#so many trans books on that shit

[tmasc420]

it's hilarious when academics try to intellectualize transgenderism. researchers make theories and concepts as to why we are the way we are. they spend hours talking to trans people to figure out how we got like this. they strive to pathologize gender variance. and you know what they find? absolutely nothing. they dont know shit. they cant find any reason for the "why". every study is the same. they just don't know. maybe spend less time trying to diagnose us with some mental disorder and spend time helping the disenfranchised people you are oh so interested in.

[sunshades]

MC Heath's chatter line about being able to move his arms weirdly while he sounds genuinely happy makes me sick he is so dear to me

LET'S ALL APPRECIATE THIS LINE HE IS SO ANNOYING GOD BLESS

there rly is something so bittersweet about this ID... that little self-esteem moment about his career in uptie chatter 2, then this one with that pride he shows at times about his body & strength... and at the same time that feeling that it's all for naught. the second of hesitation when he thinks abt what in his mind could POSSIBLY be worth returning to... you need someone to share it with. even if the person who loves you isn't here you can at least show your manager who has been trying to be your friend... argh!!

[junkjounral]

June 6, 2023

“There is no difference between trying to love and loving” —Joy Ladin

[scholar-of-yemdresh]

EDIT: List can be found here

Will anybody be interested if I made a list of adult transmasc and Nonbinary/transneutral main/major characters in adult fantasy and Science Books.

Because I'm legit sick of the infantilisation both within and outside the community. Why is so much of the NB and transmasc rep children 😭.

Even outside of the miniscule rep Even less of it are grown adult main characters. None of that side character's love interest is a trans dude business, or a they/them appears for one page and is never seen again.

Anyway I've got a handful of characters in books I've read/on my TBR and I want to share them with others looking for this kind of rep.

[captain-lovelace]

feels increasingly like measuring progress by media representation is just people shutting their eyes to like. The world we live in. It’s also always people older than me being like “you guys have no idea how good you have it now with all these trans and gay characters, WE didn’t have that” like ok. Great, thanks for your input. Hey have you heard about the number of trans people fleeing their fucking homes because they can no longer safely live in their state

[alagaisia]

Hey if you’re still enjoying and engaging with Harry Potter in any capacity you can unfollow me 😊 please and thank you

Like. I get it. I was super into it as a kid too. I did not have the social context to pick up on the antisemitism or transphobia or sexism or fatphobia or bioessentialism or racism or anything else. I also picked up on surface-level language of Fighting Back Against Evil and ascribed my own values onto what that meant and thought we were all on the same page. I remember when the original kids who grew up with the books started becoming adult fans and picking up on the (blatant!) antisemitism and everybody was still mostly willing to give JKR the benefit of the doubt on it. (“She was writing kids books!” They said. “She didn’t know she was penning a global phenomenon! She picked a common literary trend in European fairy tales (antisemitic caricature) and didn’t examine it closely. It’s a mistake anyone could make,” we said. “She would probably do things differently now. After all, she word-of-god confirmed the vaguest hints she dropped that Dumbledore might be gay,” we said.) There was actually a span of several years where biases inherent in the actual real content of the Harry Potter series were coming to light and even the people pointing them out still seemed mostly to think it was an unfortunate accident.

That time has passed. Years ago! We are long past the first months of “maybe she doesn’t realize this seemingly-feminist tweet she liked was made by a noted TERF” and then “how could she not realize that these many veiled TERF-y things she’s retweeted have implications for the many queer fans of her work” and finally “oh wow okay JKR just dropped an entire transphobic manifesto on twitter. I guess the transphobia was the point.”

Yeah, there were a few months after that where people were still processing and still working through how they felt about Harry Potter and all of its flaws with the context of the now open transphobia of the creator. I was there for that. Remember how I was one of the kids who built it up into something noble and worthwhile based on my own beliefs about what messages it was probably trying to convey? Turns out it wasn’t trying to say any of those things, and when you take the time to examine all of the terrible shit that made its way into the text whether JKR intended it to be there or not, the whole series falls apart. It’s weird to discover that there’s a room in your house that’s rotten to the core, but eventually you figure out you can’t live like that, still going in there and holding your nose and pretending it’s still the same room you thought it was when the termites were only inside of the walls and hadn’t yet started chewing their way through the furniture. Because what’s going to happen is that they are going to infest the rest of your house. If you decide you can ignore transphobia and antisemitism and everything else just because you liked the color of the wallpaper, the rest of your principles are going to crumble too. You get rid of that fucking room. You put those books on a high shelf in the back of your closet behind other outgrown clothes and interests and you move the fuck on.

