

14: is there anyone you want to be kissing right now?  Megs, but she’s busy studying (as I should be!!)

15: do you think you’ve met your future wife yet?  Yeah, Megs!

16: top, bottom, or vers?  Vers.

17: is there anyone you wish you could fuck right now?  Megs.

18: rough or gentle?  Bit of both.

19: how many stereotypes do you fit into?  Cat lady, u-hauler, combat boots, finishing each other’s sentences, lesbian haircut, vegetarian, i don’t even know, i know there are so many more.

20: what version of the lesbian flag do you like most? (butch, lipstick, original, etc.)  I don’t know what the others look like, but I’m a fan of the original lesbian flag - although I do love the ol rainbow flag too!

21: do you have a good gaydar?  I’d say it’s above average.

22: be honest, would you rather be straight?  HELL NO

23: are you cis?  Yes

24: are you a sugar mommy or a sugar baby at heart?  Hm, I’m really neither - I love a good balance of spoiling and being spoiled, anything else makes me uncomfortable.  And it’s so nice to do nice things for my love.

25: are you committed to someone at all right now emotionally?  Yeah, Megs.

26: are you looking for a serious relationship currently?  I have one!

27: is there someone you’d like to be in a serious relationship with?  I am already :)

28: do you want children?  I don’t know, I have very complicated feelings about it, and it’s not something I’m ready to think about yet.

29: is your family accepting of your sexuality?  Yeah, I used to think that my religious aunt wasn’t accepting, but she recently met Megs and took a real shine to her, hugged her straight away and spent the entire lunch talking to her (although I think she was grateful to have a new audience for the same boring shit she always talks about lmao), so that was a pleasant surprise.  My immediate family are awesome, my extended family can still be quite Heterosexual in their world view but they all accept and love me for who I am.

30: how confident are you in your sexuality?  Very.

31: are you polyamorous or monogamous?  Extremely monogamous.

32: what’s advice do you have for your 12 year old self?  You are perfect the way you are, and you will not always feel the way you do - one day, life will be good, and you will be happy.

33: have you ever been to a gay bar?  yeah, a lot.

34: leather jackets or flannel?  i want to say leather jackets, but i don’t have a leather jacket - but I don’t really have flannel either.  i do have an aggressively gay plaid swanndri, and an aggressively gay denim jacket, so that’ll do.

35: describe your dream girlfriend.  Megs!

36: do you have any lesbian friends?  yah, heaps, and a lot of bi woman friends too.

37: what elements of gay culture do you actively participate in?  uhhhh idk, just being really gay?  a bit of activism when i have the time (although i rarely do but one day that will change), i’m about to start volunteering with lgbt youth, obviously pride, idk.

38: do you find straight people irritating?  i mean, yeah, as a concept they’re The Worst, but individually they’re ok, some of my best friends are straight people.

39: would you rather adopt a kid or have a biological kid?  adopt, i’m never ever ever getting pregnant.  plus i don’t really want to contribute to overpopulation, or bring a child into this world when i am so uncertain of our future as a species.  i’d rather give a loving home to an already-living child who doesn’t have one.

40: do you love yourself?  loving myself is a process, and some days it is harder than others, but i’m getting better and better at doing it.

[utt-er-nons-ense]

My stupid coming out story.

When I was 12, I kissed a girl. We were sitting under my loft bed and I absolutely loved it. I was in a very fast, sexually active crowd with several people who identified at the time as bi, and one or 2 trans folks.

I told my mom a few weeks later that my friend Jenna (the girl I kissed) was bi. My mom said "okay". I asked her what she would say if I told her I was bi. She said "I'd say you need to choose one". I cried that night and then forced myself to forget about it.

Then suddenly I was 22, ten years later, and 4 years into a relationship with my boyfriend at the time. Suddenly I looked at him and thought, "oh god, do I even like men at all?" I told him a few months later that I might be gay. He said he had always kind of known and we had a fairly amicable breakup and remained friends.

I told my sister. She had no reaction at all. I bought a lesbian pride flag. I opened it in front of my mom by accident. She asked what it was, I said it's a lesbian pride flag. I stared. She stared. I said "I'm gay". She said "okay". I burst into tears and she hugged me and said she was sorry for not reacting, but that she had always had a feeling I was gay. She asked if that's why I broke up with my boyfriend. We giggled together.

I told my dad, randomly during dinner one night. He smiled, said "I know. I love you." And hugged me. I sobbed.

I moved across the country just weeks later. The day of my move was just a few months before covid hit the us, and since it was such a huge change I was barely settled in before I was suddenly, unceremoniously trapped in my tiny studio apartment, alone, unemployed, single, and 3,000 miles from everyone I had ever known. It was honestly horrific, but I had tons of time to think.

I also had tons of time for tiktok. And what I found there was hundreds of NB people who looked wonderfully androgynous and I realized with a weird surge of fear that it wasn't Just Women that I was attracted to.

I sat on my bed and stared at that lesbian pride flag as hard as I could. I meditated on it. I thought and thought about it.

My mom, unprompted, told me that she wondered if I was bi and trying to be gay because she told me she wouldn't approve all those years ago. She told me that she didn't know any better back then, but that now she understood, and if I was happy with my partner she was perfectly happy. No matter who they were. She said I had always liked what she called "effeminate men" (not wrong) and more butch women. To her, that drew the natural conclusion that I must like "something in between" (her words).

I replaced my lesbian flag with a bi flag. I stared and stared and stared at it, asking myself if it fit better. I told my mom it did, because I can't expect her to really understand anything more complicated than that. I suggested she use queer, which feels best to me, but she said that felt too mean. I perfectly understand that so I stuck with bi.

I have no idea what my sexuality is. I know I have a type, which is really anyone androgynous or sort of gender-shifting. But that's not a sexuality by itself, because I am attracted to boobies and chest hair, want and enjoy sex with both vagina and penis owners, it's just that I'm only initially into them if they sort of "look like both". That's a horrific way to word that, sorry NB people. I don't know how to describe it better. If you lined up 10 people and 1 of them presented androgynously, that one is who I would smile and flirt with at the bar. That's just a type, I guess, right? So I guess bi really does fit.