#its more like ‘these people see gender as something inherent and your identity contradicts that’

[fite-club]

it’s still so sad when trans guys are like “transandrophobia is real, i lost my support systems when i started taking T” like i’m sorry baby but that’s just transphobia. they don’t particularly care that it’s a man you’re transing into, it’s the transing at all that makes those people stop being around you. losing friends/etc after transition is not a transmasc-specific experience, it’s a trans-specific experience. i’m not downplaying anyone’s struggles when i say this i’m literally pointing out the systematic oppression you experienced and calling it the correct name

[system-of-a-feather]

Something that's worried us about fusion is how seemingly opposite or contradictory identities can become cohesive and integrated without causing further issues. From a trans perspective, some parts of us have dysphoria over the fact we have breasts now, others have dysphoria over the fact we haven't had surgery, and others still would have dysphoria if we were to have surgery.

I don't know if you have experiences with anything similar but if you have any insights into how bridging the gap may be possible it would really help <3

God yeah no, as a nonbinary system this shit fucking is hard so I feel you. I'm actually having to sit here a bit to think about how I would explain how thats ended up going with us. The short answer is, we kind of just stopped thinking too heavily about the long term goals as explicitly and trying to define our experiences into one box or another and rather than trying to debate what we'd do, we started to largely settle on "lets explore the options and be open to experiences on both and all ends and live out BOTH goals and see how / if our complex feelings on the matter change"

Because honestly - and I am hesitant to say this somewhat cause it might come off as upsetting, 'transphobic', or triggering to people who are more In the Depths of Dysphoria cause it really didn't help distressed parts in the past as much - but you would be surprised how much more okay and navigable topics are in practice than they are in your head. The world is a lot more diverse and things can be not that bad, not as bad, or completely different than you expect and with what dysphoria may tell you it would be - in both directions of 'no surgery' and 'yes surgery'.

I don't really think that fluidity of gender identity and expression really ever goes away, and honestly, it really doesn't have to. Your gender as confusing and complex and contradictory as it is, is still inherently cohesive in the sense gender doesn't have to be cohesive or permanent. Of course that doesn't help the situation with deciding permanent changes (like surgery), but at that point that's also just the curse of being nonbinary / genderfluid / bigender / polygender / pangender. And this isn't to downplay how uniquely frustrating it can be as a system, because god having those fluid changes have full on voices, personalities and identities DOES NOT help with it, but its to say that having that contradicting, confusing, and conflicting gender experience is not inherently pathological - at least not in the DID sense.

It's just stupid gender issues /affectionate /lh /being trans is suffering sometimes I swear to god/ /joking

The best way we've navigated this though is to just focus on the current present, focus on exploring and testing what is okay, helps, and hurts, focus on our current in-the-moment feelings about things as we explore it, focus on deeply understanding and talking to parts about how they are feeling in the current moment about things and keep that discussion open ended and genuinely accepting, and focus on what your feelings to their feelings are. It's a long process but explore, listen to yourself and listen to your parts WITHOUT trying to argue or push a long term future agenda or plan or anything. Just listen and focus on the present exploration.

Doing so largely helps paint a clearer image of your collective experiences and what are things that you Must Have and things that you Must Not Have as well as creative ways to Sometimes Have things and Sometimes Not Have things. You'd be pretty surprised how much exploration and focus on the present, short term possibilities can come up with some really creative ways to embrace a non-traditional expression and way of living that doesn't fit into boxes as clearly

And also, most importantly, work with a gender-informed therapist if you can cause they can be SUPER helpful in bridging and connecting experiences and adding suggestions.

[gingerswagfreckles]

Queer is my fave word, thanks for posting about that book, I'm gonna try to get a copy! It's just awesome to have an umbrella term for not feeling cis-hetero but not entirely certain where you fit under the umbrella yet.

Ahh yes!! You mean Gay New York by George Chauncey? That book is THE book on queer history in the US (it's really not just about NYC, but it is focused there). Not only is it the most meticulously well researched book I have EVER read, it is just. So brilliant in how it analyses the construction of and intersection of gender, sexuality, biological sex, class, race, and society. Like I read it for a class in freshman year of college and trust me I was already EXTREMELY liberal and well versed in queer discourse. Yet it completely I mean COMPLETELY changed my understanding of not only sex and gender but just like. What identity is, how much of what we see as static and natural are actually very contextual social constructs. And it really showed in a very concrete and reality based way how every identity exists and is defined through the context of its environment, and that while our experiences are very inherently real, the lines we draw around these experiences to define them are not. Like. The existence of a queer identity the way we generally think of it now did NOT exist in the same way throughout history. The intersection of so many facets of life have been interpreted so completely differently throughout history and in different places and social contexts. The queer community has never been some static and well defined club that one is or is not a member of. It is and always has been a nebulous and highly changeable social network of people with common experiences and interests who have defined their own communities in wildly different ways depending on where you look. Trying to strictly define who does or does not belong in or who has or hasn't existed in the queer community throughout history is completely pointless, because in reality we are talking about an absolutely enormous group of people who have been variously connected to and socially isolated from others, who have seen their own identities and their own communities in completely different ways.

It really highlighted for me how pointless 99% of the discourse on this website is, and how much almost all of it boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding of what identity is. NONE of the identities we think of as inherently real are inherently real, and arguing about who should be included in a community or who's identities are "valid" just shows that you think the framework through which you understand sex and gender is universal rather than cultural, contextual, and highly individual. Like, identities overlap! Identities step on each others toes!!! Words and labels change, and people do not universally agree on what they mean at any point in time!!! You would not believe how many people who you would think of as being part of the queer community didn't think of themselves as part of the queer community, and you would not believe how many people who you do NOT think of as part of the queer community DID see themselves as part of it, and were accepted!!

Like, for example, the interpretation of what it even meant to be "homosexual" was SO different depending on what period on time you look at, what location, what social and financial class these people were part of, what racial identity they saw themselves as (and that's a whole 'nother can of worms!) Sexuality was often seen as MUCH more connected to gender performance and sexual roles one took than it is today, and a lot, I mean a LOT of men who always topped did not see themselves as homosexual/gay/part of the queer community at all, especially in working class communities. And!! Guess what!! This is the part that will really blow your mind!!!

T H E Y W E R E N ' T W R O N G!!!!!!!!!!!

They were not WRONG about how they defined their identities or how they saw themselves in relation to a certain social community!! Because they were using their OWN social and sexual framework to interpret their identities and their actions!!! And saying they were WRONG in their interpretation fundamentally misunderstands that the criteria YOU use to measure whether someone is part of an identity or social group is not any more correct or real than the criteria THEY used! Saying these people were "wrong" is to impose one's own modern and highly contextual social framework on people from the past-- and TBH it's fine to see people from the past through modern lenses, and to recognize that they would be seen as gay/a certain identity by modern standards. That's fine! But the way they saw themselves then wasn't wrong, it was just different, and your criteria for what you see as gay or straight or part of a community is just as arbitrary and based on the context of your environment as theirs was.

People like to argue with this all the time, saying things like that these individuals were just suffering from internalized homophobia, gender bias, ignorance of what this or that identity "really" means, and these people are really really really misunderstanding the point. These are usually the same people who say things like "words mean things!!" when points like the one I'm making are brought up, because they continue to misunderstand how much these words yes, mean things, but mean things within historical and cultural contexts that are NOT shared by the entire world. Like, ok, you may say our example man from the 1910s is gay whether he recognized that or not, because he engaged in homosexual acts. But what does it mean to have homosexual sex? To have sex with someone of the same biological sex? Well what is biological sex, and how do we define what makes ones biological sex the "same" or "different" from your own? Is it someone with the same type of genitals as you? That's not a universally shared opinion, and the way you define the "types" of genitals are not universally shared either. What if I told you that there have been cultures throughout history who have categorized biological sex through the length of the penis, with people with shorter penises being seen as a separate sex than those who have longer penises? So two people with penises could have sex with each other and not be understood as having sex with someone of the same sex, in that culture!

Oh, that's not what you meant? That's wrong? Why? Why? Because your personal understanding and your culture's general perception of what biological sex is is more valid and real than that culture's? Why? WHY? Could you really explain why, or is it just that the difference is making you uncomfortable, because it threatens your perception of a LOT of the ideas you see as inherently real?

And we could do the same thing with the ACT of sex! I mean, what is sex? What physical acts are sexual, and what aren't? Is it just someone putting a body part inside of another person's body in some way? Well what about handjobs and other kinds of outercourse? Is sex then some physical thing we do in pursuit of an orgasm? What if you don't orgasm? Is it not sex then? Is sex the use of our bodies to derive general physical pleasure? Well what about a massage? Is a massage sex? In some times and places, many people would have said yes!

These aren't just theoretical questions- Chauncey outlines how these differing definitions of what sex is and what makes it queer not only allowed for a lot of people we would unquestioningly think of as part of the queer community to exclude themselves, but also resulted in the inclusion of people we would never consider to be queer now. Like, most female prostitutes who served only male cliental absolutely hands down refused to give blow jobs in the early 1900s, because blowjobs were seen as an extremely deviant expression of sexuality and were understood to be part of "homosexual" activity, regardless of the sex or genders of the people involved, because it was sexual activity that explicitly was not seeking to create a baby. This was a widely understood concept at the time, and persisted despite the fact that many of these women were using contraception and therefore obviously not seeking to get pregnant. Blowjobs were still seen as perverse and "homosexual," and thus not something most regular female prostitutes were willing to engage in.

Therefore! Female prostitutes who only ever had sex with male cliental but DID provide oral sex (and many other not-penis-in-vagina-activities) were often lumped in with lesbians!!! And treated as such in arrest records and propaganda! And guess what?? As a result, guess who these women usually hung around with, and where they usually could be found? Within the queer community and queer spaces!! These women were seen by the broader society as well as by much of the queer community as QUEER, and many of them likely understood themselves this way as well!

And for the record, these questions of what sex is and what gender is and what makes it gay or straight or whatever are not questions that belong strictly to the past. Survey the general population about what act they consider to have been the one where they "lost their virginity," and you will get wildly different answers. Survey self identified gay or straight people on what kind of sex acts they engage with and with who, and you will similarly find an enormous variation in reports.

