#she is looking into trans and nonbinary identities just because her kid is expressing a tiny bit of discomfort with their gender

[girlscience]

some days i am willing to give my parents so much slack. so many excuses. and other days i hear my coworker talk about her kid and realize good parents don't raise kids who are scared of them.

[loki-zen]

thinking about an old post of mine that inspired minor drama relatively recently (by being taken out of context and accused of being TERFy, as ppl do), and how the feelings it was about have changed over time.

the point of contention was basically me writing about how trans women didn’t feel like Representation to me, as a “woman” (retrospective scare quotes).

that is to say that - whatever it is you are supposed to feel, as a woman, when someone is like the First Woman To Blah, or when women get to be badass in a movie for a change* - a trans woman wouldn’t make me feel it.

In the fictional context it would be more like, idk, more and better black people representation — a feeling of “I definitely think everyone should have this stuff, and moreover that art should delve into the complexity of all human experiences not just those of a narrow demographic, and so I approve, but I couldn’t claim to have a personal connection to the Representation(tm) side of this, I don’t in any sense beyond empathy with another human (and perhaps their particular traits and/or circumstances beyond demographic markers) see ‘me’ reflected on the screen.”

and in the nonfictional context it was maybe ‘worse’ - I just felt like a lot of the time it wasn’t the same thing at all? like, if you accept as a premise that the reason any random woman is supposed to care about the First Woman To Blah is because it represents breaking through barriers that she (the random woman) had been subjected to all her life — then I very much felt like my experience of that had always been of people pointing to things that they thought were innately, biologically, unchangeably true about the sort of body that gets you assigned female at birth as the reason I should be gatekept from stuff. I felt like the same people who gatekept me from stuff would be, if anything, pushing trans women towards it in the belief that they were men and should do Man Things. I do get now that it’s a lot more complicated than that. And even at the time I certainly knew the fact of being trans could and would be a huge discrimination barrier, I just figured that this was a different barrier. But obviously also there are just trans women out there living as women and getting discriminated against as woman because bigots aren’t parsimonious and also trans status is hardly universally accurately discernible.

(* which presumably I must have felt, at least somewhat and in some contexts back then in order to make the comparison. I seem to remember that I did. I’m not really taking a stance on whether or not I do now or in what situations bc tbh I’m really not sure)

and also i just on some level didn’t look at these girls and see someone who was like me and the thing is that these days I 100% do, and it’s all because I a know enough people now not to alieve any amount of the ‘lies to kids cis people’ version of what a trans woman is.

it was actually really harmful to my understanding of any of this to have it presented as if trans women were just AMAB women without any of the conflict and resentment around socially inhabiting a female identity that, to me, had always defined the experience of inhabiting a female identity.

so now i’m like oh yay other people who think gender is stupid but not in the same way as nonbinary people, inhabiting female social identities and feeling weird about it. Maybe someone else who revels in the weirdness of identifying with the ‘she’ in ‘suck her dick sunday’ as an expression of amused disdain about the notion that this is a juxtaposition and also because it feels nice to get your dick sucked! maybe not. but she’s ~me or close enough. cis chicks can be ~me too but tbh they’re on thin fucking ice. or maybe no one is. maybe Representation was stupid all along idk

[trans-advice]

Hi, how are you?

I've been having some... trans issues. I've already asked other queer accounts about this and they have given me good answers but just still having trouble with it.

I'm agender. And I know that agender is under non binary umbrella, that is under the trans umbrella, so in theory that means I'm trans?

It's not like I don't want to be trans, it's just. I feel like I'm too close to be cis to consider myself trans. Yk? Like I'm agender, just because the words "woman" and "cis" feel so wrong and just have the general sense that gender is not for me. But I'm not androgynous. At all. I mostly wear dresses and skirts, high heels, huge earrings and makeup, I like color pink, I don't want to change my name, I keep using mostly she/her pronouns, I don't have dysphoria nor dysmorphia, I played with Barbies when I was a kid... And I know that none of this things is an exclusively girls' thing, and gender identity and gender expression are two different things, and that being queer is about how I feel, not about how I look... I know all of this but still. Feels weird to say that I'm agender when I'm this girly, and it feels even weirder to say that I'm trans when I have a vulva and wear dresses. Cause having a vulva and wearing dresses means that I'm a cis woman even if I don't feel like it?

I feel like if I tell someone irl that I'm trans they gonna laugh at me because. I'm just too close to be cis.

But I also have this idea that if I consider myself trans it could be somehow disrespectful to actual trans people with actual trans problems? Like I've always been allowed to wear the clothes I liked and play with the toys I wanted and nobody thought it was weird or wrong and for some reason I think that means I'm not allowed to consider myself trans?

God I feel like an idiot writing this.

I just feel like I haven't suffered enough to be trans, that I'm not disconforme enough with what society expects from me for having the body I have to be trans.

Every time I heard about non binary experiences it's just androgynous people having androgynous behavior and androgynous problems. Trans experiences are always so sad because society doesn't allow them to be them and I haven't experienced enough of that to be trans.

Do I seem too transphobic writing this?

I don't want to offend anybody, this is just me being a caveman, sorry.

So firstly, gender identity is separate from gender presentation & both are separate from genitals.

You're worried about what other people think because your situation of being agender while having a feminine gender presentation & gender euphoria instead of gender dysphoria.

Your worry is about legibility. The reality is that breaking biological essentialism helps liberate trans people, to say the least of it. This is also why I've seen nonbinary people requrest on like discord forums etc to not have people emojis be used for gender identity roles. You're not out of line for being agender, people got to catch up.

Now let's talk about your reaction to the media representation. We have been living under an anti-trans establishment that seeks to marginalize us. I don't want to rant about how it was back in my day. Gist is, don't use frameworks developed by anti-trans ideologies.

So then you bring up that you're worried about not having faced enough marginalization because you pass as cis. While I could go on about how "passing privilege" only goes so far, the gist is you're talking about other people's relationships & affilitations to anti-transness are instead of what your gender identity is. Further, if you do that habit of defining validity based on suffering, then you will support suffering & sabatoge your liberation.

If you're worried that other trans people won't accept you because of legibility problems, then you are still trans & there's a long history of that sort of infighting within the trans community.

For example, circa the 1970s there was a big emphasis put on medical transition, even though cis people physiologically could get the same procedures. so pre-ops & post-ops were "transsexuals" & no-ops were "transvestites". like this was because to say the least the concerns when labelling didn't respect gender identity firmly enough: they focused more on the types of transition (medical vs social). while using "transsexual" & "cissexual" does help with agriculture, you will find a lot of nasty infighting in various historical records, which is partly why we end up using labels like transgender & trans these days.

So yeah, based on what you've said, you are trans & you are welcome here.

Good Luck, Peace & Love,

Eve

[whentherewerebicycles]

wow okay i am skipping the lingerie party lol and am instead going to just briefly jot down some thoughts before i go to sleep and wake up at 5 for my flight tomorrow morning. jesus christ i have ONE MILLION thoughts and feelings about this weekend. i want to preface this by saying that on the whole, it was a fine social experience! it was nowhere near as awkward or painful as i was expecting. or like, parts of it were painful, but it was 100% to do with my own complicated feelings about literally every part of this tradition and the wedding industry in general lol, and not anything to do with the people themselves. the other women were friendly and very welcoming, i made an event best friend who was wonderful company, and it was really fun to get to spend time with both my sister-in-law and her older sister, who was so charming and wonderful. i’m glad i came even though thinking about the $$ i spent on this trip makes me physically gag.

but okay i want to just record some THOUGHTS that maybe i will continue unpacking with some distance. i feel likeeeee okay here are my thoughts.

the social norms around femininity are just a fucking minefield and i feel like i really just gotta keep walking back the impulse to judge other women for the choices they make as they navigate around the manifold traps and snares and half-buried landmines that constitute the landscape of being a woman. like jesus christ. it’s so fucked up, it’s so fucked up, the received and socially enforced norms of femininity are just so fucked up. I think ALL THE FUCKING TIME of this margaret atwood poem i love so much, which was REALLY on my mind this weekend:

How can I teach her some way of being human that won’t destroy her?

I would like to tell her, Love is enough, I would like to say, Find shelter in another skin.

I would like to say, Dance and be happy. Instead I will say in my crone’s voice, Be ruthless when you have to, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it.

I feel like the first bit was very much on my mind throughout the weekend, but those last three lines have come to the forefront over the course of this last day, as i have tried to do some Thinking about what i observed/experienced/felt this weekend. whether or not this is what it means in the context of the poem, tell the truth when you can, when you can see it, expresses something of my complex feelings: I don’t know that I can tell the truth about femininity because I don’t know that I can see it. i am both too close to it/still emotionally entangled in it and too far from it to know which parts of it are ‘real’ and which parts are just performance.

i feel like one thing that struck me this weekend, in ways that i don’t know if i’ve noticed as much before, was that so much of the things women say to each other or do in these social contexts is performative, and they know on some level it’s a performance, but we are all going through the motions of doing and saying the expected things anyway. that has not always been clear to me. i have spent so much of my own life as a woman thinking that other women perfectly, seamlessly, naturally embodied the norms of femininity, and i was the only one (or part of a group of only ones) who couldn’t remember my lines, or kept fumbling my cues, or felt so painfully, self-consciously aware that i was playing a role that i could never deliver a convincing performance. but this weekend, after the initial social panic had passed, i started trying to get out of my own head a little bit and look for things that disproved the very strong theory i had brought into the weekend. and of course then i started seeing more and more of the little moments where women say one thing and do another, or profess one belief/conviction but then the whole corpus of their lived experiences and choices contradicts that stated belief, or whatever. and also just like, moments of pathos, where someone i had judged harshly at the beginning of the weekend offhandedly revealed something about her past that really changed my perception of her, or at least made me think like, ah god, i have to have empathy for and with this person, because i think she might be a complex person just like me, with an intricate inner life that her performance partially reveals and partially occludes from view, and agh, it sucks to have to think of people as complicated instead of as safely two-dimensional & easy to dismiss, and the reason it sucks is because then it forces you to realize that you share more with this person than you’d like to admit, and that some of your wounds are the same, even if you dealt with those wounds (the wounds of girlhood, or rather the emotional wounds that our culture inflicts upon girls, which then become tangled up in complex and painful ways with the lived experience of girlhood itself) in really different ways.

but also ugh. we are all performing gender norms but there is just something that does not feel playful at all about embodying conventional femininity. i can’t think of a better way to phrase that right now but it’s like.. the performance isn’t fun. it doesn’t seem to be fun. i don’t know that anyone here was having fun doing it, even if they were having fun being with each other. but it was like doing the intensely gendered social rituals was like, the price of admission? like it was the toll we had to pay to be together spending time in the company of other women? i don’t know man but it fucking exhausts me. like i can push myself to stretch my genuine empathy and sense of solidarity with other women much further than my knee-jerk judgmental reaction, but i can’t ever get to a place where i find any of those social rituals anything other than fucking exhausting. they feel so fucking joyless. they feel like things that many women have internalized as ‘things we must do in order to have relationships with other women.’ (please do not even get me started on how exhausting heteronormativity is i think i could write an entire other essay on how women use these bachelorette party-type rituals to spend time with their closest female friends, but the whole event is still implicitly organized around men, and these women’s male partners are still positioned as the priority in their lives, and the whole event is framed as like, a last burst of intense closeness between women before the bride is delivered over to her husband. like i KNOW that this is not how women think of it but all the RHETORIC of the bachelorette party, the little events and rituals and games, the little comments everyone makes all fucking weekend, good fucking lord, my jaw is so TENSE.)

