#not the transphobic one

[drangleicasshole]

unpopular opinion: that little fucking bat from anastasia is the most bland character of all time

[girlboyburger]

people calling me a boy to try and be mean to me is so funny. have you seen my username.

[transmascissues]

it's silly but the biggest reason why im not into t yet is bc im so afraid of losing my hair. do you have any solutions/tips for it?

first of all, i don’t think it’s silly — it’s natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as like…one of the worst results of aging for men. listening to my dad talk about how much he hates balding definitely did not make me feel particularly good about the knowledge that i may very well be joining him someday. i’m not saying the fear is right, because i don’t think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but it’s an understandable fear given the beauty standards we’re working with, and it’s one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.

one thing that’s helped me is just…paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. i’ve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. i’d say it’s much harder to find an adult man who isn’t balding at all than it is to find one who’s completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything you’ve been told about how bad hair loss is, you’ll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesn’t ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isn’t really even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. we put so much weight on it but it’s really just not that big of a deal. i’ll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didn’t even notice a difference last time i saw them. it’s one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because you’ve been taught that you’re supposed to care about it.

this isn’t something i’ve done personally, but if you really want to desensitize yourself to the idea of it, embrace the time-honored queer tradition of just shaving your whole damn head! find out what you’d look like without hair, find out how you feel about it and what you can do that makes you feel good about your appearance without hair, test the waters while it’s still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it won’t feel like this big scary unknown, and you’ll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that you’ll inevitably hate it. if you don’t want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.

oh, and if you’re attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, there’s no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasn’t helped me with. just off the top of my head, i can think of a couple actors who i think are absolutely fucking gorgeous who have helped me get over my fears about losing my hair. despite what our anti-aging-obsessed world might want you to think, there is no such thing as a physical feature that automatically makes someone less attractive, and while making attractiveness less of a priority in your life is good, it can’t hurt to also give yourself some proof that actually, you might lose your hair and look hot as hell doing it.

basically, entertain the possibility that it won’t be a bad thing at all! whether that’s just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, it’s not an inherently bad thing. i’ve ended up liking a lot of things that were “supposed to” be bad effects of t — i love the weight i’ve gained and the new shape it gives my body, i get a lot of gender euphoria from the fact that my acne is now on parts of my face that i saw a lot of guys in high school get it and i’m not complaining about the scars i get from it either because i’ve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think there’s a lot of joy to be had in the changes we’re taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.

but if it’s something you really don’t want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, it’s not like there’s nothing you can do! products like finasteride (oral) and minoxidil (usually topical but i think there might also be oral versions) are pretty commonly used among trans guys, for the purpose of avoiding hair loss and for other reasons, and there are plenty of other anti-hair loss products out there (though i don’t know how effective any one of them might be). if it’s a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that you’ll go off of t if/when you start noticing signs of it, since no longer having higher t levels would stop the process in its tracks. and if you don’t find prevention options that work for you so it ends up happening, you can always explore different hair styles (judging by the pattern of hair loss i see in my family, i suspect that keeping my hair long would make it less obvious if i started losing mine), find your preferred method of covering it when you don’t feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didn’t have hair to worry about because my main complaint is the way they press my hair onto my neck), or just shave it all off if you don’t like the look of the partial balding but don’t mind a shaved head. the point being — you have options!

at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, you’re going to see your body change as you age in ways that aren’t always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. that’s just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, you’d get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you don’t bald, you’ll see your skin start to wrinkle and sag in places that used to be smooth, your metabolism might slow or your body fat might start to gather in new places; hell, you might lose your hair for a totally different reason and end up in the same place but without the benefits of having been on t that whole time. life is full of bodily changes like that. transphobes will fearmonger about the permanent changes of testosterone all day long but the truth is, there is no escaping permanent bodily changes. whether or not you go on t, your body now isn’t the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isn’t the same as it was at any point in your life before now. our bodies are never supposed to stop growing and aging and changing throughout our lives. there’s no guaranteeing that we’ll love every single change our bodies go through, but that’s okay! there are so many things in life that are more important than the way our bodies look. even if you go on t and lose your hair and don’t like how it looks, your life won’t be ruined; plenty of other things will bring you joy and more than make up for the insecurities.

just think about the gender euphoria and relief from dysphoria that t could give you. would losing your hair be bad enough to outweigh all of that? or is it just the pressure of a society that decided balding is bad that’s making you fear one single change despite how much joy you could have if you let that fear go? only you can decide if going on t is worth the potential downsides for you, but i suspect that for most of us, the benefits of going on t far outweigh the possibility of side effects like hair loss happening down the line.

