#passing discourse

[vampirepuppyboyfag]

tired of talking about passing so much in trans spaces

im fat, goth, i have a round face and hips and a large chest

im probably never going to pass to cis people

and that's okay

i shouldn't have to shift myself to the cis gaze to be a guy

[daybreaksys]

Okay but this happens in real life because there are nonhuman peoples in plural systems

this is actual struggle for human-passing non-humans, in our system we have them, they're not human, they don't have human privilege, and they go without support from nonhuman communities

mixed race people face this

she IS nonhuman, that IS her space, she should stay, not just leave her brother and come back later to pick him up

also, "m*nst*r" is a slur in our system, a very VERY bad one

I guess this is @funnier-as-a-system

Credit: @pet_foolery

[cardentist]

hey, so people need to be aware that youtube is now (randomly) holding basic features for ransom (such as being able to pin comments under your own videos) in exchange for Your State ID/Drivers License, or a 30 Second Video Of Your Face.

not to pull a "think of the children," but No Actually. I've been making videos as a hobby since 2015 (and I've had my channel since middle school), I was a minor when I started and I'm not sure I would have understood the kind of damage something a seemingly simple as a video of your face can do.

this is a Massive breach of privacy and over-reach on google's part No Matter What, but if they're going to randomly demand a state ID or license then they absolutely should not allow minors to be creators.

google having a stockpile of identifying information on teenagers is bad enough, but the Alternative of recording your face and handing it over to be filed away is Alarming considering it opens the gates for minors who Aren't old enough to have a license.

and yes, there is a third option, but it's intentionally obtuse. a long wait period (2 months), with no guarantee of access (unlike, say, the convenience of using your phone's cameras for either of the other two), with absolutely No elaboration on what the criteria is or how it's being measured.

it's the same psychological effect that mobile games rely on. offer a slow, unreliable solution with no payment to make the Paid instant gratification look more appealing (the "payment" in this case being You. you are the product being offered).

and it's Particularly a system that (I think intentionally) disadvantages people who don't treat their channels like a job. hobbyists or niche creators who don't create regularly enough or aren't popular enough to meet whatever Vague criteria needs to be met to pass.

markiplier would have no problem passing, your little brother might not be able to. and while Mark's name is already out there there's no reason why your little brother's should be too.

something like pinned comments may seem simple, you don't technically Need it. but it's a feature that's been available for years. most people don't look at descriptions anymore. so when there's relevant information that needs to be delivered then the pinned comment is usually the go to.

for my little channel that information is about the niche series I create for. guides on how to get into the series, sources on where to find the content At All (and reliably so). for other creators it can be used for things Much More Important.

Moreover, if we let them get away with cutting away "small" features and selling it back to you for the price of your privacy, then they Will creep further. they Will take more.

Note: I have an update to this post here: [Link]

[matcha-omega]

EVIL TRANSMASC

A flag for when you're EVIL and transmasc

EVIL Color meanings:

Red: The BLOOD of transandrophobes. also for EVIL gnc transmascs yay yippee yay :3

Cyan: Our TWISTED agenda (supporting our fellow transmascs and the trans community as a whole)

Navy Blue: Our SCARY masculinity/manhood

Blueish Black: Our DARK brotherhood

[that-satireguy]

You guys know people by and large aren't mistaking hairy cis women for men? You know thats a racist insult not an actual misunderstanding.. right?

You know that 'not performing femininity' won't usually have you 'mistaken as a man' it will have insults spewed at you calling you one, because it is AN INSULT to call a 'woman' a man.

THIS IS A FORM OF MISOGYNY. NOT PEOPLE ACTUALLY THINKING THAT A CIS WOMAN WITH FACIAL HAIR IS A MAN.

I have facial hair! I'm fucking IRANIAN its one of the biggest stereotypes about Iranian/Persian women that they have 'bigger beard than the men'

Tl:dr- GENERALLY SPEAKING MOST PEOPLE DO NOT SEE CIS WOMEN WITH MASCULINE FEATURES AND FACIAL HAIR AS ACTUAL FUCKING MEN

[kcdodger]

This is actually exactly why I play so hard into my Butch aesthetic. Playing the societal expectations of a butch lesbian makes it easier for me to pass as an, "Unconventionally attractive, obviously lesbian woman" than if I tried to wear dresses, makeup and present myself hyper Femininely.