anyway god i just AGHHHH. idk sorry this is definitely not coherent at ALL because i’m tired and still need a bit more distance/time to process some of this. i guess here is one last thing i want to register before i sleep. i am in my 30s now and i am living a life that is so, so far removed from the social world i grew up in. marriage is not a norm among my friend group, almost all of my female friends are queer women, many women i know are not partnered and have no interest in being partnered, and the friends who are in heterosexual relationships tend to be in very gender-balanced relationships or slightly nontraditional relationships where it feels like both partners have engaged in conscious reflection about what they want their relationship to look/feel like. also i now date women, am out as a lesbian, and spend most of my time teaching/working with queer- and trans/nonbinary-identified kids.

so like, the world i live in now is just so different from the world i grew up in. and sometimes it is easy for me to kind of downplay the intensity of my own gender distress as a teen and young adult, or to sort of - act like it was a phase in my life that had much more to do with me than with the social environment i lived in. i don’t mean ‘phase’ in a dismissive ‘those feelings weren’t real’ kind way, but more like, ‘oh that was just part of the normal growing pains of figuring out who you are and what kind of person you want to be as an adult - everybody pretty much goes through some version of that.’ it’s true that everyone DOES go through some version of that, as just like, part of the process of individuation in that age range. but also like. idk man. being back in this environment - straight white women from the midwest and south, all engaging in the rituals of heterosexual white femininity - was just so intense and so MUCH, and it brought back a flood of feelings and visceral memories that i feel like i will need to spend some time sorting through over the next few weeks. like, what i experienced back then really WAS gender distress, and it was so, so distressing. i spent the years from age 11ish to 24ish existing with this constant lowgrade baseline feeling of wanting to claw my own fucking skin off because my own gendered body felt like such a prison, and i sometimes felt like i literally wanted to destroy my own body because i could not yet conceive of an alternative to inhabiting that body or playing the role that had been handed down to me. until i started reading queer memoirs and inhaling lesbian media and (especially) reading about queer femme identities, i literally did not have an image or any kind of felt sense of what another way of inhabiting my own body might look/feel like. i literally could not imagine it!!!

and that is why the distress feels so distressing, and becomes internalized in such violent ways, i think. because it’s the blind, mindless panic of a trapped and wounded animal. except that you lack any real understanding of the larger social forces at work, or any language with which to describe or conceptualize what social norms are or how they’re enforced. so in your mind, the only thing you can see wounding you is your own gendered body, or the way that gendered body is socially 'read’ by others. and that is why you want to claw your own fucking skin off, just literally dig your nails into your own flesh and claw it the fuck off. because you can’t see a norm, but you can see your gendered body, and you can see the ways that it causes other people to react to you, or treat you, or hold you to a certain set of expectations, and so in your mind you are like: this must be destroyed. in your mind you are like, the only way out is to get out of this fucking body, but that’s impossible, surely, you can’t get out of your own body, so you have to settle for starving it and self-harming it and ruthlessly punishing it in a thousand terrible ways, because you might not be able to leave your girl’s body behind, but you can make it suffer and pay for what it’s done to you. 

i am old enough now, and have spent enough time thinking and writing about those feelings, to identify them when they arise again, and to get the necessary distance from them so that i can say, what i want to destroy are the norms themselves, and the distress they cause, and not the body that has done nothing to me but be me. so i am not quite as sucked under as i used to be. but i think that there is something about the violence and intensity of those feelings that i forget sometimes, or misremember with age and distance. it’s easy to be a little bit patronizing to my younger self (or by extension to my younger students sometimes), because i now live in a social world that is largely arranged in ways that minimize rather than intensify or amplify gender distress. but when you have no choice in how to arrange your life, and no language with which to understand what is happening to you or what you are experiencing, and no frame of reference to help you understand that this is a period in your life and not forever, and no models you can look to in order to discover alternative ways of inhabiting your body or arranging your life... my god, that’s quite different from being an adult with a wide range of experiences and with much greater autonomy over your own body and life. anyway idk i need to keep thinking but now i must go to bed and try to sleep five hours before the plane.

[djmarinizelablog]

A Conversation with the Author of City Comma State, kippielovesyou/ForcedSimile

Had a short interview with the author of City Comma State, @kippielovesyou/ForcedSimile and asked her if I could share our conversation online---she said yes!

Did you know that Hange and Levi in her work was based on Spongebob and Squidward's interactions?

Read the entire transcript below:

-------------------------------------

djmarinizela (D): if i may ask, where and how did you learn to write so good? what inspired you to write city comma state?

kippielovesyou (K): i don't mind at all! it's genuinely just years of practice. i've been scribbling stories since kindergarten (i had a long standing multi part series in first grade about all my classmates). i think one thing is certain: having a strong understanding of characters whether you borrow them or they are your own is pretty key.

a lot of points [in Isayama's story] could have been better thought out or tighter. however, we all love his characters. a weak plot (or in the case of city comma state: no plot) can be ignored or forgiven if everyone loves the characters

i'll be honest, i spend a lot of time trying to understand why a character does things or reacts a certain way. and yes, sometimes, that means i act out scenes in my car while driving. it's embarrassing...

there's a lot more to it, but to me that's the most important thing

as far as how city comma state came about: i wanted to do a slow burn romance centered around levihan, but I also wanted to show how all these characters care about and support each other. i knew in the confines of the AoT world, anyone could die at any moment and that didn't work with the softer feelings i wanted people to enjoy. how can you enjoy the friendship between mike and hange if he dies? it's possible, but it upends all the warmth we were enjoying. so i wrote an AU. i wanted to keep levi with a rough background with many walls, and i wanted hange to have her own issues that they can work through together. and i love the idea of them adopting/supporting the 104th kids without the fear of sending them out to war

D: your answer is so profound and helpful, thank you so much! I can honestly say you pretty nailed it when it comes to character development---everyone has a character arc in your fic! [my next question] is about the gender discourse in your story. I know you started City Comma State pretty early in 2014, but even back then, the nonbinary identity wasn't widely known before. How were you able to flesh out the discourse on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum and play it out on the dialogues and backstories?

K: it's pretty funny, a lot of the LGBTQIA+ has always been discussed i my family. we've had gay, lesbian, trans, gnc, bi and asexual people in my family for generations, as far back as the 20s (that we're aware of). hange's gender being debated made it a prime opportunity to write such an experience, some of which is borrowed from my own life. when i read older chapters i see certain slips in dialogue where i could have made an effort to be more neutral. we're in such a binary society that sometimes even if you feel in between, it slips in. in fact, i'm sure some people might take issue with the fact that i stuck with she/her for hange. i'm not sure i'd make a different decision today. i like this version of hange the way she is, and i hope hange's nb/gnc status comes across in more than just pronouns. hange's full identity is so much more than that and that is what i wanted to explore. and i think no matter where you fall on the whole LGBTQIA+ spectrum, you are more than just the label you've chosen. yes, in this story levi is bi/pan. but i don't think he ever says that explicitly, and he avoids labels. it seems fussy to him, which feels levi. discourse would not be his thing. i think even having a debate about whether or not he was bi or pan wouldn't be something he would want to engage in, he just wants to do what he wants. instead it's heavily implied. i think we forget since so many of us experience this discourse online and want to label things that there are people who don't want to involve themselves in it. it goes back to how would this character act. for instance, based on how levi is in canon, i can see many ways to interpret his sexuality. there's cues for a lot of different takes. but levi doesn't seem like the type that would need a definitive label in order to be happy. there's many ways to interpret hange's gender (and i've written several takes, some where they're more insistent on their pronouns), but i think hange's more excited to explore life than worry too much about much about how they're addressed or how someone talks about them. maybe another character might be more caught up in labels but hange and levi not so much

D: No, don't be sorry, I am more than thankful for your answer. I really appreciate it! I don't get to have these kinds of conversations with other writers, so I am grateful for your insights.

K: a really funny anecdote for you: i loosely based the idea of my levihan off of spongebob and squidward. you know, since they start out as neighbors and hange is more invasive than levi is used to

D: that's.... a stretch. but thanks for the tidbit! was the annual star wars contest also something that you do in your family? that part as well as all the geeky references won me over tbh!

K: it was an extremely loose inspiration! but hange mowing her lawn in the middle of the night so levi wouldn't be mad at her is on par with a spongebob move. and um...my family, while they can be a little nerdy, is not nerdy enough to do the star wars tournament! i made that up entirely

i just imagined hange having eccentric family, so they have very unusual traditions that none of the children question

i'll be the first to say a lot of city comma state is unrealistic and a little bit of a domestic fantasy. there's a lot of problems with money, employment and such that hange and levi SHOULD have but that's a little too real and not what i want to be the focus of this story. like hange landing a job that gives her a day off and she doesn't suffer a severe pay cut as a result? unrealistic. but i have other things i want to tackle. plus, in canon we have humans that turn into giants and 3D maneuver gear which would probably kill its user in real life. i think making certain parts of this fanfic a little idealistic is okay

D: are there other works that influence your writing? or authors that inspire you to write?

K: There's too many influences to count. reading is so important and even things that are bad are helpful. i actually was trying to read a YA series that seemed really cool and i had to stop reading because so many things were so annoying (I won't reveal which, since i think it has a small but dedicated fandom and i don't want to rain on their parade, it is purely a taste thing to some degree). instead of being upset and thinking that I wasted my time, i took note of what made me stop reading (that is a long list of things i didn't like so i won't bother to outline each one). even if it's something as small as a fanfiction that you had to click out of, ask yourself why you stopped. Especially with fanfiction: you already like these characters, what you're looking for is usually pretty specific (a pairing, an au, a specific scenario, etc). why, when this author has ticked all your superficial boxes, did you stop reading? and when you love something as yourself why. Ask yourself why you love the source material even! do you really love the plotlines and the world or do you love the characters? Is the dialogue strong? something to also pay attention to: people in general. how do they speak, gestures, facial expressions. really listen to how people talk (Youtube podcasts are really good for this!).

i think people would be surprised, a lot of what i really like to read is very all over. from surrealist novels, to classic literature, to science fiction aimed at children (i'm finally reading animorphs after almost 20 years!). and what i write for original fiction doesn't reflect what i'm probably best known for.

D: thanks for this, Kippie! looking forward to reading more of your works!

K: i'm still amazed at the response! writing is so solitary to me and i don't really look at my numbers. it never occurred to me that people would be discussing my fic!

