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#i used to just reblog things before
trans-axolotl · 6 days
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my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.
before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.
but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.
as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.
pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.
it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)
the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.
this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.
so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.
an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.
another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.
there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.
i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.
#personal#actuallyintersex#intersex#actually intersex#transmisogyny tw#this post is not going to be rebloggable for now but if any intersex mutuals want to reblog it i might turn reblogs on#this just feels like an intersex conversation in a way i would prefer not to do with an audience of spectators.#also a tangent: i do understand that agab is not a body descriptor. i think that agabs are a form of curative violence perpetuated onto us#this is something i've been consistent about expressing for years. if you go back to old posts you'll see that there's many times i've said#over the years that agab is messy. that i know people who were assigned one gender at birth and another gender as a toddler#who identify as cis and trans and a million other things. i understand that and im not interested in denying their existence#so. don't take this as a universal statement from me about every single instance of “amab transman” or “afab transfem.” but rather in the#context of the current dynamic i'm seeing on tumblr of widespread transmisogynistic harassment#that i think much of the way people are talking about this is exploitative and harmful#also i've made many posts before talking about how like. many things would change and become intelligble in a less compulsorly dyadic world#but we aren't there yet. and so there are many terms that are still meaningful and relevant for us right now#and as always: i am one intersex person with one perspective i like to hear from other intersex people including intersex people#who think differently from me
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anti-ao3 · 3 months
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if you still donate to ao3 even though:
ao3 censors any support for palestine
they barely improve the website despite surpassing their donation goals every single time
they do not see anything wrong with RPF that sexualizes REAL minors
they excuse racist fanworks, they actually suspend anyone who does not feel comfortable with pedo/incest shippers, or literally anyone who labels themselves antis or anti p/roships
they also don't see anything wrong with ai generated stories that most likely steal from real writers that put their heart and soul into their works
and perhaps a lot more things they do that i might be forgetting
seriously.
if you get mad at marginalized ppl calling out ao3, and you act entitled when your fandom interests are being threatened, then you're a privileged asshole. if you call everyone "puritans" or "stupid kids" for being critical of ao3, you're a privileged asshole. this is not about you. this is about the actual harm ao3 does to real people. your favorite fanfictions should not be your priority. especially if you want to keep supporting palestine or people of color in general, you can't just get mad when they point out the flaws of ao3 and stop supporting them when they're not convenient to you.
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r0semultiverse · 6 months
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phanyu · 20 days
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being a catty camp stereotypical gay guy has come so naturally to dan i wonder so bad if it was just a side of him that he hid from the camera for years and had to become comfortable with sharing OR he grew into this only in the last few
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Choi Han sees a weird stick in Cale’s hair.
“Oh, wait Cale-nim, let me…” With the slight height advantage, Cale doesn’t actually have a choice but to let the swordmaster do as he wishes.
For moment he fiddles around, trying to grab the elusive, tangled object, when he suddenly feels Cale lean into his hand. He watches with bated breath as Cale closes his eyes.
(‘Ah, I’m so tired that I’m leaning on Choi Han. Aigoo, he must think I’m pathetic.)
Choi Han spends another minute to get the stick out, claiming that it was particularly stuck in his long hair. He burns this memory into his mind while also promising to never tell another soul.
Eruhaben is next. He notices the red head’s soft locks, freshly washed and neatly air-dried with magic. As a dragon, he doesn’t think twice about the temptation, standing from his spot on the couch to test if Cale’s hair is even half as soft as it appears to be.
It is, he learns.
(Cale shivers. Is Eruhaben threatening him? Just in case, Cale bows his head to hide his fearful expression.)
The dragon watches with amusement, thinking that it’s only natural to offer one’s head to a dragon as powerful as him. Until he feels Cale almost… press into his palm absentmindedly. Eruhaben vividly feels the exact moment that his heart melts into a puddle of affection.
He definitely will use this against the bastard next time he has the opportunity.
Oddly, On and Hong figure it out next. Cale is sitting in his usual chair, reading a book with his hair falling into his face picturesquely. On recalls when Rosalyn did her hair up with a pretty pin, making it easy to move around without getting in her face.
On considers if Cale would mind On experimenting a little, immediately coming to the conclusion that he wouldn’t give two shits.
She transforms into her human form and moves behind the chair. Of course, Cale doesn’t bat an eye at her unusual movements. When she gathers his hair up in her hands, he doesn’t miss a beat, leaning back to give her better access. He only changes the angle of his book so he can still read. Hong observes his sister from Cale’s lap with curiosity.
