#relevant to tumblr's interests

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[izmaost]

Snek, another productivity = managed to pump out a whole drawing. hopefully I can ride this wave of motivation to draw :D

Commiissions open KOFI

[caeslxys]

Zephrah actively postpones ruidusborn births. It is believed that the actual number of ruidusborn in exandrian history is much larger than has been officially recorded because the stigma of it was so intense that people lied about it. Alyxian, one of the few recorded ruidusborn heroes of the calamity who received direct blessings from three different prime deities (our very own Changebringer, the Archheart, and the Moonweaver) , has been all but forgotten (read: likely erased) by history.

The Archive of knowledge that revealed the truth of Predathos and Ruidus was never some forgotten thing—it was intentionally hidden by the elites in Vasselheim. And we have no idea how long they have been operating with that knowledge. We have no idea what they have been doing with that knowledge, what silent wars have been waging for years or decades or centuries. But we saw what they were willing to do, in Hearthdell. We saw the violence and suppression they were willing to commit. We saw the pettiness of the exandrian pantheon in the Dawnfather’s response to Deanna’s: “Are you worth saving?”. In the Changebringer’s manipulative change of course in her pleas to FCG. In the Wildmother’s rejection of Opal. In the knowledge we have that Imogen spent so much of her miserable time in Gelvaan begging the gods to aid her to no avail—just for Kord to reach out only to demand that she not let them down.

Liliana’s point that Vasselheim and the other faithful elite of the world will hunt ruidusborn down to negate even the potential of this happening again isn’t new, it isn’t something this solstice and the machinations surrounding it caused, and it isn’t some unsubstantiated, fearful claim—it has been happening.

The vanguard—and Liliana—are unequivocally wrong in their means. But can you really fault them in their desire? Can you really fault the conclusions they have drawn from the experiences they have lived? If you spend your entire life being rejected by the people and the pantheon of your world for means you could not possibly control, would you not seek out someone and somewhere that would accept you? And if you found it, if some being that has been connected with you your whole life welcomed you home and wrapped you in an embrace that felt like your mother’s and says that it is starving; well, aren’t you, too?

There is likely a holy war brewing. At the end of it all, is it truly the sole fault of the people and not the organizations and society that expelled them?

[moonlightfilly]

Japan just blessed us with another aromantic! Asano Tomoko, 1 of the 2 leads in Konya Sukiyaki Dayo. I love that it wasn’t just a one and done mention either, she’s brought it up multiple times in just the first 2 eps alone!

[ominous-feychild]

Happy Worldbuilding Wednesday! What would you say is the defining trait of any of your settings?

Omg, this is a very difficult question to answer because I do a LOT of worldbuilding, haha. But let's see...

I think, technically, the most defining traits of my settings is how different they are? I hop around the (in-universe) world in each individual story, and each in-universe country is inspired by real world cultures. But mostly drawing inspiration from ancient cultures because I explicitly prefer ancient history to modern. Plus, it's more fun to research. Which--ha--I'm definitely in the minority for feeling this way, I know!

I actually mentioned this recently toward the very end of another post I made recently, but I'll restate it for convenience's sake, haha... and then go into more detail.

Glavnran (tAR) is Slavic (drawing primarily from early Slavic history, while I do my absolute best to figure out what the folklore was like before Christianity got its grubby hands on it. A polytheistic spinoff of Christianity exists in my story, appropriating a lot of its themes and imageries. That religion exists nowhere near Glavnran, so it has no place there. Also I think I've made it clear I dislike Christianity.)

Jhandar (tAR) is Indian (off the top of my head, I can't recall if I was taking from any specific era, but I'm drawing on inspiration from Hinduism and there's a prominent caste system. Jhandar is also an empire, drawing inspiration from Rome and especially the rule of the Qin Dynasty of China. While not exactly thematically relevant, it's fun and helps explain some things I wanted happening in Glavnran/the surrounding countries. Oh, yeah, Glavnran is under the thumb of the Jhandan Empire. It's why there's so much tension between the Glavni and Jhandan peoples.) (Also, the blue-and-red coloration here isn't a "good-and-evil" thing. To anyone who's read anything about my writing, it should be VERY clear that Glavnran isn't a great place and is, in fact, full of crime and -phobias of all sorts. It's based on their temperatures/climate, haha. I would've put Glavnran as orange but that fits other countries better.)