JKR uses the money made from her transphobic antisemitic children’s books to actively funding hate groups and to lobby for legislation that will and has actually affected the actual lives of trans people in an entire country. We are past the point of grieving something you were wrong about in childhood. Kids are wrong about a lot of stuff. You grow up and you learn new information and you change your behaviors based on it. You have to choose. It is transphobic to pretend there is not transphobia where there is. It is transphobic to support the work of someone who is using those funds to take rights from trans people with every fucking dollar. It is hateful to continue to engage positively with a story that at its very core is rooted in hate and bigotry and prejudice. You can choose to do all of those things but you cannot claim ignorance of them and you cannot choose those things and still pretend that choosing them upholds the values we convinced ourselves that Harry Potter stood for over a decade ago as uninformed children. You cannot choose to do those things and pretend to still support your trans and queer and Jewish neighbors. I do not want you in my neighborhood. Leave.

[sideflorfauna]

I love my little brother because he is chill enough to sit through an hour and a half long, winding diatribe of how I hate the direction this website is headed in, and the stupid specifics of online queer infighting and crab bucketing I’ve bared witness to in the past several years that never ends. I can air out my bad decisions and NEET habits to someone who isn’t there but understands the words I say and it’s so. cathartic

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread

You Don’t Have A Shot

YA contemporary romcom

about a girl who loses captaincy of her soccer team after a fight, and is paired up with her rival at a soccer camp - and has to work together for a last chance to prove herself to college recruiters

overbearing parents & stress, complicated friendships, so many sapphics,

[nova-rogue]

nothing more insulting than purposefully creating a female character w really small boobs than to have someone draw her having a huge rack btw

don't do that shit

women out here exist with naturally tiny chests and are tired of it being deemed a bad or unappealing thing especially because it is neither bad nor unappealing and also 25% of men [sorry, no research for this on wlw unfortunately] who like women prefer small chests. there is nothing wrong with this as a body type and often when a character is created this way it's (: on (: purpose (: so (: don't (: change (: it (:

[scarycranegame]

every day i get on this app i'm reminded that there's still people on god's green earth who like harry potter. not a huge fan of that, frankly

[fugottron]

I can’t believe I forgot this is what happened to Clarice. TV Will really got off easy. TV Hannibal was a freak but in a slutty way instead of being the creep he is in the books

[carrotpiss]

Ghhhhhhh

[just-another-jumblr-queer]

Found out today that one of the leaders of the local community I’ve been going to is a transphobe

So

I’m havin a Great Day

[genderkoolaid]

