#i usually ascribe it as he's trans but what if..... what if.......

[marvus-xoloto]

what if "marvus xoloto" is a stage name just like "bruno mars?"

[wromwood]

I know I've mentioned this in the past, but I always find it interesting to notice how moments where people ask or assume that I am/could be a woman would have distressed me pre-transition - would have filled me with anxiety or self-consciousness - but I now simply find them confusing.

For the record, I totally believe in not assuming people's gender based on how they look or sound. Women can have facial hair, etc. Men can have large chests, etc. But I'm talking about assumptions from most (usually cis) people who ask blunt questions like the one I'll recount below, who often don't ascribe to this belief. (Also, in my experience, getting asked about my gender from a fellow trans person is typically more reassuring than the questions I get from the previously mentioned people)

Yesterday, I was in a theater class and I stood next to someone I hadn't really spoken to before. It was while the teacher was still speaking that he decided to get my attention and whisper two questions to me. First:

"Hey, you're [first name], right?"

I softly answered yes. Note: my first name is a recognizably male/masculine name.

I'd only tried to go back to paying attention for a couple seconds when he got my attention again and asked a second question.

"I don't want to be rude, but are you a chick or a dude?"

After a second of thrown-off silence, I muttered "I'm a guy," not even looking at him as I continued to stare at the teacher. This apparently satisfied him and he also returned to listening.

Years ago, this would've bothered me for the rest of class, as I tried to pick apart how I looked and sounded that day, wondering what I personally did that could've made him ask that.

Today, my only thought was "I've got a beard now. What the hell?"

[danggirlronpa]

Oh, are we talking about trans headcanons??? I see someone already mentioned transfem Kazuichi, which I'm a pretty big fan of! But have you guys considered transfem Fuyuhiko? I think there's a lot of potential in that - in the fact that even in canon there's a lot of him not feeling like he really fits as the Ultimate Yakuza, and that he has to play a role to be so... I think it lends well to a transfem headcanon. Another I could see would be transfem Mondo, with how much in canon he plays up the masculinity, it could be something preformative in a transfem headcanon. I'm also a fan of transfem Kokichi & Shuichi, too - I've seen people headcanon the both of them as nonbinary, transfem, AND transmasc, and honestly? Love that for them, tbh.

I also am a big fan of transfem Makoto!!! I usually headcanon him as genderfluid, but I could also see him be a trans demigirl, tbh. I respect transmasc headcanons too even if I don't usually ascribe to them for Makoto specifically! I kind of like to think that the fact that Makoto's door gets stuck is a very funny quirk of fate in the event of him being genderfluid/nonbinary - even his door, which is supposed to be a men's one, doesn't ascribe to a binary! & Makoto using she/they/he pronouns is so real to me.

I also love to see Kiibo exploring pronouns in fics. Like, in canon they use he/him (at least in the localization) but I like to believe they experiment with different ones for a while, just to see if they like them.

I also tend to see Hajime as nonbinary, using he/they pronouns too! That's not exactly a transfem headcanon, but yeah.

I also love the idea of nonbinary kaede as well - using she/they pronouns. Maybe in the event of transfem Shuichi or Kokichi, she helps them explore their gender at first.

I could also see Tsumugi as being genderfluid or otherwise genderqueer in some way - she defaults to she/her but she doesn't mind other pronouns, and oftentimes go with he/him when complying a male character.

This one's more controversial, but I also love the idea of nonbinary Junko with possible internalized transphobia. Like, I think the fact that she keeps making alter egos that are male (Monokuma, Shirokuma, and Kurokuma) lends well to this, but I also keep going back to that line monokuma said about being neither male nor female because there's no gender in the animal kingdom. Incredibly nonbinary thing to say. Of course, I think how Junko handles being nonbinary is somewhat dependent on what you headcanon Chihiro as - but if you headcanon Chihiro as a transwoman and Junko as transphobic towards her, it could somewhat be from internalized transphobia- like, her having the idea that "if I'm fine with being a woman even though I feel like this about it, you should be fine with your assigned sex too!" Or even the idea that she cannot fathom why someone would WANT to be a woman in the first place - like, what reason would you have to subject yourself to it if not malicious ones or weakness? Since she is so disconnected or even discontent from "womanhood". If you see Chihiro as nonbinary, Junko not understanding or even being bitter that they get to reject the binary but she doesn't could also make sense, and her putting them in the "male" box would almost be from jealousy and spite. If you headcanon Chihiro as a transmale, it becomes a) somewhat hilarious that Junko, the big bad of the series, accepts their gender and b) Chihiro could be the person who teaches her about this stuff in a pre-despair setting, and maybe even make her realize she's nonbinary. I know it's.... slightly problematic to headcanon the main villain of the series who has shown she is possibly transphobic (depending on how you see Chihiro again) as trans, but I think it's... fine if you also headcanon other characters as so and not just the villains. Plus, I'm nonbinary myself, so I think it's allowed.

Those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head! I love trans headcanons <3

There's so much good stuff here!! I can't address all of it, but a couple of my favorites:

I LOOOVE transfem Mondo, it's one of my absolute favorite transfem headcanons. The way it changes that trial from "horrifying trans panic" to "the tragedy of someone with extensive internalized transphobia meeting someone who is further along on their journey and lashing out in unrealized jealousy, ultimately destroying the version of themself they wish to be"...MWAH. The type of tragedy that can only belong to someone transitioning. The consequences of self loathing, both in harming others and harming ourselves, made manifest! But with GENDER.

I'm sure this is just part of the rest of that line, but the phrase "they canonically use he/him pronouns" is so funny. Power to K1-B0 for being incomprehensible wrt gender just in general. Love that agender kid

I am actually a big fan of transmasc Junko! (And I'll use he/him for Junko real fast to emphasize this point) I think the idea of Junko as someone who experiences a huge amount of dysphoria when he's perceived as feminine, who then goes out of his way to present himself as a champion of gyaru culture and hyper-femininity, making it so that, even if he one day receives the mental health treatment he obviously needs, he will always be associated with this incredibly female-oriented culture...that's despair. That's the type of shit you do at rock bottom. I have BEEN there my man. EDIT:

we are on the EXACT SAME PAGE anon 🤝

I actually did, genuinely, think Shuichi was a butch girl until I played the game, and was SO excited to finally see rep of my actual high school self. Wearing hats to cover dysphoria-inducing hairstyle? Emo makeup to escape the Social Makeup Norms? hangs out with kaede??? that's one of us right there

[intersex-questions]

as an afab trans intersex person, i usually find myself greatly relating to transfems more than any transmasc i know (like having intense dysmorphia/dysphoria over not being perceived as feminine for traits i have, feeling like i have to feminise myself more than cis women to be considered feminine, having people think im a guy due to my features and/or voice, ect) but i always worry that since i am in fact afab its weird or inappropriate or even disrespectful to relate at all to their experiences, even when i fairly commonly get mistaken as transfem (happened even yesterday the day im writing this)

so is it weird to that i relate to transfems more due to my masculising intersex traits? is it bad that i do?

(also… i may send another ask about this but is there any feasible way for someone who seem to have gone through mostly female puberty to medically feminise, in the way transfems usually do? when i find myself relating i usually wish i could also do that)

Thank you so much for sharing these feelings. You are absolutely not alone in how you feel. Many intersex people, and even perisex people, feel the way you do.

This answer is going to have an inclusionist perspective. Exclusionists of both the queer (especially trans) community and intersex community might have a different perspective than I do. I believe myself to be correct, but acknowledge that others will not. I am biased.

First, gender dysphoria among intersex people is incredibly common. Dysphoria is a feeling and experience not limited to gender dysphoria, but it also does often manifest as gender dysphoria in intersex people, including cisgender intersex people or intersex people whose gender aligns closely with what they were assigned at birth. I experience gender dysphoria over my body's gender it was assigned at birth, even though I don't present as that gender and don't wish to.

Second, there absolutely are intersex people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) and label as transfem. This is a thing in the community. I know many, many intersex people who were AFAB and label as intersex. I know FTM intersex people who were AFAB and also identify as transfem or MTF. I know cis intersex women who were AFAB and label as transfem or MTF. You absolutely are not alone in this.

Third, it isn't disrespectful at all to relate to transfems/MTFs. It is almost never disrespectful to relate to the experience of another group. Many people find solidarity and similarities with other groups. Butch lesbians/sapphics and trans men often find solidarity and share many, many experiences. (For example, my stepdad was a butch lesbian in a lesbian marriage with another lesbian, before he transitioned and is now a trans man in a straight marriage with my mother.) And, that leads me into my next thing.

Fourth, you can just identify as transfem or MTF. Labels are complicated, messy, and mean different things to many people. What being trans to one person means can be totally different than what being trans to another person means. Personal labels, like ones for queer identities, have variation in meaning and usage. They cannot be strictly defined and regulated, although many people (exclusionists, gatekeepers) will try to do so and argue that it might ruin the sanctity of the label or muddle the communication of the language. Labels aren't used as exclusively personal or ascribed to people. It is fair to say that someone fits the definition of transgender, or was historically transgender, going off of the commonly accepted definition of it, but it is also fair for an individual who fits the definition of transgender to not feel as though that label fits them. Labels and terms can be used in many different ways. It is impossible to narrow them down to one definition and keep it that way. Language constantly changes. I know that many queer terms that I was taught by queer people have different meanings that what I found among queer people my age in a different region and online.

There are butch lesbians/sapphics who also identify as trans men/FTM (and vice versa). And this is okay! It's allowed! You cannot truly dictate labels and personal identities of others. Someone's personal identity is something that only an individual can ever truly know and understand. There are exclusionists, like I said, who will argue or push against this, but I think that those people are wrong and need to be ignored.

I'm going to go into discussing various labels/communities. This isn't to say, "you are these things", but to say "these are people who share similar experiences with you."

Genderqueer, genderfucked/genderfuckery are both gender-related labels that encompass so many things. There are genderqueer and genderfucked people who are cisgender. Many genderqueer and genderfucked people may label as transfem and transmasc, transfem as a person who was AFAB and transmasc as a person who was AMAB, FTMTF, or MTFTM. I know many bigender and intersex people who label as transfem and transmasc or things like that.

Transfemmasc/transfemasc/transmascfem is a label people use to mean they are both transfem and transmasc. This is very common in bigender and intersex people. And that's the thing. You can just...do that. You can label however you want. If you want to label as transfem, you just...can.

If you're not comfortable with such an inclusionist view on just labelling however you want, there is still common precedent for intersex people who were AFAB to label as transfem because they do have a transfem experience. Labelling as MTFTM or FTMTF or transfemasc has presedence in both intersex and bigender communities. Bigender people as a whole often accept that it is transphobic to bigender people to not accept such labelling—people who try to binarize things like transfem/transmasc, AFAB/AMAB, inherently ignore and erase bigender people. Bigender people have many things in common with intersex people, as both groups are erased by both the binary concept of sex and gender. Things within the queer community often still function by a binary within gender. Even in nonbinary places (like you see how transfem and transmasc are often seen as wholly separate).

I will encourage anyone as many times as they need: you can label and identify however you want. You can mix and match labels. You can "contradict" labels. Anything at all. If you want to send me another ask and answer by just saying, you can label as transfem, I will.

And, also, you don't owe anyone any information on your personal identity. Just how a trans man doesn't owe anyone information on what surgeries they've had or even want to have, you don't owe anyone information on how and in what ways you are the label you identify as and are.

As to your last question...yes and no? It depends on what experiences you have. Many intersex people who were AFAB with hyperandrogenism, especially with PCOS are prescribed different things to reduce or cope with their hyperandrogenism. For example, some people take oral contraceptives (birth control pills) as these usually contain estrogen.

I take testosterone HRT and used to take estrogen-based birth control pills for my period and generally speaking, this is a bad idea. It gave me hot flashes and caused even more painful periods that lasted over a month with significant blood clumps that were just. Not normal. I experience hyperandrogenism but am still on T HRT to increase my T levels further for transgender reasons. If you are on testosterone, talk with medical professionals before going on any estrogen. But note they might not have an answer. There isn't a lot of published information to rely on.

Breast implants exist for those with small chests. Many MTFs get breast implants. Some people will gain weight to get larger breasts as well. There are also feminizing surgeries such as facial feminization surgeries. All of these have risks and reasons, so research a lot.

So, if you have hyperandrogenism, you can discuss treatments that can lower your testosterone count. If you have physical appearance things like small breasts or facial features, there are feminizing surgeries.

There's also things you can do that are technically "masculinizing" that you can do if you want to have a body more like a pre-transition or pre-OP MTF.

(I have no idea what genitalia you have so apologies if this doesn't apply to you.) Bottom surgery can just be gotten by cis people (although for all these surgeries, I'm not discussing medical or financial barriers). If you want to have bottom surgery to get a penis via phalloplasty, in theory, you can. And you can just think of it as your penis, in a transfem way. Some countries have topical cream you can apply to increase clitoris size (unavailable in USA afaik, as much as I wish it was available). Many people with hyperandrogenism already experience clitoromegaly, however. Metoidioplasty is a form of bottom surgery that "releases" the clitoris to create a penis, which could be done to affirm yourself into having the body you want. (This is a case where some people might label as FTMTF, transitioning to "male" so they can transition to female.)

There is a reason I use trans+ in my post. The + is for anyone who undergoes experiences commonly associated with transgender ones, but aren't necessarily transgender. There are cisgender butch lesbians/sapphics who go on testosterone HRT, who get top surgery, and who get bottom surgery. It is completely okay to get any of these types of things even if you are not transgender or transgender in a traditional way.

Sorry for going on such a ramble that isn't well organized. I hope you can understand what I mean. If you have further questions or need clarification, let me know! I'm just very passionate about this topic. My partner is a transfemmasc intersex bigender and so am I (although in a bit of a different way).

So, basically, it depends on your intersex variations and what your goal is. You can do things to affirm your body to be more like someone who is a perisex MTF that doesn't have surgeries, such as bottom surgeries to change clitoris appearance or to get a penis. You can do certain things to reduce hyperandrogenism. You can get surgeries that are considered feminizing for the face or even some other places.

Also, it isn't medical, but you can look into ways transfems/MTFs socially transition without medical transition.

I'd really love it if you reached back out to me and gave me your thoughts or let me know if this helped. I know it's odd, but I truly care about every single person who sends an ask here, and I want to make sure I can make their lives better regarding their intersex experience. I very much want to do what I can to make sure you are happy with that.

TLDR; No, it isn't weird, and it's super common among intersex people who were AFAB. There are intersex people who were AFAB that identify as transfem. There are intersex people who were AFAB that identify as both transfem and transmasc. Intracommunity experiences are a thing. You should identify and label however feels right for you. Medical transition depends on your intersex variations, but cis intersex women with hyperandrogenism often take treatments to reduce hyperandrogenism, there are feminizing surgeries for places like the face or chest, and trans+ people who get surgeries that are "masculinizing" (like bottom surgeries to get a more penis type look) in order to feel affirmed as MTF/FTMTF or adjacent to those).

I am interested in no discourse or arguments on this post. I am interested in genuine feedback or additional information or other inclusionist perspectives. If anyone sees information they think was phrased poorly or any typos, let me know! I also jump around while writing posts so let me know if something just flat out makes no sense.

[nehswritesstuffs]

So, um, it's time for Nehs to go off again on One Piece bc my gears are turning thanks to Lore Piece being solid as per usual. Spoilers for chapter 1097 are under the cut, as well as talk of some of the basis of Crocomom, a fanon theory I do not ascribe to but don't necessarily dismiss, so if you do dismiss it then don't read I guess.

Okay, um... so I've been kind of thinking that Bonney isn't really twenty-four years old for a while and something more like a middle schooler (10-14), but this chapter to me sort of soft-confirmed it, as well as set things up for this other crazy-ass fucking thing I didn't think was even possible.

'Cause the end of the chapter puts things fourteen years ago, right? No mention so far of a kid despite Ginny's enthusiasm to get into Kuma's pants. Oda would have mentioned a kid, especially if it was already ten years old. Kuma is too cute to have been a dad and NOT gotten a moment with his baby. (LORD ALMIGHTY why is Kuma so adorable in this edition of Lore Piece I just wanna smush his cheeks and tell him he's doing a fantastic job at caring for his flock and being a rebel.) This means that Bonney is one of a few things:

Kuma and Ginny's daughter they had after rescuing her, giving her a different family name to distance her from the Buccaneer race, ala Ace going by Portgas

Ginny's rescued relative we don't know exists yet

Kuma's adoptive daughter that he takes in bc she looks hauntingly like Ginny

Ginny's daughter from things happening while she was kidnapped

Ginny's clone in the Clone Trooper sense, taken and prematurely aged

Ginny's clone in the Boba Fett sense, taken w/o being aged

No matter how you shake it, unless Bonney is some until-now-unknown child waiting to be rescued, all of these options point to her actually being somewhere around tween/young teen in actuality but presenting like an adult in order to get taken seriously. The anti-eyebrow piercing would even play into that, being a potential way for a kid to prove they're so big and tough and able to run with the big kids take me with you Shanks I'm no anchor. So, we're getting to her true origins soon, also where Vegapunk comes into play, whether he is a cause or a secret-keeper or whatever.

Now, remember how I said something about Crocomom? As it turns out, I feel like if we get any confirmation for the trans!Crocodile fan theory, it's gonna be within the next two or three chapters. Why? I think Croc is potentially connected to whomever captured Ginny. Iva, being their fabulous self, is not above using their power to disorient opponents. While this could mean that Crocodile is a cis man but got temporarily femme'd and turned back after humiliation, it also leaves open the possibility for Iva putting Croc through permanent HRT for either punishment purposes (so unwitting ftm not changing you back candy you've been bad now go learn a lesson) or for negotiation purposes (already afab ftm but give us our Ginny back and I can make you grow a dick and lose your tit fat). While I don't think that Crocodile was necessarily designed to be transgender from the beginning, I also feel like Oda has to know about the Crocomom/trans!Croc fanon and he is specifically the kind of author who just shrugs and goes with shit fans make up. That's how he got almost all, if not every single, birthday for the cast, so why not this twist? Like, I wasn't sold on it the first time I encountered this theory, but like I said: I never discounted it because we never know what's going on in Oda's brain. He really gave us a good potential set up here, so it'd be weird if he didn't use it.