Her upbeat attitude is ruined quickly because she doesn’t know how to braid nor tie up hair, and is missing the necessary bows and pins to do it in the first place. She runs her fingers through his vibrant red hair as she tries to remember what Rosalyn did.
Hong’s eyes go wide. Cale had stopped reading as his sister continued her ministrations, closing his eyes and leaning back, relaxing into his seat. Hong urgently signals for his sister to witness this.
Her eyes narrow in on the sight with a calculating gaze. She changes the way her hands run through his hair, simply running her fingers through and carefully untangling it instead. Cale’s face gradually loses its constant pinch.
(‘Yes, the children should do whatever they want, even play with my hair.’ Cale internally nods to himself.)
On, unlike Choi Han or Eruhaben, tests her limits. She continues her gentle pattern without pausing. After a few minutes, both of the cats hear Cale’s breathing taper away into a relaxed rhythm. On silently makes eye contact with her brother, and they make a secret promise to not make a big deal about this, lest this trick never work again.
They hear Ron before he enters the room and On casually returns to her car form, stealthily and softly landing on Cale’s lap. Ron enters, pausing at the sight of his puppy young master.
Smiling benignly, he darkly assumes that Cale had been so exhausted that he managed to fall asleep in the middle of reading.
On and Hong don’t correct him.
If Cale has an especially bitter lemon tea that night, he doesn’t make a big deal about it. Not when the crown prince calls him soon after it arrives.
He arrives at the palace where the Crown Prince learns of this spreading secret. Cale uses his superior glib tongue to force a frown on Alberu’s exhausted expression, and the exasperated hyung sighs, walking around to the couch where his dongaeng is sprawled. He places a hand on his shoulder, threatening Cale with a high political position if he doesn’t stop doing dangerous things and causing trouble.
Cale shudders and agrees. Alberu smiles at this, his hand moving to ruffle his adorable dongsaeng’s hair.
(Cale sighs, closing his eyes and humoring his affectionate hyung. He leans back, questioning why everyone has been so touchy lately.)
Alberu feels his heart stop and stutter at the fragile sight. Cale looks completely at ease, slumped in the couch cushions and pressing his head into Alberu’s palm like a cat. His lip is quirked up slightly, but Alberu would bet a golden plaque that Cale hasn’t a single idea on what he looks like right now, otherwise he wouldn’t be even half as relaxed as he is right now.
He resembles a lazy cat. He’s being pet whilst lounging, with a content and pleased expression edging on his face. If this goes on long enough, Cale might even fall asleep.
Alberu continues talking without letting his smile leak through into his words, stroking the top of Cale’s head in an absent minded motion.
(Cale ignores the sneaking chill on the back of his neck, too focused on Alberu’s words about the kingdom. The petting is a bit strange, but Alberu is the crown prince, so he’ll allow it.)
As predicted, Cale doesn’t mention it.
After a minute though, Cale starts to frown, beginning to acknowledge the feeling that he’s being scammed somehow.
“Hyung, do you have a headache?”
Alberu acts like a polite and caring hyung, starting to massage Cale’s head.
(Cale frowns more. Something is definitely going on.)
Cale opens his eyes, protesting. “Your highness, my health is perfect at the moment. You, our shining sun, couldn’t possibly-“ Alberu changes from massaging to running his fingers through Cale’s hair.
(Cale sighs, cutting off. It was just a ploy to play with Cale’s hair. He should’ve expected his highness to scam him in this way too.)
Alberu grins when Cale stops talking, looking resigned to his fate. He goes completely limp, and Alberu’s blunt fingernails scratch against Cale’s scalp gently. Cale visibly shudders at the feeling.
(‘Too scary, what if he scratches and draws blood? If Raon finds out, he’s going to feed me soggy apple pie…’)
Alberu preens at finding Cale’s weakness.
On slyly asks Rosalyn to do up Cale’s hair one day- as an experiment- and is extremely pleased when Cale not only agrees, but he closes his eyes and falls asleep soon after the Mage is done gently tugging his hair into place and adorning it with intricate pins and accessories. Choi Han walks in on this scene and threatens Rosalyn to keep it a secret (after melting a bit on the inside). She agrees with a sly smile.
If only Cale knew how everyone was going to use this to scam him in the future…
Eventually the misconception that Cale likes to have his hair played with goes around the entire group. Cale- of course- is completely clueless. He just thinks that everyone suddenly became obsessed with his hair.
Ron is the only one who can’t get Cale to relax. Even Bud somewhat managed it, but Cale stays vigilant no matter what his old butler does. Ron finds his puppy young master to be amusing.
Cale really doesn’t understand what they want with his hair. Do they want his hair?