Like. I'm 6'3. I know what I have to do.

the fundamental tension between wanting to dissociate modes of dress from gender and people wanting to use modes of dress to signify their gender so they don't have to play the Pronoun Game

[pawberri]

Can I ask what privilege looks like for a trans man? Genuinely asking this isn't me trying to be an asshole or nothing. I see it brought up a lot on tumblr but no one has ever defined what that really means and I struggle to see how it applies to us when we already don't have a lot of power in society. Disregard if you don't wanna explain, Its just hard to find a concrete answer on this and you seem very well educated on these things.

It's easiest to understand when you think of circumstances where only trans people are present. With other variables removed, you can see how trans men are able to assert their masculinity by marginalizing trans women the same way that cishet white men are able to assert their masculinity by marginalizing all women. Insular trans spaces tend to still favor trans men and transmasculinity and marginilize transfeminity. The formation of movements like transandrophobia concentrate this and reward trans men even more for excluding and "owning" women. There are also statistics to prove we fare better than trans women in terms of wages. This trend of privilege extends from treatment of early childhood gender nonconfmority to adult workplace experience to intracommunity trends. We also can marginalize non-trans women, of course, but that relationship has a more complicated push and pull as they are able to marginalize us bc of their cisness. This extends outside of our spaces depending on your ability to pass and other privileges, either conditional (like doublegendering in the case of things like the Michigan Womyns Music Festival) or permanent. Sometimes, these privileges are offered with conditions that are dehumanizing, infantalizing, and otherwise disadvantagous in the long term, but they still amount to something denied to women in our equivalent position altogether.

Julia Serano has written many books and essays that illustrate specific examples of this

[trixxedheart]

It is amazing how the "people that love and uplift transwomen" website will instantly fucking maul a transwoman if she even remotely insinuate that using radfem rhetoric harms trans people

[relaxxattack]

it's always really funny to see people debating about the ethics of supporting doof/perry like i'm sorry to tell you this but they are already canonically dating. they don't need your approval 😭

[spindlekick]

Normal person: Hey how's it going

Inspired by this post

[lauronk]

REVIEW🧟 REVIEW🧟‍♀️ REVIEW🧟‍♂️

(pretty please)

hi friendo, glad to see you! buckle up for this one, it's...a lot lmao like literally a wall of text, i tried to break it up so that it's a more manageable read but i was so wordy i do not think i succeeded.

lemme just get the elephant out of the way, the bit that's had so many tumblr girlies (gn) up in arms all day: joel's experimenting comment and his talk to me when you're more yourself bit. 🚨🚨if you don't care to read that part, skip down to the next star banner for thoughts on the rest of the episode🚨🚨

and let me say right off, i do not think that joel's reaction was right but i think it was understandable. i think some people have been living with soft fic dad joel too long and have idealized the fuck out of him (which, tbf, i do too) and some of the less favorable aspects of his character have been forgotten because, believe it or not, he is not the perfect man/dad we all like to pretend he is. that being said:

for one, i need people to stop saying "he's from austin! he would be liberal!" my sweet precious little summer children. i have lived in and around central texas, including austin, travis county, and various parts of the hill country, for 25 of my 33 years on this planet. austin is liberal, yes, especially compared to surrounding cities and counties, but travis county voted for bush in 2000. and homophobia (and conservatism and hate crimes and all of it) still exists in and around the whole area, there is not some magical anti-homophobe bubble over the city that automatically makes everyone who lives there an ally. joel and tommy are also canonically from arlington (game versions at least), and tarrant county is significantly more conservative than travis county. stop treating austin like a liberal monolith because it is not that any more than texas as a whole is a conservative monolith.

show!tlou outbreak was in 2003. pre-obergefell, in the midst of DADT, when straight was seen as the default and anything remotely outside that was other, weird, unacceptable. i am not gonna say that just because joel lives in texas he is a bigot. but i am also not gonna say that living in austin automatically makes him liberal either, which is the conclusion so many people seem to be jumping to. especially because liberal in 2003 was farrrrr different than liberal today. lgbtq+ rights were nowhere in al gore's presidential campaign. john kerry (the democratic nom in 2004) was flatout opposed to same-sex marriage and thought it should be decided by the states. you cannot look at joel miller with a 2025 understanding of queerness because we never get past 2003 and society was too busy trying to fight fungus monsters to work on their societal and cultural mindsets.