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If you haven't read Kippie's Levihan fic yet, here's the link to get started: City Comma State

[galwaygremlin]

mostly taking a break from posting rn and might save this post for later

also making my own post because i’m not DISAGREEING with the op

but. saw smthng abt how feminists who do the “women and nonbinary people” thing are Not Actually That Inclusive bc masc nonbinary people exist, and yeah i AGREE, hundred percent, buuuuuuuut. there was a line in there about “that’s great if you’re including 18y/o she/they demigirls who don’t want to go on T but always wear pronoun pins” and i. well

speaking from experience, i am a) 18, b) technically she/they because i use she/her pronouns when i’m at work and c) don’t want to go on T for a bunch of reasons

i’m young. i don’t look androgynous. i pass as a woman (although i do get the occasional “excuse me sir” in busy ERs and it’s awesome). i do not feel safe or included in women-only spaces, and i do not feel safe or included in “women and nonbinary” spaces. they feel like the all-girl sleepovers i’d go to as an elementary school kid. vaguely hostile, always like someone’s making fun of me and it’s going just over my head, i should probably keep my mouth shut and avoid attracting any attention, i want to go home.

this statement? “that’s great if you’re including 18y/o she/they demigirls who don’t want to go on T but always wear pronoun pins”

makes me feel like someone is saying “well you’re not REALLY nonbinary and you still count as a woman so i guess ‘women and nonbinary people’ applies to you”. it doesn’t. i’m not a woman. i’m not woman-lite. i don’t feel connected to femininity and i should be able to express my gender identity without it being constantly called into question, especially by other queer people.

i already get misgendered and treated like a girl all the time and it sucks. no, i don’t correct people. i don’t use they/them pronouns with people i don’t know and trust. it’s hard enough to get people to respect you in EMS when they see you as a lesbian, i’m not adding the “yeah i’m also trans, and exactly the kind of trans you hate most”. i shouldn’t have to feel invalidated in queer spaces too.

tl;dr:

“women and nonbinary” is dismissive, ignores a lot of people, isn’t as inclusive as it sounds.

all nonbinary people, no matter what their experience with gender is or how they present or whether they can “pass” for their AGAB, are valid and shouldn’t be dismissed by other queer people if the cis ones accept you when they think you’re one of them.

[safebubblebycyg]

genderfluid! sirius (the winner of the votes on my instagram!) :

☆ sirius didnt really think about gender roles

☆ they didnt really think about long hair was for girls, eye liner is a girly thing

☆ or that button ups are for guys, men wear cologne

☆ but sirius...they wore their hair long and had sparkly red eyeliner on? sirius had on a black button up and some expensive cologne?

☆ gender norms weren't their thing

☆ but they didnt always wanna wear cologne and a button up

☆ and they didnt always wanna wear sparkly red eyeliner

☆ some days they preferred neither, one over the other, and some days it changed half way through

☆ and this bugged sirius.

☆ what was wrong with them? did james and remus feel this way too? did peter and lily? regulus? were they being dramatic?

☆ so, like any teenager, they looked it up in books (that may or may not have been stolen from remus, but he doesnt need to know-)

☆ "dysphoria. its- dysphoria." sirius spoke outloud to themself. and felt a breathe they didnt know they were holding out. they found what it was

☆ but- sirius certainly didnt want to be a girl...and "the- the book says it for trans people?"

☆ so sirius, though they didnt want to, had to do more looking, this time into the gender spectrum

☆ "so trans is the big umbrella...which has the nonbinary umbrella...which has all these identities...UGH, THIS IS WHY I HAVE REMUS, HE'D USUALLY DO ALL THIS DUMB READING FOR ME, WHY IS THERE SO MANY LABELS???"

☆ "gender- genderfluid. im genderfluid. I'M GENDERFLUID!"

☆ and though they knew a label wasnt needed (because it isnt), they were glad to put their feelings to words

☆ and get some knowledge on the topic of gender too

☆ like now sirius knew that they preferred they/them, but would like to use any and all pronouns, none bugged them

☆ and knew that some days they preferred to present masculine, some days feminine, some days androgynous, just whatever felt right

☆ now as happy as sirius was, their mood suddenly dropped "what am i gonna tell james..remus..peter..lily..what about reg??"

☆ and so now sirius had to come out

☆ well, they didnt NEED to, but they felt the need to tell their friends

☆ BUT BEFORE THEY COULD DO THIS, SIRIUS BLACK CONFIDES IN THEIR FAVOURITE PROFESSOR, PROFESSOR MCGONAGALL

☆ mcgonagall nodded through sirius' rant and asked one thing at the end "would you prefer me to call you something else as opposed to mister?" (sirius grinned and nodded their head "mx would be nice? but of course i dont mind mister! or miss! anything works minnie!!")

☆ so after having a nice vent to dear mcgonagall, sirius felt ready

☆ first, sirius felt that they should tell remus. i mean, his boyfriend should know right?

☆ "moons..can- can we talk?" and sirius came out to him, late at night, curled up together. remus squeezed them and mumbled a soft "they/them it is, my love"

☆ next was james, their brother (i mean, not biologically but shh)

☆ what were they gonna tell them..."JAMIE SUPRISE IM NO BOY, IM JUST A SIMPLE GENDERFLUID FOLK" and then they ran

☆ yes, it was in the middle of then both getting ready that morning, and yes it was sudden

☆ but they got their point across and james came down to breakfast that morning with one question "so, do i get a question limit? because i need to clear some things up"

☆ next was peter and lily, the two of which were easier to tell, as they could tell them both through a joke

☆ "hey, hey, what did the genderfluid person say to the two cis kids?" "uh..what?" "they said "hey, hey, what did the genderfluid person say to the two cis kids"...i use they/them" "thanks for telling us pads but that joke was horrid"

☆ now reg...

☆ "REGULUS" to which reg whipped their head around "IM GENDERFLUID" they were both in an empty corridor. regulus paused. "UH, COOL, IM AGENDER" sirius paused.

☆ they both let out laughs and hugged each other

☆ and sirius was out! and PROUD

☆ gender norms? dont know her. sirius wore a skirt with the MOST sass

☆ and a suit with the MOST sass

☆ "as much as i love trying to avoid detention, which re, you know im trying, snivilly called me a she-man earlier and id really like to hex his fragile masculinity into oblivion"

☆ and they were just living their happy genderfluid life (:

GENDERFLUID SIRIUS!! just a disclaimer that everyone expresses gender differently, every genderfluid person has a different experience, this is just how i chose to write sirius! hope you enjoyed!

[transxfiles]

y’all i cannot express in words how excited i am for the new lumberjanes show to come out. 

i know a lot of folks on tumblr are hearing abt lumberjanes for the first time through the news tv show, but it’s based on a bunch of comics by lgbt creators, and those comics have helped me work through so much difficult stuff, and i don’t think it’d be a stretch to say that lumberjanes (and the current fandom around it) has actually saved my life. 

lumberjanes is a comic about a bunch of girls who go to a summer camp and solve mysteries and fight monsters and just hang out together and are best friends, and i love it so much. right off the bat, two girls are lesbians in a loving, healthy, caring relationship. the camp director is a butch lesbian. another girl is trans and her arc has nothing to do with being trans - she’s just one of the girls, and she’s trans too, and it’s part of her identity but she never experiences suffering around it. later on she helps a young nonbinary character realize that they’re nonbinary, and then the nonbinary character gets to join the girls at camp, and they’re so much happier there. there’s an entire section of panels about pronouns, but it’s juts a casual discussion, where one girl says, “what’re pronouns” and another says, “oh, they’re just words we use to describe ourselves, like ‘he/him’ and ‘they/them’ and ‘she/her’” and then the nonbinary character says “i'd like to use they/them pronouns please” and everyone accepts them. there are so many characters of color. there are so many diverse family groups (something we see in an arc where all of the parents get to visit their kids at camp for a day) including a girl who only has a mom, and a girl who has two dads, and a girl who has a mom and a dad and whose abuela lives with her family, and big families and small families and lots of siblings and only children. 

and lumberjanes is so sweet. it’s complex and well-written and absolutely hilarious, but it’s also so sweet and kind and soft and reading it feels like being hugged and handed a plate of homemade cookies. it’s about friendship and the complexities that entails. the entire motto fo the camp the girls go to is ‘friendship to the max’ and the story reflects that. and the girls get to be loud and goofy and wacky and wild, which is something we don’t see a lot in media. and they get to be soft and scared and sad, too, and then they get to grow from these experiences, and they get to learn and explore and be free. and that’s something i'd never really seen before, not represented in such an honest way. reading lumberjanes set me free. i found these comics in early middle school, when i was going through a really hard time both socially and with my own personal identity. i live in the bible belt, and i go to a school that isn’t accepting of lgbt kids at all. i'd recently been outed to my grade as lesbian by one of the girls in half of my classes, and in the meantime i was also dealing with my own personal gender struggles, specifically waves and waves of dysphoria that i was having a hard time understanding and defining, because i knew i didn’t want to be a girl or a boy, but i had no idea what that meant, and i had no idea that there was a third option, or a fourth option, or a fifth option, or thousands of options, because i didn’t really get the fluidity of gender, yet, and i didn’t understand that i could apply it to myself. but then i saw the characters in lumberjanes, i saw girls who loved girls and were proud of it, so incredibly proud of it, i saw kids who were realizing they didn’t identify with the gender binary and that they didn’t have to, and i do truly think that saved me. because there was a time when i was considering just ending it because i didn’t understand. and then i read lumberjanes, and it saved me.

and those are just the comics - the current fandom surrounding them has been so loving and caring and supportive of me ever since i joined it. we’re small - there’s only maybe forty of us, and the number of us who are actually content creators is so much smaller. when i first joined the fandom, we only had maybe twenty fics on ao3. now we have 93. i’m proud to say i’ve written fifteen of those, and i'm so, so happy to have found and talked with the people who’ve written the other 78. last year, when i started engaging with other lumberjanes fans online through tumblr, discord, and even the ao3 comments section, i was going through a really difficult time at school. it was my first year in high school and it was like the homophobia and transphobia were amped up to 200%, and people who i thought loved me left me, and so many of my closest friends had to leave the school to save themselves, and i felt so incredibly alone. so i said “fuck it” and i made a discord account and i started talking to some people i’d spent years admiring from afar. i spent hours goofing around with them, discussing fan theories and fanfiction and working through my personal life with them by my side. now, i consider them my friends. and i’ve picked myself back up again. i've figured myself out, for the most part, and i've got new friends and i’m staying in touch with old ones, and school is still awful now and again, but i have people who have my back. they saved me, and i don’t know if they know it, but they did. this fandom saved me. i love them so much. 

now, the lumberjanes show is coming out, and i'm so incredibly excited. the comics are niche. they don’t reach as many people. i know so many kids who are intimidated by comics, but don’t really know where to start, or who want to read them, but are scared their parents could find them. i understand that struggle. hiding a book is hard. you have to look for a space that you know no one can get to, under a bed or in a closet or in plain sight, with the cover of another book slipped over it. and so often, the risk isn’t worth it.

but hiding a bootlegged file of a tv show? that can be so much easier. 

i'm so excited to hear that noelle stevenson and possibly even other lumberjanes creators are going to be working on this show. i think that it will change lives, like the comics changed my lives. lumberjanes is a story about girls loving adventure, loving mysteries, loving each other. it’s beautiful and positive and uplifting, and in my case, lifesaving. i urge you all to please check out the comics. you won’t regret it. and please, support the show. 

i, for one, cannot wait to see it.