And these questions MATTER! These questions matter, not in that we have to find some way to answer them, but in order to understand that we can't, definitively, and that thinking our own perceptions of any of these things are more valid than others' perceptions is incredibly harmful and dismissive to the lived experiences of other people. You can't define other people's identities out of existence just because they threaten or overlap or contradict with your own understanding of some concept, because your definitions of literally any of the criteria you are using to try to build your boxes are ALSO up for interpretation!

Like, I'm sorry I know I am rambling soooo much but you opened the same floodgates that this book opened back when I read it. If the people on this stupid website had any understanding of the history they claim to know so much about, they would see how their attitudes of "this identity is more valid than that identity" and "you can't sit with us because you're not actually part of this or that identity because my definition is better than your definition" is nothing new or woke or progressive, but is the exact same shit that has always been done and has been used to marginalize people who's existence or behaviors threaten the status quo. Like yelling at asexual or pansexual or nonbinary or aromantic people or whatever other group that they don't belong, or that their identity isn't real because it threatens the perceived integrity of another identity...it's all so stupid!! Your identity is also just a way for you to define yourself within your cultural context! Like I've literally seen people be like "asexality isn't a real identity bc if we didn't live in a society that was so sex obsessed then you wouldn't feel the need to define yourself this way." And it's like....what?? Yeah, ok??? But we do live in this society???????? And you can say that about LITERALLY ANY identity??! Not even ones related to sex and gender! Like "you aren't really deaf and deafness isn't real, because if we lived in a world without sound then you wouldn't notice you couldn't hear." Like yeah?? But we do live in a world with sound?? So...people find this term useful to articulate their experiences? And they might even dare to form an identity around it, and maybe a community, and might even become proud of it, even though it is a social construct, just like pretty much everything else??

It just drives me nuts. We go around and around in circles without ever understanding that so much of the bigotry we face is the same thing we are perpetuating with each other, because we don't understand that it is natural and normal for people's definitions of certain identities to conflict, and for their interpretations of the world to run up against each other sometimes. And that there is no strictly defined queer community, and who does or doesn't "belong" is not a decision that any one person or even any one culture gets to make, ever.

To try to finally actually wrap back around to what your actual comment was to begin with, I think queer is a wonderful word, and that GENERALLY SPEAKING in our current cultural context, it is used to encapsulate so much of the messiness and overlap that makes people so uncomfortable, but is what makes the queer community so great!!!!! That being said, it of course has had different definitions in different time periods and cultural contexts just like everything else, and some people may still have negative connotations associated with it and therefore not feel comfortable using it to self-identify. And that's fine too, as long as you don't try to force other people to stop using the term to describe their own identities on the basis that your definition is more real than theirs, which is the opposite of what queer history is all about.

If anyone is interested in the book I am talking about, you can buy it as an ebook, audiobook, or paper copy here: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/george-chauncey/gay-new-york/9780786723355/

It goes into way way way more depth about everything I'm rambling about here, and backs it up with the most research and evidence I've ever seen in one single book. The physical copy is about as thick as two bricks stacked on top of each other, so if you can't get an exclusionist to read it, you can always just whack them over the head.

[partytilfajr]

If Allah (swt) has no gender, why was the Quran revealed in Arabic, a language that only has gendered pronouns and requires us to use "He". Not trying to ask an inflammatory question. Me and my friends were discussing how in English, if there was a third person gender neutral pronoun, that would be more appropriate when referring to God.

Salaam alykum,

All human experience is inherently limiting, and we are speaking about The Almighty that is without limit. Let’s explore this, because it’s important:

Let’s start with these commons questions, such as: where is God or when did God do this or that?

When and where cannot be attributed to God, they can only be attributed to you, creation. God is not bound by there. Why?

When I was born, where did I live, these are constraints of our human experience. When is a time. Where is a place. Time and place, these are containers of creation. Something that is created is related to time and place.

So, if I drank juice, something happened, we can say: “Osama drank juice at 2pm,” right?

But if I didn’t drink? Can it be said where I drank the juice? When? No, we can’t, because I did not drink juice. There is no time, there is no place.

Since God is not creation, He is not related to time and place. Why?

Because time and place came into existence after God created the universe.

So we cannot even say “when” or “where” with God, because space and time are creations of God.

How are we to understand even the concept of God, when God cannot even be defined by the most basic suppositions of how we, as humans, perceive of time and space? We cannot.

When God says that He hears us, or that He sees everything, is that to say that God has an eardrum or that he has eyes? Absolutely not. God is necessarily using the language of our conception of existence to communicate to us things in a way that we may comprehend.

So, when we talk about the language that God uses in The Qur’an to communicate to humans, I think one thing that must be noted, and I’m confused as to why you would forget this, but God uses the royal third person--”We”--quite often, and the different pronoun use in The Qur’an is used to communicate intensity, closeness, and empathy in those who read and listen to God’s words.

Arabic, like Spanish, or French, or Italian, the gender neutral tense is masculine. This is not unique to Arabic, and thus, when the masculine tense is used, it is most often general, unless there is a specific subject of the sentence--to suggest that God has picked a gender would not only contradict the point of the conception of God in The Qur’an, but reflects the cumbersome reality of imposing one linguistic reality onto another, which creates confusion.

So, not only does The Qur’an, using Arabic, a gendered language, address your point (because again, God uses “We”) but also God says, very clearly, and very often, that He is without gender, He is without any parallel in creation.

It also must be noted that any gender identity is, at the end of the day, human. God is not human. God does not share the characteristics of humanity. So, if you were to impose upon God the constraints you are asking for, you would always be, at the end of the day, assigning a human experience to God. So, regardless of the language you chose, again, you’re saying God is subject to the constraints of that experience. The Arabic language uses the masculine tense to be gender-neutral, because, again, it is a gendered language.

The Prophet was an Arab, and he was tasked with conveying the message from God to his people, who were mostly Arab and who spoke Arabic. The Miracle of The Qur’an is that it took the Arabic language, which the people at the time used to show who had superior intellect, and it used that language in the most masterful illustration of the Arabic language, as to proof that God exists.

I just don’t get how you are supposed to be a messenger for people, in a different language, as The Qur’an states that every people get a message in their language.

Oh, and The Qur’an addresses your question about revealing The Qur’an in a different language, in 41:44, where God says:

Now if We had willed this [divine writ] to be a discourse in a non-Arabic tongue, they [who now reject it] would surely have said, "Why is it that its messages have not been spelled out clearly? Why -[a message in] a non-Arabic tongue, and [its bearer] an Arab?" Say: "Unto all who have attained to faith, this [divine writ] is a guidance and a source of health; but as for those who will not believe in their ears is deafness, and so it remains obscure to them: they are [like people who are] being called from too far away.

In light of the above points, I would respectfully suggest that you and your friends spend more time reading The Qur’an, as the answer to your questions lie within the pages of The Qur’an first and foremost.

I hope this helps, and if it doesn’t, please ask follow-up questions, insha Allah.

[acrystalbirdie]

a separate post about emily gwen (creator of the 7-stripe inclusive lesbian flag) and her views on bi lesbians, because i don't want to derail a post for lesbians who find safety under her flag and want to support her monetarily/are looking for a place to buy lesbian pride items.

this isn't me saying to buy or not buy from her. this is meant to be an informative post. with that said, under the cut are screenshots of my past interactions with her when explaining my stance on bi lesbianism from the perspective of a nonbinary person. long post ahead

these are dated from july 2019, when i reached out anonymously to her on her curiouscat. her opinion might have changed since then, but i'm unsure of this. i acknowledge now that this may read as an attack bc i came to her with my opinion already made up, trying to convince her. these asks were prompted by some anti bi/pan lesbian tweets she made that day, but the context isn't necessary

[image ID: a screenshot of @diabolicdyke's curiouscat. an ask from july 22, 2019 features the following text.

you tweeted today about disliking the word "queer" for yourself and as a blanket term, and that's 100% valid! other people have a deep connection with the word - even with its original meaning of "weird" but that doesn't mean you have to like it or use it, and this gives no one the right to describe you using that word. as far as I've seen, you don't have a problem with others self identifying as queer as long as it doesn't apply to you. does this same logic not apply to the term "bi lesbian"?

self-identified queer people are not responsible for the violence that has been enacted among the LGBT+ community, because we are all seen as the same to bigots. this would be the same for anyone that would personally use the term bi lesbian. even if you don't get why people would call themselves queer or bi lesbians their removal does not suddenly make us "acceptable to cishet society."

in addition, you are supportive of he/him lesbians (justly!), but hearing a lesbian refer to her absent partner as "him" can also lead others to assume she is straight or receptive to men's advances. this contradicts the claim that bi lesbians are dangerous for implying male attraction, because they are not the only ones who do so, nor should they or he/him lesbians be blamed for causing lesbophobia.

finally, bisexuality isn't always restricted to the gender binary, and people who use that label aren't responsible for or deserve the binarism that results. if a person describes themselves as bisexual for liking women and nonblnary people, they aren't "asking" for male violence nor are they personally responsible for society's lack of awareness around women, women-leaning folk, and nonbinary people as a whole.

is this something we can civilly discuss? I'd like to hear your thoughts about this, but if this makes you uncomfortable or offends you there's no need to answer. thanks for reading, I know this was rather long 🧡💗

- Anonymous

the response from diabolicdyke reads:

This isn't something we can civilly discuss because 'bi lesbians' are both lesbophobic and biphobic and also don't exist. You like men? Keep the word lesbian out of your lesbophobic, selfish mouth. There have already been men harassing lesbians because they think they can be bi. You're making up a bullshit term that hurts people. If you're attracted to men but still have a preference for women? THAT'S STILL JUST BISEXUALITY.

/end ID.]

[image ID: a screenshot of diabolicdyke's curiouscat. an ask from july 22, 2019 features the following text.

you can be bisexual without liking men... there are more than two genders... nonbinary lesbians and he/him lesbians already exist and aren't responsible for 'inciting" male violence.

I'm not saying that sapphic people should treat women and woman-leaning folk as different. I'm saying that nonbinary people overall are not the same gender as women and this is a way the term bi lesbian can be used - bisexuality does not inherently mean male/female and it's not any sapphic's fault that men will be violent because that is victim blaming them for not doing enough to educate allies. this is like saying "you chose to call yourself queer, you brought this bigotry on yourself and you make all of us look bad"

I don't know how else to say this - it's binarist to assume bi lesbians like men. bi lesbians *do not like men.* there are more than two genders. bi people as a whole aren't to blame for forced heterosexual violence on either the gay or lesbian population. this sexuality is not inherently damaging.