(I still think that Crocomom specifically is a long shot since Luffy's five at this point, so unless Dragon is going to potentially wage war on his ex/babymama and neither of them mention Luffy, it leaves even more parts of the puzzle that don't quite fit (and Croc wouldn't already be ftm bc that's a lost chance at a new character design, which we all know Oda is shit at resisting). There's a lot of them that already don't fit to me, but that's neither here nor there. I'm just concerned that even if we do have ftm!Crocodile thanks to Iva's Devil Fruit, that a lack of Crocomom would mean that One Piece has its own version of the Blaise Zabini Debacle in the works (apologies for bringing HP into it but it's true) and we as a fandom are better than that.)

OR I COULD BE WRONG ABOUT ALL OF THIS AND GINNY WAS CAPTURED BY MARINES, GIVING HER TO VEGAPUNK FOR EXPERIMENTS, WHICH WOULD LEAD INTO OTHER STUFF but yeah

None of this theorizing I think could have been possible, like, ten/fifteen years ago, because part of me feels like Oda has been putting his foot down a lot based on what it is we've been getting. Some stuff could have, yeah, been sort of meddled with by the editors/SJ at this point, but it feels like he's been able to get away with a lot more than he did before. Being such an important asset can do that.

...but yeah, if none of this happens (or is at least more firmly kickstarted) by chapter 1100, chances are that we're not getting it.

[brynwrites]

How to Write Non-binary Characters: Part II

Visit PART ONE: the basics first!

PART TWO: the nitty gritty.

Non-binary in relation to Presentation.

What are we talking about here when we say presentation?

Presentation in relation to gender is how a person chooses to look, dress, and act in relation to their culture's gender norms. A person who wears dresses and makeup, speaks in a higher pitch, and daintily crosses their ankles is presenting in a feminine manner in most Western cultures because these are traits labeled as feminine in these particular cultures.

As mentioned in part I, non-binary people may choose to present themselves in many different ways.

Androgynous. The androgynous presentation (i.e. a presentation that is between masculine and feminine, presenting with traits ascribed to both) is commonly associated with non-binary people. Some non-binary people present as androgynous because it feels most natural to them, while others present as androgynous because it helps to inform the rest of the world of their gender.

Masculine or Feminine. Many non-binary people present as masculine or feminine despite being non-binary. They may present this way because they enjoy it and it feels natural, or because they grew up presenting that way and don’t have the time or means or desire to adjust, or because their best efforts would not allow them to present as androgynous without extreme measures they don’t feel the desire to undergo. But whatever the case, non-binary people who present as masculine or feminine are just as non-binary as those who present as androgynous!

A mix of presentations. Some non-binary people will mix up their presentation, either based on their mood, or on how they feel about their gender at that moment, or to keep their presentation similar around a specific group of people (such as work vs friends). This can mean presenting as masculine sometimes and feminine other times, or as androgynous sometimes and masculine or feminine others, or a mix of all three. This switch may happen in relatively even amounts, or the person may wish to usually present one way and on rare occasions another, or anything in between.

A word on gender dysphoria: non-binary people may or may not experience gender dysphoria (i.e. a feeling of unease or distress because their body does not match their gender identity). For non-binary people, this generally takes the form of wanting to be more androgynous. Whether or not a non-binary person experiences any dysphoria does not make them “more” or “less” non-binary. It is not in any way a qualification of non-binary-ness.

A word on gender nonconformity: Just because someone is gender nonconforming does not necissarily mean they are non-binary. Many binary queer people choose to present in ways that don’t conform to gender norms, and they have every right to do so. Sometimes gender nonconforming people are trying to decide whether they are truly binary or not. Whether they decide that they are binary, or non-binary, or trans, or make no decision at all, this is a perfectly respectable way to explore one’s gender.   

Non-binary in relation to Pronouns.

Pronouns are often used as a linguistic form of gender presentation and designation. Most people relate singular they/them pronouns to non-binary people—and often non-binary people do use they/them exclusively—but there are many combinations and ranges of pronouns non-binary people choose. Let's go over some common options:

They/them, exclusively. They/them have been used as singular pronouns since the 14th century, and are already a popular way to refer to a person of unknown gender. They/them is often used by agender and bigender people, but as with all pronouns, may be claimed my anyone of any gender, including binary people who feel they/them if the best portrayal of their gender identity.

He sometimes, she other times. Transitioning between two or more different pronouns based on how someone is living their gender in the moment is very common for gender-fluid people. Just like with presentation, this exchange may be equal or it may be weighted heavily to one pronoun over another, or anything in between.

Binary pronouns, exclusively. Some non-binary people never feel the need to switch from the pronouns they were asigned at birth, while others feel they fit the binary pronoun opposite the one asigned them at birth. Some also choose to keep their original pronouns in order to avoid coming out to transphobic people. This is no way makes these people less non-binary than non-binary people who choose any other set of pronouns!

Multiple pronouns. People from all non-binary identities will commonly choose to go by multiple pronouns simultaneously. This can be because they feel close to all those sets of pronouns, because they have no desire to choose a specific set, or because they don't feel the need to give up the pronouns they were assigned at birth in order to take on new pronouns.

Note that this is the one situation in which people might have preferred pronouns. (If someone chooses a single set of pronouns, those are their pronouns! It's not a preference—it's a part of who they are.) But people who have chosen to go by multiple pronoun sets might have one they prefer to be called, especially in a particular setting. For example, a non-binary person might say "I prefer to go by they pronouns at work, but I also identify with and accept she pronouns, so I won't be offended if customers routinely use those for me."

New pronouns. Now that the non-binary community in western culture is finally coming together, there are new sets of pronouns being created specifically for non-binary people to use. There are infinite options here, one of the most popular being xe/xir, but they're still the least claimed pronouns due to most of society not being familiar with them.

It/its pronouns. While some people have claimed it/its pronouns and there are situations where it/its pronouns might accurately fit a character, its best to leave those stories to non-binary and trans writers, due to the long history of it/its being used to dehumanize trans people.

A word on gendered terms: the non-binary community interacts with gendered termanology (such as Mrs., brother, dude, gal, queen, gentlemen, sir, etc) in the same way as they do pronouns. Many non-binary people have certain gendered terms they accept, while some accept all and others accept only genderless terms. These accepted terms may match with their pronouns (e.g. someone who uses he pronouns also using masculine terminology, like mister, sir, brother, dude, etc) or may not.

Now that we have all these cool pronouns, how do we relay this information in our writing?

There are a few common techniques to help relay character pronouns in writing:

The Mind Reader's Way. Let your point of view characters just happily know what everyone else's correct pronouns are all the time so you can move on with the story and not have to sit down for awkward conversations. It may be unrealistic, but should not break suspension of disbelief for anyone who genuinely wants to read about characters from non-binary genders going on fun adventures. Keep in mind that this works best in societies where characters only use one pronoun set.

The Introduction Path. Have it be customary for characters to introduce themselves by stating their pronouns, and call all characters by they/them pronouns until they do so. This lets the story move forward quickly, but can be awkward if you have primary characters (such as villains) who never introduce themselves to the point of view character.

The Everyone's Friends Route. Have there conveniently always be someone else who knows that character's pronouns and can slip them into conversation.

The Pronoun Pin Road. Much like pronoun pins, include a piece of world building into your setting that culturally requires people to wear something particular relaying their pronouns. This works best either in a modern or futuristic setting where characters can wear actual pins/shirts/etc, or a secondary world where you can control all aspects of the culture.

The Coming Out Highway. The most awkward but most realistic option is to force your characters to explain their pronouns if they don't fit society's strict gender norms. This can be as simple as one character asking "sorry, I don't mean to bug you, but what pronouns do you go by?" or another character arriving to the second day of class in masculine clothes and announcing "I go by he/him pronouns today."

Whatever route you choose, make sure to be consistent throughout the story. 

Part Three: Common Pitfalls and Easy Fixes.

[aroworlds]

Fiction: The Pride Conspiracy, Part One

December isn't the best time of year for a trans aromantic like Rowan Ross, although—unlike his relatives—his co-workers probably won't give him gift cards to women's clothing shops. How does he explain to cis people that while golf balls don't trigger his dysphoria, he wants to be seen as more than a masculine stereotype? Nonetheless, he thinks he has this teeth-gritted endurance thing figured out: cissexism means he needn't fear his relatives asking him about dating, and he has the perfect idea for Melanie in the office gift exchange. He can survive gifts and kin, right? Isn't playing along with expectation better than enduring unexpected consequences?

Rowan, however, isn't the only aromantic in the office planning to surprise a co-worker.

To survive the onslaught of ribbon and cellophane, Rowan's going to have to get comfortable with embracing the unknown.

Contains: A trans allo-frayro trying to grit his teeth through the holidays, scheming aro co-workers, a whole lot of cross-stitch, another moment of aromantic discovery, and many, many mugs.

Content Advisory: A story that focuses on some of the ways Western gift-giving culture enables cissexism and a rigid gender binary, taking place in the context of commercialised, secular-but-with-very-Christian-underpinnings Christmas. Please expect many references to said holiday in an office where Damien hasn't figured out how to run a gift exchange without subjecting everyone to Santa, along with characters who have work to do in recognising that not everybody celebrates Christmas.

There are no depictions or mentions of sexual attraction beyond the words "allosexual" and "bisexual" and a passing reference to allo-aro antagonism, but there are non-detailed references to Rowan's previous experiences with and attitudes towards romance and romantic attraction as a frayromantic. Please also expect casual references to amatonormativity and other shapes of cissexism.

Length: 4, 914 words (part one of two).

Note: You'll need to have read The Vampire Conundrum for many references to make sense.

Rowan should be assumed an Australian character in an Australian city. Our Christmas, therefore, involves hot weather, short sleeves, barbecues and confusion at certain holiday traditions common in the Northern Hemisphere. 

They’re aromantic. How isn’t he obligated to help decorate her desk in as many pride-related ways as possible? 

“It’s Secret Santa slash December Holiday Gift Exchange!” Damien emerges from the meeting room, shaking a paper-scrap-filled jar with the gleeful attitude of a toddler attacking a pile of presents. In order to give the occasion suitable gravitas, he draped a rope of red tinsel over his shoulders, the fronds glittering in the flicker-prone lighting. “Come gather!”

Rowan looks up from his computer, biting back a groan. This isn’t a surprise, given that Shelby answered his interview questions about “workplace culture” with descriptions of their celebrating capitalist-infused Christian holidays, and the office more than lives up to that promise. A tree sits on the front counter, its branches crammed with baubles. Tinsel hangs on everything from which tinsel can be hung and rests in snake-like coils over the computer towers, screens, desk partitions and the large corkboard. Ribbon-wrapped pencils topped with felt trees, stars and stockings flowered, overnight, from everyone’s pen mugs; Melanie gave Rowan three of them for his frayro mug. Every desk features a red bowl of tree-shaped marshmallows, candy canes or that weird Christmas lolly mix common in dollar shops.

Only the lack of music renders bearable this explosion of festivity. Damien said he drew that line last year after Melanie and Shelby alternated between Michael Bublé and Josh Groban’s Christmas CDs.

Rowan doesn’t want to think about that sublime horror.

Christmas to him means slipping a few TSO tracks into his melodic metal playlists and gritting his teeth until the new year.

“O come all ye faithful,” Melanie sings, spinning her chair around. Every day this week she’s donned a different Christmas-themed T-shirt; today’s features a screen-printed Rudolph head with an apple-sized nose made from red minky fleece. Rowan doesn’t understand the American “ugly Christmas jumper” thing—why?—but Melanie appears to be replicating the trend via short sleeves and jersey knits.

Damien jerks his elbow at the largest whiteboard, half filled with the Banned Holiday Decorations List—items including “music, carols, hymns and singing”, “all types of fake snow” and “Cadbury Crème Eggs”. “Didn’t we talk about carols?”

Rowan doesn’t want to be accused of being a dreadful, fun-loathing millennial about which too many articles have been written on dislike of office gift exchanges … but he doesn’t know how not to be one, either. Why do people like this? Buying presents for people who aren’t strangers but aren’t friends, hoping that his attempt isn’t too generic only to open something tailored to feminine cliché ... followed by the apologetic explanation or justification that Rowan isn’t easy to shop for.

Can’t he save himself fifteen bucks and skip the disaster?

He’s never understood how he presents a difficulty that isn’t cissexism and a lack of imagination: buy him good thread, expensive coffee, dress socks, a nice mug, food storage containers or fancy kitchenware. He’ll even take a cheap box of chocolates, since his housemates will eat anything should they believe it food. Just get him something that isn’t a floral-patterned bath set followed by the hand-wringing apology that the giver just doesn’t know what to get someone as confusing as Rowan!

Why don’t they ask him what he wants?

He’s over spending money and time on gift exchanges only to receive cissexism, dysphoria or stereotype wrapped in paper and tied with a bow.

Rowan draws a breath and slips his fingers under his thighs. He should have sent Damien an email when Melanie started decorating, but Rowan was thinking about pushing their print date back two weeks and not thinking about Mum’s out-of-nowhere request that Rowan attend the family Christmas. “Uh … Damien? Can I … quick word?”

Why did he get himself a new psychologist? One who says terrible words like assertiveness?

“Give us a minute.” Tinsel rustling, Damien crouches beside Rowan’s chair. “Will here do?”

If everyone overhears, Rowan can pretend he’s talking to one person while knowing they all benefit from his explanation. Besides, going into the meeting room makes this a thing. “Yeah. Um. I … I don’t usually get the right presents from people in gift exchanges. By which I mean ... presents that aren’t a reminder that they think me female, and if they give me enough nail polish and heart-shaped jewellery and glittery handbags, I’ll admit it. I don’t want that? Really don’t want that?”

Why do his parents want to play at being a happy family? Does Mum want to show off to Uncle Keith and his new wife? Have they forgotten how badly last Christmas went? Or is this just more cissexist assumption that Rowan will discard his masculinity when needed? If they behave as though Rowan should fit their expectations, will he—eventually—surrender to them?

I’m not being difficult because I want my masculinity and transness respected. I’m not...

Melanie leans over to poke Shelby’s shoulder, her bright red lips forming a ring.

Damien blinks, hesitating as if he doesn’t know how best to respond. “That ... sounds like my niece’s favourite birthday. Although she took the bag, put one of my sister’s dumbbells inside and swung it at the boy over the road who wouldn't stop calling her pretty. And then made an army of neighbourhood girls wielding heavy unicorn bags.” He shakes his head. “I mean that … you obviously aren’t a certain kind of eight-year-old or into glitter, so...”

If only Rowan had the nerve to do that to Aunt Laura! “I bet he never did that again.”

“No. I’ll make sure … that the person who has you gets you something appropriate.”

Inappropriately-feminine gifts aren’t his only difficulty. Rowan doesn’t how to voice something so complex (to cis, gender-conforming people) about gender and gift-giving without sounding like he’s complaining for the sake of complaining—the demanding, difficult trans man of his parents’ accusations. Most often he endures a cis female celebrity’s latest perfume, but well-intended “accepting” people give him an Old Spice gift set—acknowledging his masculinity at the cost of his personality. How do cis people not chafe at gift-giving traditions that assume people can be reduced down to one of two categories with narrow behaviours and interests ascribed to each?

It’s easier to draw the line at gifts that only avoid being the embodiment of the giver’s cissexism and donate everything else, as much as Rowan yearns for one year with a good present he doesn’t buy himself.

Will cis people ever understand that being trans means holding back on responding to cis nonsense?

“Thanks. Yeah, thanks.”

“Secret Santa slash December Holiday Gift Exchange rules!” Damien straightens, shaking the jar; paper rattles against glass. “Twenty-dollar limit, keep it fun, don’t give anything inappropriate for a professional environment. I want to be eating mince pies, not taking people into the meeting room for discussions on adulthood. We exchange on the last day, December 20.” He reaches into the jar, the neck a tight fit for his hands, and tweezers out a folded piece of paper before handing it to Rowan.

Damien shakes the jar again before offering another slip to Melanie and then Shelby.

Don’t people draw names themselves from the bowl or jar? Nobody else seems concerned by this lapse—Melanie starts laughing when she sees her name—so Rowan shrugs and opens his, deciding it must be normal enough.

The Aro Gods must be inclined to a little seasonal kindness, for he sees “Melanie” written in Damien’s handwriting.

No need to struggle through generic alternatives like food or wine; pride pins will make her happy enough. A pen? A mini aro flag? Choosing may be Rowan’s worst problem, but he can get her a few things and give her whatever’s over the limit after the exchange.

They’re aromantic. How isn’t he obligated to help decorate her desk in as many pride-related ways as possible?

“Rowan!” Melanie bustles over; he quickly slides his paper up his sleeve. She makes metallic jangling noises—words like “ringing” or “pealing” don’t apply—as she moves, thanks to a gold chain bracelet decorated with small bells at each link. Matching earrings dangle from her ears, clinking out of tune with the ones at her wrist. “Can I ask you something?”

He nods, hoping she’ll let pass unremarked his description of holiday cissexism.

“Where did you buy your flag patches? I want one. Well, maybe more than one, because there’s the aro flag, and the ace flag, and maybe one of the aro-ace flags, but I haven’t decided which one I like best since there’s several that are nice, and...”

Once-in-a-lifetime inspiration hits Rowan with finger-twitching force. “I don’t know,” he lies once Melanie runs out of steam. “Uh … a friend gave them to me and ... I don’t know where they bought them. Online, probably?” He swallows and tries for distraction, gambling his poor ability for falsehood against Melanie’s likely ignorance. “Maybe look on Etsy? I’d look on Etsy.”

“Etsy? What’s that?”