(He asks Ron for a trim a few days later. Ron only cuts off the dead ends and leaves it neat but long, much to the young masters displeasure.)
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frascospecimen · 2 years
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furries are fucking awesome man reblog this post if you think furries are awesome
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nebulainatree · 1 month
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Ok in honor of this post getting pretty widely viewed I'm posting my (self proclaimed) funny tumblr text meme edit here
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amaranthdahlia · 7 months
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youtube
love valley - shigaraki brothers short pmv
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lucascsinclairs · 2 years
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Color Palettes Inspired by Stranger Things 4
Send me a palette and a Stranger Things episode, character, character dynamic etc and I’ll make a gifset! Feel free to reblog and use for your own works, but remember to like and reblog!
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mokeonn · 6 months
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Before I go to sleep I leave you all with this piece of advice: sometimes you don't actually have to answer big political questions, sometimes you can just say "I am not smart enough to know that, I just know the small things I do to help." Like you can often times completely avoid making a fool of yourself if you just say you don't know.
#simon says#to explain here and not in a reblog:#sometimes when you try to explain big picture solutions you're gonna sound dumb#you might not have done enough research#you might not have a rebuttal to a counter argument#you might not be articulate enough to explain why you think this#sometimes you gotta take a step back and give the simple solution. the one man solution#you do what you can to fight against the problem#you talk to people to help spread awareness and how to fight the bad problem#and you vote and invite others to vote for bigger steps towards solving the problem#like you can talk about theory and how you believe we need to do a huge drastic thing to solve and issue#but people will disagree and argue til you're blue in the face#they'll poke and prod until you mess up or lose your temper and use it against you#and you'll feel dumb and they'll learn nothing#sometimes the best thing to do is step away from the big picture and just say 'idk what the solution is I just know the things I can do“#sometimes you gotta admit you're not a scientist/expert and you can't answer that#i used this while talking with my Dad tonight#he brought up our climate crisis and space travel as a possible solution#and I said I think that's just addressing the symptom and not the cause and we need to care for our Earth now#and he asked me what solutions I think would fix it#and knowing my incredibly smart Dad who is articulate and ready to throw rebuttles at a moments notice to play devils advocate#and my past experience in struggling in this topic with him before#i just told him I didn't know. all i knew is the little things I can and do do to help#and that hopefully by spreading the word and habits and encouraging others to vote for those bigger solutions I could help make a change#but all I really could do is the little things I have control over#and the topic became much less stressful about the little things we have control over#like planting native plants and recycling and adopting habits that are healthier to our planet#which was 100% more preferable to if I tried to give a big solution. because I would reveal i didn't have all the knowledge needed to argue#and my articulation would make me sound like a stupid kid who only thinks they know what's best#so yeah I basically suggest that if you dont wanna feel like shit after debating someone just step away from the big picture for a moment
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tinystepsforward · 12 days
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ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".
like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!
on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.
returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body
literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence
#reblogs turned off because obviously i'm already bracing to be pilloried for saying one thing not quite correctly or whatever#and also bc i have zero interest in having this be boosted by trans dudes on their own transandrophobia agenda either#i'm just venting#but frankly the first time i got yelled at for saying that as an intersex person some of the immense violence i experienced as a child#was motivated by transmisogyny#i was a teenager and it was someone a fair bit older than me with more local clout so like. it's been a decade. how is it worse now.#intersex spaces have made SO much progress and yet#also yes i'm femme! i'm femme in a trans way! many dykes who aren't women are!#many of us got more comfortable w it as adults who had gender agency!#in literally the same way it took my wife ages after transitioning to work out she's also butch and doesn't actually want to do femme thing#bc that's a shared experience in how we've navigated the expectations of womanhood before opting out of the parts we don't want!#anyway the lawcomm shit was fucked bc honestl i don't give a shit if someone lost their gonads as an adult in an accident#they should be protected even if they don't consider themselves intersex#and we know that gender as an axis of oppression comes back to the reproduction of the nuclear family#and that cis women who can't have kids sometimes become the political football though ofc not as much by far and like#idk. y'all ever heard about solidarity? sometimes i feel like i'm back in the place where the loudest traumatised person at the party#is yelling at another young woman like “you'll never understand what it's like to be a victim”#when said young woman was assaulted the week before.#a politics that starts by defending and defining oneself w oppression kinda fucking sucks actually#and intersex people stopped policing intersexness by who got mutilated a long time ago#bc actually we want the generations ahead to not get that treatment#and when i see “trans elders” going on about how “if you pass and got on hrt before 18 you're not trans like i am” i'm like. why! what!#anyway. tired.#may regret this. we shall see#tony muses
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heybaetae · 8 months
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if i may... 🙈
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titsthedamnseason · 1 year
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okay my darlings, you know what time it is…..SURPRISE SONG GAME TIME!!! except this time it’s extra super duper special because this post is actually queued because today is MY SHOW 🤭🫶 aka it’s atlanta n3 therefore i am BEGGING you to manifest the absolute best of your best picks and leave them in the tags or replies for me to see later and then give you an internet smooch if you win 💗 HAPPY GUESSING
i’m going to guess my absolute dream combo of hey stephen and dorothea
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kyliafanfiction · 4 months
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I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.
Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.
And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)
But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...
Well, it's not.
Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.
And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).
It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.
Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.
Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.
It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.
And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.
But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.
So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.
And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.
But again - fictional.
In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.
So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...
It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?
At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.
Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).
So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).
So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.
Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.
(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)
#Anakin Skywalker#Azula#Grant Ward#Amy Dallon#Panacea#Empathy#Sympathy#I kind of used both terms probably a little wrongly I don't know but I think my point is clear#the tagged characters were Just a few of the characters I had in mind while writing this#So many times I see people talking about the context and the way this and that character who did horrible shit and then I see other people#give them so much shit for that and say its not okay to talk about these things because it's victim blaming or erasing the crimes#or disrespecting the victim and like - it's all fictional but also like... even if it were real#a real person who suffered#whatever else they do later#is a real fucking person who fucking suffered#Ultimately if you can't bring yourself to empathize with a given fictional character - whether it's because their crimes hit close to home#or not - it's fine#you're not a bad person for that and I'm not saying that#but if you consistently never empathize with the fictional characters who deserve it and consistently try to downplay their trauma in the#context of the fiction or even try to erase it#Then maybe reflect#and either way - let other people empathize and talk about the context and all the rest for these characters in peace#even if you feel like they're whitewashing or victim blaming they probably aren't in 99% of cases and even if they are when it comes to#fictional characters they're fucking fictional just block or ignore or back button and move on maybe vent in your own space#But just - leave it alone#And maybe - if you haven't before - try to practice the 'Advanced Empathy' required to feel for these fictional monsters. It really is a#good exercise#Also like please reblog this I'm not really on tumblr for the notes most of the time but I really poured out a lot into this one and I'm#tired of doing that only to feel like I'm shouting into an empty void#I am on here because on some level I want engagement I want the connection
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destructive-delight · 14 days
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of all the things youtube has picked up on its way down the cliff into the advertiser friendly algorithm hellscape that it is now, giving creators the option to heart comments is probably the only feature i truly consider an unambiguous improvement that i appreciate from both a commenter and creator perspective. wish more sites would offer that.
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themintman · 2 months
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INTRO POST RAAAAAAH 💥💥💥💥
Erm hihi!! My name is Clemont but I also go by Mint. I am 16 and use he/him pronouns! I post a lot of art n just ramblings here. I will keep updating this post over time, so feel free to check in and see what's new!
I'm also on Tiktok but I don't really post there anymore.. oopsies - @/Clemont_ine
My content will probably change over time, but for the last three or so years I've been feral over Minecraft Story Mode, specifically season two so expect a lot of that lmao.
Expect an ungodly amount of Jack and Nurm. Like an excessive amount. It's not healthy.
Other stuff that may explode into my page every once in a while /interests ⬇️
A hat in time
Deltarune / Undertale
Miitopia
Mcyt (specifically DanTDM)
Spiritfarer
pokemon
Delicious in Dungeon
My asks are open for literally anything!! I love to answer questions about my designs, headcannons, etc. I also take requests and art trades!!! They just may take a while to finish depending on stuff like what you want me to draw, if I'm busy, my mental health, all that stuff. So feel free to say hi! 🩷🩷
I love being social but am too scared to initiate contact, which is what prompted me to start a Tumblr. It seems like a more social app then stuff like Tiktok in my eyes, and the people seem a lot more chill. So if you comment something or repost one of my posts and don't get a response, know that I did see you! I read what you said and likely had a little giggle to myself, just some days being social and talking is harder than others. Also, I ramble in my tags. Like.. a lot.
I have a second blog for my Pokemon IRL stuff! @aerial-ace (may rb this on that blog as an intro of sorts there too LMAO)
My art tag is #clemont_ine but im.. not great at keeping track of it. Sorry 😞. But quite a few drawings are under that!!!
Erm... yeah so that's all!!! Again, will update on the occasion. But I'm very glad to be here!!
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