- Anonymous

the response from diabolicdyke reads:

You're ignoring three things:

1- all the nonbinary people who say that what you're saying is bullshit (esepcially nonbinary lesbians)

2- the fact that most bisexual lesbians say they ARE attracted to men

3- the fact that the term bisexual lesbian has TERF origins

/end ID.]

[image ID: a screenshot of diabolicdyke's curiouscat. an ask from july 22, 2019 features the following text.

I'm nonbinary and there's a large part of nonbinary Twitter that agrees with me - bi lesbians aren't replacing nonbinary lesbians. however I can see this is getting us nowhere and there's no room for civil discussion, as you yourself stated. I genuinely hope you have a nice day

- Anonymous

the response from diabolicdyke reads:

Replacing? What are you talking about? Bisexual and lesbian are two separate terms, that's the end of that. Considering that the vast majority of lesbians think this whole thing is grossly lesbophobic, and you are ignoring that, I hope you have a crap day.

/end ID.]

i feel like my arguments are compelling, with the most important one being that self identification is not responsible for anti-LGBTQ+ violence. this places blame on the individual instead of looking at the actual perpetrators of lesbophobia. wlw should not be blamed for the actions of lesbophobic men.

i have roughly the same opinion now, two years later, with one exception: in the ask i specified that bi lesbians are not attracted to men. that was a mistake on my end to define an identity i didn't have myself. i also realize now that it doesn't matter if bi lesbians are attracted to men. these labels are for individuals to define their attraction however they like, and labels should not be "prescriptive," trying to encompass a single definition that must be adhered to.

i gave my opinion because i felt as a nonbinary person that my gender was encompassed under bisexuality/romanticism, and thus that it is possible to be bisexual without having attraction to men, by acknowledging nonbinary alignments as a separate attraction from women. this doesn't change that there are nonbinary lesbians who feel comfortable with being perceived as woman-aligned or non-men. i personally am just not one of them.

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[eroticcannibal]

Sorry to slam into your inbox about it like 7h late, and like,, a couple thousand more characters than I intended big oops there, but there’s never a good opportunity have an actual dialogue, so hello hi I am a Trans Person of De/Retrans Experience™ and I cannot express like the incredible internal tension being trans AND detrans at the same fucking time!  And how horrible it is to know that bc from the outside my transition path looks like a tale of “teen transitions then returns to ‘actual gender’ in early adulthood” my family/acquaintances think I have regrets that I DON’T and that trans-ness is a phase and nothing I have done, to their eyes, contradicts that, no matter what I *say* about my experiences and reasons it doesn’t matter bc of what I look like! None of them take my word seriously! Like, I’ve been trying to change the narrative n talk w the ppl around me about this for a few years now, but I can’t tell you how hard it is, esp when like *admitting* to ppl you have first hand experience is seen as like inherently shameful/a reason to ignore you. Like, how hard it is to try and divorce the de/retrans narrative from regret?  The fact is, most ppl I know in situations close to mine are nonbinary and “swinging back” from binary transitions/IDs or otherwise had to make a choice to retrans for like many different personal reasons, and don’t actually **regret** transition or their choices. Even ppl who profess to want nuance are unwilling or unable to engage w the mechanics of radfem recruitment of detrans ppl and discussions of how to effectively counter it (esp w/o having like any kind of community of non radfem ppl of de/retrans experience), or get angry when you point out the similarities it has w their targeting of young disconnected lesbians (seeking out the isolated, the feeding of “you’re the Most Oppressed”, giving [bad] reasoning and grounding to ppl experiencing pain and confusion). Anyway, I’m not saying all de/retrans ppl are prefect, and ppl who like identify as “detransitioned” have a real tendency to be huge gender (bio)essentialists and it’s Actively Awful, but like sometimes it feels like I’m actively begging for ppl to engage in meaningful discussion and tangible community building actions between the other flavors of gender failures around them and it falls on deaf ears, and it’s incredibly frustrating! Op Ed time, but there’s really something to be said for how society instills the Fear of Transition Regret™ into us and holds up the image of a detrans person up as emblematic of it, and I think we try to distance ourselves and the community from the entire concept, minimizing using studies of how uncommon regret is, and narrowing the de/retrans definition “it’s not detrans unless you ID as../if you don’t..”, and being confronted w the living form of the Spectre of Detransition, whatever their story, we recoil from it, creating a space that is inherently unwelcoming for de/retrans ppl. And there’s a limbo out there atm, for ppl who cant or don’t see themselves as trans (anymore?), but who’s experiences (and bodies?) are decidedly Not Cis(anymore??). It certainly doesn’t help that like, the three routes ppl seem to take are like 1)detrans terf/otherwise gross gender essentialist bigot  2)I ID as trans still, do not use these words to describe my experience, and don’t talk about it 3) disappears into the ether to never speak of my experience again, so its again v hard to like build some semblance of autonomous community n connection that doesn’t get coopted by radfems. Anyway, sorry for the mini-festo, but I’ve been sitting on some thoughts for a while it seems and the like 3 posts I saw just smashed open the floodgates oof

----

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this, this is incredibly important and I’m so sorry that you are stuck in that position, it genuinely sounds awful.

I am absolutely on board with supporting de/retrans folk, but I’ll be honest, with not having those experiences and with how they aren’t talked about outside of “if u trans u will REGRET IT”, i’m kind of at a loss as to *how* to do that other than “ur valid” which... just isn’t enough. I do firmly believe that given how complex those identities are, because they aren’t going to fit neatly into a cis/trans binary, that it is vital for the trans community to have space for those people (lets be honest, cis people ain’t gonna) even if the person in question doesn’t ID as trans any more, but I would love to know more about how to foster a welcoming and supportive environment for de/retrans folk. 

[jamiebluewind]

I was wondering if I could get your advice on a fandom matter? Do you think it's okay for people to portray characters differently when they're coded a certain way? (Ex: someone mentioned the Strilondes from Homestuck were Jewish-coded from a minor conversation but it's never confirmed in canon.) Like I wholeheartedly accept others' views and dont want to hurt anyone but my personal HCs differ. I'm bi so I know what its like when people label characters and I'm worried I'm doing the same y'know?

I'd say to keep in mind that there is a difference between using facts in canon to build a theory and ignoring facts in canon to create what is basically an alternate universe. The first can almost always be respectful and the second can be either respectful or very disrespectful, depending on context, fandom, and what's portrayed.

For example

Character A is a white male and has been show to have a genuine crush on a boy. No sexuality is stated. Nothing else is known past that at this time including his feelings towards other genders.

Headcanon 1: The character is only attracted to men. It builds on nothing and takes what we have as true until proven otherwise. It's the least likely to offend and a viable theory.

Headcanon 2: The character is attracted to more than one gender. This takes the data we know and takes it into more theoretical territory, but it's still possible due to not being contradicted by the source material. Another theory.

Headcanon 3: The character is straight. This directly contradicts what we know in canon. This is an AU and likely to offend, especially since the alteration changes our character from a member of a marginalized group into one that is less so. However, even the inverse of the situation would be offensive due to the nature of the trait.

Headcanon 4: The character is transmale. There is no evidence in canon that corroborates or contradicts this, but it could be considered a theory because it's not breaking canon. It will most likely only offend if it's used as a way to fetishize the group.

Headcanon 5: The character is on the asexual spectrum. This one might cause controversy with some people even if it is a valid theory because the average person isn't educated about what ace spec actually is. The character could be demisexual or gray. He could also be asexual and still have a purely romantic crush. It's a complex issue, but it can work as long as long as the identity is treated with respect.

Headcanon 6: The character is black. This directly contradicts canon and thus would be AU, BUT unlike headcanon 3, the change is adding representation to an underrepresented group and the change does not alter the core parts of what makes the character who they are. Instead, it add another layer to it. Some people who are strongly canon compliant will complain, but as long as the culture is treated with respect, it can be a way to contradict canon without it being inherently offensive.

Headcanon 7: The character would train water Pokemon if he existed in that world instead of his. This is an example of something that most fans wont really argue over. It's inherently canon divergent, lighthearted, doesn't have to alter the core parts of the character, and differing opinions have no real impact on it.

These are just a few examples, but I hope you can see the differences. In the end, the important thing is to approach whatever you do with respect. No matter what you do, there will always be somebody out there ready to yell about it, but if you do it right, you wont hurt the ones that matter.

Hopefully that helps. ^_^

[flamewyrmz]

a late night rant from twitter im putting in one place, because its a trainwreck of several threads there. mostly copy/paste and still not proofread, but a collection of thoughts on gender, sexuality, personal identity, and love and support within the lgbtq community. i do really lay myself bare here so id like to ask that if you disagree or have criticism you do so respectfully and with that in mind, thank you <3 and if this means something to you itd mean the world to me if you shared it

dunno if ive said this here before but like. if you think you might be bi/pan but youre on the fence cos maybe youve never had a crush on a nonfictional guy or get more crushes on guys than on girls and you find yourself tied up in knots like "well im gay but im also attracted to nonbinary people unless theyre mostly woman-aligned but i dont wanna say im bi/pan because then people will think i like girls and like i like them theoretically but--" let go. just say fuck it! im bi/pan! 

try it out and if it doesnt feel right it doesnt feel right and thats fine and in the end no matter what youll have learned a little about yourself. this is actually my advice on any gender/sexuality dilemmas you might be having. go wild. try it out. see how it feels. dont feel like you have to confine yourself to something just because youve stuck with it for some amount of time. 

if youre questioning dive right into the deep end! no matter how it goes youll be a better swimmer in the end. its all not quite rigid and a little fluid anyways (for some more than others obv) so if youre unsure, man... go for it. its ok to backpedal

--

this is important advice to me because ive struggled with it multiple times in the past and this has only recently clicked and i really wish it had sooner. first it was with being... not straight in general. like i was actively dating someone of the same gender and i never considered that that meant, uh, im not straight. always "do you like boys or girl?" "uhhhhhhhhh. uh. UH" 

then with being in the range of aro/ace spect. then with being nonbinary! then with being nb but primarily male. and then goddammit im just a boy. accepting that God I Love Men And Only Men (and with it that i *wasnt* aro or ace in ANY capacity) and then, very recently (like up until a couple months ago. like im p sure this year. not 2017), going back on that and admitting i was bi. it is so so freeing to just say "fuck it" and test those waters!