Lynsmouth (SaS) is Western European (the Western World gets a lot of focus in media, so Lynsmouth and the country it takes place in that I've definitely named get to be the Token "West" in my writing. It gets inspiration from all over Western Europe, but I've primarily focused on France and the Netherlands for it. It's also got Italian-style mafias, haha. They have the Christian-adjacent religion where they glorify a single god. It is, however, subtly dying out, because of Lore and immigration of a sort. The "new arrivals" so to speak have their own religions.)

Kihroin (RFtA) is Northern African (as in Islamic. I'm most likely leaning most strongly into Morrocan inspiration for anything "modern", but obviously most strongly leaning toward ancient history. Islam itself obviously won't appear in my writing, as I'm working within a fantasy world with provably real pantheons of gods. I haven't decided how I'll adapt their hyper-religiousness into Kihroin, especially because I'm personally uncomfortable with religion (though I bet you couldn't tell) and yet want to adapt something that major to their modern culture(s) into my writing. Yet another reason RFtA isn't a current project.)

Cirrane (RFtA) is Latin American (given that actual Native American history is incredibly difficult to get our hands on--cough cough THANKS COLONIZERS, THANKS CHRISTIANITY cough cough--it has a lot more modern inspiration(s) than ancient. Howeverrrr... that's not necessarily a "bad" thing considering that Cirrane is a very bad place and I know plenty of people will @ me accusing me of racism for it anyway. Nah, man, it's pretty much everywhere in my writing! It's almost like it makes for a better story! Also my Mexican gf approves of what I'm doing with it, so take THAT, SJWs.) (Oops, I ranted there for a second. Long story short, it takes a lot of inspiration from all over Latin America! That applies to the other two "Latino" countries too, though, haha. Besides that, it's also stolen quite a bit of imagery from Rome. Ah, that must be where the Evil's from. /hj)

Tzakah (RFtA/tCC) is also Latin American (one of my favorite places in all of my worldbuilding!!! Is also extremely tropical. It's a lot more "original" of a culture due to worldbuilding stuff, but it still takes a lot of Latin American Inspiration.)

Minogua (RFtA/tCC/???) is the last Latin American country (explicitly has a previous history of colonization that they've (relatively) recently shaken off through rebellion and ousting the authorities from other countries. Tackles a lot of those issues a lot more directly and has them more modern than the other two. Though it makes sense considering Tzakah was previously part of Cirrane. Regardless! There's lots to possibly tap into, but Minogua so far only has characters originating from there. Well, and minor plots relevant to those characters but y'know. I definitely want to eventually make a story placed there eventually to more directly explore its themes!)

Honorable mentions/speedrun:

Isagnea (tAR, though idk how much it'll show up, and ???) is Italian (not very worked on, but it's the home country of some side characters... hence why it's not really worked on. It'll definitely see more attention if and when it becomes relevant. Most likely, it won't be until if/when I work on another story focused on those characters. Or, y'know, it appears in another story.)

Ilyich (tAR, tho it likely won't show up more than once) is Slavic (country Glavnran was once a part of, before they split off (not peacefully) over religious differences. Methinks a Christian-esque religion might actually be rather hated by the Glavni people...)

Shilyma (tAR, mentioned but not visited) is a Slavic/Asian mix! (so, yknow, likely would take inspo from Mongolia? Not too developed, but is like Tzakah in that its origins are unique.)

Anispe (tAR, end of series, and ???) is Greek (spoilers! 😁 But Jhandar is actively at war with it, trying to get them under its thumb as well! I have Plots to eventually make a story centered on Anispe before it was Anispe, too!)

Shaoraigh (SaS) is Celtic (an oldie but goodie! I did a good bit of worldbuilding here in the past even though it's never appeared in my writing. One of its gods are VERY important in the worldbuilding, however.)

Drønhals (SaS) is Celtic/Norse (Freya's home country, was once part of Shaoraigh (in-universe) but they separated over religious differences!)

Tulidin (tCC) is Chinese (I'm probably changing its name eventually, though. Also has minor worldbuilding and a character originating from there.)