“Handcraft eBay,” he says in relief, thinking through his thread stash. “Where people sell handmade things. I don’t know when I’m seeing my friend next, but I can ask...?”

He’ll need purples, greens, greys, black, white—oh, and blues! A little orange, a little yellow. Has he enough fabric? What about time? Should he do the main ones first and then others as he can squeeze them in?

On the way home tonight, he’ll start by stopping at his local sewing store.

***

Rowan hits “send” on an email to Damien, ignoring Mum’s latest text, as Shelby bounds up to his desk. Like Melanie, she’s added Christmas T-shirts to her daily ensemble; unlike Melanie, Shelby’s T-shirts appear to come from a department store’s children’s section. Today’s shirt shows a cute-but-scientifically-inaccurate dinosaur in a Santa hat holding a red box. Also unlike Melanie, Shelby hasn’t added earrings, pins, necklaces, bangles or socks in honour of the season. “Yeah?”

Damien added “battery and USB-powered light-up objects” to the List after an office vote provoked by a flashing necklace that resembled miniature string lights.

Shelby whispers, meaning that she speaks in a raspier tone with volume enough that her standing on the other side of a crowded football oval needn’t impede one’s hearing. In fairness, Rowan has heard her speak over a hundred gossiping Year 7 students until they surrendered to the stubbornness of an older woman who doesn’t go to bed caring what they think of her. “Can you go through all the … the identities? Can you show them to me and tell me what colours go with them? Do they all have their own colours?”

Rowan can only sit and gape.

“Please? I need someone to go through them all.”

He lunges for his half-filled mug, hoping his perpetual need for coffee conceals his surprise. “You mean pride flags? Queer pride flags?”

“Please.” Shelby nods, grips his arm and gives a meant-as-comforting nutcracker-like squeeze before lowering her hand to fidget with her phone—a device likely dug up with the fossils from the dinosaur on her shirt. It doesn’t have a cover; he guesses she covered the back with multiple layers of washi tape coated in (yellowing) clear nail polish. He doesn’t ask why. “Maybe you can start with the ones you use, and that one Melanie has, and then tell me the other ones? There aren’t that many, are there?”

Rowan, lukewarm coffee in his mouth and heading down his gullet, chokes.

Several moments of spluttering and coughing, aided by Shelby’s enthusiastic back-pounding, pass before he can answer. “Uh … there’s lots, actually. Lots.” He considers explaining about Tumblr before deciding on the appropriate answer: a thousand kinds of nope. “Do you want gender ones, or sexuality ones, or aromantic ones, or...?”

Shelby’s blank, brow-creased expression shows that, if she read Rowan’s leaflet, his emails and the hand-outs provided by Damien’s trainers, the knowledge hasn’t stuck with her.

(They weren’t better than Rowan’s own and only mentioned aromanticism as a way of being asexual.)

“The ones you and Melanie use...?” She lowers her voice to a point where someone may, in theory, be unable to hear her from the other side of the room. “I want to get Melanie a little extra … something, this year. With a flag, maybe?” She jerks her elbow in the direction of Melanie’s mug, currently filled with something smelling of camomile and dish-water. “But I should know more about the other ones, too. Like yours. Can you show them all to me?”

There’s no way in this tinselled hell that Melanie can’t hear Shelby, yet Melanie appears engrossed in deleting emails.

Last week, Rowan said “aromantic” once to their newest volunteer in a conversation about the pride flags on their website. Seconds later, Melanie materialised from the hallway, passed over one of Rowan’s leaflets and introduced herself as aro-ace before giving a five-point rundown on ways to avoid casual amatonormativity—not that she’s yet comfortable saying the word—in the workplace. There’s no way she’s contemplating the mysteries of her trash folder while Rowan talks to Shelby about aromantic pride flags! Breathing “aro” aloud is now akin to summoning a demon—one revelling in the discovery of the identity that makes belated sense of her life.

“You want me to show you aromantic flags?” Rowan asks to clarify, baffled.

Shelby beams at him. “Yes, please.”

Melanie, frowning, deletes an email.

Did Damien have a word with her? Did the volunteer complain?

Rowan can’t say that he wants to play tour guide through the world of queer vexillology, but Shelby has gone five weeks without saying the phrase “you trans people” and two months without reassuring Rowan on the subject of pronoun-correction. He also knows Melanie and Shelby are friends outside of work, bonding over stage shows and music. If Shelby wants to support Melanie in her aromanticism, how can Rowan refuse?

While Rowan sat there planning the politest way to navigate the glaring error in the trainers’ leaflets, Melanie stood up, exclaimed that aromanticism isn’t the same thing as asexuality and demanded that they do some reading before engaging in “obvious aro denial”. He owes her. She scares him a little, but he owes her.

(Should Rowan master the ability to handle conversations and presentations, he may consider becoming a sensitivity trainer. That two-day workshop, while decent enough on gender and sexuality, left him again concluding that most queer alloros have no idea how to reference and include aromanticism in their conversations about queerness.)

Another Mum-authored text flashes up on his phone, displaying the words “Christmas”, “clothing” and “appropriately”.

No, no and hell no.

“Yeah, okay.” He bends down to grab his satchel, tucked against the left-hand side of his desk. A decent collection of patches and badges now covers the front flap, including his cursed-but-memorable “aro” patch. “That’s the trans pride flag, with the blue, pink and white, and beside it is the bisexual flag. The flag with the greens and black is the aromantic flag, and the allo-aro flag has the greens and gold. It’s pretty much the same as the aro flag, except with yellow and gold instead of grey and black.” He points at each patch as he moves through his explanation. “Allo—allosexual—aromantics are aros who experience sexual attraction.”

He’ll stick to simple definitions with Shelby, even if they lack ideal expansiveness.

Shelby nods, smiling.

“For me, it means I’m aromantic and bisexual. Aro-aces, like Melanie, are aromantic and asexual, meaning she doesn’t experience sexual attraction.” He almost asks her if she remembers what “aromanticism” means before realising that he’ll sound like a condescending primary-school teacher. “This flag with the blues, white and grey is the frayromantic flag, which designates the specific way I’m aro. The flag on Melanie’s mug—”

Shelby leans against his desk, her grey braid trailing over one arm. “So you have an aromantic flag and an allosexual aromantic flag? A special aromantic flag?”

Are they heading towards the sort of conversation that involves anger over “making up” identities outside the speaker’s reckoning of acceptable? Or does she mean “distinct”? “Ah … kind of? The green and black flag represents all aros—Melanie and me. The green and gold one’s just for me, and I don’t use her blue and orange one.”

For the first time in living memory, Melanie pays Rowan and Shelby no attention.

“I see! You want to reflect different types of aro.” Shelby almost says the word without unusual stress; Rowan considers applauding her but decides he won’t risk undermining his point on avoiding excessive overreaction to queer terminology. “Do you ever put the flags together? Like if you want to be both things at once?”

When isn’t he the state of multiple identities at once? Rowan decides she means “represent” instead of “be” and nods. “Yeah? Some people put a heart with the stripes of the aro flag in the middle of the trans or bi flags, but I don’t like that because using a heart to represent us all is a bit … eh. You know, heart, love, love hearts? Lots of people don’t care, though. I’ve also seen folks split them in an image, or have the stripes fade into each other. Like trans stripes fading into aro stripes.”

“And you like that better?” Shelby blinks, her blunt nails tracing the edge of the case. “Would Melanie like that? The aromantic flag fading into another one?”

There’s no way Melanie didn’t hear that—and no reason for her to say silent! Last month she told Rowan and Shelby to get mint chocolate cake for her birthday after walking in on them debating sponge versus cheesecake in the meeting room!

(Sponge, in Rowan’s opinion, is the classic cake format.)

“Yeah. It shows my identities together without using symbolism I find awkward.” Rowan lowers his voice, leaning closer to Shelby. “Melanie will probably go for the aromantic flag fading into or combined with the asexual flag, if you’re doing something with two flags. I don’t think she’d be into hearts, but a split image or fading? That’d work.”

Shelby straightens, beaming, and gives Rowan another firm arm-squeeze. “That’s great! Thank you so much for helping, Rowan!”

“Don’t you want to know more about aro-ace flags...?”

“No, that’s great!” Shelby, heading towards her own desk, no longer attempts to speak at anything not normal volume. “Aromantic into asexual! I’ll remember that!”

As Shelby turns, he catches a glimpse of the cracked screen on her phone—or, more specifically, the movement of her hand as she presses stop on her recording app.

Is that legal? It surely isn’t normal? Or is she an auditory learner, meaning she’ll learn best by playing the recording over … but in that case, why not say so? He could have directed her to YouTube videos and podcasts! Perhaps, though, she only shows her ignorance in digital etiquette, in the same way Rowan took Melanie aside to explain that the use of caps lock for the body of a promotional email violates good manners as much as—more than!—she thinks signing a form in red ballpoint? Should he complain about something suggestive of her willingness to understand him?

Rowan stares, shrugs and shakes his head as a third text pops up.

Sometimes it’s easier to just not ask.

Too bad that can’t apply as easily to family.

***

Rowan stands, yawns and stretches. His lunch half-hour beckons: sunshine spent with food, cross-stitch and a flock of pigeons tame enough to perch on the far end of his bench. Since today involved apologetic emails followed by a contrite phone call to his goddess amongst printers, time free of people feels like looming perfection. Just him, the pigeons, a sewing needle and the homemade pasty he hid from Matt inside a bag of frozen peas.

Any day in which he gets to enjoy his own cooking can’t be too terrible.

Perhaps he should do as his psychologist says: put a chest freezer in his bedroom and a lock on his door.

“Rowan!” Damien, his hair tousled enough to make Rowan think of a woolly mammoth in a sharp suit, carries a plate of something smelling like honey and chicken into the office. “While Melanie’s out, can you show me your mug shop? You said there’s a lot of aro-ace flags, right? Or would she want one like yours, the green one? I don’t get her something like your blue and green shield one, though?” He shrugs and sets the plate down on Rowan’s desk. “My wife’s friends with her sister and we got invited out, but there’s another swap. I don’t want to get her the wrong thing. Do you mind?”

At least Damien does the sensible thing of asking while Melanie’s out on lunch. Maybe this won’t take too long: Damien’s a terrible photographer with unreasonable expectations of Photoshop, but he does know how to buy things online.

“Yeah. Hold on.” Rowan opens up his browser just as his phone beeps. Nope, ignoring that. “I’ll show you what mugs I think she’d want.”

He hadn’t realised how many people here are friends with Melanie outside of work. It must be nice to have a regular social life that isn’t “being at work” and “sighing at housemates”, but there’s advantages in possessing the short holiday shopping list of family, a work gift exchange and a couple of friends. Besides, does anyone want one’s co-workers to know what happens at an outside party?

“Don’t ignore your phone because of me.”

“It’s Dad.” Since Rowan can’t find a pithy or amusing way to explain that Dad’s text message will be a guilt-trip ordering Rowan to come to Christmas for the sake of the family’s happiness followed by a second guilt-trip explaining how much his refusal to confirm has upset Mum, he just shakes his head.

You talked about this with the psychologist. Guilt. Trip.

He made an appointment for the second week of January; he should have made one in December as well.

“That bad?”

He can’t remember the specifics of his rant that day atop the desk, but he must have suggested at an interesting relationship with his parents. “Yeah.”

Did they forget telling Rowan that if he doesn’t like how they treat him, he can leave? They told Rowan that he isn’t welcome while he remains intolerant of them—while I expect them to treat me as I deserve. He left. Now they want him back to smile for the family photos?

What’s worse? Enduring a day of misgendering, deadnaming and cissexism, which shouldn’t result in unknown voyages of horror if he bites his tongue? Or avoiding short-term discomfort while gaining the long-term torment of the family’s schooling Rowan in appropriate Ross respect for blood and holidays? What chance is there of avoiding harassment if he doesn’t go?

Maybe he can leave off shaving for a week before Christmas and turn up with his new, albeit patchy, facial hair while wearing an op-shop debutante gown, so he “dresses appropriately” and “doesn’t confuse the relatives” as requested.

How many truckloads of Valium will he need for that?

“Rowan? Are you okay?” Damien, now sitting on an office chair, peers at him as though waiting for Rowan to do anything more than stare at the computer screen.

“Ugh. Sorry. Just thinking.” Rowan sighs and types in the shop’s name, bringing up their website, and then opens a second tab to another archiving different pride flags.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Damien asks in that gruffly-gentle voice, one that makes Rowan want to smash his fist through a window.

“Yeah, no.” Rowan draws a breath and points at the screen with a hand a too trembly for his liking. “So you’re going to want to know what flags represent what, because there’s a drop-down menu where you can choose from different flags...”

It’s easier to talk, easier to run through all the different flags in a depth of explanation Damien doesn’t request, easier to think about something that isn’t family—a subject with complexity enough to distract but without provocation enough to distress.

He doesn’t know if Damien asks questions from curiosity or kindness, but Rowan’s pasty becomes pastry crumbs scattered over his desk and keyboard; Damien’s chicken, half-eaten, sits cooling on its plate.

“So cupioromantic is the one where you want the relationship but you don’t feel romance?” Damien frowns and runs both oversized hands through his hair, now resembling a befuddled bear emerging after a long hibernation. “Why have a word for that? I mean, everyone feels like it isn’t one of those movies and dates anyway, so why specify that?”

“Where you don’t feel romantic attraction but desire a romantic relationship,” Rowan says, telling himself that Damien unknowingly regurgitates the tired “demiromanticism is normal” argument. Isn’t this better than looking at the fifth text message? “Some people need it to be a word. Movies aren’t that divorced from reality. They’re … too easy, too glossy, too perfect, too unrealistic, but...”

He sighs. Not dating brings many benefits, but Rowan has to admit that he misses the fun of falling in love, even if trouble always follows. Misses the fun of dreaming, hoping and fantasising; misses the bright, happy glow of being caught up in someone else. At risk of being considered a bad aro, he likes that glorious limerence pushing him to navigate people despite his gibbering anxiety! In some ways, knowing he’s capable of falling in love over and over feels heady and powerful; amatonormativity more than the nature of Rowan’s frayromanticism bestows difficulty on its aftermath.

I want to fall in love with you ... and after getting to know you, do it again with someone else, all the best bits of romance’s beginning on eternal repeat.

Instead, he avoids dating and the inevitable development of his partner’s hurt, surrendering to a world where his shape of attraction isn’t acceptable or reasonable. Albeit with a trace of bitterness that frayromanticism will be easier to navigate should Rowan not be an anxiety-plagued, bisexual trans man!

Of course, discarding romance makes pursuing his shape of sexual attraction unacceptable and unreasonable...

“How are they real? Nobody just sees someone and falls in love like that—”

“Dude, dude, I’ve fallen in love like that.” Rowan shakes his head and launches into the speech that’s the spiritual duty of any card-carrying aromantic: “Do you fall in love after you get to know someone? After they love you back? Do you know what ‘fall in love’ means to you? Because it’s easy to name all sorts of feelings ‘love’ and think they’re romantic when the world says you have to be alloromantic. It’s even easier to not be romantically attracted and not know! Have you thought about it?”

Damien, his eyes so wide that he reminds Rowan of a zebrafish with a brown wig, shakes his head.

“I swear, alloros like romance movies because while they’re a … a simplified, idealistic version of romance, they’re close enough to what people feel—or think they’re supposed to feel—that they … ring, resonate. They wouldn’t do that if it were complete invention. Just like science fiction isn’t real but talks enough about human experiences to have meaning to human audiences. Unreal, in so many ways, but just real enough. So—”

Damien holds up both hands, palms facing Rowan. “Stop. Stop.”

Now the anxious part of Rowan’s brain realises he’s lecturing at his supervisor in a way no need to avoid thinking of his family justifies; he gulps, fingers trembling. While the office code of conduct doesn’t specify things like unwanted speeches questioning another person’s belief in their romantic attraction, he doubts this acceptable behaviour. “I … shit. I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! I just...”

Will he ever stop causing a mess at work?

“You’re talking so fast,” Damien says, slow and careful in the way of a man talking to a panicked horse, “that I can’t keep up.” He sighs and runs one hand through his hair. “This isn’t something I thought we’d be talking about! I just wanted to check that everything was right...” He shakes his head, but he doesn’t sound annoyed or outraged. Just bewildered. “Okay. Right. What about all those sorts of things that we think are love? What do you mean by that?”

At some point during the resulting afternoon, Rowan sends an email thanking his printer for her willingness to amend the job queue, ignores his brother’s entry in the competition to provoke the most seasonally-appropriate guilt, and scribbles a note to ask the higher-ups if they’ll spring for a basket of expensive coffee and chocolates sent to said printer.

Damien nods several times, takes dot points on a flyer print-out and the back of the report draft for last week’s holiday event, asks more questions and promises that he’ll remind the higher-ups of their involvement in submitting January’s flyers two weeks late. After eating the rest of his re-heated honey chicken at Rowan’s desk and narrating the story of how his future wife followed him from pub to pub during a crawl for his brother’s buck’s night, Damien concludes that he only experiences attraction for someone after they express attraction for him.

Melanie, having rested her arms on the back of Damien’s chair to overhear the last half of the conversation, gives him a smothering hug and welcomes him to “the quiver” before cackling at Damien’s blank look.

Find a recipro mug, Rowan later scribbles on the bottom of his to-do-list.

At least that job doesn’t involve relatives.

[azdoine]

So let’s talk about them fairies.

In Homestuck, magic is broadly a cipher for queerness. This connection is first introduced when John gets his magic tricks from a book about a homoerotic relationship between two men:

"It's really amazing how hard it is to find a sausage-sized piece of a guy on the floor of a room that dark and smoky."

"I wanted to ask if he was sure about this, performing in broad daylight. He was used to working in dark rooms. It was usually the first thing out of his mouth when he would queer a trick."

The motif continues -- Roxy, who “loves wizards”, is attracted to John, the closeted amateur magician who retcons events, making them unhappen in the manner of a wizard, and she falls in love with Dirk, a gay man, as well as Calliope, the transgender wizard of Oz. And so on and so forth.