hell, you find something you resonate with but looks a little silly? go for it! use those bun/buns/bunself pronouns. go with stargender! ace-flux demibiromantic? hell yeah rock that shit! it can always change and you can always decide its not right and go back! h4y dudes

--

all of that especially goes for teens who dont know what the fuck theyre doing. im only 20 yea and barely 20 at that but man i wish id heard this sooner

and please dont take that as me saying "well if youre a lesbian sexuality is fluid and maybe youre actually bi"! hell no. if youre a lesbian and you KNOW youre and lesbian and couldnt ever be anything else then rock on you funky little lesbian! but if you id as a lesbian but are teetering on something like "well im attracted to some fictional and theoretical men but not any real ones and maybe its just compulsory heterosexuality but im not sure and--" dont be afraid to try a different label. its all what feels right to you and theres absolutely no harm

--

people bash on like. """mogai genders""" and nounself pronouns and the split attraction model and all that and like. yeah! those things can hurt people! personally i struggled with the split attraction bit combined with how broadly people define the ace spectrum. it can be used to hurt. and it is used to hurt. sometimes its deliberate, sometimes its not. but the hurt is there. but its not inherently good or bad. 

and yeah, some of it sounds silly. hell, it sounds silly to me sometimes! but to some people hearing that label makes everything click into place, even if just for a little bit, and i take that very seriously. it is one of the best feelings in the world and i want as many lgbtq people (of any age) to experience it. 

for some people it feels right to zoom waaaaaaay in and section it into lots of little bits and for others its "fuck it! i dont know shit! im just queer!" and those are both equally valid (that words been thru 12 garbage disposals but i cant think of a better one) maybe you go back n forth and thats fine too! as long as youre open to it changing or being wrong it cant hurt and, like i said, its one of the best possible feelings to have it click like that

--

as an aside: being bi can *totally* mean "im attracted to men and nonbinary people are long are they arent primarily woman-aligned" or it can mean "im attracted to everyone fuck it" personally? i use bi over pan because i feel like it better encapsulates that i *do* have preferences (i say this all the time but God I Love Men) but ultimately gender doesnt really matter to me cos everyones cute and hot and generally attractive and im not leaving anyone out because im just a little more inclined to kissing boys. but thats me!

--

as Another aside: i do still to some degree identify with uhh this is gonna sound contradictory but agender boy? or more like boy agender? boygender with left none? i just dont personally feel like its worth taking the time to explain over n over. but it used to be, for me, n i dont regret that a single bit! i wouldnt regret that even if i *didnt* still feel that way in any capacity. honestly? 

i dont regret any of the ways ive identified in the past even though feeling stuck and cornered into some got a little harmful to me (and if youve gone through somethin similar and DO regret it and wish youd never heard whatever term you used thats good too. im very strongly advocating for "use whatever labels you want and if it dont fit it dont fit" here but if they did hurt you and youre still hurting about it i understand 100% just dont use it to pull others down. if it concerns you say your piece and let them decide)

--

this is personally a little hard to admit so bear with me here 

honestly? ANY sort of strong identity didnt start developing in me until i was.... 14 or so? and very slowly at that. like gender evened out around 18 and sexuality just a few months ago LMAO. but up until i was a teenager i didnt really feel much of anything re: gender or attraction (and the attraction thing is pretty normal for kids and even teens tbqh!) 

and i just.... didnt really think about it! i had This Name and apparently was a girl and i didnt really get what it was like to BE a girl but thats what people said and i didnt know there were other options so i went with it! the name didnt bother me either (except for when people made jokes about a Certain Historical Figure with the same one. just thinking about that i get tired) 

and when it came time to actually grapple with the whole concept of being *into* people i just kinda... slunk away! no joke until like 10th grade if someone started a rumor that i was dating x or y had a crush on me i would start to avoid them entirely. lost a friend in 4th grade that way but then in hs hed turned into a TOTAL DICK so no loss there. i think part of that was also people making the assumption that i was straight though? big shrug! 

i didnt even realize attraction was a thing i had until i got asked out and just kind of "oh wow??? that sounds so nice??? i feel the same??? yes??" and thats WHY i went thru varying aro/ace labels. cos it unfolded slowly (which again is totally normal if youre a teenager, so dont worry about it if youre going thru that. roll with the punches. and if youre a teen and youve got it figured out? thats totally normal too!) 

and the gender thing was similar once i learned that it was an actual possibility (especially being nb, and ESPECIALLY especially being agender) i slowly just... poked at it until i figured something out (fun fact: what set me off to finally go "fuck it im not a girl at all" was being stuck in an awful hair salon chair while my mom got a haircut that took FOREVERRRRRRRRR and i was having godawful period cramps. like i knew not being a girl wouldnt DO anything about them but i made that decision then n there n didnt look back!) 

and then i kept pokin at it and watching it like the seed id planted finally started to sprout and i realized i didnt actually know what kind of seed it WAS. i guess ive always been very nebulous in those aspects and its just now forming into something solid. like i said, its a little hard to admit and i... dont think ive actually talked about this in this depth before to, like, anyone? 

because the "oh ive always known" narrative is the only one you ever see in popular media and sometimes even from the community itself! and theres nothing wrong with having always known! but theres also nothing wrong with being like me! but i still feel a little anxious talking about it like it somehow means im a sham. 

hell, id even go so far as to say i WAS a girl as a kid! i WAS varying shades of agender and nonbinary and ???? as a teen, and i AM, like, 95% a guy right now! maybe in a few years ill be something else. none of those things contradict each other. things like that can change! its not set in stone (but like i said: for some people it is! or, like, set in slime that you left out for 5 years so now its pretty much a rock but if you really try it still squishes into something else?? none of these things invalidate the others! were all unique). 

i wouldnt say that at any point ive been cis or straight, cos even when i just went with being a girl and stuff it was always a little ??? but, yknow. even if i HAD been those things at some point it wouldnt matter to me? things just are the way they are and were the way they were

--

im making myself really vulnerable here and my thought process is a mess and i ramble and repeat myself and my memory and attention span is like 2 seconds and i dont proofread but. its important i think. i dont have a lot of followers and fewer still thatre active but... that really doesnt matter. 

maybe someone will retweet at least one of these messy, messy threads. maybe link it to a friend. maybe screenshot it and post it on tumblr [note: LMAO YEAH AND ITS YOU DUMBASS], or to keep for themself. if any of my words help anyone out even a little then it matters and honestly? then its the most important thing in the whole danged world. if even one person sees any of the things ive said tonight and it means *anything* to them, even if just "oh, im not alone in this" then ive succeeded here. 

i dont want any of us to ever feel trapped or alone because shit! lifes too fuckin short for that! its goddamn hard being anything but cisgender and straight! sometimes it sucks! like really sucks! there have been so many times ive broken down completely over being trans and felt like, for myself, its the most awful thing in the world. its why prides so important. its why community is so important. 

because even when the pressure of the world brings you down so low you think youll never escape theres something or someone there to take your hand and pull you back up, put you on your feet, and say "i know its hard. and itll get hard again. but i believe in you, and youre strong enough for this, and im here with you through every step". that goes for anyone but especially goes for us. and im not just talking about lgbtq youth here. all of us. which is *why* im laying myself completely bare here. 

most of this stuff? ive either never talked about or only vaguely mentioned. but im putting it out there. because there was a point where i needed it but didnt have it, and even if its just one person, i want to give someone this advice so at least they dont have to deal with the same stuff i did. and if youre reading this? i love you. im here for you. im my dms are always open and if for some reason they arent its almost definitely an accident and if you say something ill reopen them. 

and if youre someone who hates me? maybe even mutually? if it came down to it id let you come to me at your lowest moment, no questions asked, no judgement held, and at the end of it still be the same kind of enemies we were before and never speak again. there are some exceptions of course but honestly ill forgive a lot for someone who needs that kind of support. and if youre one of the people this applies to, i know youll probably never take me up on it. i dont expect you to. i dont expect you to even for a second be comfortable with that idea. thats fine. but if for some reason you ever need it, its there. 

i can count on one hand the ex friends that i wouldnt give that to and thats ONLY because theyve legitimately hurt me and left lasting damage (and for some of them? its mutual. and im sorry for that, regardless of how i feel about your treatment of me im truly sorry for my actions. that probably sounds fake and anyway i digress) 

and if youre a complete stranger? someone who follows me but has never interacted with anything ive posted? a mutual i havent spoken to yet? im here. and im bumbling, and awkward, and not the best at comfort but you can always come to me if you need someone. im only one man and im under a lot of stress but i swear ill do the best i can, even if its only reading and replying 3 days later and even then just listening and offer whatever gentle comfort or reassurance youll accept. 

because thats important to me. thats the impact i want to leave on this world. i dont ever want anyone to feel as small, as scared, as worthless, as alone as i have. im no fighter. im not going to lead any revolutions and hell im too anxious to even go to protests but im here for support. im here to help and heal. and thats important too

--

and if you listened to that? thank you. if you just skimmed? thank you for that too. if you shared it with someone? thank you (so much). and if you dont? thank you anyways, just for the time

just know this: i love you. i dont care who you are, if youre reading this i love you and im behind you 100%. im here if you need it. stay strong, do something that makes you smile if only for a moment. take that leap of faith. dont restrict yourself for even a second

i meant to go to bed at least two hours ago so goodnight <3 be safe, drink some water, if you have any kind of pet give it some love. take care of yourself. youre the most important person in your own world and never forget that, even if you dont think you are. even if theres something or someone you treasure above everything else. dont diminish your own worth! you are alive, and you are here, and theres nothing more important than that, really. the things you love matter more than anything else. hold them close

[queeranarchism]

8 Steps Toward Building Indispensability (Instead of Disposability) Culture

(Reposting this article by Kai Cheng Thom because Tumblr ate it. Sorry long post, page break hates me)

give an mc without integrity a mic

and s/he will rhyme the death of the people

—d’bi young anitafrika

When I first came into activist culture, I was a runaway queer kid searching for a home: a terrified, angry, suspicious, cynical-yet-naïve teenager whose greatest secret desire was for a family that would last forever and love me no matter what.

Yet I also knew that such a family could never exist – at least not for me.

You see, I had another secret: Underneath all of my radical queer social justice punk bravado, I knew that I was trash. I was dirty and unlovable. I had done bad things to survive, and I had hurt people. Sometimes I didn’t know why.