EDIT: you can 100% reblog this if you want to, whether you’ve read the comics or not!

[honexjams]

just was watching an ftm tiktok compilation that featured kalvin garrah and it got me heated, i have a LOT to say about him and his influence but i will condense it to this:

all trans people have an era of discovery and experimentation, for some that includes experimenting with pronouns online to see what theyre comfortable with. the rise in people IDing with they/them or they/she or they/he is infinitely more to do with more trans kids feeling comfortable to experiment than it is with unconcerned cis people wanting clout. (i know some cis people do ID as lgbt for attention, i grew up in a very depressed/depressing and drug-laden small town where its not unheard of for people, especially young people, to go to strange lengths for relief, comfort, and entertainment. this small amount does not tend to go through the worst of the treatment i had as a young, binary trans person in this parish, which alone will garuntee those folks didnt ID this way 'for funzies' very long)

writing off all of these young people as simply wanting attention is harmful to both nonbinary people directly and binary trans people who are young and trying to figure out what theyre comfortable with.

i can say for myself personally, that i am very sensitive so if the trans online sphere was as critical in 2012 as it is today, it probably wouldve thrown a wrench in my personal process of understanding my feelings and realizing the transphobic responses i got from coming out were just that and not the absolute truth. which wouldve in turn left me IDing as non-binary or nothing at all online for a longer time because i wouldve been more concerned with my fear of seeming like i wanted attention online than actually trying to nut up and come out at school or do anything i needed to do irl for my comfort.

i first listed my pronouns on a writing site thats mostly barren last i checked, and what i put was "he/him/they/them" because i was at a place where i was caught between what i felt was true about myself, and having just come out to my mother as an 11-year-old and her not believing me.

demonizing non binary pronouns and identities will 100% effect this generation of trans kids because for those with no support, they will turn to the internet. when both their real life and the online spaces they go to are highly critical and unaccepting of nonbinary identities, any kid less than 100% sure theyre a binary trans person will suffer at the very least an extended period of confusion and denial, and at worst never fully come to grips with who they are.

ive always felt really strongly about this but i feel as i hit the 10 year mark of knowing i was trans (and still being pretty young at 20yo) its a good time to express these feelings a little more formally than i tend to. especially because i fit into the like, Ideal Trans Experience of knowing i was a boy at a young age (i mentioned finding trans people at 11 but i have Very early memories of telling other kids on the playground that 'i was born a boy who looked like a girl so my parents raised me as a girl' which is dummy accurate to a trans experience often shown in media yk).

(this next paragraph is all personal anecdotes which are important to my point but if you dont care feel free to skip over it)

I do very much believe and accept nonbinary people as truth because i can understand how someone can feel like something that isnt understandable to the society they grew up in because that was my experience as an lgbt person in the deep south. I remember hearing my mom at a local parade (a Very Community-Focused thing where i grew up), see two teen girls holding hands walking down the street and saying "theyre a little young for that, huh?" to a friend, I remember asking her what 'gay' meant as a kid bc ofc i heard it at school and just wanted padding for if i ever said it out loud because as i knew it, wasnt a curse word but it was Bad Word (bc i knew from hearing it around school that it was a Bad Word)i wanted to know what it meant, she said "some boys date boys, its not really a Good lifestyle, but sometimes they do it". Ive heard many transmedicalists say 'how can you have dysphoria for nothing?' as in how can someone be agender. I am a binary trans man in a committed relationship with another man and I am frankly bewildered as to how a binary trans person can believe such a thing as 'the only genders that exist are ones i know about, even after discovering my own queerness' because I can perfectly understand the correlation between binary and nonbinary trans people. For me, growing up as a teenager in the south in the 2010s, gays were vaguely accepted but still ostrisized, and in school i had a classmate who i knew is a binary trans man because i still know him now, and I, my insecure, weak, self concious self emailed my teachers about my pronouns and name while he was still being called his birthname in class and my cousin, who sat in front of me next to him (thats how small a fown this is) was the only person who called him his chosen name, which was how i figured he was like me.

I personally dont want bottom surgery even tho i Fully identify as a binary male, I simply came to the understanding that a 'cis penis' is not something I will ever have so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ may aswell get used to the things i can tolerate, unlike my chest and 'feminine' features that T has changed.

Long story short if You are a binary trans person who doesn't get what the whole nonbinary thing is all about, simply try describing your own trans experience as if you were really not a boy or girl. As if you really, through your deepest soul-searching, came up with the fact that you simply dont identify with neither male nor female.

Back to the original point of binary trans people in a self descovery phase, if You are a binary trans person? try to remember the first time you felt really invalidated in a way that truly struck you as like, a direct attack on how you feel (like how those depressing 'relatable posts' do), did you ever feel like if that was something you experienced in a crucial part of your discovery period that it wouldve hurt a lot? maybe even to the point where it surpressed how you felt about yourself? All i want from the trans community is to not let anyone else feel that way. I truly do fear for young trans people and how this exclusive environment stunts them.

[yikesharringrove]

Nb Steve as requested by @takemebythehand-andsetmefree

Happy Pride!

Here is a link to my post about Harringrove for BLM, and here is a link to Writers/Artists Against Police Brutality

Here’s also a link to the Masterlist of Harringrove for BLM coutesy of @harringrovetrashh

Thank you all for organizing, participating, and donating.

-

There is an instance where Steve gets misgendered, not by malicious intent, but it still happens, so take care of yourselves, don’t read if that could harm you.

-

“I think I’m a girl.”

This revelation wasn’t totally shocking to Billy.

Steve loved pretty things. Could be found more often than not jamming around in a little skirt, lots of makeup. So Billy just said

“Okay, Baby. Then I love my gorgeous girlfriend.”

And that was so sweet and all, but to Steve it still didn’t, it felt just as bad as boyfriend.

“Actually, maybe not.”

-

“I think maybe there’s something wrong with me.”

They were in Steve’s bed together, Steve laying practically on top of Billy.

“What makes you say that?”

“Parts of me feel like I’m a girl, and parts of me feel like I’m a boy. But all of me hates both of those options. I mean, I love looking like a girl, but when you, when you said girlfriend, Bill that felt just as fucking bad as boyfriend. I think I’m broken.” Billy shifted around until Steve was looking right at him.

“You are not broken. You are beautiful and amazing and confused. But you are far from broken. There’s more in the world than girl and boy. You can be anything, anyone.

“Back in California, I knew all kinds of people. I had friends all along the trans umbrella. I had a friend who was a trans guy, but preferred presenting for feminine. I had androgynous friends that presented however they pleased. I had friends who identified as no gender, or all the genders. I had a friend whose gender identity would change on any given day. Gender is fucking fake, and if you’re not comfortable with whatever you were assigned at birth, make something new for yourself.”

“I think that I’m somewhere in between. Not a woman, but not a man.” Billy grabbed the notbad next to Steve’s bad, drew a horizontal line across it.

“So basically, think of gender as a spectrum. Over here you’ve got women. This includes trans women, who are women that were assigned male at birth. One the other side you’ve got men, which includes trans men. In the middle, you’ve got nonbinay folks. Nonbinary is an umbrella term that just means these people live outside of man and woman. This includes agender people, who have no gender, and people who identify as more than one gender, like bigender or pangender. All along the scale you have people who are genderfluid and genderflux, whose definition of their own gender may slide along the scale at any given moment. You also have people that identify as demiboy, or reversely, demigirl, people that only identify partially as boy or girl, respectively. There’s also the idea of being transmasc, or transfem which are people who were assinged a gender at birth, but identitfy more with the other, without completely identify themselves as trans. So a person assigned male at birth who doesn’t consider themselves a transwoman, but more comfortably identities with feminity as a concept.”

He held out the drawing to Steve.

“There’s also different pronouns, and this isn’t even touching the intersex scale. Gender is so fucking whack, Sweet Thing.

“There’s a lot of different ways to play with it, and each person is so different. You can identify one way and present in a way that isn’t stereotypical to how you identify. And no one can tell you you’re wrong. Because you’re not.”

Steve was studying the drawing with wide eyes.

“Pronouns?”

“Like how I was assigned male at birth, and identify as male, so I use he/him pronouns. People along this scale can use whatever pronouns feel best. Some people use they and them so that they aren’t being gendered, and there are other gender neutral pronouns, like ze/zir and ve/ver.”

“But I mean, they is like, it’s plural.”

“Nah. They has always been used as a gender neutral pronoun. Plus, if it feels best, it can mean whatever the fuck you want it to.”

“So I could, I could like, be a them.”

“If that feels good.”

“Use it for me. Let me see.”

“Okay, um, I was laying in bed with my significant other, Steve and they were asking me questions about gender identity and expression. Afterwards I made them a cup of tea and cuddled them all night.” Steve’s eyes opened back up.

“Bill, that’s, fuck, that’s it.”

“They?”

“They. That felt, it felt good. I didn’t, I don’t even know.” Billy squished them tighter to himself.

“I’m glad, Baby.”

“So, does that make me nonbinary?” Billy just looked at them.

“Does it? You tell me, Sweet Thing.”

“I think so. Nonbinary. So like, maybe transfem? But I think I would be more agender”

“If that’s what’s true. You can call yourself nonbinary and leave it at that, or you can take as many labels as you feel fit. It’s your identity. Fuck with it as you see fit.”

Steve was worrying their lip.

“And you don’t mind?”

“Mind what?”

“That I’m not, not a guy.” Billy pressed a kiss to their forehead.

“‘Course I don’t min. You’re still you. You’re gender doesn’t matter to me at all. As long as you’re happy and comfortable and safe. That’s what matters to me.”

-

Steve needed to tell the party.

They spent so much time with the gaggle of kids, and kept getting fucking misgendered. Not that it was their fault, they didn’t know Steve was using different pronouns now.

“Look, I know those little Gen-Z’ers aren’t gonna care. I mean they see me in makeup and dresses and shit all the time, but this feels, big.” Billy was driving them over to the Byers’ place where all the kids were waiting. “But, but what if they take it wrong. What if they just think I’m this confused girl or something. Or they say I need to make up my mind.” Billy reached over to grab their hand.

“If they do, I’ll punch ‘em out. One by one. Fuck them kids.”

But they all took it so fucking well, it was actually anticlimactic.

“I mean, it’s pretty obvious you don’t conform to a gender binary.” Dustin hadn’t even looked up from their campaign as Steve fucking came out. “But like, thanks for telling us. And trusting us. You’re pretty brave I guess.”

Steve rolled their eyes.

“Thanks. You’re all so sweet and sensitive. I was shitting myself on the way over, and none of you are even fazed.”

“Yeah, I saw this coming.” Lucas rolled one of his dice.

“Do you want to do it again? We’ll all pretend to think you’re disgusting and call you a freak or something. Would that be better?” Mike had a challenging look on his face. Steve just slumped into the couch.

“No. Whatever. It’s fine.” They were actually pouting.

“What, you wanted like, a Lifetime movie moment? Where we all cry and say that we love you regardless and pretend we literally all didn’t see this coming?” Mike rolled his eyes.