Naturally, more complex relationships with magic signify more complex relationships with queerness. Rose hates her mother’s apparently-performative obsession with wizards, but she also keeps and writes personal slash fiction tales about them, and she performs her own sorceries as a lesbian. Eridan, who orbits around magic without accepting it openly, is basically a misogynistic incel, but he also canonically dresses in feminine clothing in death. The continual deconstruction of magic as something unreal or conceptually incoherent, even as it clings to a tangible presence within the text, replicates and signifies the marginalization, recuperation, and erasure of queerness by homophobia and transphobia.

One magical figure in Homestuck that I want to talk about is the fairy; as a particular magical identity, and thus as a symbol for a particular queer identity, I believe it casts an important light on several character and story arcs.

Andrew Hussie is at least plausibly aware of historical marginalizations and oppressions, as evinced by the deliberate use of e.g. ‘octoroon’ terminology in Sassacre’s texts. With that in mind, how might the specific historical use of ‘fairy’ terminology inform the various fairies we see in Homestuck?

In Gay New York, George Chauncey characterizes the historical fairy as follows, placing them in the context of male homosexuality:

The determinative criterion in the identification of men as fairies was not the extent of their same-sex desire or activity (their "sexuality"). but rather the gender persona and status they assumed. It was only the men who assumed the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to women who identified themselves -- and were identified by others -- as fairies. The fairies' sexual desire for men was not regarded as the singular characteristic that distinguished them from other men, as is generally the case for gay men today. That desire was seen as simply one aspect of a much more comprehensive gender role inversion (or reversal), which they were also expected to manifest through the adoption of effeminate dress and mannerisms; they were thus often called inverts (who had "inverted" their gender) rather than homosexuals in technical language.

With reference to Chauncey and others, Emma Heaney likewise characterizes the fairy as such in The New Woman, placing them in the context of trans femininity:

Trans feminine genders were legible and understood in the period. Fairies and girl-boys were not only viewed as “crossing” from man and woman, but as trans feminine people, whose conditions of life were set by their association with cis women... Fairies were viewed as interchangeable with cis women in sexual and domestic pairings, and their femininity established the contrasting “normalness” of their masculine partners...

This non-determining relation between genitals and sex did not lead to the breakdown of the categories “man” and “woman” or the evacuation of meaning from these terms. Rather, fairies simply occupied the social role of women during this time. This operation extended to a popular recognition of the way trans femininity conditioned the interpretation and thus the experience of cis women.

The historical fairy, then, and the conventional fairy by extension, serves as a signifier for homosexuality, gender non-conformity, crossdressing, transgender ‘gender inversion’, and/or queerness in general -- particularly in those assigned male at birth, but again, also in general.

Who are the fairies we see in Homestuck, and where do we see them?

Well, the primary fairies we see in Homestuck are the trolls, of course. In folklore, troll mythology emerged from a different culture, but trolls inhabit a similar order of mythology to the fair folk, as nature spirits and as friends or foes to humanity. In Homestuck, the trolls who achieve god tier status also obtain fairy wings; for trolls, godhood is inextricably entangled with butterfly and fairy symbolism.

Metamorphosis is clearly a significant part of troll biology, and therefore ingrained in their mythology. They've got cocoons everywhere, and are often likened to insects through biological terms. The wings have nothing (we know of) to do with troll adulthood. But have a lot to do with their perception of what ascension should be, which is the culmination of a pupation process. Which is why some may look to fairies as an ideal, or rule them out as fiction on account of the ideal they represent. Ascended trolls in this game are essentially magical fairies.

The confluence between troll feyhood and divinity, as a kind of godlike expression of metamorphosis, takes us back to the queer concept of the fairy as sexually fluid and transformed, as well as the sexual fluidity of the trolls. Through SBURB, the trolls are enabled to ascend to a distinctly queer godhood, coming to embody the same divine androgyny as the cherubs do; in particular, through an epic coming-of-age, the trolls are given the opportunity to “grow sideways” instead of growing up, quite literally developing laterally and stepping outside of the normal process of physical maturation for their species.

As Kathryn Stockton says in The Queer Child, with reference to Edelman’s No Future:

...the figure of the child as the emblem of parents’ (impossible) continuity spawns delusional visions. These are visions of the seamless reproduction of oneself, whose future is always represented by (one’s) children. Thus “the future” and “our children” are always bound together in a kind of frightening (and hermetically sealed) “reproductive futurism”: a “social consensus” that... has been made “impossible to refuse”...  If in any context there is “no baby” and thus “no future,” “then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning”—enjoyments dramatically laid at the door of homosexuals.

I coin the term “sideways growth” to refer to... something that locates energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive.

Reading fairy tiering as a kind of queer apotheosis -- and thus, as a kind of deviation from the reproduction of the future -- is difficult precisely because it serves as a mechanic in a game about the reproduction of the cosmos, but I would argue that the reading is less counter-intuitive than it seems. The trolls are intrinsically queer by the human standards that center the comic: even as the trolls reproduce, their form of reproduction itself negates the reproduction of a conventional and heterosexual human future, and and it destroys the nuclear family unit.

To be clear, on Beforus and Alternia, the trolls are still entwined and bound within a kind of reproductive social matrix, and SBURB reifies this matrix, abusing childhood itself as the site of the production of the future. But god tiering -- and fairy tiering in particular -- is an entirely superfluous mechanic. It is not necessary for the completion of the game, nor does it exist as a linear extension of the echeladder that is much closer to the core of SBURB’s gameplay. It allows all ascended children to personally perpetuate their own existences beyond their inevitable deaths, rather than perpetuating the existence of the cosmos at large.

God tiering is thus a form of sideways or nonlinear character advancement that exists apart from the demands placed upon children by the game: it is a form of sideways or nonlinear growth and self-actualization that exists apart from the reproductive demands placed upon the young by society. Fairy tiering simply literalizes this metaphor, allowing the queer troll children both to grow sideways and to come to embody hyperreal symbols of queerness.

All of this is particularly evident in practice. Fairy symbolism surrounds many of the trolls, particularly insofar as they serve as “fairy godmothers” to the beta kids, but our primary and most explicit fairies are Vriska and Aradia, simply because they’re the only beta trolls to god tier in the alpha timeline:

Aradia herself is surrounded by death at all times, but her morbid obsession is shaped by her embodiment and her state of being. As a ghost, deceased herself, she is imprisoned wholly by the teleology of reproductive futurism, and thus she is hollowed out into a manifestation of SBURB’s inevitability:

Aradia’s ultimate resurrection as a fairy -- after she has already fulfilled her cosmogenic role and helped her team to complete their session -- thus constitutes her transcendence of her role in the perpetuation of existence. Her metamorphosis allows her to transcend her old role as a temporal lynchpin in SBURB’s reproductive futurism, and having so ascended, she leaves for a sempiternity in the dream bubbles; she rejects the future in favor of the alternatives of the dreaming and the dead, growing sideways on multiple levels.

Vriska likewise has a complicated relationship with SBURB, one inextricably influenced and foreshadowed by her history as an experienced FLARPer and augmented reality gamer. For Vriska, who was recruited by her caretaker and mother figure to prey upon other children, FLARP was nothing less than a way for her to fulfill those demands:

The narratives of FLARP thus constitute a fantastic representation and allegory for the more fundamental social realities of Vriska’s hellish life -- and the lives of others -- given form through augmented reality, as video games are wont to be in Homestuck. But at the same time, through FLARP, Vriska is able to attempt to recuperate some noble identity for herself:

Vriska is able to shuck off the reality of her situation as a victim and a cog in an overwhelming cycle of abuse, becoming the person she wants to be: strong, powerful, and in control of herself and her life as an adult and a glorious scoundrel. The equally-overwhelming fakeness attribute of this persona is irrelevant, because Vriska has made this persona real enough for herself, seizing strength, power, and control on every front.

It’s only natural that she also sees SBURB as another meaningless game to exploit...

...because to her, it is. It’s just another reality for her to navigate, and thus another site for her to attempt to extract something for herself. Where every other god tier we see is murdered through the will of another, and then god tiers almost incidentally or accidentally, Vriska deliberately fairy tiers with full knowledge and awareness, in an ultimate act of excess as a power gamer, abusing and mastering the system around her for her own benefit. Her fairy tiering is inextricable from her disrespect, exploitation, and subversion of the cosmogenic order for her own pleasure.

And naturally, like Aradia, Vriska dies and is laterally exiled to the dream bubbles. In the dream bubbles, we see the alpha trolls who god tiered in the alpha timeline -- Meenah, the Thief of Life who only has vitality in taking it from others, manipulating Life without really creating it anew, and Aranea in particular. Aranea is not only Vriska’s ancestor, who informs her aspirations and character; she’s also her ectodoppelganger from across the Scratch, and a true fairy archetype:

As a god tier Sylph, Aranea is an explicit fairy on multiple levels, and she aspires to ‘heal’ the timeline she occupies. Her power as a fairy is that which empowers her to divert the timeline; her fairy status is that which subverts the reproductive futurism of SBURB and the teleology of the alpha timeline, allowing the sideways growth of an offshoot to supercede the inevitable forward growth of the alpha. Aranea’s sideways development is so absolute that when she and her plans falter, a literal plot hole -- with all of the story-breaking power it allows -- is required to bring the alpha timeline back into a forward order.

Fairy tiering is implicated in sideways growth on every level, but I think I’ve said enough about that in particular -- there’s a lot more to be said, and much more interesting things to say, about fairies and queer subtext in Homestuck.

Let’s go back to the revenge cycle among the beta trolls, with an eye upon the fairy as a queer figure.

The beta revenge cycle begins with various sessions of FLARP between Aradia, Vriska, Tavros, and Terezi; at some point in these games, Vriska uses mind control to force Tavros to jump off of a cliff.

On the literal level, this is just Vriska being pissy and needlessly cruel to Tavros -- both as the descendant of the man who loved and killed Vriska’s own ancestor, and as the boy who is too pathetic sensitive for Vriska’s playstyle. But Vriska’s cruelty is preceded by a particularly interesting monologue:

Rather than simply punishing Tavros or otherwise getting on with his torment, Vriska verbally solicits fairy behavior from him. Tavros dresses like Pupa Pan -- the child in arrested development, the proto-gay child, the fairy-child, the fairy-touched child -- and Vriska compliments him on the cuteness and appeal of his fairy presentation. She asserts, or assumes, or realizes that Tavros wants to be Pupa Pan, just like she wants to be Spinneret Mindfang, and she asks him to try flying with her; she asks him to try acting like the fairy child that (she thinks) he wants to be.

On the symbolic level, Vriska is pushing Tavros to join her in flight among the fairies, and thus, to come out of the closet as some kind of queer figure, or at least, to try queer behavior with her. She hurts him in the process -- perhaps because he isn’t queer, despite the fairy symbolism he surrounds himself with and aspires to, but the question of Tavros’ implied queerness is almost incidental to the reality of his pain at Vriska’s hands. If Tavros was ever going to grow wings and fly like Rufioh and Pupa Pan, it wasn’t going to be because he jumped off of a cliff, nor was he ever going to come out of the closet just because Vriska kicked the door down and pushed herself upon him.

Not that Tavros was ever going to get overwhelming sympathy for his victimization. The fairy subtext of Vriska’s violence against him was only reiterated when he first reached out for help, and he was turned away not simply because he was unsympathetic as a male victim of (sexualized) violence at the hands of a woman, but because he was a boy who had deliberately chosen to participate in femininity:

Tavros played a stupid game with an aggressive girls, and he won a stupid prize when she victimized him, but the equally fundamental victim-blaming at play is that in ‘playing a game for girls’ -- in attempting to take flight as a fairy child, and in attempting to enter the realm of the feminine and/or queer -- he got exactly what he was asking for.

After Tavros, we come to Vriska, and she doesn’t find her place in the beta revenge cycle any more fulfilling. Aradia takes vengeance upon Vriska for her brutality towards Tavros, and Aradia does so by confronting her with the ghosts of her victims:

On the literal level, this is also a straightforward act of revenge against Vriska: Vriska is tormented by the various trolls she has killed, subjecting her to a truly ironic and karmic comeuppance (and subjecting her in equal measure to a vicious retraumatization as a fellow victim of spidermom).

But Aradia’s revenge also has a unique meaning with relation to the fairy symbolism that surrounds these characters; Aradia is forcefully reminding Vriska that she’s not the Tinkerbell to Tavros’ Pupa Pan; in fact, she’s his Captain Hook.

Aradia confronts Vriska with the apparent bleak reality of her situation: that she’s a murderer and a pirate, a not a lost boy or fairy-child. It’s only natural that she destroyed Tavros instead of straightforwardly acting as his fairy guide, because she was never actually his fairy. 

It’s hard to understate how emotionally devastating this is in a queer reading -- Aradia has contextualized Vriska solely as a child predator instead of the queer child that she is, and she has symbolically misgendered Vriska by stripping her of her fairy narratives. Vriska can cling to her pirate narratives, as she does quite a lot of going forward, but she still circles her fairy fantasies with Tavros, as she does when she meets Tavros in the game:

Vriska senselessly acts her fairy fantasies out no matter how impossible it seems for her to fulfill them, and no matter how unfulfilling they’ll be as a consequence.

She tries to unite Tavros with his shadow, (her perception of) his repressed true self, but she’s basically using him as a doll, and she knows it. It’s aggressive and masturbatory, and that’s exactly what she hates about her affection, at least on some level. She’s a trans girl who has been confronted with the reality that she’s being a creepy fucking chaser and acting like a stereotypical straight guy.

This desolation, the psychic amputation of Vriska’s fairy fantasies, is what Aradia has really done to Vriska. Aradia has denied Vriska’s right to be a queer figure in Tavros’ life, let alone anyone’s life, and she has reminded Vriska of just how shitty a queer role model she would be -- Aradia has told Vriska that she’s actually just a predator, just like her spider lusus, and she has psychologically and symbolically amputated Vriska of her claims to queerness.

This is something that Vriska really can’t forgive.

Vriska’s act of revenge against Aradia is -- yet again -- straighforward enough on the literal level. Encouraged by Doc Scratch -- as a man who gives voice to Vriska’s worst desires, or as a predator who manipulates her -- she takes a sliver of control of Sollux and pushes him to inebriate himself, before having him kill Aradia.

However, this is contextualized not only as violence within a relationship...

...but also as violence through Gemini.

Aradia has been assaulted by her partner, as contrived by Vriska, and she has also been assaulted by the duality of Gemini, which stands for the duality of like mirror images before it stands for the duality of opposites; it is the male twins in conjunction with one another, not the reconciliation of opposed principles in unity, as within the divine androgyne.

More explicitly stated, Aradia has been murdered or otherwise brutalized by Sollux, who serves as the lingering specter of intimate partner violence against fairies (i.e. trans femmes) and misogynistic masc4masc bullshit in general.

And having been so brutalized, Aradia is reduced to a shell of herself; in her vulnerability, she is first co-opted by the reproductive futurism of SBURB and then preyed upon by Equius.

The deeply autoerotic quality of Equius’ fixations -- as a man who dominates but wants to be dominated; as a man attracted to a robotic body who only finds fulfillment as an AI; as a man who tries to make the target of his affections akin to his corporeal blueblooded self, before finding fulfillment as a red sprite like her -- reveals the fundamental likeness between him and Aradia, as the target of his fixations, or at least, it suggests that he sees some kind of likeness between him and her, on some level.

The transmisogynistic images that inform Equius’ mythology -- the cybernetic male-mother, the hulking brute, the autoerotic autocastrator, etc -- also thus reinforce the notion that Aradia is subject to transmisogyny as a fairy, and Equius’ literal construction of her body for his pleasure positions him as one who abuses and exploits the transgender body, holding it to the constructed mold that pleases him.

Having destroyed Aradia even more thoroughly than Tavros, the revenge cycle turns yet again against Vriska, and Terezi punishes Vriska by proxy... by telling Doc Scratch, abuser of women and children, that Vriska is in the possession of his cue ball.

Doc Scratch detonates his cue ball, but in doing so he quite deliberately ends Vriska’s prospects as a fairy, rather than simply killing her. He continues Vriska’s amputation by literally taking her eye and arm, scarring her body and reifying her life story as the Captain Hook to Tavros’ Pupa Pan. He deliberately posits her as the symbolic antithesis to the fairy, he does so through the permanent destruction of her body so as to tell her that she will always be that antithesis, and he constructs her body so as to keep her from fulfilling the fairy ideal.

That Vriska is still able to recuperate her identity and make something truly fantastic of herself as a punk pirate is incidental to the reality of her pain at Doc Scratch’s hands. That Vriska crafts her pirate persona in the splitting image of Mindfang in particular, who is herself Aranea the fairy, reveals the bleak reality that Vriska is, in fact, still approaching the fairy archetype on some level, as closely as she realistically can, in spite of being shunted into another role. Vriska is far from femme, and she’s hardly heterosexual, but she’s still a fairy girl (i.e. a trans woman) on the symbolic level.

Most of all, Vriska serves as one of many middlemen in the equation, but both Aradia and Vriska are subject to bodily destruction at Doc Scratch’s abusive will, and both of them have their bodies reconstructed through cybernetics by Equius, leaving them open to his abuse, before ultimately finding bodily integrity and greater wholeness as god tier fairies.

(Speaking of which, remember when Tavros wasn’t able to bring himself to kill Vriska in order to god tier her?

This isn’t just Tavros’ failure to give Vriska a divine power-up, and it’s not just his refusal to reciprocate some kind of black romance fling with Vriska, sexual or otherwise -- it constitutes his ultimate failure or refusal to validate Vriska as a fairy! No wonder she’s so butthurt.)