yes, joel is friends with bill and frank and yes, he seems to not care one way or the other that they're gay. but (unfortunately) for some people it is a vastly different thing when it is your friends (and when it comes to bill and joel i use the word very loosely) vs when it is your kid. my best friend came out to his conservative parents and while they reiterated that they loved him no matter what, they still had to "work through" accepting that it meant not getting the exact future they had envisioned for him, and they still went through a period of denial even though he was in his mid-20s and had known this about himself for some time before working up the nerve to tell them.

joel walks in on his teenage kid not just fooling around with a partner of the same sex, he walks in on her fooling around with, in his eyes, an adult. cat & ellie may not see 17 and 19 as all that different, because they are in a time where the rather arbitrary 18yo = adult line has been erased, but that line is likely very much still there in joel's head. he sees an adult woman in his teenaged daughter's room, tattooing her, giving her drugs, and fooling around with her. any parent would have flipped their lid, MY parents who were lesbians would have flipped their lid. to quote judy gellar on friends: "that's a lot of information to get in thirty seconds."

should he have said experimenting? no. should he have implied that the 17yo didn't know herself well enough to know what she's saying about herself? no. but to joel - she is high, she is a kid, she is mad at him now for interrupting and embarrassing her in front of cat. and let's be so for real, joel miller does NOT have a good record of thinking before he speaks, nor has he really been shown to acknowledge and share his emotions more than a handful of times.

this has all been a very long-winded way of saying i think slapping a blanket homophobe label on joel is utterly lacking in nuance, context, and literally any critical thought. i think saying his behavior is OOC is lacking those things as well because at the end of the day he is an emotionally damaged/emotionally constipated old man from Texas who probably internalized some of those ideals whether he meant to or not.

and i think it is very clear that despite that misstep, he loves and accepts ellie for who she is. he shoves a man who calls her a slur, he asks about dina with the same awkwardness that my dad has ever asked me about a significant other with, he says dina would be lucky to have her, and he still sees her as his daughter at the end of it all.

for the rest of the episode:

honestly, top to bottom, fucking loved it. joel making her guitar rather than finding it? carving the moth in himself? infodumping about the tools? sheer perfection.

ellie being a little gremlin and digging her hand straight into a cake, joel/pedro singing (even if pedro wasn't actually playing lol), the SPACE CAPSULE AND THE TAPE, we got a baby girl and a forehead kiss, we got a joel and ellie who are as domestic as it gets, it was all incredible.

i loved the changes made as well (for the most part): eugene being the trigger for ellie's realization; the delayed timeline on her moving to the garage and their estrangement; seeing some things unwind from joel's pov as opposed to ellie's; the little joel and maria convo (GIVE ME MORE) and uncle grumpyyyyyyyyy; also i would happily watch joel shove seth a thousand times over. i loved ellie trying to work through her logical list of questions and then immediately panicking and shoving them in a drawer when joel knocks.

PORCH SCENE PORCH SCENE PORCH SCENEEEEEEEE i'll be so honest at first i was like why the fuck are they giving this to us now? but i loved the scene so much i don't care lol and i do think, in the end, it was good placement for it. i think it gave us everything we needed to see to make ellie's behavior thus far make sense (her reaction to the pregnancy, her wanting to do daddy-daughter patrol). AND JOEL SAID I LOVE YOUUUUUUUU i cannot believe we got that.

honestly one of my favorite things about this season has been how just upfront about what exactly joel & ellie's relationship is in a way the game (to my admittedly limited knowledge) never was.

also at the end of it all, just absolutely top notch performances by pedro and bella, as always. all of it was just fucking incredible, i cannot believe we are so blessed to live in a timeline where they are our joel and ellie, and they love each other so deeply offscreen too.

issues? needs more tommy and maria. needs more minutes per episode. needs more episodes in the season. and also the museum needed to be longer really. that's such a big chunk of the game and i know they gave us fresh new stuff but also...dinosaurs with hats 😭

[valtsv]

thrilled to announce that you can now become a yaoi war profiteer thanks to tumblr polls

[utilitycaster]

I'm vagueing a very specific post here but there's one post from a few days ago that manages to be both unbelievably patronizing, to the point of dehumanizing, towards people from colonized countries and cultures, and also claims that maybe the reason people who don't like Campaign 3 Don't Get It is because maybe a game based on Pathfinder would have more complex villains than one based on that childish black-and-white game, D&D. And while the first point is, well, white and western-centric and I find it genuinely horrifying that 40-odd people in the fandom liked and reblogged this one. I do want to point out that fully and eloquently debunking the that point would probably require I spend a while reading Spivak and hooks, and to be clear, I am attempting to do so, but that takes time.