[courfee]

messing up his hair is actually just an excuse to show off his biceps

[sualne]

talking around it, hurting around it.

(timeline)

[immediatebreakfast]

Unitentional or not, the importance of the gothic feminine put on Jonathan's shoulders in this part is worthy of many words. There is so much symbolism that is mostly reserved for female gothic characters on Jonathan that it's no wonder some parts of his unwanted survival game with the Count.

Jonathan can't feel, nor believe that he is safe in his room anymore thanks to Dracula being downright daring with his supernatural antics to an almost alarming degree. So, as a good gothic heroine, Jonathan defies the orders given to him, grabs a source of light, and explores the place where he is held captive.

I went back to the room, and taking a lamp, tried all the doors.

The door sequence, and realization of how truly isolated Jonathan is from any kind of human being is painted in strokes of Bluebeard's wife, even calling how a key could change Jonathan's fate, and showing what is beneath the opulent wing of the castle in which he tries to sleep.

However, what comes later is something very important.

Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last.

This is such a eye opening detail for Jonathan's relationship with the feminine, and his role as a gothic heroine. He can't stay in his room, a private place where he is supposed to be safe, because everything is now haunted by Dracula's patriarchal and masculine presence even when he is not there; the room is tainted, and it's a reminder that Dracula will violate Jonathan's boundaries again if he wants to.

So, when Jonathan recognizes the tell tale signs that the only unlocked door in the castle is not only "neutral" ground by how old it is, but also can be seen through feminine lens he is utterly relieved, and thinks that in there he will finally have a moment of peace. Jonathan embraces this thought of that little oak table existing outside a realm that the Count has not touched, one that instead has seen women fall in love as explicitely compares his shorthand diary to a love letter.

Of course, this clear dissobedience of the Count's orders will have consequences, the novel wouldn't be gothic if it didn't. Yet, what matters is how these consequences will affect Jonathan, will they shatter a fundamental view that he has? Or will they make worse his mental downward spiral?

[lazylittledragon]

already said this on the bird app but it is fucking hilarious that terfs are getting pissy about not being able to use paris paloma for their anti-trans anthems. like you've strayed so far from feminism that you see a real feminist and lose your shit

[notaplaceofhonour]

thread

[uncanny-tranny]

Like, the reason I'm always suspicious of people going, "I'm not transphobic, I can't be transphobic! I'm attracted to/date trans people!" is that there is a huge difference between seeing trans people as your inherent equal that you happen to sometimes also feel attraction toward and seeing them as objects to own and dehumanize through any means necessary.

And if the only reason you can see for why you aren't transphobic is that you're so attracted to us, then (in my eyes) you are the latter.

[hanzajesthanza]

geralt "i will NEVER deadname my best friend" of rivia

"he will ALWAYS be dandelion to ME"

[zillychu]

"did you draw this character as trans, or are they cis?"

the answer is yes. whichever makes you happiest. or, if you're being weird or a jerk about it, it's whatever makes you angriest. if you're transphobic, every character I draw is trans. especially your faves. they're Turbo Trans actually.

unless I'm specifically saying otherwise, you're welcome to view the characters I draw as whatever you like! sometimes they're trans when I draw them, sometimes they aren't. sometimes they're just a pretty man or a girl with small boobs or whatever. I tend to prefer an androgynous aesthetic so it's not easy to tell lol

[slightly-depressed-sloth]

Whenever ppl imply Damian would be homophobic I just kinda assume they're either new to comics or have some internal biases to work out cause I don't know who they're talking about but it isn't my boy Damian ultimate-over-invested-ally Wayne

[give-ginoza-some-bread-and-sleep]

Reblog if you’re real fucking tired of your gender identity being invalidated on a daily basis.