To sum it all up, the beta cycle of revenge is almost entirely about maladjusted fairies -- maladjusted trans femmes and AMAB queers -- acting out and abusing each other in a conflict that spills over to hurt others, all under the direction and oversight of Doc Scratch’s predatory inclinations. Terezi might really be in it for something like justice, to avenge her friend, but Vriska, Aradia, and Tavros are also entangled in something even more intimate, violent, and personal.

TL;DR: trolls are gay, trans Vriska needs therapy

[vanquishedvaliant]

Epsisode 8 of Zombieland Saga has shown us in no uncertain terms that Lily Hoshikawa “Number Six” is a trans girl. Most of us didn’t see this coming, and there was no expectation of any treatment of this kind. For many people this is just an amazing, awesome surprise of representation in an awesome anime.

However,  some people are a little less happy about how it was handled, and while I’m not gonna tell anyone how they should feel about it, because ultimately your own feelings about how you are represented are valid-

unless you’re one of those sad bastards throwing slurs around despite the overwhelming evidence against your shitty archaic filth, in which case I hope you live a sad and lonely life fermenting in your caustic attitude

-I’d like to offer some of my thoughts on the way this played out, to see if breaking this down helps temper some people’s initial reactions. Some of the things that people attribute to ‘bad rep’ or ‘offensive’ can also be seen in a less aggressive light from another perspective. 

Could some scenes have been done in a more careful way to avoid any potential brush with discomfort? Perhaps, but firstly I don’t think that Perfection is something to demand for when we are getting a holy shit canon trans character with 8/10 handling in a show we never expected (as opposed to somethign that advertises its GAY RIGHTS!!! and then lets us down). 

Secondly, I’m not even sure that the most round-edged, comfortable approach to this kind of subject is always the right answer to approach these topics in the first place. Sometimes we need the hard edges to properly convey the mood and reality. Sometimes those edges can cut in the same way they do in real life; but it doesn’t always make them attacks on their own. Sometimes it makes them tools.

But let’s look at some of the actual features that seem to grate;

Most notably; Saki’s reaction to learning Lily’s dead name and cause of death; It doesn’t seem to me like any part of her joking is particularly trans-targeted joke? Saki is usually somewhat crude and insensitive in her jokes, and the show clearly shows us that Lily’s annoyed by it in any case.

But the jokes taken on their own; 

a) death from hair growth shock is funny - 

Yep. Sure is. Context also makes it tragic, but whether it’s contextualized in traumatic dysphoria or not (combined with the visibile overwork of her child star career), dying of shock is a kind of lame, funny way to die. It’s rude and insensitive, but not offensive trans rep.

b) Lily’s deadname is incredibly masculine, and that contrasts with her cute appearance and demeanour

This ones potentially got a little more ground given that it involves invoking her deadname, which is something no one super appreciates and isn’t generally necessary. In this episode it serves as a tool to open the book on Lily’s past, and remember that though she doesn’t go by it anymore, Lily herself was the one who brought that name into the conversation.

As far as the actual joke goes; It’s funny that the deadname she was initially given is so completely at odds with every part of her, and her father’s hyper macho name was part of the joke as well. At no point here does Saki insist on using that name, she just thinks its a hilarious deadname to have gotten rid of.

c) Saki butts heads with Kotaro when they ask him if he knew

Given that she doesn’t contest the rest of the situation, I think it’s pretty easy to ascribe the confrontation here to Kotaro just being a dick face in general, and not specific to this case.

The idea that the girls had to ask Kotaro if he knew in the first place might seem unnecessary when taken from an “optimal treatment by knowledgeable people” context, it also serves a valuable purpose in allowing Kotaro- the most insensitive, dickish, and crude person in the group- to go the hell to bat for Lily, and reinforce with no contest that Lily’s prescence, name, and gender are not up for debate, and Lily herself gets to stand up for this.

d) “How did we not notice?”

Damn good stealth. Approaches the realm of “thing you shouldn’t worry about IRL”, but it serves to highlight the attention not paid to Lily, how trans people exist whether you notice them or not, and allows a reinforcement on the team’s perspective of her; Lily’s Lily, and she’s Cute.

e) Lily dying in general;

All the girls deaths are tragic, cut down in their prime. It doesn’t change here. What does change is the contextualization of death. Death of the body coincides with death and rebirth of the self, and through zombification Lily achieves one method of getting what she wants; avoiding dysphoric puberty and getting a fresh start on the the tragedies of her old life.

The highlight of her dysphoria being horrible enough to literally kill her is a little blunted by Saki’s joke, but the two are able to coincide. We’re given reason to believe that bodily comfort was so critical to Lily that losing it was paramount to dying. Someone commented about the nature of trans girls ‘rather dying’ and ymmv here, but it lends an appropriate sense of weight to the aspect that feels genuine.

There’s a dozen other things here, but the concept applies throughout. Some of these are not about insensitivity or poor handling; they are about communicating a point thoroughly. Again, if some of these facets don’t sit well with you, that’s your valid interpretation. But from my book... this is just an astounding episode. It came out of god damn nowhere and dazzled us with a legit canon actual trans character. Not coding, not talking around it, not outdated tropes. An actual trans character.

[oppressiveliberator]

This is a question for the mun: I realize you’ve been settled on this topic for this blog’s portrayal but what are your thoughts on the trans Ghetsis headcanon that’s floating around? How would you portray it? (to clarify the idea is that he’s an old fart of a trans man I’m pretty sure but)

((i'm not sure what you mean by 'settled on this topic'--but I assume that you mean my Ghetsis is cis(or that one of the big focal points of my presentation is his current state/poor health rather than anything else)?

BUT UH. I mean, I don't ascribe to it myself? I didn't even know that was a headcanon going around, really. But. . .I dunno, I don't have any feelings on it? Lol, everyone's allowed to headcanon what they like, y'know?

Uh as for how I'd portray it. . .I dunno, probably no different than I usually portray Ghetsis. One's gender doesn't really have any bearing on who they are, so his character would largely be the same. He still thinks he's god--he might be more accepting of differences in others? At the same time, he'd be just as likely to scoff at others--he's beyond their human concept of gender, that they cling onto it so frantically is pathetic to him.

I've portrayed him as being annoyed with, for example, N showing an interest in wearing dresses(i believe that was @gems-of-lirema 's N) but ultimately he'd defend N if somebody else was disapproving of him--that kind of response might be. . .lessened? He'd still be very 'you're a boy, why would you wanna do that' but also be content to let him present how he wants?

I think he'd be less of a. . .my Ghetsis has a sort of preoccupation with having children, I guess?? He likes the idea of being a father to many heirs(though N is the one that matters) and so on, so he's got a lot of kids around the world that he's fathered over his years of life and travels. But that wouldn't carry over to trans!Ghetsis sort of. Plasma scientists wind up with an interesting side project--find out how to produce children using two eggs or something like that where he can still father children but not have to be the carrier lmao.

UH. . .he'd still be comfortable in his masculinity despite long hair and often wearing gowns. By this point he's got his shit figured out. Minimal dysphoria because he's gone through procedures that cure it and make him feel more like his body is his own. Few people would even know he's trans.

UH. DOES THAT ANSWER THE QUESTION. . .? If not feel free to ask for more specifics!!))

[system-architect]

CHARACTER ROLL CALL: Kio

his personality a fiery opposite from his much cooler-acting partner, kio is also a rata novan who was catapulted through the mists and into the present day thanks to an incident involving some potent ley-energy and an asura gate. empathetic, good-natured and good-intentioned, kio is sort of a living life lesson in how compassion shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness, as he’s as iron-willed, bullheaded, stubborn, and an unstoppable force as much as he is kind. a both research and practicing doctor, kio is an incredibly adept blood magic-specialized necromancer who studies the natural flow of magic through the body and the potential of healing by manipulating it. they’re smart as a whip and good at what they do, and have a tendency to bite off more than they can chew, but he seems as if he’s incapable of being intimidated by anything...

B A S I C S

full name: it’s actually kioxxe, but he prefers kio

Age: 179, but the mists put his growth in stasis, causing him to appear 27 as of 1331 AE. (his eyes are a little freakishly huge, making them look a bit younger than he actually is.... he says he’s just aging gracefully!!)

Height: somewhere around 3′1″, maybe

Build: not particularly muscular at all, but physically capable enough. average build with some chub on his stomach and thighs

gender: [noncomittal hand wiggle] trans masc, a bit NB

sexuality: gunner is the only person he’s really interested in. has tended to date boys/is gay but having a sort of Connection is the most important thing to him

pronouns: primarily he/him but also accepts they/them

O T H E R S

family: only child; both parents died in rata novus

birthplace: rata novus

job: does more research than work nowadays; they want to be an accomplished doctor though (they already are but... not really actively working to provide care for anyone)

phobias: failure, stagnation

guilty pleasures: SUGAR. he adores candy despite fully knowing how bad it is for you. sometimes he can be a little “do as i say not as i do”...

M O R A L S

morality alignment?: teeters between chaotic good and lawful good-- they have their own internal set of laws they ascribe too, but he’s chaotic compared to the rest of society and cares little for ascribing to the standards set by others

sins - lust/greed/gluttony/sloth/pride/envy/wrath

virtues - chastity/charity/diligence/humility/kindness/patience/justice

T H I S - O R - T H A T

introvert/extrovert: fairly extroverted; doesn’t necessarily need others to recharge but is a very friendly and amicable and sociable person by default

organized/disorganized: EXTREMELY organized-- he’s blind, so he needs everything to be put back exactly to where it was. he has about 20/500 vision, so he can see stuff as Blobs, but having everything be neatly organized with very bright color and texture coded fabric tags all over just helps a whole lot

close minded/open-minded: very open minded. you can tell him anything-- so long as you’re not hurting others unjustly, he doesn’t care and isn’t phased. he’s someone you can really confide your deepest weirdest secrets in

calm/anxious: can seem a bit outwardly frazzled and nervous once in awhile, but make no mistake, they’re generally cool as a cucumber and always in control. gets authoritative when anxious

disagreeable/agreeable: agreeable person generally, but if you go against one of those internal laws he sort of has about life, he Will be a pain in the ass and you should get out of his way

cautious/reckless: cautious and meticulous, but not afraid to take risks once he’s decided it’s worth it

patient/impatient: extremely patient but when he snaps, He Snaps

outspoken/reserved: outspoken, if he sees something wrong he has a desire to speak out and correct it, and reaches out to people he sees suffering. if he disagrees with you on something, he’ll let you Know

leader/follower: a leader type for certain; sometimes can appear as a follower but if he seems like he’s following you around it’s just because you have the same goal as him at the moment and it fits

empathetic/unemphatic: extremely empathetic, sometimes almost to a fault-- they can get needlessly hung up on their emotions when he feels like he’s failed to provide adequate care for someone or something

optimistic/pessimistic: exceedingly optimistic. just like gunner, he can stare death in the face and won’t flinch. he’s iron willed and is convinced he can out-stubborn anything in the world. he refuses to give up on anything until it has truly passed the point of no return, and even then, his idea of ‘the point of no return’ is much less harsh than others’. you say he’s fighting certain doom or a lost cause, he’ll say he’s not and you’re just being a coward and giving up too easily

traditional/modern: his very open minded nature causes him to be very accepting of more modern ideas and technologies, but he does have some traditions he prefers

hard-working/lazy: will work himself to death if not stopped

R E L A T I O N S H I P S

partner(s): he’s been gunner’s partner for a very long time and they end up getting married at some point!

what they’re like as a friend/how they make friends/what their friend circle is like: kio somehow both makes friends easily and has very little friends, usually due to their nose being buried in research. however, they’re very approachable, and don’t mind people coming to them for advice. he easily makes friends with the underdogs in any group because he’ll notice them and seek them out and make them feel welcome

most unique or surprising personal relationship (whether friendship, family, etc..): kio and plex eventually have a good degree of camaraderie after plex joins the group, plex being an underdog that needs support both emotionally and medically, and kio being someone who can both provide that and doesn’t judge him based on his past since kio feels plex has a good heart despite The Inquest Thing

mortal enemy/enemies: he has a sort of complex about injustice and the innocent being harmed and anyone who willfully contributes to that sort of injustice in the world is automatically an enemy in their eyes. make no mistake, despite all their empathy and kindness, if kio is certain you have a Bad Heart, they won’t show mercy if they have to exact justice against you

[evakuality]

Some thoughts on writing and characterization

I’ve seen a lot of discussion in the fandom lately about how to write characters and to what extent it’s okay to change canon characteristics in fic, and I guess in art too.  One comment I saw really stuck with me and I want to explore the ideas behind it a little more.  Now I just want to clarify here that I’m not telling anyone they have to write a certain way or that any idea in any post I happened to see (and which I can’t remember now where I saw it, so I can’t even credit the person with that idea) is wrong.  I just had some ideas which were pinged by that one comment in particular and the whole discussion in general.  This is messy and my own opinion only.  I’m well aware that other people think other ways, I just want to record how I feel about it all.  Also, as usual, this got VERY long so … uh, beware of that.

So, the comment I saw claimed that making Isak smaller and slighter and weaker than he’s shown in the show, or making Even actually taller and stronger is just a preference and that doing so is perfectly fine because who’s to say that in the parallel universe represented by the fic that those things aren’t true.  And okay sure, in some ways that’s fair.  We don’t expect things to be exactly the same in an au.  Different situations will inevitably end up with characters having different outlooks, and I get that.  I write that sort of thing myself, and there’s a real joy in thinking ‘how would changing x thing about y character affect him or her while still keeping them recognizable?’ But for me that’s different to what we’re talking about here.

What’s happening here is our fics taking actual physical traits of the actual actors and changing them.  And unlike personality characteristics, these aren’t things that could believably be changed.  To be clear here, I’m not talking about ‘what if Isak were a fairy?’ (I love that fic!) or ‘what if Isak were trans?’ (I love that idea too), but rather a tendency to write a ‘changed’ character as if he were an actual part of the canon.  The difference is subtle, I know, but the distinction is actually huge.  Again, I reiterate, we can all write what we want etc etc but I think exploring this difference is important in figuring out why we as fandoms write the way we do.

Deliberately changing something to wonder ‘what if’ is quite different to writing a certain set of tropes in a certain way.  Because the thing is, if it really were just people having a preference we would have a much wider variation of these traits presented as if they were canon.  Let’s do a thought experiment.  Let’s say someone writes a fic.  It’s labelled Isak/Even and presented as if what’s inside is just the sort of variation you’d find in a parallel universe.  In it, Even is a small Asian guy with dark hair who is physically unimposing.  Isak is a tall, broad, very muscular body builder.  There’s no ‘what if’ and no hint that this is out of the ordinary.  Indeed, the fic treats this as just how they are in canon.  None of this is tagged because that’s just Isak and Even, no big deal.  How many of us are squinting at that going ‘what? That’s not Isak and Even; how can the writer of that fic not say that’s a deviation from what we know?’ I think we can all agree that this fic would be strange, and we’d instinctively go ‘this isn’t Isak and Even’ because it’s not.  I think those sound like fascinating characters, and I’d love to read about them, but they aren’t Isak and Even.  I’ve also seen people saying ‘don’t like, don’t read’ but in this case that doesn’t apply because it hasn’t been tagged.  There’s no way before going in and reading that fic for us to know that there’s something that’s been changed from canon.  

So why is it okay for us to say ‘parallel universes so they’re just like that’ for one set of characteristics and not the other?  Why do we shrug and accept tiny, weak Isak but we find it difficult to accept tiny, unimposing Even?  Why is it that a particular set of tropes are an acceptable preference that can just be dumped into a fic as if it’s canon but others can’t be?  And why is that particular set of tropes that’s permissible the set that allows for a heteronormative reading of the text and the pairing?  We do a disservice to the characters when we do just shrug and accept this as just the way it is and don’t examine why we like it.

Because the important thing here is that these tropes are not just an Isak/Even thing; they occur in practically every fandom that has a popular m/m pairing.  I’m not in the fandoms for Harry Potter, Merlin, Supernatural, Glee, Marvel etc and yet I have heard similar comments about pairings in all of them.  Some fandoms even come to blows if you put the ‘wrong’ character in the ‘wrong’ role (Supernatural fandom, you are always fascinating to me).  It was never quite that bad in Skam, but there was a long time when people were vilified if they wrote Even as the bottom and people were tagging bottom Even and making author’s notes because they were so worried that they would call down the wrath of the fandom on their heads.  This is ironic since the only canon hint we have about their sex life strongly suggests that Even was the bottom in that case.  And you know, if this was just harmless fun, people writing what they like and posting it for free, I’d probably be okay with it (though I’d beg for it to be tagged so I could avoid this stuff that I don’t particularly want to read).  But the thing is there are two problems here: 1. It’s so ingrained in this fandom now that we now consider this ‘canon’ so it’s never ever tagged and 2. This type of thing can have an actual effect on actual real people.

Again, this wouldn’t be an issue if there was a wider range of stories in the fandom.  I’ve seen people saying that the Scandinavian fics are much better in this way and that they use those tropes much less so there’s no problem with diversity of ideas in the fandom.  And that’s fantastic, it really is.  I’m genuinely happy for the people who can read those (and I really want more translated and/or to learn enough language so I could read them).  Unfortunately, many people are like me and can’t read them so we are all stuck with the English language fics.  Equally unfortunately, a lot of those fics fall into these tropes.  Many of them include just small moments where some small thing is casually dropped in as if it’s ‘just how it is.’  Isak swims in Even’s clothes, Isak is tiny, Isak has to stand on tiptoes to kiss Even etc etc.  None of these, by themselves, is inherently bad.  The problem comes when they are piled on top of each other, fic after fic (and indeed art after art).  When this is 90% of what we see in fic it becomes a pattern, and soon it becomes accepted as truth.  Except that, in the actual show, none of those things is the truth.  