“I mean, a little pomp and circumstance would be nice. Accepting myself and coming out to you all was a bunch of breakdowns in the making.” Dustin threw himself dramatically onto Steve’s lap.

“Oh! Oh, Steven! My sweet dear loved one! This is shocking news! But my love for you will never crumble! If anything, it is fortified!” Steve just laughed and shoved Dustin off their lap.

“Brat.”

-

“Can I just get a cheeseburger and fries?” The peppy waitress was twirling her ponytail, batting her eyes at Billy like Steve wasn’t right fucking there.

“Of course. Anything else for you?” She pat her eyes. Billy just blinked at her, completely dead-eyed. He gestured to Steve.

“Sorry, Girl. Didn’t see you!” She tried to laugh it off. Steve’s blood went cold.

“I’ll get the same please.” Her eyes widened at the sound of Steve’s voice, still deep, still masculine, despite the light blue dress, the pretty makeup.

“Oh, sorry. I’ll get that right out for you boys.” She shot away, embarrassed. Steve let their head fall onto the table.

Billy ran his fingers through their hair.

“Two for the price of one misgenderings.” They muttered into the table. Billy was gently scraping his nails into their scalp. “That was like getting kicked while down Jesus.”

“I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I’m sorry I can’t totally understand how shitty it makes you feel.” They sat in silence for a moment until Billy tugged on their hair as the waitress approached with their food. She set it down cautiously.

“Could we get some ketchup, please. And they’re gonna want mustard.” Steve smiled weakly at him, they way he overemphasized using they.

“Um, of course. Anything else?”

“Could you grab them another water?” It was just less than half-full, but Billy couldn’t be stopped.

The waitress just blushed, filling Steve’s water and placing ketchup and mustard on their table with a little enjoy.

“Bill, she didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah, but she still did. And I wanted you to stop feeling invalidated.” Billy shoved the burger in his mouth.

Steve just smiled at him, told him he ate like a pig.

[whatsupspaceman]

Writing and reading non-binary characters

i think talking about non-binary characters in literary settings is really important.

Often times, characters who use they/them pronouns fly pretty easily in a visual our auditory setting like film or comics, but I’ve seen a lot of “how do i do this” when it comes to writing.

I want to talk a little about a character I wrote for a short story in a college writing class. Their name is Damien, they are a wizard in an urban fantasy setting, and they exclusively use they/them pronouns. I am a nonbinary person too, and while I use any pronouns, I knew my class was predominantly straight, cis people, and I did not want to compromise on this character’s identity- by assuming (correctly), that they would default to he/him pronouns because of Damien’s name. I was worried about doing this, obviously, knowing I would probably get some transphobic remarks in workshop. I’ll talk a little bit about that too.

The story was in third person, and centered around Damien, the college aged magic user, and Wren, a middle school aged girl who tags along with them. My first draft I did not really describe the appearance of either character- Wren I think just being a kid, and Damien having cropped black hair. The comments I received never questioned Wren’s appearance, but I received a lot of “Well, what does Damien Look Like”, “I would like to know more about Damien”, “I felt that you were being unnecessarily vague with the whole pronoun thing-”

In this draft, I didn’t mention that Damien was non-binary exclusively until near the end, where Wren asks, and Damien responds that they’re “neither a boy nor a girl.” I probably put a little too much faith in my cis classmates here- some of whom didn’t get it and others who skipped the comment entirely. Anyway, from a trans perspective- the act of clearing this up was an afterthought, something I’m tired of doing in my every day life, and something I didn’t want to focus on in my magical wizard story. However, because of the lack of non-binary representation in general media and especially literature, there’s a bit of compromise necessary to take with majority cis readers and trans writers. I had to move the clarifying remarks as to Damien’s gender identity earlier in the story to avoid the all-encompassing obsession with gendering people and characters that many of my readers possessed.

I think the most noticeable thing about this story was the reaction to transphobia- or the lack of- in it. I did not have any instance of Damien being misgendered, no snide remarks, no assumptions, and no physical description of their birth sex- all things that are absolutely rampant in trans characters I typically see portrayed in media. (Now, I understand the importance of having non-binary characters in media who aren’t perfectly androgynous because that is yet another stereotype in and of itself, but we’re still in Gender 101 here. I only had so many pages) And for this story, Damien’s assigned sex had absolutely no business being in the story. It would be absolutely redundant to tell the cis audience that, and only cement this idea of Damien’s “real gender” in their minds. Does that make sense? So, of course, all of the cis audience assumed that Wren, the cis character, was in the same boat as them and the need for a gender assumption. I got a lot of “Why doesn’t Wren misgender them?” “Why doesn’t Wren remark on how confused they are about Damien’s gender?” and the absolutle worst comment of all, “When Wren falls on them, why don’t they talk about their gender- like ‘she couldn’t tell whether the weight under her had breasts or not-‘“

I don’t have to tell you that was Really something else to read in workshop. And of all the “this was unrealistic” remarks I got, never once did anyone think to comment on the unrealistic nature of curses, magic wands, spells, and umbrellas that shoot fireworks. Turns out, it’s my fantasy world and I get to eradicate transphobia if I want to! The reason this happens once again is because of the predominance of sexism, racism, and homophobia in fantasy settings- some of the most famous of which are written by cishet white men. (and yes, Even cishet white men i actually enjoy reading.) it’s not a new thing, but it is something writers Must consider when writing fantasy. We have to destroy the idea that discrimination is inherent to fantasy and scifi universes, or that minorities just Don’t Exist in such.

And finally, the presence of singular they pronouns in a third person story. We’ve all read stories where there are two people (for example) who use he/him pronouns. Suddenly the author throws in a new paragraph, or dialogue without a tag, and you can’t tell which “he” is talking or doing the action. We’ve all been there. However, we’ve Also read scenes where all the characters use the same pronouns, and the author does a lovely job clarifying- peppering in the perfect ratio of names vs pronouns, collective actions versus clarifying characterization: “Oh, Obviously X character is the only one who laughs like that”

Writing they/them pronouns is absolutely no different. We must overcome this idea that it is some brand-new scary writing technique. And if you’ve never written non-binary characters, you’re gonna mix it up a little bit! It’s only natural. That’s where practice comes in, a lot of editing, and beta readers.

Damien shook their head. Taking Wren’s hand, they pulled her over to the side of the road, out of the way of the car.

Damien shook their head and grabbed Wren’s hand. They stumbled to the side of the road together, narrowly avoiding the car.

In the first example, I use singular they for the action of pulling Wren to the side of the road, and in the second, I use the collective they- and sometimes that might require you to use “they both” or “all of them” more than you thought you would. And here, the two examples are a little different- your language is still going to reflect the urgency of the situation, and what each character wants to do- that’s still natural.

The most important thing to remember is just to treat your nonbinary characters like people. Real people with tons of different identities and intersections and ways to express their gender. Bad and good and chaotic and quiet and loud and self absorbed and generous. (And please, please make more human nonbinary characters too!)

[pointlesstrashyexistence]

Gender Identity Help. Calling any She/Theys Willing to Give Advice or Opinions

So. . . over the last few months in quarantine, I've been experience an identity crisis. So for some background, I knew I wasn't straight around middle school. I tried a few different sexuality labels and mostly identify with pansexual although every once and a while sometimes this becomes omnisexual. So I only came out to my parents last year, although somewhat unwillingly and not with the optimal amount of safety, while we were walking back from a college tour and my father asked if I decided if I liked boys or girls yet and I started silent for too long. They’re fine with it although my dad still doesn't really get my sexuality as I don't think he understands nonbinary people and I’m still not sure if he’s transphobic or not. My mom used to work as a counselor for students who were at risk of dropping out, many of whom were queer students who were potentially being kicked out of their homes, and her closest extended family member is her gay cousin, so she has a very early 2000s cishet understanding of gender and sexuality. Often she will hear a sexuality or gender identity she doesn’t know about and will ask me for an explanation, which I try to do as best I can.

Anyways, after coming out to them, I dormed during my fall semester and the first half of my spring semester in freshman year before quarantine. From 6th grade to 12th grade, I had been in Catholic schools that required I wear a uniform. Due to my hatred of my body because it was developing early starting around 4th grade and I had been catcalled by a random man once while in middle school, me being a tomboy, and my own internalized misogyny, I actively tried to not wear feminine clothing outside of school. By the time I was in high school and figured myself out more, I gradually realized I did like being feminine sometimes, but I avoided femininity because of the fear of being catcalled or harassed (I had once been followed my senior year while alone, wearing a floral dress and lipstick). I also realized that I was also very fearful of exuding any gay energy in front of my extended family when I did dress nicely and would often settle with wearing frumpy baggy clothes. So my freshman year felt like the first time I could express myself however I wanted and not feel judged for it. I finally began experimenting with makeup and nail polish, I wore cute colorful outfits with print. And I also wore dark or baggy clothes still, but ones that made me look rather androgynous. And I realized I really liked looking androgynous, but I kind of figured that was just because I was a tomboy.

For the rest of quarantine during spring, summer, and early fall, I didn’t really have much time to think of about it. I was scrambling to do assignments, feeling unmotivated, dealing with with former gifted kid problems like a deep feeling of inadequacy over now struggling with my assignments when I used to barely need to study, upset that I couldn’t see my friends, frustrated with many problems that came up one after another in my family. It was a mess. And then November came. Things had cooled down a little bit more. I felt more out together. A lot of things were still shitty but I was handling them better. And one day I looked at my hair and decided I wanted a haircut. I’d had a short just-past shoulder length curly bob with bangs when freshman year started. However, I lost my scissors in moving back to parents house and my hair had grown down to my chest and my bangs were very long. So I wanted to do something similar, but suddenly decided to make it even shorter, about an inch above my shoulders.

I loved my hair after the haircut, although for some reason my curls had suddenly gotten less curly, which I’m hoping is just my hair needing a readjustment period but I’m not sure. But I very quickly realized something, I liked how I looked when my hair was up. There was barely enough hair for a ponytail, and it was so short that I looked like I had an undercut and curly hair on top. And I liked this even more when I wore my circular glasses. And I liked this even more when I wore a large hoodie that made my chest look smaller. And I realized I really liked looking androgynous. And sometimes when I looked like this, I didn’t really feel particularly girl-like. I couldn’t quite explain it. And this just got more difficult to explain when I realized sometimes I still felt like a girl. Not in that I looked very feminine so I felt like a girl, but that I just felt like a girl.

So now I’m wondering about my gender identity. I think I will consider using she/they pronounce for a while, although I don’t really have many people in real life I’d be comfortable asking to use those except my friend who has also struggled with gender and recently came out as a trans man. I don’t think this is a feeling that will go away, I think it was just dormant and often flew under the radar because of how I dressed, viewed myself as a tomboy, and other factors. So now I have been wondering what does this make me. I was assigned female at birth and have largely identified as a girl/woman my whole life. Femininity and womanhood is still a part of my life that I’m attached to and I don’t want to get rid of it. But then there are the times where I don’t feel like a girl all the time or I feel feminine and girly but not actually a girl. Is it right for me to refer to myself as AFAB? I briefly considered myself as non-binary but I think maybe there’s a more specific term that potentially fall under the umbrella. I’m still not familiar with all the terms under the umbrella of non-binary. I had heard of and had a basic idea of transfeminine and liked it but I didn’t really think it was right of me to use that as I’m AFAB. Would any older she/theys, or any trans or non binary person in general I guess, be willing to just give me some advice or their own opinions?