Tranny. Many people don’t know the history of the word, they assume it was an assigned hate term or slur along the lines of the “n” word. That’s not how it happened. Tranny was invented by us in Sydney, Australia in the 1970s where drag was a big deal, and still the best drag shows ever are in Sydney, Australia – they’re amazing. So a lot of trans-identified women who were assigned male at birth did drag, that’s how you made your living. And so they were transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, and they were all doing drag to make money. They all bickered amongst each other who is better than who, “Well the drag queens are better,” “No, the transsexuals are better.” “You are all freaks, we’re better.” And on and on and on. But they worked together and they were family together, so they came up with a word that would say family and that was tranny. In Australia they do the diminutive, that’s how they come up with words. So tranny. I learned the word in the mid-1980s, late 1980s from my drag mom in San Francisco, Doris Fish, who was the city’s preeminent drag queen and she’d come from Sydney. And she schooled me in this word tranny, she said, “This way it means we’re family, darling.” “Thank you mama.” [...] So we used it and we were trannies together. And F to M was just beginning to start, the trans men were just beginning to become visible, Lou Sullivan was a neighbor of mine around the corner, and he was the first big out trans man, wrote his book. So trans men and cross dressers . . . cross dressers were also family. Transsexuals, we were all trannies and that felt good. That got into the sex industry and became a genre – there was tranny porn, there were tranny sex workers – chicks with dicks, she-males. [...] And, my only guess is that people who . . . because the only way they would have found out about the word is if they were watching tranny porn or having been with a tranny sex worker and then hated themselves so much that they turned it into a curse word. So it’s not really technically correct to say we’re reclaiming a word – it was always ours. So, many people mistake the word for the hatred behind the word and, in my generation, and I’m sure in future generations of trans people, tranny is going to be a radicalized, sexualized identity of trans in the same way that faggot is a prideful identity in the gay male community – not all gay men are faggots, but those who are are proudly fags and those who are dykes are proudly dykes within the lesbian community, trannies are proudly tranny within the transgender community. Does that mean we can’t call ourselves that because some trans woman does not want to be called a tranny? No. I’m going to keep calling myself a tranny. To the trans woman who gets called tranny, I’m sorry – as soon as . . . you’ve got to look at why you’re getting called tranny and if you don’t pass, you’re going to be read as a transgender person and then you fall back on the cultural view of trans folk which is freak, disgusting, not worth living, we can hurt you. It has nothing to do with the word, it has everything to do with the cultural attitude. So the word has stirred up a shit storm, but it’s not the word.

— Kate Bornstein on the word "tranny" in this oral history from the Digital Transgender Archive

[call-me-strega]

Dc x Dp Prompt #24: The Midwest Prince(ss)

Danny is a Singer/Siren/Banshee au where he’s basically a Chappel Roan-type figure.( Also, I'm Dead on Main trash so Strangers-to-Friends-to-Lovers, Celebrity x Civilian romance for two of my favorite boys)

Danny’s Ghostly Wail develops into vocal manipulation bc he’s a siren or banshee. Ember teaches him to sing and control the power. He finds music is a good outlet for his emotions and decides to pursue music as Danny. It takes him a few years but he develops a style and brand that he bases off the Realms. However, he doesn’t anyone to connect him to Phantom so he uses parts of his ancestors’ names to become “Walker Gale”(shout out to my beautiful mutual @mirigold-mayflowers for helping me pick that name), ordinary small-town midwestern boy turned Music Icon. He hires Val as his personal bodyguard, Sam as his manager, and Tucker as his head stage tech.

He dresses in really campy clothes the low-key mimic his ghost form as well as other ghosts he’s met. The outfits change to match the vibe of the song. So a rock ballad with an outfit inspired by Ember, Show Tunes-Murder Mystery-type-beat with a costume for Amorpho, EDM-techno-hyperpop themed song styled after Technus or Skulker, etc. He just has a lot of fun experimenting with his appearance and he’s an icon for it. He even makes friends with Star and Paulina through this and they give him feedback and help with new looks. The eventually join the team as his PR and Styling team.

Since he’s a banshee/siren all his songs have this underlying despair/sadness even if they have a fun and bubbly beat. He also references his feelings about being/hiding as Phantom and being partially dead and shit but vaguely so no one actually knows or assumes it’s a metaphor. Many of the themes are actually things lgbtq people identify with, specifically trans and bi fans. He also references battles he’s fought and ppl assumes he’s talking about mental illness or abuse which attracts another category of fans altogether. Again inspired by Chappel Roan his first album his called "The Ascent and Downfall of a Midwest Prince" gaining him the nickname the "Midwest Prince".

He’s weird and unfiltered and full of emotion and he gains a few fans in the hero community too. Raven and Zatanna start a fan club for him, well aware he’s some type of banshee/siren but knowing that the extent of his powers are being used to deliver beautiful performances. The are staunch supporters of him and his music and spread it to their friends. The current fan club is Co-Presidents Zatanna + Raven, VP Greta(Secret, a.k.a: a ghost hero), Starfire, Bart, Cassie, Tim, Kon + Jon, Steph, Cass, and Billy.