So when I found activist culture, with its powerful ideas about privilege and oppression and its simmering, explosive rage, I was intoxicated. I thought that I could purge my self-hatred with that fiery rhetoric and create the family I wanted so much with the bond that comes from shared trauma.

Social justice was a set of rules that could finally put the world into an order that made sense to me. If I could only use all the right language, do enough direct action, be critical enough of the systems around me, then I could finally be a good person.

All around me, it felt like my activist community was doing the same thing – throwing ourselves into “the revolution,” exhausting ourselves and burning out, watching each other for oppressive thoughts and behavior and calling each other on it vociferously.

Occasionally – rarely – folks were driven out of community for being “fucked up.” More often, though, attempts to hold people accountable through call-outs and exclusion just exploded into huge online flame wars and IRL drama that left deep rifts in community for years. Only the most vulnerable – folks without large friend groups and social stability – were excluded permanently.

Like my blood family, my activist family was re-enacting the trauma that we had experienced at the hands of an oppressive society.

Just as my father once held open the door to our house and demanded that I leave because he didn’t know how to reconcile his love for me with my gender identity, we denounced each other and burned bridges because we didn’t know how reconcile our social ideals with the fact that our loved ones don’t always live up to them.

I believe that sometimes we did this hypocritically – that we created the so-called call-out culture (a culture of toxic confrontation and shaming people for oppressive behavior that is more about the performance of righteousness than the actual pursuit of justice) in part so that we could focus on the failings of others and avoid examining the complicity with oppression, the capacity to abuse, that exists within us all.

And I believe we did it in part because sometimes it’s impossible to imagine any other way: We live in a disposability culture – a society based on consumption, fear, and destruction – where we’re taught that the only way to respond when people hurt us is to hurt them back or get rid of them.

This article comes out of that queer kid’s longing for forever-family, and from countless conversations with other members of social justice communities longing for the same. It comes out of my own fuck-ups having been generously forgiven by others, and from my effort to forgive those who have harmed me.

It comes from a desire I feel all around me for an alternative to the politics of disposability, for a politics of indispensability instead.

“Indispensability politics” isn’t a term I’ve coined personally. It has existed various communities for some time, and I learned it orally, though I cannot find a written source. But the following principles are ideas – suggestions for a foundation on which indispensability culture in leftist activism might be built. They are a work permanently in progress.

They’re not meant to be a new set of rules for activism. Nor are they a step-by-step guide for holding accountability processes or a complete answer to the questions that I’m raising around.

Still, I hope that they are helpful to you.

1. The Revolution Is a Relationship

sometimes

we want to close our eyes

jack off to pictures of radical disneyland

not watch as we gnaw our own

flesh into meat

—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “so what the fuck does conscious mean anyway”

Something that worries me about social justice communities is that we tend to conceptualize “revolution” as a product, as a place and time that we expend all of our energy and anger to create – often without regard to the toll this takes on individuals and our relationships.

In this way, “The Revolution” occupies a position in activist culture that actually reminds me of the role that Heaven played in the Chinese Christian community I grew up in: It is a fantasy of ideological purity against which our actions are judged, a place that we long to live in, but seems impossible to reach.

In our – often justified – anger and disappointment at the failure of ourselves and our communities to uphold the dream of revolution, we lash out.

We try to cleanse ourselves of the pain of betrayal by cutting off and driving out the betrayers – our abusive families, our conservative friends. We try not to look at the betrayer in the mirror.

What if revolution isn’t a product, some distant promised land, but the relationships that we have right now?

What if revolution is, in addition to – not instead of – direct action and community organizing, the process of rupture and repair that happens when we fuck up and hold each other accountable and forgive?

2. The Oppressor Lives Within

The most important political struggle I will ever have is against the oppressor – the racist, transmisogynist, ableist, abusive person – in myself.

I don’t mean to say this in a self-flagellating, self-blaming way. I’ve experienced oppression, violence, rape, and abuse from others, and this is not my fault.

I mean that I’ve started to believe that I can’t engage in authentic activism, I can’t create positive change without recognizing and naming my own participation in the oppressive systems that I’m trying to undo.

Coming from this position, I’m forced to have compassion for the people around me who I see also participating in oppression, even as I’m also angry at them. With compassion comes understanding, and with understanding comes belief in the possibility of change.

When we become capable of holding that contradiction in our hearts – when we can be angry and compassionate at the same time, at ourselves as well as others – entirely new possibilities for healing and transformation emerge.

3. Accountability Starts in the Heart

Too often, I’ve seen accountability processes in social justice communities devolve into vicious “your word against mine” situations and social power plays in which people accuse each other of harm and abuse.

As witnesses to these situations, we become trapped, caught in the double bind of either having to pick a side or doing nothing. Both options carry the risk of becoming complicit in the harm being done, and the “truth” becomes impossibly blurred.

I often wonder how different things would look if it were more of a cultural norm to understand accountability as a practice that comes from within the individual, instead of a consequence that must be forced onto someone externally.

What if we taught each other to honor the responsibility that comes with holding ourselves accountable, rather than seeing self-accountability as a shameful admission of guilt? What if we could have real conversations with each other about harm, in good faith?

In a culture of indispensability, I cannot ignore someone when they tell me I have harmed them – they are precious to me, and I have to try to understand and respond accordingly.

To become indispensable to one another, we must also be willing to be responsible for and accountable to one another.

4. Perpetrator/Survivor is a False Dichotomy

There is an intense moral dynamic in social justice culture that tends to separate people into binaries of “right” and “wrong.”

To be a perpetrator of oppression or violence is highly stigmatized, while survivorhood may be oddly fetishized in ways that objectify and intensify stories of trauma.

“Perpetrators” are considered evil and unforgivable, while “survivors” are good and pure, yet denied agency to define themselves.

Among the many problems of this dynamic is the fact that it obscures the complex reality that many people are both survivors and perpetrators of violence (though violence, of course, exists within a wide spectrum of behaviors).

Within a culture of disposability – whether it be the criminal justice system of the state or community practices of exiling people – the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy is useful because it appears to make things easier. It helps us make decisions about who to punish and who to pity.

But punishment and pity have very little to do with revolutionary change or relationship-building.

What punishment and pity have in common is that they’re both dehumanizing.

5. Punishment Isn’t Justice

Punishment is the foundation of the legal criminal justice system and of disposability culture. It’s the idea that wrongs can be made right by inflicting further harm against those who are deemed harmful.

Punishment is also, I believe, a traumatized response to being attacked, the intense expression of the “fight” reflex. Activist writer Sarah Schulman discusses this idea in detail in her book, Conflict Is Not Abuse.

It isn’t inherently wrong to want someone who hurt you to feel the same pain – to want retribution, or even revenge. But as Schulman also writes, punishment is rarely, if ever, actually an instrument of justice – it is most often an expression of power over those with less.

How often do we see the vastly wealthy or politically powerful punished for the enormous harms they do to marginalized communities? How often are marginalized individuals put in prison or killed for minor (or non-existent) offences?

As long as our conception of justice is based on the violent use of power, the powerful will remain unaccountable, while the powerless are scapegoated.

But even beyond this, a culture of disposability and punishment breeds fear and dishonesty.

How likely are we to hold ourselves accountable when we’re afraid that we’ll be exiled, imprisoned, or killed if we do? And how can we trust each other when we live in fear of one another?

We have to find another way to bring about justice.

6. Nuance Isn’t an Excuse for Harm

One of the most common responses I see to critiques of call-out culture and disposability is that perpetrators of violence and predators use these critiques to obscure their own wrongdoing and avoid accountability.

Furthermore, we, as communities, use the “complexity” and “nuance” of such critiques as excuses for not intervening when harm is being done.

But indispensability means that everyone – especially those have experienced harm – are precious and require justice. In other words, we cannot allow the fact that something is complicated or scary prevent us from trying to stop it.

Trapped in the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy of understanding harm, it might seem like we have only two options: to ignore harm or to punish perpetrators.

But in fact, there are often other strategies available.

They involve taking anyone’s – everyone’s – expressions of pain seriously enough to ask hard questions and have tough conversations. They involve dedicating time and resources to ensuring that anyone who has been harmed has the support they need to heal.

7. Healing Is Both Rage and Forgiveness

If the revolution is a relationship, then the revolution must include room for both rage and forgiveness: We have to be able to tolerate the inevitability that we will be angry at one another, will commit harm against one another.

When we are harmed, we must be allowed the space to rage. We need to be able to express the depth of our hurt, our hatred of those who hurt us and those who allowed it to happen – especially when those people are the ones we love.

It is up to the community to hold and contain this rage – to hear and validate and give it space, while also preventing it from creating further harm.

The expression of anger and pain is key to the transformation of violence into healing, because it allows us to understand what has happened and motivates us to change.

And it’s up to the community as well to then provide a framework for forgiveness, to help envision a future where forgiveness is possible, and how it might be achieved.

8. Community Is the Answer

There are no activist communities, only the desire for communities, or the convenient fiction of communities. A community is a material web that binds people together, for better and for worse, in interdependence…

If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community. Among the societies that had real communities, exile was the most extreme sanction possible, tantamount to killing them. On many levels, losing the community and all the relationships it involved was the same as dying.

Let’s not kid ourselves: We don’t have communities.

—Anonymous, Broken Teapot Zine

The above quote is a revealing glance into the inner dynamics of social justice and activist culture.

It reveals the source of our incapacity to create accountability and the deep emotional and material insecurities that lie beneath it.

Perhaps the reason we tend to recreate disposability culture and trauma responses over and over is because we are all, secretly, that frightened runaway kid, constantly searching for a home, but not really believing we can find one.

Maybe we don’t create communities of true interdependence – of indispensability, of forever-family – because we are terrified of what will happen if we try.

But I believe, have to believe, that true community is possible for me and for all of us. The truth is, we can’t keep going on the way we have been. We need each other, need to find each other, in order to survive.

And I have faith that we can.

[him-e]

anon asks:

Hi! I really enjoy your asoiaf m/eta - I was wondering, do you think that Jaime is on his best way to become Tywins "true heir", a scenario in which Brienne has a role similar to Joanna's? I.e. Jaime's genuine affection for her becomes his only sympathetic quality in the end, much like Tywin's genuine love for his wife appears to have been is only truly likable trait? Not to reduce Brienne (or Joanna) to that alone, but it would emphasize Jaime's doom and her rise nicely.