[rivetgoth]

I had this friend I met in the Hetalia fandom in like 8th-9th grade who was like, a lot older than me (I was like 12-13 when we met and she was like 17 or so), and we were REALLY close for a really long time, we'd talk and call every day and it got to a point where she was really dependent on me in this awful way where she would like constantly threaten suicide if I didn't answer her texts fast enough and shit like that. She was really rich cuz her dad was a doctor and one time she bought me an entire fucking Xbox One (I did not ask for it like... I'd always been a PlayStation gamer LOL) because she didn't have anyone to play Halo with her. My family still has it and uses it as a DVD player/Netflix machine.

Anyway the really batshit thing about this person (BESIDES the fact that she was like, definitely a pedophile who loved shota and frequently sexted me after she'd turned 18+ and I was like 14 and she also had both a bestiality and incest fetish that she'd talk to me about constantly — I was a kid I had no moral concept of anything and just liked being edgy and feeling mature) was that she was like. A chronic liar who constantly faked identities. And for years after cutting off contact with her I would look back and realize that she had faked even more than I had noticed at the time. The thing is, I knew for sure she wasn't lying about her home life -- Her address, what she looked like, her dad's profession, her age, her house, her pets, etc, were all things I had proof of. But when I knew her she was constantly remaking her Tumblr to escape drama she'd start, and she would constantly make side blogs under pseudonyms and pretend it wasn't her (sometimes it would be random shit like aesthetic blogs under different names or ask blogs for characters or smthn, other times it was like, callout blogs for people she had gotten into drama with where she would pretend to be someone else defending her). I assumed back then that I was always going to be in on it, because she would always tell me whenever she made one of these fake accounts, and sometimes she would encourage me to make a new account too as a sort of roleplay thing where we both pretended to be people we weren't... Until I learned that she wasn't always telling me. Every so often, I would become mutuals with a new account who would start messaging me about my interests and strike a conversation with me. Then something would slip and my "new mutual" would admit that they had actually been my friend all along... Which should have made me immediately cut contact because that's weird as shit, but I was young and she was a close friend, so I would just sorta accept it.

She ended up being like, horrifically transphobic. She got run off her blog twice for being specifically transmisogynistic, first insisting that she was allowed to headcanon canon trans women as feminine men and then on her next blog insisting that lesbians couldn't be attracted to trans women. I was still young and closeted and she was one of my closest friends and was constantly messaging me that the situation was making her suicidal and she was just wording things wrong and totally supported trans people and people just weren’t giving her the benefit of the doubt and she was still learning so I tried to just stay out of it without losing her. Then... I came out as trans lol. She stopped replying to me when I first came out and then made a bunch of vents on her tumblr about how much it upset her and about how “using he/him pronouns for AFAB people is triggering” for whatever fucking reason. She told me her “best IRL friend” who she had introduced me to once on Skype but who never logged in again after and who refused to ever do a group call or anything (definitely another fake account) said that it was irrational for me to expect my friends to respect my pronouns so soon after coming out and that I shouldn’t be upset if I get misgendered. Then she apologized but told me my name and pronouns would never fit me. As you can imagine, as a little baby trans kid who was closeted from my family and terrified of even having come to terms with being trans, I didn’t really have a great defense.

Soon she started being really woke like 2014 style Tumblr SJW to save face, she came out as nonbinary and told me in private it was because she felt bad when people called her cis during discourse (she absolutely wasn't nonbinary) and she coined a "new sexuality" that was "attraction only to people you perceive as feminine, regardless of how they identify" -- what this actually meant was "attraction to cis women and not trans women." She ran an aroace help blog despite not being aroace? And made a bunch of pride flags that I still see around sometimes to this day. She would start fights a lot and try to out-woke people and got into a bunch of drama with other SJW types of the day, got into a bunch of drama with TumblrInAction and Mogai-Watch and shit like that, and she claimed for a short while that she had a headmate (FWIW I totally believe DID is a legitimate thing but like. Trust me on this one.) who was transphobic and that it made her so sad, she told me that it was actually that headmate that had been transphobic before, and every so often her headmate would front out of nowhere and misgender me and use really abusive language like calling me a cunt or a bitch or whatever. She started making these "intersex nonbinary" OCs who she would constantly make porn of under the guise that they were representation for LGBT people who were just like, extremely fetishistic cuntboys and dickgirls (they were “intersex” to explain why they could be “girls with natal penises” or “boys with natal vaginas”).

At that same time, she somehow always managed to have these random, very sporadically active trans women mutuals who were apparently amazing friends of hers, who shared some interests with her but also would defend her when people brought up her past, with these long-winded “Well, I’m a trans woman and I think what she said is perfectly justified and everyone makes mistakes and she’s always been a good ally!!” Then one day some trans woman received an ask from her account where she claimed to be a “black trans woman” (she was, of course, a white cis woman) and she freaked out and claimed she had “been hacked by TiA or 4Chan to make her look bad” — I realize now she had just been sending anon messages pretending to be things she wasn’t and forgot to hit anon LOL. Late in all of this she also got into a bunch of hot water for being really antisemitic and saying she didn’t trust Jewish people because they were just like Christians and like, 5 seconds later she came out as Jewish and wrote this whole long sad vent about how she had had internalized antisemitism and then started going by a random Hebrew name LMAO.

In the end the final breaking point was when I found her secret TERF blog, where she had been making posts for months about how trans men are just insecure women who are trying to escape misogyny by stepping on the backs of “fellow women” and using me as a fucking example, and also saying that me not coming out as a trans man had been “basically rape” since she had been SEXTING me when she was 18+ and I was 13-14+ and that it was traumatic to know someone she had trusted was secretly identifying as a man LMAO. She was also obviously saying all sorts of transmisogynistic things, but also had these really bizarre fetish posts about wanting trans women to fuck her...? I confronted her about it and she literally fucking out of nowhere told me that she was in the emergency room with a mysterious illness that might kill her and she was allowed to have her phone but due to privacy laws couldn’t send a picture as proof. While “in the hospital” she deleted the TERF blog and her personal blog. I had known her for literal YEARS at this point (we had met when I was 12-13 or so and by the time we no longer spoke I was a few months from 17), and I was completely stunned to fucking hear this person trying to pull “I’m in the hospital with a deadly disease” at being confronted for some shit like that LMAO. I made a post about it on my public and another “trans woman friend” of hers logged in to vehemently defend her by saying that there’s nothing wrong with AFAB women being untrusting of trans people because female oppression is uniquely traumatic and that there’s nothing wrong with women expressing their sexuality by sexting minors as long as the minor consents and that I was the real predator for “hiding that I was a man” (remember, I’d been a 13 year old closeted trans boy), before never logging in again... 😭 One of the last times we ever talked was when she demanded I refund her for the fucking Xbox and I refused.

Anyway, the long-term aftermath of that is that a few people online (in some random cringe areas of the internet) who archived some of her antics still think that I also wasn’t a real person, since they caught onto how much she lied about too, so they think I was also a sock puppet and I have no interest in clarifying and making myself known to those people LOL. I have no fucking idea where she is now, she deactivated everything after her being a TERF came out. There’s like, so much more to that I could say because I knew her for YEARS and, like I said, she was one of my “closest friends.” Her parents had wildly expensive pure bred designer dogs that she would make Vines of. She wrote Beatles real person fan fiction. For her birthday one year I made her a shirt on Zazzle with an inside joke about one of her OCs... does she still have that? Either way, she was easily the most batshit person I’ve ever known closely online and I will forever associate the Hetalia fandom with people like that.

[digitaldreams0801]

FU But Gay

In honor of this comment on Frontiers Unexplored that made me laugh my ass off, it’s time to talk about gay stuff in the Frontier rewrite. (Minor spoilers for chapters 15-17 and contains very over the top humor)

I mentioned this in an author’s note somewhere in some chapter (I don’t know which one, and it might be for a chapter that hasn’t been released yet; as of this post, I am writing chapter 49 but have only posted chapter 30), but everybody in this cast is queer in some way. Why? I’m gay, and I like writing about gay characters. 

Also, a very good point that I’ve heard brought up within the fandom is that when the Frontier cast becomes Digimon, they become something that isn’t at all confined by the boundaries of humanity. Gender? Sexuality? What are those? I only know Digimon. 

Bokomon stated earlier in the story that Digimon don’t have gender either since you know. they’re data. so I took that as an excuse to make everybody gay! You get to be gay, you get to be gay, and you get to be gay! 

Without further ado, let’s get gay. 

Takuya 

Takuya is bisexual and a trans guy. That’s right, transphobes! I sucked you in under the preconceived notion that all goggleheads are cis! Funny enough (not really), I actually had somebody get mad at me for the trans rep in this story before Takuya was even revealed as trans. They stopped reading after getting mad that I included nonbinary characters, but I didn’t care and kept going out of spite. Also, I want to say that since bisexuality doesn’t exclude nonbinary identities contrary to popular misconception, Takuya could feasibly get with Chihiro, so worry not to the people who ship those two (since there are more than I thought there would be). Takuya could feasibly use he/him and them/they pronouns, but he doesn’t have ~ a second gender crisis ~ until after the events of the story. Shoutout to Aguni, Vritra, and Alda for making that happen since they hate gender (probably). As of the time of the story though, Takuya uses exclusively he/him pronouns. 

Koji

Koji is pansexual and nonbinary. The main reason that this comment made me cackle so much is because it was right; Takuya and Koji are bi and pan respectively. Koji doesn’t really give a damn about gender; he just wants to be held and also to punch his father but that’s irrelevant. Koji uses he/him and them/they pronouns, but he doesn’t come to terms with that until after the story ends. He’s faster with it than Takuya, but it still takes a bit. 

Tomoki

Tomoki is asexual and panromantic. He uses he/him and they/them pronouns. Tomoki is one of multiple asexual characters since I myself am ace and love expressing that through the characters I write. Tomoki is baby, and we should all look after him no matter what. 

Izumi

Izumi is, much like Koji and Tomoki, pansexual. She comes out as nonbinary after the story, and it is definitely thanks to Zephyrmon’s influence. Zephyr would 10/10 cause that and not really give a shit about it. She uses she/her and they/them pronouns. 

Junpei

Junpei is bisexual and nonbinary. He likes he/him and they/them pronouns though he admittedly prefers the former. His romantic type is Koji or Izumi; there’s basically no in between. He’s a disaster bi but I love him and you should too. 

Koichi

Koichi is asexual and demiromantic. He doesn’t really mind much what the gender is of the person that he ends up with as long as they care a lot about each other. He’s also nonbinary like Koji and comes out as using he/him and they/them pronouns not long after the book ends. 