What I can point out, however, is 1. in a post claiming to speak for colonized people maybe don't end it with a petty dig at the more popular of the two biggest guns in TTRPGs, that's just basic rhetoric and 2. As Critical Role began pre-stream in Pathfinder 1e and your argument is apparently that works that inherit from D&D are inherently overly simplistic I have some real bad news for you about where pathfinder derives from.

[penig]

So there's very little, if any point, either agonizing or rejoicing about casting Skarsgaard as Murderbot because execution is everything and it could be every bit as bad as some people expect or it could be as good as other people expect or it could be a real mixed bag and there's nothing we can do about it, anyway. We won't know what we think about it till we watch it, but people like making discourse in a vacuum and here we are.

I totally get that there's something simultaneously inevitable and revolting about the idea of a character, canonically extremely oppressed in a world in which everyone whose skin color is described is more or less brown, being played by a member of the least oppressed population demographic with which most of us are familiar. My initial reaction was not great, either.

But every time I see someone say: "Murderbot is not a cis white man!" I can't help thinking: "No, it's not. But in the TV show, it looks like one."

Look, I'm bisexual. And cis. And monogamous. The person I married happened to also be bisexual and cis. We didn't stop being bisexual when we married each other, but when we're together, we don't look queer. We look heterosexual. Which means, we get a lot of heteronormative privilege we don't ask for and I can see why more visibly queer people might resent that. But you know what happens when we try to reject that privilege? People both straight and queer look us dead in the eye and tell us that we're not really queer.

And that sucks.

Ask any light-skinned black person capable of passing for white, any Jew being told that it's okay to commit terrorist acts toward them because they're really white, any queer in any closet, any SecUnit getting a job as security consultant believing that if its soft, grateful clients didn't think it was an augmented human they wouldn't like it so much.

It's not a good idea to rate things hierarchically. Particularly not oppressions. Every person's oppression is unique, and some are more fatal than others but they're all uniquely awful. Knowing that you're not what you're passing as and that the only way to gain access to certain things that should be available to anybody is to deny part of yourself is pretty bad; especially if failure to pass properly is likely to get you lynched. Or stripped for parts and recycled.

Murderbot doesn't want to be a cis white augmented human male. It doesn't like how it feels to be treated as one. It wants to be itself. Even though being treated as itself has always meant being treated badly, and it doesn't like that either. It isolates itself a lot in environments where it has to pass as an augmented human, to minimize the time it spends maintaining its false face.

Consider what it says when contemplating what name to put in the FeedID that Senior Indah insists upon, in Fugitive Telemetry:

I could use the local feed address that was hard coded into my neural interfaces. it wasn't my real name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used it, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would think of me as a bot. Or I could use the name Rin. I liked it, and there were some humans outside the Corporation Rim who thought it was actually my name. I could use it, and the humans on the Station wouldn't have to think about what I was...I posted a feed ID with the name SecUnit, gender = not applicable, and no other information.

It could have an easier life and make the people around it more comfortable if it compromised on presenting itself as itself, whole entire. But it doesn't want to claim that easier life. It's not worth it.

Maybe that'll come across in the show and maybe it won't and maybe whether it comes across or not will depend as much on the viewer as on what appears on the screen. We won't know till we see it.

Till then, I'm not ready to write it off.

[caprisunr]

Regardless if Tim has been meaning to do this on purpose, if it sort of became a thing somewhere along the way, or he didn't at all—there's a notable similarity in the way Maddie and Eddie are approached from a characterization standpoint in the show's writing room. Which has eventually led me to believe that if ‘Buddie’ does ever end up actually happening, it will come about paralleling ‘Madney’ in some capacity. 