I’ve said it before, but many of these accepted things are not correct: In canon, Isak and Even share clothes and they fit both of them fine, Isak is shorter than Even but he’s not so tiny that tiptoes are necessary for kissing.  And the major issue with such revisions as if they were canon is that they all play into a certain set of stereotypes.  And those stereotypes all serve to put our m/m pairing in a very heteronormative position.  They trap Isak in the ‘weak, submissive, spoiled, nagging bottom’ role and Even is forced into the ‘dominant, aggressive, controlling, forceful top’ role.  And none of those things is either inherent in the physical attributes of the characters (even if physical attributes reflected stereotypical personality traits, which they don’t) or a true reflection of the characters’ personalities.  Even isn’t aggressive or domineering.  He’s not controlling.  He runs away from his issues rather than facing them, and he hates being controlled.  He’s unlikely to enjoy doing to others what he hates having done to him.  Isak, on the other hand, can be an aggressive little asshole who would punch someone if they looked at him or his boyfriend in the wrong way.  In terms of personality (again, if personality truly reflected these stereotypes, which it doesn’t), it would make much more sense for those roles to be reversed.  Canon Isak acts much more like the ‘top’ in these tropes, and canon Even (gentle, kind, avoidant Even) is closer to the ‘bottom’ stereotype.  (For the record, I’m not advocating for merely turning the tropes on their heads and just having Isak be the strong, dominant one and Even the weak, submissive one; they may be closer to those stereotypes but they still don’t fit into these sets of personality traits.  They’re both strong and confident in some ways and very vulnerable in others.  This is just saying that even if we were sticking to the stereotypes, the way each role is usually ascribed makes little sense with our canon characters). These are such complex, layered, rounded, human characters that reducing them to these ideas seems so limiting; by doing so, we lose so much of what makes them such interesting and powerful characters.  There’s also the fact that, as shown in this meta I wrote, Isak hates the feminized stereotype of gay people and would not thank us for putting him in that role.  And while that might make for a fascinating character study, that’s not what tends to happen in fic.  What tends to happen is that this dynamic is just accepted as true and assumed to be the way things are.  I’d actually love to see a fic where a deeply internally homophobic Isak comes to terms with actually enjoying being a ‘feminine’ gay man (If anyone knows one, please feel free to let me know about it).  But it’s not canon and it’s not what the bulk of fics with this type of Isak are doing.

Now I’m being a little facetious here because, of course, Isak is fictional and his wishes and preferences don’t mean anything except to add a layer of irony to this now-accepted and common idea (unless we’re trying to write a canon Isak in which case we should really pay attention to what he thinks and feels).  But there is a group of people who are affected by this stuff -- lgbt+ people in fandom.  This group is exposed to these ideas over and over and over again.  This group will be taking on these ideas little by little.  No one fic or artwork by itself is an issue, of course.  No one person is ‘the problem’ just like none of us is perfect (I’m here to say I’m sure I’ve fallen, and will fall, into some of this stereotyped stuff myself despite trying not to, and I know I’m horrible at tagging in particular and am trying to get better).  But the problem is that when this is the message, over and over again, it’s very hard to think outside or see outside it.  No matter what fandom we lgbt+ people fetch up in, this message is always there.  And much like Isak in the show, we lgbt+ people in fandom are exposed mostly to this certain set of tropes, this idea that there is an actual defined and acceptable role for gay or other lgbt+ people to take on.  That one character is, and always will be, smaller, weaker, often younger, and therefore more submissive and that the other is, and always will be, larger, stronger, often older, and therefore more dominant.  This is not inherently true, not in real life; people don’t fit into sets of stereotypes and lgbt+ couples don’t inherently have one who is always top and one who is always bottom.  Again, this wouldn’t be an issue except that when we do this, we imply that those actual real life lgbt+ relationships also have a dichotomy which feminizes one half of the pairing in a way that can be harmful when it’s all that’s presented.

In itself, this idea is an issue because it says all relationships fit into the same narrow set of dichotomies.  This isn’t actually a good message for anyone in any relationship (and many heterosexual texts shoehorn similar roles into many romances too), but it’s worse when the relationship portrayed is lgbt+ because it implies rigid gender roles where, by definition, they don’t exist.  It’s also true that even while we see these tropes in heterosexual romances as well, straight people have a much wider diversity in the way their relationships are portrayed.  However, there are far more limited representations for lgbt+ people, particularly in traditionally published, or broadcast, media.  That means that when they turn to fanfiction and the bulk of what they see is this very narrow set of tropes, it’s hard not to take on board those messages.  Isak himself is a good example of why this is bad as I said in that internalized homophobia meta I linked earlier.  He stays in the closet much longer than he might otherwise have done because he had such a narrow set of models of what it means to be gay.

Then, of course, there is the way that the smaller one in the pair can end up being fetishized.  He is always the one who is made to wear the feminine clothing, he is the one whose body is most often exposed in art, he is the one who then acts in a very stereotyped ‘feminine’ way in fic.  These fetishized moments are deeply uncomfortable to come across as an lgbt+ person and it’s an extra unfortunate byproduct of these ways of lgbt+ people being represented.  So while, yes, everyone has a right to write what they like when they’re putting their work out onto the internet for free, it’s also nice for us to take a step back and look at the wider context.  Because none of this happens in a vacuum, and as individuals and as a fandom it can pay to take that step back and ask why this is our preference.  It may seem like a small thing to write a small physical characteristic change which makes one or the other character seem smaller or weaker (or alternatively bigger or stronger) but as part of a wider pattern it all builds on everything else we put out there and creates a fandom where a lot of what we consume just cements in a set of expectations of what it means to be lgbt+ that is then very hard to see past.  

I’m not saying no-one should ever write these fics, of course.  If we want to write Isak being small and needing to go on tiptoes, then we should go for it, but we should be aware of why we’re writing that way (and maybe find a way to put Even on his tiptoes; everyone deserves a good tiptoe kiss moment!)  If we want to write D/s sex, we should do it, but maybe we need to think a bit about how we’re presenting it.  Is it healthy?  Is it properly negotiated?  Why have we decided which character should be in which role?  Stopping and thinking a little can only help the creative output in the fandom; it can give us a wider range of reading and viewing material to choose from, and it makes us more aware of what we as a fandom are doing.  The Harry/Draco fandom in Harry Potter apparently turned this around, moved away from a rigid idea of who was top and who was bottom (and who was dom and who was sub) and it’s flourishing even now, so many years after its canon is over.  If we want to flourish into the future too, maybe we can diversify a little more and be a little more thoughtful and respectful of the people this fandom is supposed to represent, too.  To the lgbt+ people in fandom, who deserve to see ourselves in as much variety as straight people do and who do not deserve to see ourselves fetishized and reduced to tropes over and over again, this could mean a lot.

[vulva-o-queef]

@hestiaq​ (making a new post because I don’t want to keep reblogging a long threat)

I’m really sorry for what you were put through. I sincerely hope you’re in a better situation now and doing okay. That’s horrific.

I remember the Ted Bundy bit you’re talking about- and she’s…. honestly quite right? If enough men have NPD/ASPD a few of them are going to seem intelligible, I think. I don’t really understand what you’re saying about Ted Bundy- if it’s tongue in cheek or not.

Okay, like I said, I haven’t seen this post she made. necromancerdoll just said that larps said sociopaths/psychopaths “can’t perform well in society/function with others.” I know aspd and being a sociopath are often considered the same thing, and I know a lot of them are pretty transparent assholes. Psychopathy isn’t a formal diagnosis at all, but criminal psychologists do use the term, and there’s a pretty solid consensus on what it means. Some people say psychopaths are a subset of sociopaths, and other people say it’s a similar but distinct thing, but in either case, one of the main characteristics of a psychopath (which a sociopath doesn’t, or doesn’t always have) is that they’re smooth and charming, and they use those traits to manipulate others.

My comment about Ted Bundy was sarcastic (and probably not in very good faith, but also wasn’t really related to the main point of all this), because saying psychopaths “can’t perform well in society/function with others” is the opposite of the truth. Ted Bundy was charming, socially adept, approachable, and likable, which was exactly how he managed to lure in many of his victims. He would put on a fake cast and ask women to help him get things into his car, which is what that scene from silence of the lambs is based on. Larps might be totally aware of all that and just phrased something too broadly. The only way it would be relevant to the rest of what I’m saying is, if she really meant to say that psychopaths are socially inept, it would be another example of how she tries to speak as an authority on mental disorders she doesn’t understand. Mostly I was just poking fun.

Women are over-diagnosed. But I don’t understand how Larps pointing out shitty behavior is the same as “diagnosing everyone”. Also, she’s talked about how borderline personality is over-diagnosed and often ascribed to women who are dealing with trauma. She’s also not talking about it from a “I don’t personally like them” only- “these people” are people who are cruel and vicious and play victim when called out on their cruel vicious behavior.

Clearly, you and I interpret the things she says about bpd and ‘cluster b’ in general very differently. For one, diagnosing anyone over the internet is absurd. In my first response to her, I did agree that she has made some good points, mostly about the link between autogynephilia and narcissism. But that’s about noticing an overarching theme within a specific population, and there’s already a decent amount of academic writing about that link. Case studies done by real psychologists. Actual studies done with controls and statistics and so on. And even with stuff like fucking “trans lesbian” dating profiles that larps points out herself, there is some solid evidence there due to the sheer repetition of entitled attitudes, fetishism, etc, the list goes on. My issue is with the way she thinks she understands BPD when she clearly doesn’t, how she applies “cluster b” or bpd to an awful lot of people, largely young ‘transmen’ or radfems she doesn’t like, and how whenever anyone she’s put down for having BPD tells her to cut it out, or tells her that she’s wrong about them, she dismisses anything they have to say by citing “people with bpd are insane,” or telling them they’re being irrational due to their disorder. Basically she’s using it as a shield to avoid being held accountable for the things she says. “Anyone who’s telling me borderline people aren’t irrational is only saying that because they’re borderline, and therefore they’re irrational!” I’m not saying she’s diagnosing “everyone.” And regarding transmen specifically, there are a lot of psychological factors involved in that situation, and for someone who’s so vocal about the cultlike, exploitative, backwards nature of the trans movement, you’d think she would understand how absurd and frankly just plain egotistical it is to think she can simplify all of those psychological factors and dynamics down to “cluster b.” Again - remember that she’s talking about people she’s never met in her life, usually judging from one blog description, a handful of posts, or sometimes nothing more than a fucking selfie.

Even as a younger girl with supposed “BPD” (who even identified with the label)- I wouldn’t have found this stuff offensive, and if it did (which I might have, and sometimes still do)- it’s really that easy to log off or go outside.

That’s good for you, and I respect your perspective. And you’re right, I could just log off and ignore what larps is saying. You can say that about anything anyone says on the internet, and technically it’s true. But I didn’t. The things she’s saying are ignorant, I find them personally hurtful, and I think she’s spreading misinformation, harmful stereotypes, and regressive thinking. I see that she’s saying dehumanizing and belittling things to women on this site who deserve respect, and probably worst of all, I see that there are a lot of people who look up to her, ask her for advice, sometimes idolize her a bit, and many of them will believe pretty much anything she says. She’s feeding them bullshit and some really vile ideas about mental health stigma, and how people with certain disorders (mainly BPD) deserve to be treated. I don’t think she’s the devil incarnate, and I don’t think she’s out here ruining lives and destroying families. I think she’s an asshole with an inflated sense of her own insight and knowledge, and I decided to say something. I could have logged off, but in this case, I didn’t. That’s all.

...I don’t understand how Larps memeing on a Tumblr blog and often posting insightful ideas about personality disorders is “insulting, ignorant, and dehumanizing”.

Yeah I don’t know what you consider “insightful,” but posting the definition of “insane” and copy-pasting a list of bpd symptoms and saying “see? these people are insane,” and tagging her response to my post with #have u ever noticed how all of these people have personality disorders (callback to “anyone who’s telling me borderline people aren’t irrational is only saying that because they’re borderline, and therefore they’re irrational!”) ...doesn’t quite cut it in my book.

She doesn’t bring up cluster b whenever she “feels” someone is acting unreasonable and dramatic- they… are unreasonable and dramatic- at least in whatever context, and people don’t have to dig deep to see who someone really is to be able to just say “no that’s insane, bye”.

Mmmm... I realize you see the situation differently from me, but am I acting insane? I mean, at worst, I’m making the undeniably blunt way she talks to people into something bigger than it needs to be. And yeah, I know... classic cluster b, amiright? But even if that’s the case, even if I’m misinterpreting her views, surely you can see where I’m coming from. And there are quite a few people who have the same objections that I do (mostly radfems, radfem adjacent women, terves, etc.). When she wrote that tag #have u ever noticed how all of these people have personality disorders, isn’t it clear that she was referring to me, as well as the rest of the radfemmish women who have been speaking against this behavior from her lately? Isn’t she making an assumption that I have a personality disorder (which I do not)? 

Do you really think my objection to the way larps talks about bpd is an indication that I have a personality disorder, and that I’m insane? Unreasonable at worst. But yes, she is absolutely using the excuse that those who object to her saying borderline people are irrational are saying so because they’re borderline/irrational. And like I said, I’m hardly the only example of her saying things like this. Someone just reblogged the original post of all of this and said #I just blocked larps bcuz shes been reblogging random old posts from me calling me a cluster b as bait #as far as I know I’m the only quote on quote crazy bihet that doesn’t have a pd? Someone else wrote #I really looked up to larps hence I’m so torn about this #if I didn’t believe she was a smart and decent well meaning person I wouldn’t care. That’s just on that particular post, within the last few hours.

People with personality disorders are diagnosed because they’re anti social and cause harm to those they “love”/interact with and the cluster b community (that I hung around) spend most of their time groveling in misery- despite often constructing their own fantastical narrative of people horrifically abusing them and demanding to be coddled for every emotion.

Some of them, yeah. Not all of them, and not enough to justify making assumptions about people you’ve never met.

What I mean is- the pain that they’re feeling is an offense to ego a LOT of the time. And other’s shouldn’t have to walk around eggshells to make sure that they don’t injure others egos.

Agreed.

Like it’s not real, rudfems don’t enable or contribute to violence against women. None of these women, no matter how mean they are, contributed to the pain I experienced in childhood for being called BPD- actually it was always men and handmaidens.

I didn’t accuse larps, or any other ‘rudefem’ of contributing to violence against women. I know that men were the reason ‘hysteria’ could be diagnosed in the past, and I know that men are the reason bpd is being overdiagnosed in women today. And I’m honestly not even trying to say larps is being misogynistic to the women she says this stuff to (though re-reading, I realize it could easily sound that way). Misogyny or not, dismissing someone’s perfectly measured, reasonable objection as irrational just because they have a bpd diagnosis - which in several cases, dr. larps diagnosed all by herself - is unacceptable, is the same pattern and circular justification used on ‘hysterical’ women in the past, and is particularly bad because, as we agree, bpd is too often being diagnosed as the new version of hysteria. She’s re-enforcing age-old stereotypes about mental illness, and she’s buying into it so completely that she really believes that borderline people are so unreliable that she knows what’s going on in their heads better than they do. Hence saying that borderline people objecting to her backwards stereotyping are doing so out of a kneejerk reaction to a damaged ego, rather than because they know what she’s saying is false.

Also - she isn’t talking about everyone with “diagnosed” BPD.

If that’s what she means, then she’s the one who needs to say it, not you. Again, I respect that you have a different view of this, and I understand your perspective, I can’t believe what others say about her intentions and supposed read-between-the-lines distinctions, when she doesn’t say it herself, and the things she says and the way she acts do not communicate what you’re saying about her.

Meaning, there’s a distinction between people who have been diagnosed and are suffering, and people who have been diagnosed (or not) and are cruel and have a total lack of insight and disregard for other people.

Mental health is complicated. You can’t divide people with bpd into two clean categories like that. That’s not how it works. And you CERTAINLY can’t lump people into the “bad” category simply because they don’t like how you talk about their disorder. You can’t see someone objecting to what you’re saying and assume that YOU know that they’re coming from a “total lack of insight.” People are not psychic. Larps is using the fact that some people with pds have a lack of self-awareness to dodge accountability when it’s convenient for her. It’s complete circular logic - something you would think she would be above, no? “they’re irrational, and when they complain about me calling them irrational, I can shut them down by saying that any complaint they make is irrational.” I know I keep saying this, but it’s true. In my first comment, I pointed out that this is her pattern, and what was her response? hashtag have u ever noticed how all these people have personality disorders. fucking exactly what I said her response would be, because that’s the only excuse she has. 

And yes, insight is a qualifying factor that “””exonerates”””” (quite a loaded word in this context????) someone from being “really” BPD. The thing about BPD is that they will not (or cannot) change- like it’s not a fixed part of your personality, and if it is- you deserve to be called out, and if it isn’t and you still behave like that… you deserve to be called out, still.

Again, no. If this is the case, then we need to make a second definition to separate “REALLY bpd” from “sorta bpd,” since currently they both meet the same diagnostic criteria. It’s not up to you, or larps, to create definitive new categories of mental illness.

I went from being told I had “borderline tendencies” to being diagnosed with full BPD, to basically nothing at all, because I became aware of those patterns, learned how to be objective about my thoughts and emotions, and practiced resisting them to the point where they only show up if I’m already in a really bad state. I don’t consider myself to have - or to have had - a personality disorder, because I’ve almost completely gotten rid of those mental reactions. But I know people who do have BPD, who are self aware, who are trying the same things I did, but the difference is that even though they now have the tools to keep them in check, those mental and emotional reactions are still present for them, and likely always will be. To say they don’t REALLY have bpd because they’re able to control it is frankly insulting. “If you’ve been able to improve it through treatment, you never really had it in the first place.” I know that’s not how you meant it, but that’s what it boils down to.

BPD is not defined by a lack of self-awareness. It’s a pattern of ingrained emotional and mental reactions (and, subsequently, behaviors). These often develop as a method of self defense against external abuse. Or sometimes there’s no abuse and it’s there anyways. The cause isn’t always clear. But the criteria calling these symptoms “pervasive” doesn’t mean the individual is unaware of them. People who know they have bpd, and who are working on treating their bpd still have bpd.