Chihiro

Chihiro is pansexual and nonbinary. They’re neutral on the gender of their partner but would probably have a bias towards other trans people because of their experiences with being nonbinary. They may or may not make gay jokes about themselves and Takuya for the hell of it they do. Chihiro uses exclusively they/them pronouns, and you will wind up on their shit list for insinuating that they are particularly masculine or feminine when they pretty clearly hate that. 

Yumiko

Yumiko is yet another asexual character, and she’s panromantic like Tomoki. She has a bias towards women, but she could still wind up with anyone who respected her. She uses she/her pronouns, but the Digimon sides of her don’t really care about gender (Fioremon in particular really doesn’t give a flying fuck), so that could easily change in the future. 

Hinoka

Hinoka is a demisexual lesbian who loves women. It takes a while for her to connect with others, but when she does connect with a girl, chances are Hinoka will wind up head over heels sooner or later. You know, as soon as she can figure out her feelings, but that could take a while. Hinoka uses she/her pronouns, but much like with Yumiko, this could change. 

Saki

Saki is pansexual and genderfluid. As of the time of the story, Saki is only out as pansexual and nonbinary, not having realized that they’re genderfluid yet. Like with a few others, the influence of the Digimon pushes them to realize that they’re genderfluid. During the story, they use they/them pronouns, though they wind up using any pronouns after the story ends. They laugh when people struggle to figure out their gender at a first glance to further feed their internalized chaos. 

Mayumi

Mayumi is pansexual and nonbinary. She comes to terms with being nonbinary after the story ends and starts using they/them pronouns in addition to she/her. Mayumi doesn’t really mind about the gender of the person she ends up with, and she would probably flirt with anybody if she had the motivation and the love for it. She doesn’t feel that way about anyone in the group, but she totally would if she did. 

Haroi

Haroi is simply demisexual, though much like Mayumi, he comes out as nonbinary after the story. He uses he/him pronouns during the story and later comes to start also using they/them. Haroi doesn’t mind the gender of the person he winds up with, but it takes a while for him to develop feelings. In conclusion, he’s baby. 

Closing Thoughts

What have we learned here today, kids? Everybody is gay. When you’re a Digimon, straight people don’t exist. Also, cis people are minimal because of Digimon gender stuff. If you want to headcanon the two cis characters (Yumiko and Hinoka) as nonbinary, go for it. You have free reign over your headcanons, and I sure as hell will not going to stop you. Woo for the gays! We won! 

Also if anybody is wondering about the influence of the Spirits since I brought that up I’m developing an AU focused around that and I’ll share the info about it as soon as the spoilers on it have been revealed in canon which will happen in chapter 39 the AU is called Spirit Fuse and it’s very interesting

Anyways, that’s about it from me this time. This post was pretty casual and goofy as far as my writing goes, but this stuff is all canon. Go gays! We win!

[rapeculturerealities]

“BUTCH” HAS LONG been the name we’ve given a certain kind — that kind — of lesbian. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men — that’s the part only we [butches] know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.”

Many of us wear the butch label with a certain self-consciousness, fearing the term doesn’t quite fit — like a new pair of jeans, it’s either too loose or too tight. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, 59, doesn’t refer to herself as butch but understands why others do. “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me,” she says. “But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.”

What does owning it look like? Decades before genderless fashion became its own style, butches were wearing denim and white tees, leather jackets and work boots, wallet chains and gold necklaces. It isn’t just about what you’re wearing, though, but how: Butchness embodies a certain swagger, a 1950s-inspired “Rebel Without a Cause” confidence. In doing so, these women — and butches who don’t identify as women — created something new and distinct, an identity you could recognize even if you didn’t know what to call it.

By refuting conventionally gendered aesthetics, butchness expands the possibilities for women of all sizes, races, ethnicities and abilities. “I always think of the first butch lesbian I ever saw,” says the 33-year-old actor Roberta Colindrez. “This beautiful butch came into the grocery store and she was built like a brick house. Short hair, polo shirt, cargo pants and that ring of keys … It was the first time I saw the possibility of who I was.” And yet, to many people, “butch style” remains an oxymoron: There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters — our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless; it’s that unlike, say, the gay white men who have been given all too much credit for influencing contemporary visual culture, we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.

ETYMOLOGICALLY, “butch” is believed to be an abbreviation of “butcher,” American slang for “tough kid” in the early 20th century and likely inspired by the outlaw Butch Cassidy. By the early 1940s, the word was used as a pejorative to describe “aggressive” or “macho” women, but lesbians reclaimed it almost immediately, using it with pride at 1950s-era bars such as Manhattan’s Pony Stable Inn and Peg’s Place in San Francisco. At these spots, where cocktails cost 10 cents and police raids were a regular occurrence, identifying yourself as either butch or femme was a prerequisite for participating in the scene.

These butches were, in part, inspired by 19th-century cross-dressers — then called male impersonators or transvestites — who presented and lived fully as men in an era when passing was a crucial survival tactic. We can also trace butchness back to the androgynous female artists of early 20th-century Paris, including the writer Gertrude Stein and the painter Romaine Brooks. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and early 1970s that butches, themselves at the intersection of the burgeoning civil, gay and women’s rights movements, became a more visible and viable community.

From their earliest incarnations, butches faced brutal discrimination and oppression, not only from outside their community but also from within. A certain brand of (mostly white) lesbian feminism dominant in the late ’70s and early ’80s marginalized certain sorts of “otherness” — working-class lesbians, lesbians of color and masculine-of-center women. They pilloried butchness as inextricably misogynist and butch-femme relationships as dangerous replications of heteronormative roles. (Such rhetoric has resurfaced, as trans men are regularly accused of being anti-feminist in their desire to become the so-called enemy.) Challenged yet again to defend their existence and further define themselves, butches emerged from this debate emboldened, thriving in the late ’80s and early ’90s as women’s studies programs — and, later, gender and queer studies departments — gained traction on North American and European college campuses.

The ’90s were in fact a transformative decade for the butch community. In 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler published her groundbreaking “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” and her theories about gender were soon translated and popularized for the masses. In her academic work, Butler argues that gender and sexuality are both constructed and performative; butch identity, as female masculinity, subverts the notion that masculinity is the natural and exclusive purview of the male body. Soon after, butch imagery infiltrated the culture at large. The August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair featured the straight supermodel Cindy Crawford, in a black maillot, straddling and shaving the butch icon K.D. Lang. That same year, the writer Leslie Feinberg published “Stone Butch Blues,” a now classic novel about butch life in 1970s-era New York. In Manhattan, comedians such as Lea DeLaria and drag kings such as Murray Hill took to the stage; it was also the heyday of Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For,” the serialized comic strip she started in 1983. In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres, still the most famous of butches, came out. Two years later, Judith “Jack” Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano published “The Drag King Book” and the director Kimberly Peirce released her breakthrough film, “Boys Don’t Cry”; its straight cisgender star, Hilary Swank, went on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a role that still incites contentious debates about the nebulous boundaries between butch and trans identity. These artists and their legacies are the cornerstones of our community. As Legler says, “This is where we’ve come from, and the folks we look back to. If you identify with that lineage, then we’d love to have you.”

LIKE ANY QUEER subculture, butchness is vastly different now than it was three decades ago — though the codes have been tweaked and refined over the years, younger butches continue to take them in new and varied directions: They may experiment with their personas from day to day, switching fluidly between masculine and feminine presentation. There are “stone butches,” a label that doesn’t refer to coldness, as is often assumed, but to a desire to touch rather than to be touched — to give rather than receive — and is considered slightly more masculine than “soft butch” on the Futch Scale, a meme born in 2018 that attempted to parse the gradations from “high femme” to “stone butch.” (“Futch,” for “femme/butch,” is square in the middle.) And while there remains some truth to butch stereotypes — give us a plaid flannel shirt any day of the week — that once-static portrait falls apart under scrutiny and reflection. Not every butch has short hair, can change a tire, desires a femme. Some butches are bottoms. Some butches are bi. Some butches are boys.

Different bodies own their butchness differently, but even a singular body might do or be butch differently over time. We move between poles as our feelings about — and language for — ourselves change. “In my early 20s, I identified as a stone butch,” says the 45-year-old writer Roxane Gay. “In adulthood, I’ve come back to butch in terms of how I see myself in the world and in my relationship, so I think of myself as soft butch now.” Peirce, 52, adds that this continuum is as much an internal as an external sliding scale: “I’ve never aspired to a binary,” she says. “From day one, the idea of being a boy or a girl never made sense. The ever-shifting signifiers of neither or both are what create meaning and complexity.”

Indeed, butch fluidity is especially resonant in our era of widespread transphobia. Legler, who uses they/them pronouns, is a “trans-butch identified person — no surgery, no hormones.” Today, the interconnected spectrums of gender and queerness are as vibrant and diverse in language as they are in expression — genderqueer, transmasc, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming. Yet butches have always called themselves and been called by many names: bull dyke, diesel dyke, bulldagger, boi, daddy and so on. Language evolves, “flowing in time and changing constantly as new generations come along and social structures shift,” Bechdel says.

If it’s necessary to think historically, it’s also imperative to think contextually. Compounding the usual homophobia and misogyny, black and brown butches must contend with racist assumptions: “Black women often get read as butch whether they are butch or not,” Gay says. “Black women in general are not seen, so black butchness tends to be doubly invisible. Except for studs: They’re very visible,” she adds, referring to a separate but related term used predominantly by black or Latinx butches (though, unsurprisingly, white butches have appropriated it) who are seen as “harder” in their heightened masculinity and attitude. Gay notes that “people tend to assume if you’re a black butch, you’re a stud and that’s it,” which is ultimately untrue. Still, butch legibility remains a paradox: As the most identifiable of lesbians — femmes often “pass” as straight, whether they want to or not — we are nonetheless maligned and erased for our failure of femininity, our refusal to be the right kind of woman.

ANOTHER LINGERING stereotype, one born from “Stone Butch Blues” and its more coded literary forebears, particularly Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928), is the butch as a tragic and isolated figure. She is either cast out by a dominant society that does not — will not — ever see her or accept her, or she self-isolates as a protective response to a world that continually and unrelentingly disparages her.

When a butch woman does appear in mainstream culture, it’s usually alongside her other: the femme lesbian. Without the femme and the contrast she underscores, the butch is “inherently uncommodifiable,” Bechdel says, since two butches together is just a step “too queer.” We rarely see butches depicted in or as community, an especially sobering observation given the closure of so many lesbian bars over the past two decades. But when you talk to butches, a more nuanced story emerges, one of deep and abiding camaraderie and connection. Despite the dearth of representation, butch love thrives — in the anonymous, knowing glances across the subway platform when we recognize someone like us, and in the bedroom, too. “Many of my longest friendships are with people who register somewhere on the butch scale,” Peirce says. “We’re like married couples who fell in love with each other as friends.”

Legler, for their part, recognizes a “lone wolf” effect, one in which some young queers initially love “being the only butch in the room.” In organizing the group portrait that accompanies this essay over the past months, Legler was curious “what it would be like for butches to just show up together and to be able to display all of their power, all of their sexiness, all of their charisma, without having it be mitigated in some way.” And not only for butches of an older generation, but for those still figuring things out, transforming the scene in ways that both defy and inspire their elders. “It’s been centuries in the making, the fact that we are all O.K.,” Legler adds. “That our bodies get to exist: We have to celebrate that. You can do more than just survive. You can contribute.”