Hi, thank you! A couple things first, before I sink my teeth into the rest:

a) this is in no way an objective statement, but no matter how his arc ends, even if it goes the darkest way possible, Jaime has plenty of sympathetic traits (not necessarily qualities, mind) that allow me to find him relatable, and this makes him ALREADY incomparable with Tywin;

b) I don’t believe in love being a sympathetic quality or a mitigating factor per se, and I don’t think people who love are necessarily one step closer to *goodness* than people who don’t. For example, while I don’t see Stannis as necessarily incapable of love—I quite like the idea that under his stern facade there’s a lot of feelings, for his child, for Jon, for Davos, and maybe even for Melisandre, on top of his complex issues with his own brothers—even if we stick to the interpretation of Stannis as a loveless character, I don’t think this diminishes his fundamental goodness. On the other hand, there are the Lannisters, who are fifty shades of questionable, but they ALLL love so much!

The truth is that anyone can feel love. It’s not that special, you know? It’s just a human emotion—powerful, but not inherently moral. Not intrinsically a virtue, an end to be pursued at all costs, in itself and for itself, as traditional romantic narratives would want you to believe.

This is particularly true for a character like Jaime, who has been established as a lover since his first notable appearance in the books.

“The things I do for love (he said with loathing)” is probably his most iconic line, and it’s no coincidence that it’s associated to the TERRIBLEST, EVILEST THING he’s ever done (no irony). Jaime's debut in asoiaf is tied to the concept that lovers aren’t ALWAYS right just because they love, and to some extent the character himself is aware of it ("loathing” refers not to Bran, whom Jaime has really no reason to loathe lol, but to “the things I do”, aka the repulsive action he’s about to commit in the name of his love for Cersei). So the idea that Jaime’s ~one and only~ sympathetic quality can be his love for Brienne, when loving is both his original sin and virtually the only thing he’s done in his life, doesn’t work for me. (you might argue: but Jaime’s love for Cersei is incestuous and Badwrong, and Cersei herself is Bad whereas Brienne is Good! yeah, I think that line of reasoning is a slippery slope, because it places all the emphasis and the responsibility on who you love rather than how you love, as if the moral fiber and ~appropriateness~ of the object of your love is what makes your love noble. Mind, this is a very courtly-romance logic, so it’s nothing especially offensive, but I still don’t like its implications. It runs a bit too close to “bad people don’t deserve to be loved” to suit me).

with that said…

denying the centrality of love in these novels would be a terrible mistake. George is a romantic, and his attitude towards some romantic tropes isn’t deconstructionist at all, but rather a vibrant (albeit complex) celebration of them. Yet not all fictional depictions of romantic love are equal: I think Jaime/Brienne and Tywin/Joanna belong to two different genres. 

Jaime/Brienne is essentially a fairytale. It’s, of course, Beauty and the Beast. A tale about transformative love—love as acceptance of the other, love as understanding of the other, love as healing, love as the driving force for a radical viewpoint shift, a change of attitude and lifestyle (symbolized in the original tale by the physical metamorphosis of the Beast), love as having an actual positive impact on the world. As everyone knows, Martin loves the trope and makes it integral, more or less subtly, to several dynamics throughout the books. It has been stated repeatedly, even by the author himself, that Jaime and Brienne is one of those; the only question is whether there will be a subversion, and to which degree. Personally I’ve always seen as subversive the way GRRM gets rid of the problematic goodness = beauty equation (that exists in the original because fairytales are highly archetypal and symbolic and they rely heavily on simple visual associations, but they’re also inevitably intertwined with societal/cultural biases and the primordial fear of the imperfect and the deviant) and throws in the mix a Beauty who is actually Super Ugly! and a Beast who is a splendid, glorious, golden lion. When the Beauty is the Beast and the Beast is the Beauty, and the gender stereotypes inherent to the trope are repeatedly broken, the metamorphosis is necessarily mutual.

Can this fairytale have a tragic ending? Absolutely. Martin is a master at this—it’s actually what his deconstruction is about, taking fantasy/fairytale tropes and adapting them to completely different genres, causing that sort of cognitive dissonance in the reader, who isn’t used to see THAT trope take THAT form (see: “Martin kills all the heroes!”). However, whatever the deconstruction at work is in JB’s case, i doubt it will end up completely negating the transformative nature of the trope itself. But let’s set this aside for now, because it’s not relevant to the discussion.

Tywin/Joanna is different in genre, scope, meaning, basic tropes. To begin with, I don’t see Joanna as the Beauty to Tywin’s Beast. There’s no clash between two conflicting worldviews here; their love isn’t of the transformative kind, it’s a love that cemented their established identity, rather than challenge it. I think this pairing is written around a completely different cluster of tropes—the power couple, the “behind a powerful man there’s always a powerful woman”, and the dead mother/wife. I like to think of Joanna’s death as transformative in the sense that it represents the loss of the feminine---it creates an unbalance in an already awfully masculine-coded family, whose aftershocks still affect the lives of all her children even decades later. In short, Tywin/Joanna is a tragedy.

(seriously: if you’re looking for a parallel to Tywin/Joanna in Jaime’s narrative, a “humanizing the monster” kind of love, look no further than Jaime/Cersei. Jaime’s love for Cersei humanizes him, and Cersei’s love for Jaime (and her children) humanizes her. Unfortunately, the narrative makes it clear that theirs is a (figuratively) sterile, doomed kind of love. Like in a greek tragedy, we feel sympathy as we clutch our chests in anticipation for its inevitable collapse. Fate did to Tywin/Joanna what a downward spiral of irreconcilable differences, deep-seated grudges and destructive actions did to Jaime/Cersei, but the end point is equally tragic.)

Also: Jaime’s BATB dynamic with Brienne is not a “sympathetic” footnote squeezed in between his villain arc A and villain arc B, nor something that can be reduced to “his only likable trait” and waved off. It’s a crucial aspect of his arc (and Brienne’s, who is—let’s not forget—a major player from AFFC on) and has ramifications on the overall plot (Oathkeeper, sending Brienne after Sansa, Lady Stoneheart, not to mention the discussion around honor and oaths that is a central theme in asoiaf). It’s not a coincidence that Jaime is introduced as a pov only after he meets Brienne. This dynamic is integral to the story George is telling.

In comparison, Joanna (and by extension Tywin/Joanna) is something that belongs to the past, and only affects our story indirectly. It’s a dead character and a dead relationship. And that’s what marks the biggest differences, not only with Jaime/Brienne but also with Jaime/Cersei. Joanna, in the context of the narrative, is remarkable for her ABSENCE. It’s her death, the void that she created much more than her life, that has an impact on the characters. It doesn’t help that Tywin, the one person who’s able to remember her as a fully fledged human being, isn’t a pov either. GRRM gives us only scraps, and it’s up to those of us who care to put together the pieces of the puzzle of who Joanna used to be. This is, of course, a despicably convenient treatment of a female character on the author’s part, even more despicable since it’s not an isolate case in asoiaf. There’s no easier way than a dead mother to fabricate a sad background for your protagonist, and it also solves the problem of making her fit within the narrative, giving her an actual personality and things to do, etc. We expect better from a writer of Martin’s calibre, and that’s where the criticism comes from.

But lazy sexist writing aside, why does George give us so little?

I think it’s (in no small part) because he understands the power of certain romantic tropes, how they seduce the reader’s imagination—how humanizing they are. Tywin’s love for Joanna and Joanna’s love for Tywin, if explored in depth, would humanize Tywin to the nth degree.

But Tywin isn’t supposed to be given the sympathetic treatment. Of course, GRRM knows better than make him a cardboard villain, so he gives him nuance, he gives him contradictions, among which there’s a dead wife he loved fiercely. But he doesn’t flesh it out. He doesn’t give us a detailed story, only scattered bits and pieces, generally second and third hand information. This relationship isn’t made for the stage but for behind the curtains, because Tywin’s ~feelings~ need to remain veiled and largely inaccessible to us, just as his inner monologue is: we aren’t supposed to sympathize.

Jaime, on the other hand? Jaime gets a pov and TWO romantic relationships fleshed out in depth, one of which is a BATB dynamic with a heroine. His heart is on stage for everyone to see in a way Tywin’s heart isn’t—cannot be. I think it’s essential to recognize that Jaime and Tywin occupy different spaces in the narrative, and their potential to be seen as sympathetic characters is largely different. It’s hard for me not to see authorial intent in the way Jaime is perceived VS how Tywin is perceived.

This brings me to the other question you raised, if Jaime is on his way to become Tywin’s true heir. I can only try to answer this is by looking at what motivates him, at what could be a significant and satisfying resolution of the issues his character raises. 

Jaime never cared for power but, like every Lannister, he strives for greatness. Now that that greatness is unachievable through his swordfighting skills, he’s looking in other directions, other possible fields to excel in. One of those is certainly Tywin: family. The other is knighthood: his other family. Both failed him, and he failed them both. The way Jaime failed knighthood is obvious to everyone, but the way he failed his ~responsibility~ towards house Lannister is subtler: by trading his birthright for a place at Cersei’s side, he basically washed his hands clean, giving Tywin free rein to further hate and abuse Tyrion in an escalation of desperate and delusional attempts to avert the latter’s ascension as heir to Casterly Rock, that climaxed with Tyrion being accused of regicide and Tywin’s death. There’s a great image in Jaime’s narrative, of the crimson and gold Lannister sigil VS the white shield of the kingsguard, but the real question isn’t which one Jaime will eventually /choose/... it’s whether he’ll ever realize he can be NEITHER. 

The great lion of Lannister? That’s Tyrion. Every attempt to turn the clock back is futile. The Rock is Tyrion’s by right since the moment Jaime chose to step back and join the Kingsguard for life.

And the white shield… is Brienne. It’s always been her.

a scenario in which Brienne has a role similar to Joanna’s […] would emphasize Jaime’s doom and her rise nicely

But is Jaime Tywin in this scenario, or is he Joanna?