“...deserve to be called out”... it’s not larps’ business to “call someone out” for having bpd. She can call someone out for acting like a shithead, but simply having bpd is not a flaw that needs to be criticized. Your phrasing makes it seem like that’s what you’re saying, and although I’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant, that’s what larps seems to think.

Not only are neither you nor larps qualified to determine the “category” of bpd that people on the internet who you’ve never met fall into, but even IF that’s how she sees it, then, again, she needs to say that herself, and she needs to reflect that view in the way she treats people.

But to conclude, she really does make that explicitly clear that she doesn’t think everyone with BPD is a “screeching, manipulative, hysteric”.

Where

You made a bunch of excuses for her and I still have no reason to believe any of it is true

However, I’m mostly speaking for myself here because I’ve been hanging around tungle for too long and I mostly want to say that this all doesn’t really matter. Like, so many feminists on here ramble on about “but what about bpd women who get misdiagnosed?” yeah I didn’t face brutality at the hands of snarky women on the internet. These are not the people that even enabled the violence that me or many other women with trauma face.

Again, I didn’t say that. I don’t think she’s destroying lives either, I was just frustrated, saw that many other women are frustrated about her too, and I felt like saying something, so I did. That is the extent of my motivations here. I do think that she is spreading harmful stereotypes and misinformation, but I’m under no delusion that she is causing damage on a massive scale. She is, however, just one more raindrop in the proverbial ocean of mental health stigma. Insignificant as a single drop may be, surely it’s no less significant than any of those people with bpd whose bad behavior you say should be called out. If it’s larps’ business to call them out, then it’s just as much my business to call her out.

It’s not up to her and other women like her to clarify every single thing they say- people DO generalize and we should be able to communicate without having to specify for everyone.

I’m not asking her to clarify “every single thing” she says, I’m asking her to stop acting like a shithead, labeling people she’s never met, acting like she’s an authority on personality disorders, and using her actually wildly skewed perception of these disorders which is steeped in regressive, harmful, and demeaning stigma and stereotypes about mental illness in order to manipulate her way out of being held accountable for any of it. I’m not telling her to stop generalizing for the purpose of communication, I’m asking her to stop making inaccurate generalizations based on stereotypes, and to stop using “cluster b” as a catch-all for bad behavior. Just because someone is a shithead, or unreasonable, or overdramatic, doesn’t make them borderline, and it’s insulting to the people with bpd who are truly good people, who also have to deal with their disorder being an internet trend for self-dx’ers to milk sympathy and excuse their abusive behavior (sounds just like what larps would diagnose as cluster b, I know, but it turns out that many people who don’t have bpd exhibit these traits as well), deal with shitty treatment from healthcare providers who read the diagnosis and think they know everything about you before you even walk in the door (back when I had the ‘full bpd’ diagnosis, a therapist said to my face that people with bpd were considered ‘used goods,’ and my current psychiatrist treats me with an absurd and totally unjustified level of suspicion), deal with the massively pervasive stereotypes everyone else holds about bpd (ranging from ‘serial killer’ to ‘used goods’ to ‘fake trend on the internet to get attention’), as well as dealing with - oh yeah - the actual fucking disorder, as well as often comorbid cases of PTSD, depression, anxiety, bipolar, etc.

I’m just saying, it would be a lot more effective and hurt a lot less people you supposedly didn’t mean to target if you just called out the actual behavior instead of “calling out” a disorder. Additionally, I’m pretty sure that people with bpd who do lack self awareness are far more likely to respond to direct criticisms of their behavioral patterns than they are to respond to the label of bpd being “called out.” They’d just see the latter as more fuel for self-pity. It’s a little harder to justify being the victim of someone saying “hey stop being abusive.”

And if that’s not enough reasons for you, consider: people who have shitty behaviors who don’t have a cluster b disorder (yes, larps, they exist) are just gonna hear criticisms of a disorder they don’t have and brush it right off. Call out the actual behavior, and there’s a chance they might recognize it in themselves. It’s like a quadruple win.

A hallmark of bpd/npd/aspd/hpd is having no insight into that, that people say shit, and you take what you can and leave it-her, or me, or anyone else mincing that up….. doesn’t help bpd women live in a world where nobody is going to mince anything up ever. It did not help me when people coddled me, and I intuitively knew that and was deeply frustrated with it.

You’re right that it doesn’t help to have people make excuses for you or ‘coddle’ you. But not being unfair and pushing harmful stigma is not the same thing as “coddling.” Nor is “not mincing” words the same thing as saying things that are untrue, unfair, dismissive, and insulting. Much like Trump saying blatantly racist things is NOT “just telling it like it is.” (and no I’m not comparing you or larps to trump or calling anyone racist. except trump)

Many of the women who have ‘spoken up’ about larps on tungle, I’ve seen on other mediums (fb, wordpress) and they’re often just blatantly manipulative

Really? Am I being blatantly manipulative? Or insane? And, to reiterate, is what I’ve said on her post enough for her to assume that I - and anyone else raising these issues with her - ALL have personality disorders? Is it justification for her to say that I’m “glorifying” ASPD/BPD?

and will never have any insight to the fact that all of this is really a non-issue

I gave you several examples above, and here's your treasure trove:

https://larpsandtherealgirl.tumblr.com/search/cluster%20b

Notice how she loves agreeing with everyone saying they’ve been abused by someone with a cluster b disorder, or otherwise says something negative about a person/people with a cluster b disorder, makes sweeping generalizations and basically uses “cluster b” with the same tone that you would call someone an asshole - that is to say, using the same logical standards of “you said some shit I thought was rude, so I think you’re an asshole & I’m going to call you one” when talking about psychological medical diagnoses?

Yeah, occasionally she claims she’s only talking about The Bad Ones, but that’s a pretty thin excuse when 99% of the time you make no attempt to differentiate, and post things like screenshotted symptoms (which - if the “good ones” with that disorder actually have that disorder - would apply to the “good ones” too) with captions like “these people are insane.”

Again, I realize you see the things she says very differently from me, but surely you can see where I’m coming from. And I would hope that you can see that my having this perspective does not justify saying I have a personality disorder, that I am insane, or that I am “glorifying” ASPD and NPD. I would hope that the similar shit she’s said about several other women who said things similar to what I said would also strike you as unjustified. You can make excuses that she wasn’t literally diagnosing me with a personality disorder, but you can’t make that excuse every single time she says something like this.

but instead “leave radical feminism because it’s so full of mean lesbian separatists” and make huge texts about it everywhere else and how rfeminism is a cult.

Okay... this is an entirely separate and irrelevant subject and I’m not sure why you’re bringing it up. I mean it sounds like you’re saying “people who don’t like being told they’re insane are just butthurt kek” which I really hope is not what you’re saying. I’m pretty sure there are plenty of radical women who would object to being called insane and having their opinions dismissed because of a mental health diagnosis, who would raise their objections and still believe in their politics, probably due to the fact that - in this context - those things have virtually nothing to do with one another.

My point is- she’s not just saying ppl who criticize her have bpd- they often do because people with personality disorders come out of the woodwork to be hideously angry at anyone who calls them abusive or “wrong” and “bad” (whatever that means at any given moment).

In summary: I appreciate and respect that you interpret the things larps says in a very different way, and I’m not trying to tell you that you should be hurt or anything like that. But I can’t accept what I see as excuses that you’re making for her, since she doesn’t offer any of those explanations herself, and I don’t see any evidence of the intentions you’re attributing to her, in her own words or behavior.

At the end of the day, larps is the only person who can speak for larps’ intentions (much like the people whose criticisms larps deflects by claiming they’re motivated by irrational emotion and a threatened victim complex SHOULD be the only ones who can speak for their intentions).

And at the end of the day, larps didn’t show anything but disrespect and a total unwillingness to even consider that the way she speaks to, and treats, people with bpd and people who criticize her portrayal and internet-diagnosing of bpd, might not be 100% faultless.

At the end of the day, larps read what I had to say about her dismissive attitude and manipulative, circular justification for avoiding accountability. Her response was to double down on calling people with borderline “insane,” and double down on her own belief that googling a list of symptoms makes her an expert on psychology, as well as an expert on the thoughts in other peoples’ heads. She used the exact circular, dismissive excuse I was calling out, yet again said that the people criticizing her were all doing so because of their - well “our,” I should say, since she diagnosed me - personality disorders, rather than their actual thoughts, opinions, and perfectly reasonable objections. And then she answered a bunch of messages laughing about how crazy and terrible “cluster b”s are. No, she didn’t literally say “EVERY SINGLE PERSON with bpd is like this,” but come on. She’s not the only person who can recognize patterns of behavior.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Wait, why do people have trans headcanons about Tobias? I love reading about trans headcanons. Soooooooo tell me about trans guy Tobias. 😃😃😃 And link me to trans girl Tobias headcanons if you know where to find them!

Right, so, a lot of people read Tobias’ discomfort in his human body as gender dysphoria, or at least a pretty good sci-fi analogue, which I think is really cool!  I generally don’t write trans Tobias myself because...actually tbh I think I’ve never written a fic where Tobias took his shirt off and/or anything else that would make anatomy a real issue, so you’re totally within your rights to headcanon whatever you like.  My somewhat disinterested grasp on gender makes me a bad candidate to write trans stuff because.  Like.  Listen.  You can use whatever pronouns you want with me and I will absolutely not give a damn.  I’ve gone by five different first names falling everywhere from feminine to androgynous to masculine (some people call me Gabe), I’ve been called sir, miss, ma’am, and you there, and honestly: I don’t care.  So like...I am not writing gender dysphoria stuff because I don’t have a good handle on gender in the first place.  

As far as the trans girl Tobias headcanons go, I don’t have any of them on deck to be linked because it’s not my jam, but I’m sure someone will step up to the plate here.  I did read a really excellent fic one time where Tobias acquired Rachel and she and Rachel went to the mall on a date and it was pretty cute, but also it is lost to the depths of my AO3 history.

Regarding trans boy Tobias, on the other hand, I feel it a little more.  Hear me out here.

Tobias is literally flat out tortured by bullies at school (MM4), which, listen, I went to a really small parochial school where their handle on the concept of trans-ness was dubious at best.  First gym class, Tobias is basically screwed, even though his uncle probably doesn’t give enough of a damn to say what he can or can’t put on his paperwork.

Tobias mentions several times that his uncle doesn’t care about him, but was can all basically agree that he’s probably also abusive as well as being neglectful.  More to the point, though, Tobias says that his aunt cared more when he was younger (before he came out maybe?) and that she mostly used him as free labor once he was older.  So in this situation I headcanon that the majority of the time, Tobias’ uncle doesn’t give a shit what Tobias calls himself and is therefore a nominal improvement on his aunt, who still calls him Tabitha and yells at him every time he cuts his hair off.  Tobias at some point tells Rachel offhand that, yeah, his uncle hit him from time to time, but at least he usually called him “kid” or whatever, and Rachel almost gets on a goddamn plane to go beat the shit out of his aunt.  (I firmly headcanon that in any universe, Tobias spends minimum one hour a month talking Rachel and eventually Ax out of hunting down his extended family.)

The Animorphs all know he’s trans and are ready to Fight about it.  This is generally the reason that I prefer trans boy Tobias rather than trans girl Tobias, because I like AUs that fit reasonably well into canon and in order for Tobias to be a trans girl, he would have to be in the closet with literally every single person he knows.  He would be lying constantly to the Animorphs about who he is.  And honestly his life is so terrible that I can’t stand to put him through that, and moreover: don’t come here with your The Animorphs Don’t Really Trust Each Other nonsense.  Get out of my house with that.  I will talk for days about the breakdown of team dynamics toward the end of the war, but these kids would fucking die for each other, don’t come at me with your Jake Is Transphobic shit.  I’ll deck you, straight up.

BOOK 23 SPOILERS: The Ellimist shows Elfangor the future so that Elfangor knows to write his letter to his son and Tobias has to work really hard not to burst into tears in front of Visser Three about it.  Relatedly, Loren is a disabled woman who married an alien, I am 100% sure that Tobias coming out to her would be 0% of a problem.  “I’m so glad you trusted me with this and I want you to be happy, but also we are at war so maybe this is not the best time to have a heart-to-heart.”

Listen...Andalite culture is such a hidebound train wreck that I have no idea off the top of my head if they would be fine with the trans thing.  I have some strict-ish headcanons about how marriage works (literally intended for reproduction, as in: usually arranged, often a friendly formality that only lasts as long as there’s a child to raise, and structured so as to match couples based on their ability to parent together and their genetic compatibility), but nothing hard and fast about sex or gender.  Except that I will have my tragic gay aliens and therefore: same-gender love matches exist.  But even if Andalites aren’t down with the concept of the gender spectrum, Ax will have known Tobias for most of a year before Tobias’ biological sex becomes an issue that even exists in the physical world, and I’m pretty sure he could be talked around.

I feel like the morphing thing has great potential for transgender usage, which I guaran-damn-tee you the Andalites have not thought of (I have a lot to say about how the Andalites seem...pretty uncreative with the morphing thing).  In a happier world, after the war Tobias admits publically that he’s trans and that it’s part of the reason he’s uncomfortable in his human form, and Frolis maneuvers himself a new human body that looks a lot like his old one with a few major exceptions.  A feather, or a silhouette of a hawk in flight, becomes a familiar Trans Pride mark, with people carrying flags and wearing tattoos at marches.  Rachel has never been more delighted with the world, and picks up a new crusade.  She only gets arrested a few times.

Oh, also let me take this moment to give you a few other headcanons about queer Animorphs.

Jake: actually Jake is straight because I have never seen someone who is so obviously a Straight Ally Doing His Very Best but in like every aspect of his life.  He’s doing a good job and he’s the first person Marco comes out to.

Marco: B I S E X U A L as fuck and dtf basically anyone.  This is straight up canon, literally any given Marco book includes him commenting on at least one person’s attractiveness.  I think the only Animorph who does not routinely get hit on is Tobias and I’m willing to ascribe that to Marco’s very understandable fear of death by acute grizzly bear.

Cassie: li’l bit bisexual, li’l bit gnc, lot bit too busy to care.  I feel like Cassie is also demisexual because...she’s so much about the person.  Whenever she talks about Jake and why she’s attracted to him, sure, she’ll talk about his eyes or his smile, but it’s usually about how his real smiles are rare and therefore special, or about how he seems so confident and adaptable under the gun, or about how much he cares about his causes.  Thus: demi Cassie.

Rachel: listen I don’t know because I feel like Rachel probably wouldn’t bother to take the time to have an identity crisis ever, she would just be like “update everyone I’m also into girls” and move on with her life.  People would ask her what her sexuality was and she would give them a disdainful look and say “not your fucking concern” and go on about her day.  Rachel goes to her deathbed without ever giving a single fuck about anything, up to and including what she should or should not call herself.  (Oh but obviously Melissa Chapman is a lesbian and has been in love with Rachel since they were kids)

Ax: cinnamon buns are Ax’s One True Love and while I do feel like he’s probably pansexual and kind of blithely disinterested in the human parameters of gender, I also feel like he’s the kind of person to tell people out loud and in public that his sexuality is Cinnabon.  He learns this kind of joke from Marco and the others all immediately despair of them both.  Jake just.  Washes his hands of this whole situation.  He’s out.  He’s done.  Ax is beyond help.

Tobias: even in universes where I write Tobias as a cis boy, please assume that he is definitely bisexual and also likes to wear eyeliner.  It is the only makeup he can successfully apply except for lipstick (lipstick is pretty idiot-proof as long as you can match colors), but his winged eyeliner is so good that Rachel sometimes has him do hers.

[lexyeevee]

Correcting the record

Some people are saying some things again, and I don't really have a masterpost of why those things are off the mark, so here is one. I guess I'll update this if anything else spicy crosses my radar, for ease of linking.

(That doesn't mean to send me new things; I don't need to be kept constantly up to date on the latest hot takes from Breitbart Jr.)

I know this is long, which means most people won't bother to read it. But hey, that means it must be true, right? That's how it works for callouts, so surely it works the same way here.

Foreword

KiwiFarms is a forum that grew out of a wiki dedicated to the sustained stalking and harassment of an autistic trans woman. Their biggest subforum is called "lolcows", referring to the idea that certain people are valued only for the forum's ability to squeeze mockery out of them.

This is the source of much of the scandalous "truth" about glip and myself.

They don't lie, not exactly. Instead, they find a single tweet or sentence somewhere, then concoct a story that fills in the details. That way, they can present the original source as "proof". A casual reader will notice that the source matches their story, and take the story as true. The source doesn't prove the story, but that's a subtle distinction.

Sometimes they'll even claim that the source says something slightly different than it actually does, and still most people won't notice. Maybe the order of sentences gets reversed. Maybe "this will happen" is spun into "I want this to happen". Close enough.

Once they have one reason we're horrible, they can take for granted that we're horrible, which justifies interpreting the next snippet as proving that we're horrible. The more horrible we appear to be, the easier it is to justify digging ever deeper.

They collect mountains of these stories, which makes it very difficult to push back. No matter how many individual tales we respond to, there will always be more. It's actually a well-known poor debating tactic, but it works.

A huge post about how awful someone is looks like a documentary, even though it's carefully constructed to only "report" on things to make the subject look bad. Things we've disproven or apologized for years ago still show up in callouts. Just a few days ago, I saw someone link a post that didn't even exist any more; it had been replaced by an apology. Neither the person who linked it nor the person they linked it to seemed to notice this.

Juicy gossip spreads very quickly, both among people who love gossip and people who genuinely want to do the right thing. Retractions and corrections are boring; nobody spreads those. Besides, if you spread something awful about someone, and it turns out to be false, what does that say about you? Once you've spread gossip, if you want to save face, it's in your best interest to insist the gossip is true — whether it really is or not.

Other people are discouraged from pushing back on our behalf, since that risks attracting the same scrutiny. Besides, if you try to say someone isn't abusive, you may get called an abuse apologist. That makes no sense at all, but it doesn't matter.