[writtenbyhappynerds]

Fanfic 102: Unit 3, Diversity

          Hello! Welcome back. This week we’re going to talk about Diversity. Beyond how to insert diversity into your writing, the nuances, and the ways you can create a believable character. The Editor and I understand how sensitive of a subject this is, and wanted to take the time to make sure the information we are doling out is inclusive and well-written and quality. There is often a lack of diversity in media and books, and often when it is included it’s shoe-horned in for brownie points. We understand that, and we want the up-and-coming writers to be better than those before them. The two most important things to remember are the following: no diversity beats terribly-done diversity, and, the way that the character is diverse is not and should never be their whole personality. We will be discussing LGBT, ableism, and race.

          The LGBT community is a vibrant community with members of all shapes and sizes. The most important part when writing a character who is gay or trans is that this aspect is part of their identity but it is not their whole identity. When we discussed characterization in Fanfiction 101, we talked about not reducing side characters or members of the cast to one-note aspects of their personality. The same applies here, and a character’s sexuality or gender expression should not be at the forefront of every conversation. You shouldn’t create these characters with their sexual or gender identity being at the forefront of your mind, because you wouldn’t do that for a straight or cis character. You wouldn’t sit down to make a character with your first thought being ‘ok but they have to be cis,’ so it’s silly to do the same to a gay or trans or nonbinary character. Make them like you would any other character. What changes would be aspects of their identity, or values they hold near and dear to their heart or motivations. Those may be different than a straight character or a cis-gender character.

          If you’re straight or cis and writing a gay or trans character, you need to do your research to accurately portray the character in a realistic and believable way. An example we love is Todd Chavez in Bojack Horseman, who portrayed an asexual character, and Todd’s journey as he came into his own. Bojack Horseman also portrayed polyamory with Hollyhock, who was the adopted daughter of 8 dads. What we enjoyed was that Todd’s sexuality added dimension to his character. It didn’t reduce him to being the token LGBT representative, and it didn’t force him into a box where he could only focus on LGBT issues. Todd was and is so much more than that, and his sexuality is a part of his story, but it’s not the sole story.

Rick Riordan is a master of writing experiences that are not his own, and he cheated the system by basing his characters off of people he knew. This is a method that you can use. You can base your characters off of friends, public figures, etc. If you decide to not do that, googling what transgender men and women have to experience or what top surgery is isn’t enough. I would suggest looking to Youtube, where many transgender and LGBT  influencers have talked about their experiences. I would suggest looking to forums, Reddit being one of them. Yahoo Answers is also a really good source. What you want is as many experiences as you can get: ones that are similar, and ones that contrast. The goal is to combine them and make your own character in a melting pot of other experiences. You owe it to not only those who read your story but yourself to do the research. You want your characters to represent the communities you do, and the ones you don’t as best you can.

          Let’s move on to people of color (POC). The same rules we’ve discussed prior apply: A poorly written POC is worse than no POC (Looking at you Baljeet). In addition, that POC’s ethnicity should not be their entire personality, and if you are creating a character just to say that you have made a POC, then you have already failed. There are many issues we see when we find people of color in fanfiction. Among them are language barriers, naming, and a misinterpretation of cultural values and experiences.

          Putting words in a foreign language in the middle of fanfic is very, very common. You see it everywhere. In Avengers fanfic it’s Russian or Norse. In Batman fanfic, it’s any of the languages that the Batkids speak. The writers put in these conversations that sometimes go on for pages in another language, and then add an author’s note at the bottom with the translation. This is awkward, and when you read books, this is something you never see. If you want your character to speak another language, you don’t need to actually write the other language. Putting a few sentences through Google translate doesn’t make you a better or more dedicated writer than someone who adds the tag: “she was screaming now, all her words coming out in rapid French.” Tags can be used to dictate a change in language, and I encourage you to use them. Now, there are of course exceptions to this rule, and those exceptions usually lie in food, names, and things. Calling someone a name that is in another language is fine. Describing food in another language is fine, and things are generally ok. But that’s just for you. Your characters also have to speak the language.

          No one worth their salt or heritage is going to go through a moment where they start out speaking in their fluent tongue and then “forget” to switch back and forth between English and their native language. It is so incredibly unrealistic and awful and it lets the reader know someone who is not actually bilingual wrote this piece of work. When you learn two languages, here’s what really happens: you forget words. You have to stumble through words in your own language before you get to the one you need. You call things, “that thing.” You point. You sometimes say “what’s that called?” you find aspects of the second language, or even your own language stupid and you don’t want to do it. You get words mixed up and you make mistakes. That’s all okay, and that all happens, and should be written as such. One of my teachers never forgot the French word for spider because she got the shit scared out of her by one and didn’t know what to call it when she needed someone to kill it. My aunt took 3 years to learn Turkish by immersion and now can speak it fluently. You don’t even need to be fluent in every language, and many people only know a handful of words in one or a few sentences in another. That’s totally okay! If anything that’s more realistic because it’s super hard to learn a new language and speak it fluently. Don’t force your characters into a box like that. Let them make mistakes.

          Culture is a huge thing when writing POC. You have to keep in mind that culture shifts, and what may have been culturally huge for one set of characters won’t be as significant for others. You want your characters to interact with their culture in a way that is realistic, and not reductive. Kelly from the Office is a great example, as she invites the office to celebrate Diwali with her. Lara Jean from To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is another example. We see her eat Korean food at home, and in the books, she still celebrates Korean holidays. Where the shift comes into play can be seen in Never Have I Ever where Devi is not as Indian as her parents, and we see her struggle with the culture. She still goes to Hindu association things, Ganesh puja, and she wears Indian clothes. However, she’s still a normal teenager out chasing boys and worrying about colleges. In Superstore the Muslim character prays 5 times a day, and still works at the grocery giant. The big takeaway is that these people have lives that include, but aren’t limited to their cultures. They aren’t reduced to stereotypes.

          Naming characters is already rough. However, naming characters from a different background than you are even tougher. The Editor has a lot of anger towards Panju Weasley, from Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Her exact words, as they were texted to me:

**

>Like Cursed Child where Ron and Padma has a kid named Panju.

>What the fuck is a Panju?

>That’s literally the dumbest name in the world

>All she had to google was Indian names.

>There are so many fucking lists.

>I dont even think it’s an actual name. Like it might be a nickname for some people but I dont think people have actually named their child panju.

**

          As usual, the Editor is very correct. There is a simple solution to getting around what we’ll call the Panju Dilemma- a phrase which we’ll use to describe terrible naming choices of POC. In Fanfiction 101 we had an entire unit centered around naming. Nameberry.com exists, and if they don’t have it all you need to do is Google the country of origin and the sex of the OC. Sometimes you can add in the year the OC was born, to really get a feel for the time period, but that doesn’t always work. For example, in one of our stories we have a cluster of kids from Syria. When it came time to name said kids, we Googled: popular Syrian names 2003. That’s how we got our OCs: Reem, Nour, Nizar, Jano, and Stella. Naming is very important, and you owe it to your readers and your characters to do them justice, and not saddle them with a terrible name.

          The final note of diversity we want to talk about is actual ability. Ableism is often overlooked in movies, shows, or books. It is something that is shoehorned in as an extra adversary for the OC or the cast, only *gasp* This time the biggest adversary is themselves. I hate that. I want to eliminate that because as someone with a disability and someone who has worked with kids with disabilities, you can absolutely write and code characters like that in so long as, and say it with me now, it is not their entire personality.

          You can totes write a character with anxiety and/or depression, so long as you don’t snub these very real mental disorders that millions face on a daily basis. You also have a duty, especially with anxiety and depression, to not glorify, glamorize, or romanticize either. Do not romanticize self-harm. Do not romanticize anxiety. Do not romanticize depression. They are not cruel tricks of life that befall beautiful intelligent women. It is not “tragically beautiful.” Depression and anxiety and self-harm are not a paragraph for you to lament on while the OC gazes longingly out the window at her lover. Anxiety keeps some people from talking on the phone they’re so nervous. It gives girls panic attacks in mall food courts because they don’t know what’s going on anymore. Depression isn’t your OC watching the rain in a hoodie and sweats, it’s not showering for days on end because you can’t find the motivation to. It’s having insomnia because you can’t sleep. Self-harm is not an OC’s love interest holding their wrists and telling them to stop. It is deep pain and numbness and hurting yourself to try and feel something. It is rubbing Neosporin on your cuts and hoping they go away. It is forcing your friends to keep it a secret because you don’t want anyone to know because what if they take it away from you. These mental disorders are not yours to romanticize. They are yours to show the growth and power and strength of your characters. They are yours to use to show how trauma has affected your character and can represent normality behind mental health and emotion and talking about things like this. Even more so than girls, writing a male OC with anxiety or depression is more empowering because you are allowing a character to talk about their feelings when that isn’t seen as acceptable by their sex. If you feel you are able to take that plunge, and you can do the adequate research to represent the disorder well, go for it.

          In addition to mental health, physical disabilities are often overlooked. I have a chronic illness. I have never seen in a book, movie, TV show, or fanfiction anyone with a chronic illness, let alone my chronic illness. That in of itself is a broad term, and I’ll let chronic illness mean anything from lupus and POTS to asthma and anemia. These disabilities make a character have to work harder, but hey, look at Captain America. The boy had every disability under the sun and he got out alright. No one is going to make changes for you. You have to be the change you want to see. If I want OCs with chronic illnesses, I have to write them and do them justice by not only my community but the communities that I don’t represent. Jeremy Scott’s The Ables is a great example of writing disability and using it as part of, but not a character’s entire identity. The main characters all have superpowers but are put in a class that doesn’t allow them to use said powers. This is because they are all disabled. The main character is blind and telekinetic, another can read minds but is in a wheelchair, another is a genius but has cerebral palsy. Their disabilities are a minor obstacle, but not the big bad, and that is a great way to write disability. People who live with physical disabilities or chronic illnesses have to deal with said limitations every day. To us, as time goes on it becomes less of the monster at the end of the story and more of an everyday beast. It becomes normal, and there are bigger things for us to worry about than just our disease. This speaks for every aspect of diversity we have covered in this chapter: The people with said note have to live with it every day. It is a common enemy, not the final boss. To treat it as such is to say that it is our biggest concern in life. I wish my chronic illness was my biggest concern, but I have other fish to fry.

          What we have done here is not an all-inclusive list of diversity. This chapter took 2 weeks to write because the Editor and I wanted to do right by our community. Not just the communities we proudly represent but the communities we don’t. There are many more nuances and aspects to diversity that are out there, and what we have presented is our best. Yet it is still incomplete. If there is something important that you feel we have left out, we sincerely apologize. We acknowledge that what we have written here is not all-encompassing for diversity. We wanted to talk about issues that are common occurrences. However, what we have covered is not the end-all of what’s out there. We apologize for the delay, and to make up for it, our next unit Writing Children will be published at the same time as this one. We sincerely apologize for the delay.

Xoxo, Gossip Girl