Because Joanna died so that Tywin could rise as the character we all know (once again, I side-eye the idea of Joanna being Tywin’s “conscience” or her death being his ~villain origin story~, but it certainly made him more unbalanced). For the parallel to work, Brienne has to die for Jaime to rise (as a true villain, as his father’s heir, as Cersei’s valonqar, whatever), which has been speculated, and which I’m aggressively AGAINST. Because Brienne is the next generation, Brienne is a character who can have a REAL positive impact on the world, while Jaime… let’s be real, Jaime is a relic. He’s a relic of Robert’s rebellion, of a time that doesn’t exist anymore. The “Greatness” ship has sailed for him long ago: 

he’s never going to do anything as remarkable and controversial as murdering Aerys (oh sure, there’s Cersei, but I wouldn’t consider killing her an accomplishment. A mediocre rehash of his one and only teenage hit, at best)

he’s never going to be Arthur Dayne, either. Who the fuck wants to be Arthur Dayne anyway? That guy kept a pregnant girl prisoner. Being THAT guy would be only a regression for Jaime. He understood that there are orders you can’t follow at seventeen, why should he revert to performing his duty uncritically at thirty-five?

oh, and of course, he’s not going to outmatch Tywin. DUH, he’s TRYING, but it isn’t a primary concern or a central motivation for him the way it is for Cersei, for example. Everything he accomplishes in his military campaign in the Riverlands, he does only because people fear Tywin’s shadow, not his own. We can talk until next week about whether the trebuchet threat crowns him as Tywin’s true successor, or is actually a strategy more similar to the way Jon and Dany (and Ned) use their enemies’ children to maintain THEIR peace terms (which are fair and righteous whereas Jaime’s aren’t, and that makes all the difference of the world, or not, ymmv!), but what really matters is how his military campaign ends: he dumps garrison, orders and all without a note as soon as girlfriend shows up with a missing cheek and a quest to fulfill. It’s not that he lacks the intelligence or the ferocity to follow Tywin’s steps—he lacks the resolve. He lacks the commitment, because he’s always, perpetually, split in two.

I think it’s that split, and his ultimately futile attempts to become great at one thing or the other when BOTH are no longer available for him, that is the central obstacle that Jaime needs to overcome. Because Jaime wants Honor and Glory, but you know what Honor and Glory are?

Two horses.

Enter the valonqar impasse, and a lot of speculation on Jaime focuses on how he will ~choose violence~. He’ll drop all pretenses of honor, forget about Goldenhand the Just, (optionally) embrace his role as a Lannister commander and dig his own grave in a pointless, doomed last stand to hold Casterly Rock from Tyrion’s attack, and when it falls, kill Cersei and himself. And to be honest, a lot of this sounds plausible enough—I think it’s almost a given that at some point he goes back to Casterly Rock, has a last confrontation with Tyrion, and yeah, likely kills Cersei. 

But it’s a tad too close to Tywin’s wishes to suit me: sure, Tywin would never want Jaime to kill Cersei and commit suicide, but would he want him to defend Casterly Rock against Tyrion? Fuck yes. He’d be DELIGHTED to see Jaime step up as his ~heir~ and fight against his own paranoia of Tyrion the monster child eating the Rock from the inside just like he devoured Joanna’s life. The greatest irony about Tywin is that the kid he wanted to be his heir couldn’t be more ill-suited for the role, whereas it’s the other two—the girl and the dwarf—who deserve to claim that role for themselves. Why change that in the end? More to the point, how does Brienne factor in this? What kind of impact does she leave? Jaime’s resolve to embrace his role as the heir to Lannister does not, in any shape or form, need Brienne to happen. Nor does his choice to fight against Tyrion, or to murder Cersei. Tyrion confessed Joffrey’s murder, and the relationship with Cersei was meant to go to shit since the moment Jaime lost his hand and stopped being her perfect mirror, possibly even earlier. Remove Brienne from Jaime’s entire timeline, and you still have basically the same arc. OF COURSE, Brienne’s importance on the story doesn’t hinge on her impact on Jaime’s narrative. But I wonder what’s the point---like, structurally---of writing a BATB dynamic where transformative love is a crucial aspect, and end it with “and so they parted ways and each one continued to do the shit THEY WERE GOING TO DO ANYWAY, Brienne as the knight who believes in vows and Jaime as... whatever Jaime’s up to”. Bruh, what a waste of narrative space.

And this is where I switch to purely speculative/wish fulfillment mode, so, HANDLE WITH CAUTION, lol. I think Jaime will reject both Honor and Glory and die as the Kingslayer, as nobody’s heir, as the Lannister who lost the Rock, unredeemed… in the eyes of everyone but us, and whoever will be holding his hand in the last moment.

A few weeks ago, I went to see Logan. As I watched Wolverine sacrifice himself so that his daughter and the new generation of heroes could, well, inherit the world, so that they could have a chance for redemption when it’s too late for him, I thought, THIS, this is I want from Jaime. To die, but not before he’s pushed HIS heir forward, the person who will save the world, who will be the hero he cannot be. To “plant seeds in a garden you never get to see”. Unlike Joanna, who had no choice in this nor any idea of how important Tyrion was going to be for the world, I want it to be Jaime’s decision. This is the only way we can go back to “the things I do for love” and redeem that statement.

Because it’s that statement, even more than Jaime himself, that needs redemption. What matters isn’t the “for love” part, it’s the “do”. See, Jaime has already done something unequivocally good for love. He jumped in a bearpit and saved Brienne. So why are we still having this debate? Because, well, the scope of that action was limited to him and Brienne, to that particular circumstance, and to the relationship between them. There’s still something egotistical in saving the life of someone you care for—it’s still a “I’m doing this because you are important to ME” logic. Me, me, me. The real heroism, the real sacrifice, is renouncing to the person you love—renouncing to your “dream of spring”, so that others can have it. It’s what Brienne does, when asked “sword or noose”. It DESTROYS her, but she INSTANTLY gets that her feelings of loyalty, devotion and, yes, love for Jaime are no justification for letting two innocent people die.

AND THIS IS WHAT MAKES HER THE REAL DEAL, FOLKS.

We still have to see how Jaime receives the choice she made. Badly, some argue, he’ll be pissed and she’ll fall from grace in his eyes, because what else can the Lady Stoneheart ordeal be if not a plot device to make Jaime go finally berserk, a set up for the valonqar? But I think the whole incident is going to leave Jaime genuinely Shook (TM). Not only because he’s suddenly getting all the receipts of why he’s a bad person in his face, not only because he’ll see what his father’s brilliant military logic has done to a formerly admirable woman like Catelyn, but also because Brienne’s lesson will HURT the way TRUTH hurts. He’s a person who’s sacrificed a lot for love, thinking it was worthwhile; Brienne’s choice will prove that it’s not. That he should have sacrificed his love to do the right thing, instead.

You need to serve something greater than your own emotions. This is the most important of Brienne’s lessons, and I think there’s a possibility that Jaime actually UNDERSTANDS it, because that would be the ULTIMATE change, for him. (so powerful that it could potentially break that thrice damned prophecy, even.) To see that his feelings, desires, hopes and dreams aren’t important. It’s neither Honor nor Glory, and in the end, it’s not even Love. It’s about doing the right thing, full stop.

I realize this is very fanficcy, but boy, do I love Jaime Lannister and want his arc to end in a not completely nihilistic way. :)

(sorry it took me so long!)

[catboyfeli]

i feel like it’s really telling that most nondysphoric trans ppl are bisexual

like bisexuals inherently don’t conform to gender roles

and with tumblr treating gender and behavior and feelings as gender, no wonder everyone’s convinced they can’t just exist as a gnc person without weaseling their way into trans spaces

like you can just present male some days and female other days and be cis plenty of people, especially bisexuals, INCLUDING MYSELF, desire to flip-flop between social roles

gender as a social role is completely socially constructed and all this gender stuff just UPHOLDS that. trans people are dysphoric about their sex which translates into social dysphoria because it reminds them OF their sex being “wrong.”

and then all this gender shit also confuses binary trans people into thinking they’re genderfluid or something when they really just are in denial, or have fluctuating dysphoria, or something similar. and then nb trans people get roped into all this too.

i talk abt this a lot and i know nobody cares but its the most infuriating thing but if i try to talk about it i’m the bad guy :/

anyway i just think social roles need to be abolished instead of supported like everyone’s been doing. gender as a social concept only exists from people trying to create a way to separate the two sexes, which turned into something more due to sexism. if you wanna be seen as the opposite gender or neither gender then yeah you might be trans! but it also easily could be something else causing that feeling! people being so quick to jump on the bandwagon is just so harmful and trans people, DYSPHORIC people, deserve their own spaces.

people have gender and gender roles all mixed up and just b/c you identify as something doesn’t make it valid? trans people don’t identify as trans they just are b/c their brain knows something’s not right. it’s just so ugh. wanting to take on a different social role isn’t dysphoria, it’s a SIDE EFFECT of dysphoria, so having that alone doesn’t necessarily mean anything. it just baffles me how people think it’s at all comparable when social roles are socially constructed like??? i just don’t understand how else i can say this to get it through people’s heads? it’d be easy to debate someone but i’m not doing that on this hellsite

idk im just so tired of people saying “gnc and nb isnt the same!!” but then going around and iding as nb BECAUSE they feel disconnected from gender and its social roles like???? you just contradicted yourself. if you’re ok with your bio sex then chances are you’re cis and just don’t conform to binary gender roles. gender and gender roles are basically the same thing like there’s little distinction.

people also make gender into this big fucking thing like once i said the only possible way to nb to exist is to have a neurosex that’s an equal mix of male and female, thus creating atypical dysphoria, and people got SO FUCKING OFFENDED LIKE uM

i shouldn’t need to explain how stupid that is djkldljkfjklfjk ugh

anyway the only way gender is real is via brain sex. gender as a social construct is real, buuut also fake because it’s a social construct. not conforming to gender is GOOD because it means you’re not letting yourself be shoved into a box. but that doesn’t make you trans. and you’re still either male or female and not fitting into gender roles doesn’t mean anything or make you nb, atypical dysphoria does.

and honestly the whole being wlw and mlm at the same time thing is so?? creepy and fetishy??? i really shouldnt have to explain why. like i identify as female, male, and neither, but that means Literally Nothing and if i, as a cis girl, tried to weasel my way into mlm spaces it’d be fuckin creepy. it just makes trans mlm look like a joke and it’s pretty shitty.