I am not the first person to vocalise that these two characters [Eddie Diaz and Maddie Han (Buckley)] seem to parallel each other in more than the typical three-way patterning. 

But to talk about Eddie and Maddie and how they're constantly in equidistant loop to each other, I need to talk about how Chimney and Buck's essence is essentially each face of the same coin to support two very similar counterparts—they bear a subtle resemblance with the way their storylines align. If we hark back to season 1: Chim is stuck on Tatiana; to whom he poses for as this perfect all-rounder hero. With Tatiana, Chimney becomes the kid who in order to be somebody worth sticking around for [he] has to prove that he's of value — Buck is stuck on his sex rendezvouses (before Abby a few episodes later), stuck in this unhealthy whorl where he copes with people leaving and nobody wanting to stick around, by having short-lived affairs.

During season 1 their [Chim and Buck] storylines are pretty much a sum of poor choices that eventually help them, or deceive them into thinking for a while that they have found themselves. They constantly find reassurance in being valued for what they think makes them an indispensable part of their compeer’s life, to no avail, when they come face to face with the fact that neither [Tatiana or Abby] had plans of sticking around for them —Chim who was ready to take the next step by proposing, and Buck who was already deeply involved in Abby’s life and practically living in her house. They are both left at the altar with their vows in-hand with a run-away bride.

During season 2 we have Chim and Tatiana seeing each other again after 6-ish months since she fled. Tatiana is pregnant and engaged, a future she didn't see viable with him. And During season 3 we have Buck and Abby seeing each other again after two years approx. Abby is engaged to a man that has two daughters, a future that she never thought about with Buck — both episodes end with them re-linking to have one last conversation that'll allow them to cross-over the bridge. 

Chim and Buck both suffer similar deteriorating self-esteem issues when it comes to conceiving an honest relationship that doesn't only rely on the physical —until Maddie and Eddie are introduced, and Buck seems to break free from Abby’s curse a couple of episodes later (closing chapter completely when he has that last conversation that helps him understand where she was coming from), and Chimney has left Tatiana and his concerns about his life altering trauma long forgotten. 

Season 2 episode 1 ‘Under Pressure’; Buck meets Eddie through work introduced by Bobby who had just hired the latter. Three episodes later during ‘Help is not coming’ (the earth-quake finale from the two-parter), Buck drives Eddie to pick Christopher up in an emotionally umpt scene. Maddie mentions Buck having a boy crush on Eddie and if that meant he was ready to move out of Abby’s place during episode four, the same one where later Buck ‘steps in’ Eddie's life and introduces Carla Pierce to him [Eddie] so she can take care of Christopher (his son) while he works. And then in episode 17 of season two, Shannon (Eddie's estranged wife) dies. —  Chimney meets Maddie through Buck introducing them at her house-move-in during season 2 episode 6, where he helps her install camera devices so she is safe (not yet aware of Doug.) Maddie tells Buck ‘he is so cute’ (to which he thinks she's referring to Eddie) in that same scene. They become acquainted and start hanging out, and two episodes later Buck notes they're dating without actually knowing it. After denying it, Maddie and Chim have their first date in episode 11 (unsuccessfully as Doug kidnaps Maddie and stabs Chimney), that same episode Maddie kills Doug (her abusive ex-husband) in self-defense. 

Before misfortune knocks on their doors Chimney and Buck approach their respective relationships without any expectations. Buck starts by head-butting in a one-sided fight with Eddie where he feels overthrown by his competency and fears his place is in jeopardy, only to turn up for both of them to be complementary in the field and work together perfectly in unison. And Chim by going over to his co-worker’s sister house to help with some security system management, only to start hanging out with her exponentially until it becomes so easy to be with each other that they fall in to this lovely routine that leads to love. — Simultaneously, Eddie and Buck also start falling into the same routine, that leads to Buck co-parenting Christopher naturally.

In spite of whether you consider ‘Buddie’ romantically inclined or not by the narrative—Chimney and Buck's storylines align again, when after being done with their necessary-evil relationships they come to find a complimentary companion, at the same time. 