[transmascissues]

today, my coworkers’ refusal to see me as a man put one of our patients in a position where they felt unsafe for the third time. i’ve been at this job for less than two months total. i don’t even care about getting misgendered anymore, i just want the people we’re supposed to be taking care of to feel comfortable around me.

i work at a hospital where we have to supervise our patients in a lot of vulnerable situations. there are safeguarding rules in place for certain things that male employees aren’t allowed to be present for when it comes to female patients. and yet, the people training me and telling me what to do have repeatedly put me in situations where i’ve been forced to do things that the female patients aren’t comfortable with me doing. and because they have repeatedly failed to teach me the rules for doing my job as a man, i have no way of knowing when i’m crossing one of those lines unless one of the patients tells me.

i’ve had to watch a victim of SA stare at me in abject terror as my coworkers asked her to strip naked with me still in the room. it took several minutes for her to even be able to speak enough to ask if i could leave the room. i found out after that she broke down crying the moment i walked out. my biggest regret is that i didn’t realize what was happening fast enough to leave before she ever had to say something, because she shouldn’t have had to say it. i never should’ve been allowed in the room in the first place, because that’s not something male employees are supposed to be present for. but i didn’t know that yet, because i was training and i thought surely, they wouldn’t train me to do something that directly violated their own safeguarding rules. that moment was the first time, and it’s haunted me ever since, but it wasn’t the last time. not only did it happen for the third time today — it almost happened for the fourth, and would have if someone hadn’t spoken up to say they should pick someone else. i care for these people so deeply, it’s why i took this job, and i’m so tired of hearing the fear in their voices when they have to ask me not to do something i never should’ve been told to do.

i’m very used to the personal discomfort of being misgendered. i willingly deal with it a lot at work as well as in other situations, not because i’m in the closet (at this point in my medical transition that would be impossible), but because it’s such a frequent occurrence with my coworkers that we would never get anything done if i took the time to correct them every time. but to see it get to the point of causing such visceral discomfort in other people? people i’m supposed to be taking care of and keeping safe? that’s something else entirely, and i’m fucking exhausted.

and after all of that, some of them still look at me like i have two heads when they tell me what to do and i say “i can’t do that, only female employees can” because i’m learning now. clearly i’m already seen as a man by our patients, but my coworkers would still rather put them in an unsafe situation than just train me as a man.

[mayasaura]

One thing that really stuck me about gender in Nona was the sexism in the teacher's perception of Pyrrha. She sees two young women living with someone she perceives as being male, and on learning they're not related, her immediate assumption is that Pyrrha is taking sexual advantage of them. How incredibly unfair that assumption is to Pyrrha, to assume this about her and to continue assuming this despite how clearly Nona adores her. What it implies about the broader setting that this was apparently a somewhat reasonable assumption to make, and that there are battered women's shelters for her to try to gently direct Camilla to. How starkly it throws into relief that this assumption has never once been made in the series before.

That's what really hit about the scene. This was the first time a perceived-male character had been assumed to be a sexual threat. It was the first time being a woman or a girl had carried an assumption of victimhood. I had already noticed that the Nine Houses seemed to lack any kind of gender-based hierarchy, and didn't show any signs of misogynistic gender roles, but it really struck me again in that moment how freeing it had been. To have had two whole books from the perspective of teenage girls with no concept of sexual violence. To have had a whole setting where those assumptions just didn't exist, and would never have occurred to anyone.

And I think that's one thing that really holds me back from agreeing that 'Nine Houses' = Bad and 'Not Nine Houses' = Good. The societies outside the Nine Houses are still the legacy of the billionaires who left the Earth to die. They're still capitalistic, they have plastic bags clogging their bays, and after ten thousand years, they still haven't been able to put down the misogyny juice. I don't think it was a mistake that this information about the setting was communicated the way it was, using this assumption about Pyrrha. The delivery cuts way too deliberately to the putrid heart of gender bias; where misogyny, misandry, and transphobia are all just different angles on the same damn thing. A total milf perfectly playing the part of loving and beloved father, but still assumed by observers to be a sexual predator. That's not a culture I want to champion.

[j0cto]

this is basically what happened, right?