And there's no downside to doing any of this. If something false spreads to thousands of people, who's accountable for it? Nobody. You can outright make things up about people and nothing bad will happen to you — but if it's just a misunderstanding, all the better.

Keep all that in mind as you read this.

glip did not refer to autistic people as emotionless robots

Let's start out with a particularly great example of callouts in action. The log screenshot used as "proof" that glip said this about autistic people actually proves it false, because the conversation was:

pk: know what also pk: the section on sociopaths was creepy pk: they’re like emotionless robots

glip/eevee didn't really self-diagnose as autistic

It's weird to be accused both of thinking we're autistic and of insulting autistic people.

But no, not really? We've both observed that lists of symptoms are conspicuously familiar. We don't make any effort to call ourselves autistic, we don't claim to know anything about autism, and our lives haven't changed as a result of this observation.

I don't really get why people care about self-diagnosis anyway. I "self-diagnosed" with ADD before going to a psych who then regular-diagnosed me with ADD and gave me magic brain pills for it.

eevee did not put glip's boobs online

Another good example, though I don't think this ever spread beyond the confines of the forum thread.

I have a public filedump, full of files. One file is called "bewbs.jpg", and unsurprisingly is a photo of some boobs. Someone assumed the photo was of glip's boobs, and so it became truth.

Surprise! It's not. I don't know who's in the photo. It's some image I found online, probably over a decade ago. I don't have the slightest idea why I uploaded it. You can even check out the metadata and see that it was saved from Photoshop 4, which I've never used. Also, Photoshop 5 came out in 1998, when glip was 8, so... prooobably not them.

our cats poop a lot i guess

No, seriously, I've heard this complaint. Our cats do poop a lot, but I'm not really sure what it's supposed to say about us, or what we're supposed to do about it. Corks?

glip is not abusive

The "abusive" label is usually ascribed to a massive callout post by PengoSolvent, but he never said that. He did say "potentially abusive", but left the conclusion up in the air. The difference seems significant.

Oh, and he later recanted, and he's now on good terms with glip. Turns out it was all a series of misunderstandings.

Also, I've been dating glip for nearly a decade now and I'm pretty happy with them, but for some reason, nobody seems to think that counts for anything.

fieldoftheother's level 100 post is bad

Previously.

glip is not trying to get kids to see their porn

I've seen a couple people cite this line from the Discord, claiming it means glip wants 13-year-olds to read forflor:

my legacy will be 13 year olds secretly reading forbiddenflora and realizing they're gay and/or trans

But this was said because people were talking about having themselves been young teenagers who secretly looked at porn and realized they were gay or trans. It was a tongue-in-cheek observation: teenagers will look at porn one way or another, and if they read forflor, its themes may very well jostle some realizations.

I've also been told that glip must want everyone who reads the main comic to also read the porn, because they put character development in the porn. But if that were the case, why would they have the sites separate in the first place? How would anyone even know there's porn, just from reading the main site? The only place that even comes close to linking is in a heavily-disclaimered blurb at the bottom of a few character profiles, on the volunteer-edited wiki, which neither of us even knew about until someone told me in response to this very post. This makes no sense as a master scheme.

The truth is much more mundane: glip feels attached to their characters and likes to make comics with character development.

It is true that glip doesn't care if teenagers seek out their porn. I don't care either? We're not your parents, and we have no way of stopping determined horny teens anyway. It's tagged and separated so people who don't want to see it don't have to, but if you're trying to seek out porn then that's your own business. Just, uh, please don't try to talk to us about it, that's super weird.

glip drew a porn comic with an underage character, but...

This is true. They later took the comic down, and they've since talked about how it was a way of wrangling with their own experiences with CSA.

glip is not transphobic

I think people say glip is transphobic because their comic has a girl with a dick who doesn't hate her dick?

Well, er, newsflash: not all trans girls hate their dicks? It seems like this complaint is implying glip should only depict stereotypical self-hating trans characters, and I don't really understand how that's any kind of improvement.

Ironically, I've seen this claimed multiple times by people who refer to glip with the wrong pronoun.

glip's irc does not prey on children

Someone we knew as spaggledagger claimed that people hit strongly on her on our IRC, despite knowing that she was only 13 and had never had any kind of sexual interaction. She also claimed to have gone to the police and asked them some details.

I've been over this before, but the short version is:

She never mentioned she was 13 until the day she left the IRC for good (because of alleged ageism on our part — she'd invited a friend and the two of them were being incredibly disruptive). On the contrary, she made frequent reference to drinking and having had sex, so by all accounts she presented herself as an adult.

The thing she says the police told her is technobabble. It makes no sense at all.

We cannot find any shred of evidence of the conversations she says she had. However, we did find one thing she claimed was said to her — it was in public, and wasn't directed at her at all.

She mentioned having lied to get an ex-boyfriend in trouble. We also got a message from the moderator of another small community who'd interacted with her before, warning us that she tried to get back at them for banning her by claiming elsewhere that she'd been abused.

She claimed to be paranoid because we mentioned living near her, but she told us where she lived, after someone else in the channel mentioned living in the same area. We've never lived anywhere near either of them.

So this was someone with (by her own admission!) a history of lying to screw over older people, who never told us her age, who supposedly got incomprehensible advice from police, and whose few concrete details were completely wrong.

This particular claim appears to be a total fabrication. To get back at us for not wanting her friend around, I guess?

eevee does not support legalizing child porn

I once read an article that argued for it, and I said "I'm not sure I disagree" — referring to the argument, which was that outlawing a photo of one particular kind of crime was inconsistent. I'm bothered by inconsistency, but obviously it wasn't right to just legalize child porn, therefore the argument must be wrong. So I thought about it out loud.

That's why I also asked someone why a photo of a particular type of crime should be illegal. It wasn't rhetorical; I genuinely wanted to know what the other person thought about the inconsistency.

I wasn't especially clear about this at the time, and it didn't occur to me that my lazy phrasing could be taken as active support for abolishing the law. It was also pretty insensitive to treat a serious topic like debate club — especially one that almost certainly had impacted some of my audience. I know I upset a couple people, and I'm sorry for that.

The tweets have since been dug up and transformed via a game of telephone to "supports legalizing child porn", "has talked extensively about legalizing child porn", and straight up "is a pedophile". Sorry, no. I just like nitpicking, and I made a very poor choice of thing to nitpick.

I've also tweeted about this before.

eevee is not trying to help kids to look at porn

In a FurAffinity journal from 2009, I played armchair lawyer over FA's handling of minors and their access to porn. FA had (and, I assume, still has?) a policy that if an admin finds out a user is underage, their account will be prevented from seeing porn — "agelocked" — until they turn 18. This was usually said to be for legal reasons. I was saying there weren't any legal reasons.

The claim is thus that I wanted teenagers to look at porn for some kind of nefarious reasons. I don't know what those reasons could be? I didn't even draw porn at the time, so it's not like I was trying to lure anybody in or whatever. My actual motives were much more mundane:

I like nitpicking. See above.

I'd seen a few cases where people had done some very invasive snooping to find someone's age. I thought that kind of near-stalking — especially targeted at someone already suspected to be underage — was pretty creepy, and I saw the policy as encouraging it.

glip had been drawing porn since they were 16, mostly in the form of commissions, and at one point had been agelocked. They were 19 when I made the post, so it was still relatively fresh in my mind, and I was annoyed that the policy had landed squarely on glip's main source of income.

(That said, FA is a rickety thing, and I don't think they'd ever tried to agelock a porn artist before. I believe the result was that glip could still post porn, but then not see their own work. I don't know if that was ever fixed.)

eevee did not let her cat die rather than give him medicine

I heard this one second-hand so I don't know exactly what's being said, but regardless I am fucking livid about it. It boils down to a sentence from my old tumblr:

given that atenolol’s most common side effect is lethargy and styx already spends most of his time asleep i don’t think i’m going to do this

My cat, Styx, started rapidly losing weight around the beginning of April. I spent the next month and several thousand dollars being shuttled between vets, trying to find a cause. At one point I was sent to a cardiologist, who — shockingly — diagnosed him with a heart condition.

He was prescribed atenolol, a beta blocker and the usual treatment for the heart condition. I was hesitant to give it to him, since also on the table was FIP — a disease with no cure and a life expectancy measured in days. Beta blockers can cause lethargy, Styx was already sleeping most of the time, and I didn't want to cost him his last few waking hours for no reason.

I decided to wait a few days for the vet's formal diagnosis. What I got was the post linked above, saying the most likely cause was FIP; the heart condition wasn't even on the list. So, yes, I decided against the vet's recommendation, and did not give him the medication for the condition he probably didn't have that wouldn't have affected him until years later anyway. There was never any indication that the atenolol would've helped his FIP in any way; I interpreted the vet's advice as being just in case he had the heart condition instead.

A week later, the vet finally started talking about looking into experimental treatments for FIP — a full ten days after the first mention of a disease that can kill cats in as much time.

Four days after that, we buried the cat I loved. He'd just been sitting in pools of his own diarrhea — the same thing that had ultimately led a vet to recommend we put down our elderly cat.

That month was by far the worst thing I've ever been through. I did everything I could think to do, burned through cash, spent every waking moment with him, and it wasn't enough. I still can't reread his eulogy; it's the only thing that makes me cry.

Extremely cool that some jerks who are desperate for a reason to hate me are now trying to use my dead cat against me.

eevee/glip are not... usually... mean online

It's not uncommon to see people calling us super mean based on a tweet thread that they've carefully cropped to remove the part where the other person was being an asshole. Maybe check for that first.

We get enough assholery that we have fairly low bars for who qualifies as an asshole, too, so there might be false positives. If that's you, ah, sorry. We try our best!

But also, it's common for someone to be a dick while feigning politeness, and we tend to have little patience for that, whereas other people have seemingly infinite patience for it. If you see us snapping for seemingly no reason, we probably got a very different read off of someone.

Final thoughts

I'm sure there's more, but hopefully this is enough that you're starting to suspect a pattern. Most of what we're called out for is wildly misinterpreted or misreported just enough to be damning.

These are people who misgender us and use glip's old name, then call us transphobic in the same breath. They follow our every public move with bated breath, while being largely anonymous or sockpuppets themselves. They show up as one of the top referrers every time I publish a game on itch. They've dug up a comment I made on a friend's LiveJournal from 2004 and implied nefarious explanations. They archived the entire "styx" tag on my old Tumblr, meaning they read everything I went through and their only takeaway was some new "dirt". They've taken the worst things that have ever happened to both glip and I, and used them as blunt weapons to say we're awful. They put this crap in the Tumblr floraverse tag, inflicting it on people who just want to share fanart. They hide in our IRC and our Discord, waiting for new logs they can post and reinterpret. Only completely locked-down spaces are safe from their obsessive eyes, and they openly speculate about what happens behind closed doors as well.

Does this sound like a reasonable way to behave? If a single person acted this way towards someone else, anyone would be rightly horrified — this is straight up stalking. But people reblog their callouts and never question their tactics. I guess stalking is okay if we "deserve" it, and we deserve it because we're awful, and you know we're awful thanks to the stalking.

Here's my question: if they know all their existing stuff is true, why do they keep looking? Ostensibly they believe that we're both proven to be complete monsters, so what else are they hoping to find? Do you think I accidentally tweeted a confession to a murder? Does my old MySpace contain the plans for an orbital superlaser?

Or look at it this way: who have we hurt in the however many years this has been going on? Where are all the actual victims of our cruelty? Who has been protected by this muckraking, and from what?

They have no interest in what's true, only in what's titillating. It's right there in the name of the forum: "lolcows", not "investigative journalism".

And, hey. If you want to hate us for actual reasons, please go ahead. I'm thoughtless and insensitive at times, and I'm bad at maintaining friendships. glip is short with anyone who appears to be acting in bad faith. We both fuck up sometimes. If any of that has put you off, fine. If you think we're insufficiently horrified by the idea of a 17-year-old somewhere sneakily looking at a drawing of a boob, sure, hate us for that too.

But don't make stuff up to fulfill your power fantasy of defending the world from a cartoon villain. Yeah, you — I'm sure a bunch of Kiwi folks are eating up every word of this post simply because I've written it. Hot tip: the first thing to enter your brain is not automatically the truth. How cruel are you being if you're wrong?

[mantra4ia]

#RenewSense8: A summary of my call to Netflix Customer Service

Our conversation was quite pleasant and civil, as it should be with customer service. They are there to help, treat them nicely. #KindnessIsSexy I’ve given a summary of what we discussed and the Netflix (US) agent transcribed to me, in case anyone would like to make a similar call to #RenewSense8 As it was a long conversation, I’ve divided into 5 parts under the “continued reading” break. If you’re a U.S. Sense8 fan and wish to call, the number is: 866-597-7172

ACT 1: Self introduction: 

My family have been subscribers to Netflix since May 2015, and we were frustrated and broken by the cancellation of Sense8.

ACT 2: The Merits of Sense8: 

Diversity in cast, culture, sexual orientation, etc. How it doesn’t whitewash and how it’s positively significant to me as a viewer that a trans character is actually being portrayed by a great actress who is a transwoman.

Sense8 is unique because its long overdue we talk about the things they do: Relationship equality, not just equality broadly but by showing us the actual day to day interaction of those character relationships (ex: a lesbian couple at pride, two men kissing on the beach, where else will we get “from queer to eternity” on TV?), and the subsequent struggles and prejudiced faced, women’s incarceration, global politics and poverty, worldwide cultures different to our own as viewers, and it introduces stereotypes only to break them.

I went on to say that even while sense8 addresses the elephant in the room that we are in a time of being very fearful and critical of “the other” with sensates being hunted, at the same time the show promotes global awareness, looking out for each other, and a sense of global community (as a human race) at a time when we need that message to be heard most in the real world (I then proceeded to quote Hernando’s “art mirrors life“ speech where he talks about how art reflects both the artist and the viewer)

It is a culturally relevant, of the times show (at which point I quoted Capheus “Building Bridges (Not Walls)” speech)

How sense8 is smart TV that doesn’t tone down or pull punches, and that you don’t watch passively (when you are in you are in): you binge and share and engage / interact with the community of fans

ACT 3: Merits and Vision of Netflix

source and source #2 talk about how Netflix corevalues are, among others, Creativity, Intelligence, Honesty, Communication, and Passion. I highlighted how this alligns exactly with the cast and crew of Sense8, and it’s messages to fans.

I went on to talk about why I believe(d) in and support Netflix nearly exclusively. In my case I’m not a patron of any other streaming service and with rare exception my family doesn’t watch broadcast or network TV because…

We don’t want to support the growing habit of networks to be ‘trendy’ in the sense that they are quick to make-and-yank shows as the winds of popularity turn, without proper promotion or support of their writers, cast and crew. I cited my recent favorites subjected to this ex) ABC Forever, NBC Emerald City. I followed by saying I have admired Netflix exactly because I felt till recently they don’t ascribe to those practices. You don’t hang shows out to dry, you don’t go with what’s trendy; you go with what’s well written and executed with passion and you let it speak for itself.

I told the agent that I started service with Netflix specifically for Sense8, for me it was their flagship.

I continued by highlighting that while I started with Sense8,  I stayed because of their original series content; up until now I’ve felt Netflix is supposed to set that bar that networks catch up to (Ex: Sense 8, Medici, etc) in the same way that Sense8 sets a bar not just for talking about cultures, norms, and love, but showing multi-cultures, challenging norms with questions, and sharing the full spectrum of love.

(continued) Part of the companies vision: Netflix makes the shows and movies that won’t otherwise get made, and you give second life to the shows that earn it with great characters. (Ex: Longmire, The Killing). It is the refuge for the weary, discarded characters yearning to speak great stories. Continue in that tradition by renewing sense8.

Netflix VP of Original Series Cindy Holland says “Never has there been a more truly global show…which is only mirrored by the connected community of deeply passionate fans all around the world” but the CEO Reed Hastings by contrast said the platform hasn’t canceled enough shows. “…we have to take more risk, you have to try more crazy things, because we should have a higher cancel rate overall.“ Well then why cancel the show that arguably takes the most risks by combining characters, high action and representation!

I concluded by saying that Netflix became a success as a streaming service because it prided on “Knowing What Customers Want Before They Do” and “Leading, Never Following” and went on to discuss how canceling Sense8 flies in the face of that, which tells me it’s no longer the same company that leadss.

ACT 4: Real Solutions to suspected problems

I’ve heard from several cast on social media and reporting outlets that cost was the main factor in the sense8 cancellation and that if Netflix truly realized that value of their show and its audience, then it should rework budget and cost cutting solutions as opposed to the ill-thought out pulling the trigger. This series in on par with the scope of “Game of Thrones,” so it deserves a certain level of discretionary spending based on a great vision. 

But to play along with cutting back, Sense8 has built the world in s1 and 2, and established a strong character driven story, so you could, if needed, cut back on number of locations and travel. Would I miss those shots? Yes. Could we still make a great sense8? Yes, because it’s not about globetrotting! That’s wonderful, but at the heart it’s about Lito, Sun, Wolfgang, Kala, Will, Riley, Nomi, Capheus, and crew. If they are written well within their cultural upbringing, viewers will still watch. Fans come for the imagery, they stay for the characters,

Or you could cut back the number of episodes per season, 12 to 6 or even *cringe* 4.

Worst case scenario: if you still come to the conclusion that you have to cancel the series, give it a third season (not simply a cliffhanger or one-off episode) to properly conclude a great story!

ACT 5: My next action as viewer

This is the first time I have seriously considered cancelling our service because Sense8 was dropped.

As a viewer, I usually say “I hope Netflix picks up XYZ show” because up to now Netflix has been my standard for hope, but today was the first time I caught myself saying “I hope Hulu buys the rights to this Netflix show.”

I will drop my service on June 5th (original premiere date of sense8) at part of the #RenewSense8 twitter blackout campaign. I’ll renew my subscription when this show gets another season. Until then, I’m giving my business to another service.

Lastly, in closing I thanked the agent and asked if there were other follow up steps I could take.

She gave me an address which I could make a written complaint and request.