Not only do their storylines align, but so do the salient subtleness and self-centric cerberus when it comes to their surly temperament with their respective parents, vs. them having each a postiche family:

Chimney's father is notoriously an entrenched man who barely took notice or interest of little Howard or his wife when they lived under the same roof. He was difficult to impress (stoic), uninterested, neglectful—the latter worsening when Jee-Hyun Han (Chimney's mother) passed away from cancer. During his early years, as stated in the show, Chimney tried really hard to obtain his father's approval, futilely. His abortive tries ended up resulting in deception, so he gave up on building any further relationship with his care-taker [father]. They moved to the USA, and ultimately only his father went back to Korea after Chimney's mother stayed on her ground about staying there for the time forward. Unfortunately, as I said, his mother [Jee-Hyun Han] would end up dying years later when he is 14-15, and the Lee’s [Jee-Hyun Han's best friends who had a kid, Kevin, his age] took his tutelage — Buck was the youngest of 3 (unknown to him at that point.) Both of his parents were complex characters who were devoted to their own grief and catastrophic premonitions, that would turn into a repelling force of care-giving. Buck was nescient to the reasonings behind his birth, that he'd been purposefully tethered to higher responsibilities; conceived to be bed out to another body, to be the saviour of the brother he didn't know existed. Margaret Buckley is shown as highly depressed, cynically negging, a gaslighter, caught up in her vexation and showing signs of someone that is predestinarian. Philip Buckley is an enabler, repressedly angry, also a gaslighter, and conveniently demanding. They're both neglectful emotionally and physically, meeting Buck's demands momentarily to fulfill their guilty consciousness. Buck spends his childhood and teenage years trying to make himself visible, to the point of getting hurt on purpose for crumbs of their attention. He is unsuccessful to obtain their love at all, and leaves eventually after he's kicked out of college.

It is not surprising then, that Chimney and Buck, who have been abandoned by their primary care-givers and have fought to get their attention suffer from issues recognising their worth and don't step back from a fight to defend themselves when faced with the incognitas and comments from their parents. They're both reactive to stimuli, and use their fight mode to confront the world as seen multiple times. 

Before becoming a firefighter Chimney hustles. He works multiple jobs trying to find a way to make ends meet while simultaneously searching for something that calls to him. He ends up working sometimes at a bar under Kevin's management. Unfortunately the bar is at a loss. But he finds that throughout helping people exit the establishment calmly and effectively, most importantly, safely, he wants to be a firefighter. Chimney is 25-26 at this point, as it dates 2005. — Buck spends the rest of what's left of his twenties cross-country with his jeep. He tries many jobs, and strolls without a purpose all over the country. At some point he ends up in Perú. He's working at a beach-bar when Connor (friend of his) approaches him with a proposition of going to LA, where Buck eventually finds his way to the fire academy and the 118. Buck is 25-26 at this point, as stated in the show that he is 26 whilst being a probie in s1. 

There's a parallel in both age and situational that brings them to being firefighters at the end. 

Chimney unfortunately loses Kevin in an emergency, who also becomes a firefighter with him. He is also at risk of losing Albert (step-brother) when his car flips over in a drunk-driver accident while Maddie is giving birth. He also loses Maddie same instances as Buck. — Buck feels the secret of Daniel (older brother who lost his life to juvenile-leukemia) throughout his life like a curse. Almost loses Maddie the first time to Doug kidnapping her, and a second time to Amber (the serial killer) kidnapping her and slashing her throat while pregnant with her second child. He thinks he's lost Eddie during the well incident, then loses Eddie during the sniper arch when he gets shoot, and thinks he's almost lost him again when Christopher calls him about Eddie's breakdown where he destroys his own room.

Chimney finds parents who love him in the Lee’s — Buck finds parents that love him in Bobby and Athena. 

The subsequent likeness in their [Chim and Buck's] storylines is the quintessence of the matter that leads to Maddie and Eddie also being tantamount. They work as a mirage of their stories' intertextuality. Something that came about to me while watching 8x12 last night. The chance that we would get an episode centric on Eddie and Maddie were slim, but never none, and the way it was done so shows what I stated previously — Essentially the nature of their stories being paralleled. 

[reineyday]

why do they keep making bucky a government-manipulated pawn 😭 from the american military to hydra to whatever weirdass public relations campaign valentina is pushing the thunderbolts through (see: end credit graphics & the cereal campaign), like he had his brief time on the run and his goats in wakanda but he's sucked back into a sketchy institution once again like what are they doing with him. sure the movie was fun, but every time i think about it i just end up head in hands.