but also they seriously need the change the terms for nb people because theyre described as like “being attracted to female genitalia and femininity but not necessarily females” and ??? FEMININITY AND FEMALE ARENT THE SAME THING BY THIS LOGIC YOU COULD BE ATTRACTED TO A FEMININE MAN, BUT WAIT HE PRESENTS AS A MAN SO JUST SAY FEMALE PRESENTING AAAAAAAAAAAA

and like if someone presents as female... they’re female. gender and identity doesn’t matter they look female, their biologically female, they’re female. it should be about SEX not what they identify as. attraction to trans people is about perceived sex, not gender. and you can be attracted to someone who presents as female but then find out theyre actually male and lose the attraction. it’s just such a COMPLEX THING YOU CANT PUT INTO BOXES LIKE THIS ugh

i just think the whole gender thing needs to go honestly. its all about sex and perceived sex, personality, behavior, looks, interests, mannerisms, etc. i just summed up how gender contributes to attraction in that one sentence. that’s how unnecessary it is. you can like people who aren’t male and have feminine mannerisms. tada! we just summed up a way to experience attraction without making it weird!

its kind of funny how people describe attraction is a way that enforces binary roles despite trying to go against them. like instead of saying a lesbian is attracted to women why not just say a lesbian is attracted to everyone but men? it recognizes how presentation and perceived sex go into play without making things weird. because even if someone isnt a man, using this in the sense of a dysphoric nb person and NOT just how they ~identify~ bc that’s stupid, but anyway if they’re not a man, but present as a man, then the lesbian isn’t going to be attracted to them, and that’s just how it works.

but! the lesbian could meet a man who presents as male but feminine and has feminine mannerisms, and realize she’s actually bi and is just attracted to femininity, because attraction is complex and much like how people won’t fit into binary social roles, people’s attraction ALSO won’t fit into binary social roles, so maybe a girl could be really into masculinity and think she’s straight but then see a masculine girl and realize she’s bi, and not be into feminine men b/c just because she likes men doesn’t men she likes ALL men and b/c masculine and male aren’t the same thing

hoo i could go on but i know nobody is reading this. maybe i could try to put all my thoughts into a legible essay someday idk. anyway i just think real nb people are so rare that it’s better to treat their gender as a lack of gender, rather than a third gender, and that their gender exists BECAUSE of their atypical dysphoria, not because they ~identify~ as something different or anything dumb like that.

i see why people think a third gender would be beneficial but i’m just trying to be realistic. trans people are only 0.37% of the population. nb trans people would make up an extremely small amount of that percentage, so it only makes sense to NOT change the way the world works for over 99% of people, and instead find a compromise in treating their gender as a lack of one. plus the whole third gender thing is something gnc youth love to latch onto which isn’t healthy. creating a third gender for people who don’t fit into binary gender roles is regressive and enforces binary gender roles. that’s it that’s what this whole spiel was about basically im done now goodbye

[erriikkka]

As I develop my capabilities, I’ve been really a hoarder of movies, Disney films to be exact. Since then, it has always been a part of me to pay attention to these movie pictures that accompanied and innovated me throughout the years. Furthermore, i have abide to tackle the route in reaching my dreams and I have these bundle of films that represents my childhood in which i can relate to. These movies are the reason that at some point in my life, it also happens to me, and there, I see myself in my that particular scene so what are you waiting for? come on and see what’s inside my movie blog!

I. Beauty and the Beast

the 18th-century fairy tale was brought into life.

Beauty and the Beast

Disney has already given us live-action versions of animated films like Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty in recent years but in a way, Beauty and the Beast feels like the riskiest of them all so far, as far as potential backlash is concerned. Beauty and the Beast is still much more recent than those other animated classics, and many can clearly remember growing up during the film’s initial release and explosion in popularity. Starting from editing, the musical, the casting, setting and the whole production staff made everything possible for this film has to be brought into life and its just very alluring, it will never disappoint you. There are numerous scenes from the film that leave me breathless and had me in tears. One of these scenes is when Belle and the Beast had their first date and dance in the tune “Beauty and the Beast” which depicts their love story. Speaking of their lovestory, the story’s fantastical elements made it feel truly “realistic,” these touches the hearts of its viewers especially, the die-hard Disney fans who waited for this time to happen. It was like a time travel from time to time through the use of the music box which plays the life of Belle since she was born. Lastly, it was when Gaston fatally shoots the Beast from a bridge, but it collapses when the castle crumbles, and he falls to his death. The Beast dies as the last petal falls, and the servants become inanimate. As Belle tearfully professes her love to the Beast, the enchantress reveals herself and undoes the curse, repairing the crumbling castle, and restoring the Beast’s and servants’ human forms and the villagers’ memories. The Prince and Belle host a ball for the kingdom, where they dance and lived happily ever after. With that, I could definitely say that i am mesmerized by this film and it has a huge impact in my life. This movie get to be my favorite movie. 10/10

II. Frozen

Frozen.

My happy pill.

  Frozen desalinates the new generation, our generation. Wherein, the youths are being portrayed by Elsa who would always keep a particular secret from everyone for the reason that she’s afraid that the society wont accept her. Within her, i saw myself, i saw how excruciating it is for her to lose her loved ones, i’m not saying that the same thing occurred to me but, even my family’s complete, there’s always that something that’ll be missing.  Since then, this film has been my happy pill and Elsa served as my spirit animal and just like her, I should be continuing what I’ve started and what I want because basically, it’s me, that is me. No one could ever deny the hard fact that these challenges will always come and test us, but we should all believe in ourselves that we can like what Elsa did. She stood up for herself and she even managed to grow into a beautiful rose even if she’s all alone. The reason why i really can’t resist this film is about it’s life lessons that we should always think first before we should do any decisions for it might affect our future.

III. Inside Out

The universe is full of dark matter and black holes, of planets made of diamond and space clouds that smell like raspberries. It is beautiful, terrifying and very, very odd. but none of that wonder holds a Christmas candle to what goes on in the mind of an 11-year-old girl. Take Riley—a fun, goofy, hockey-loving kid from Minnesota. Sure, she might not look all that unusual from the outside. But dive into her gray matter and you’ll see towering shelves full of memories and terrifying forests of broccoli in her subconscious, cloud cities forming in her imagination and elaborate dreams taking shape on the sound stage of her psyche. Above it all, in the control tower, work Riley’s core emotions: Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear. They push buttons and twist knobs and help power Riley through each and every day, making scads of marble-like memories all the while. Most of those marbles are eventually whisked away to long-term memory storage. But a handful stay in the control room. They’re her core memories, moments so critical in Riley’s development that they’ve spawned whole islands of identity. When Joy is sucked out of the control tower, though, it becomes impossible for Riley to do much but sulk and cower and occasionally blow up. And while that’s not good in and of itself, it’s a fantastic depiction of what kids feel when they’re under a lot of stress. When you’re 11 and your whole world has changed, your inner world is shaken, too. And we learn here that our emotions, even ones that might seem, on the surface, “bad,” can help stabilize things. Riley’s parents don’t understand what’s going on with their suddenly sullen daughter, but they want to help. And so they do—through love and patience and understanding. It’s pretty obvious that Mom and Dad are great (though not always perfect) parents, and Riley, eventually, sees them as such. That means Inside Out isn’t content to depict how awful things can get when our lives take a sudden downward turn. No, it also wants to show us how important family can be in the process of picking yourself up and moving on.

IV. Moana

  Princesses come in all shapes, sizes, and colors, though Disney’s latest addition to its ever-growing gallery of empowered female heroines, Moana – The sail of the century. It is a tale of the young daughter of a Polynesian chief who seeks to explore the world beyond her island in the Pacific and save her people in the process. Moana’s father continually asserts that because her role is to be the island’s next leader, she must remain on the island. However, her decision to defy her father’s orders leads to a fulfilling experience. She skillfully incorporates Polynesian culture into its plot, demonstrating its beauty and intricacy while respecting its origins. The film includes the traditional Polynesian legend of Maui, a demigod known for his mischievous personality and contributions to mankind, most notably his creation of the Pacific Islands by pulling up rocks from beneath the ocean. Maui’s character is cleverly utilized to highlight the significance of Moana’s agency as a young woman. Demonstrating his rude personality, Maui constantly doubts Moana’s ability to navigate the ocean and help her people because of her status as the young daughter of a chief. Moana’s continual capacity to prove Maui wrong emphasizes her independence and inherent talents regardless of her social standing or gender. Though Maui and his godly powers contribute to the storyline, Moana’s strength and determination are central to the film’s plot and communicate a stirring message of female empowerment. Patience is the key to happiness, they say, and nearly the entire film embodies that belief. For example, Moana must find enough patience to learn how to sail, patience in Maui who doesn’t trust her at first, and patience throughout her entire journey. During the film we see Moana fail a few times before she finally succeeds, and that added humanity to her character, which a lot of protagonists tend to lack. When a lot of people see this, especially our youth, I think it will help them realize that mistakes are a part of our journey through life, and some things require patience before success. The film will be cheered as many things — an entertaining holiday film, a princess story without the slightest hint of romance, a multicultural addition to the Disney family — but best of all, it’s a sharp attack on helicopter parenting. Unlike most of the young women we meet in fairy tales, Moana has a happy childhood and never wants for anything. Like many middle-class American kids today, she has two wonderful, caring parents who only want what’s best for her. Otherwise, the movie offers positive messages of self-discovery and empowerment. And Moana herself is a great role model, demonstrating perseverance, curiosity, and courage.

V. Coco

They say, Coco is the best movie of Pixar in years, and I totally agrees with it. Most of the scenes in the movie takes place in the Land of the Dead, but the movie never stops overflowing with life. Colors riot and effervesce, Mexican folk-art patterns tease the eye, music and song ride beneath each scene and goose it forward. The movie’s so exuberantly visual that it feels as if you’re sticking your head inside the collective unconscious of an entire culture. Not to mention it’s soundtrack “remember me” which says the whole story and within that, we can all see that many people can relate in this kind of music especially the emotional ones. Although out the movie, it made me cry for the reason that at some how I can relate and I know how it feels when your parents are contradicting the things you wanted to do. This movie is a 10/10 for me. It’s really nice and knowing me, being emotional this movie suits my sentimental heart. While all is well in the end, the movie can be dark and sad , especially for those who’ve lost beloved relatives. But it also has powerful themes of perseverance, teamwork, and gratitude and encourages audiences to love and appreciate their family and always follow their dreams.

5 worthy movies that you shouldn’t miss! As I develop my capabilities, I've been really a hoarder of movies, Disney films to be exact.