Shoutout to misc unnamed countries that exist, but I've never gotten around to naming them for one reason or another! Like, for example, the Jhandan-Glavni colonies Rieka and Adilzhan are from and the Hawaiian-and-Japanese-inspired country hidden away from the rest of the world. (Wish I could make it Pure Hawaiian, but... you try doing research on Hawaii. Join me in my hatred for Christianity.)

Can you tell I've been writing/working on this world for ten years?

This post has gotten WAY longer than I was expecting (though really I should've figured, smh) so I'll make this last bit quick:

The technology contained within each country/story is very different, both due to wealth gaps and time period jumps! There's... a lot of worldbuilding. The Arcane Rifts takes place approximately 200 years before Sun and Shadow and Rising From the Ashes (which are connected to each other), so that on top of the exploitation from Jhandar means they're not going to have the greatest tech for example. Sorry this was so long! Hope you enjoyed reading!!!

Also, apparently I have more of Western Europe in my worldbuilding than I thought. Now I'm disappointed in myself.

Also-also, I misread this Ask. I thought it was asking for the defining traits in everything... whoops. I made this WAY harder on myself than I needed to.

Tagging those interested!: @the-golden-comet @the-letterbox-archives @honeybewrites @darkandstormydolls @mysticstarlightduck

@urnumber1star @aalinaaaaaa

[marvelsmostwanted]

ICYMI:

Non-binary athlete Nikki Hiltz (they/them) is a U.S. champion in the 1500m. They will be heading to the track and field World Championships in Budapest this August!

(I’ll keep an eye out for if/when those races will be on TV and post back here. Sometimes they’re on NBC or Peacock, or ESPN2.)

[vulturevanity]

hi i'm so glad to see someone else on this hellsite who is as obsessed with dot as i am. your analysis of her character are like me looking in the mirror because i have the same damn thoughts. she is so neurodivergent and has problems and i love her. take my hand

slaps her on the head. This baby can fit so many of my own mental illnesses in there

[aurosoulart]

my company is starting a paid artist residency program!!

I don’t know if I have any artist followers who would be interested in this, but the plan is to work with new artists monthly by giving them hardware (a VR headset), mentorship, and funding.

this program is for XR art in Figmin XR specifically - the type of 3D art I’ve been creating on livestreams in augmented reality - and would last 1 month

if you are a VR/XR artist (or if you know someone who is!) and might be interested in this, please let me know! even if you’re a 2D artist who’s just curious about learning this medium, let me know as well - I’m aiming to create a candidate list of interested artists for the future :)

please send a link to your work if you don’t have your artwork easily accessible on your tumblr page! thank you! 🙏

[stargir1z]

FANDOM AND THE FOURTH WAVE: YOUTH, DIGITAL FEMINISMS, AND MEDIA FANDOM ON TUMBLR a phd thesis by briony hannell. the most comprehensive long-form analysis on late-2010s tumblr SJW culture i’ve ever found. 

[thebaffledcaptain]

I’m going to sound like a filthy british bastard by saying this but one of the things I think turns me away from this heavily fandomized tumblrification of the american revolution is genuinely the lack of british perspectives. I obviously don’t fault tumblr for this being the case (it goes without saying that it is a far deeper issue than just that… cough cough american nationalism and exceptionalism and the effect that has on the media) but in spaces like this there really just isn’t… any nuance at all to this conflict which was so undeniably nuanced in so many ways. it’s all about gay founding fathers and cool spies which. I understand the appeal but at a certain point I’m genuinely not sure how much of it we can call history

[aromanticasterisms]

iansan relevance right off the bat let's fucking go

[miqojak]

"I am going to do some Gpose today" I have said to myself for a week or two since my health issues have been lessening... and then I think about how much energy and time it takes, and I just... don't.

[torgawl]

i want dottore to be playable so bad, i need to know his thoughts on diluc

[soul-of-rei]

And to make it clear, when I'm talking about the physical triforce, I mean as in the triforce similar to how it's depicted in the og 1986, Skyward Sword, or shards of courage in Wind Waker.

I also say "watered down" bc technically the full triforce can be argued to be with Zelda (proof being her sealing Calamity Ganon away and the triforce showing)? But it's not the physical triforce as we know from past Zelda games. Think like the light force in Minish Cap Zelda.