His identifying features are a signature make-up look and white underdye (when the color is on the underside of the hair). He’s grown his hair longer so it’s not super visible when he has it down and not styled. He also looks different without make-up so he can totally go unrecognized in public and live life semi-normal (as normal as a half-ghost vigilante powerhouse superstar can be). He actually planned it to be that way so that he could still go to college and stuff even though he’s doing it mostly online. All this to say that Danny has low-key got a Hannah Montana thing going on. Also, let's mix it up a bit and say he's based in Star City.

One day Danny goes to a second-hand book store because he's looking for a cheap textbook when he bumps into an absolute hunk of a man who doesn't seem to recognize him. Jason had been in Star City to visit Roy and Lian. He stopped at a second-hand bookstore to see if he look for some older editions of books (one time he found a second edition copy of Persuasion so he likes to peruse) and ran into a super pretty boy who made his chest feel funny and doesn't realize he's a Wayne. They got to talking about started really connecting. They decided to exchange numbers and kept in touch, meeting up every now and then when they had the chance. Danny gave him his private social media accounts so Jason never learned much more beyond that Danny worked in the music industry but not his exact role in it.

Eventually Danny moves to Gotham, either bc he switched labels or to be closer to Jazz whose doing her doctorate thesis on reforms that need to be made in Arkham. He and Jason begin meeting up in person more frequently and start catching feelings. Danny really wants to ask him out but feels sleazy doing it without telling Jason about his past and superstar alter ego. However, he also doesn't want to lose the mostly normal friendship they have. On the flipside Jason wants to date Danny but doesn't want to drag him into the life of a vigilante or the life of a Wayne. Both of them Pine and Agonize over this. In the end Danny decides to bite the bullet and tell Jason who he is, every part of who he is. He invites Jason over for a movie night and tells him he's got something important to tell Jason.

That same day Starfire decides to introduce Walker Gale's work to the other Outlaws and Jason really resonates with his work. He identifies with the lyrics on a literal and physical level and recognizes the underlying emotions that usually only other ghosts or liminals can. Starfire overjoyed that her friend likes his music decides to show Jason some of his music videos and photos. Jason, not being blind or an idiot, recognizes not only the props and costumes but his crushes face under that (very well done) make-up.

Jason is stunned and conflicted: it’s not like Danny lied to him about who he was, but he was entirely truthful either. Did he assume Jason knew? Or did he just not trust Jason? Why did he even bother with Jason, a seemingly regular guy, if he had such a claim to fame? And Jason keeps listening to his music and it’s speaks to him the same way hanging out with Danny does, making him feel seen and connected. It makes him all the more sure that someone incredible as Danny doesn’t need someone like Jason. He heads to Danny’s place that night very subdued.

He gets to Danny’s place and the smile that greets him twists him up inside. He puts on a mask and tries to act normal but Danny can tell somethings up but persists as he has made up his mind to be clear with Jason. He sits him down and tells him there is something important he wants to tell Jason. He starts by letting Jason know that he cares about him very much and appreciates the normality and closeness of their friendship. He confesses that he doesn't normally get that bc well, he's the superstar "Walker Gale". Danny goes onto say that the reason he didn't say anything earlier was because he treasures the simplicity of what he had with Jason and the reason he's telling him now is because he couldn't continue a relationship that he wants more from without being completely honest.

Jason's heart thunders in his chest and he stares at Danny with a slightly constipated look. Danny asks Jason what's wrong and on an impulse Jason word vomits his feelings. That he actually found out through a friend earlier today, that he really connected to his music the same way he did with Danny, that he's never felt seen the way Danny sees through him, that he's never felt the same way as deeply before, that he's completely and utterly in love with Danny but was scared to say anything and get him involved with his crazy life and the Waynes. And Danny sits and listens shellshocked.

And the only thing Danny can think to do is kiss this incredible boy senseless and tell him that if he likes him back then they can figure it out.

[transfemme-shelterdog]

Something I hope and wish for a lot of trans men is for them to realize that like many other things, masculinity is a spectrum. Speaking as someone who grew up hanging around men for over 20 years, and still do to this day, there is a wide range of ways that cis men express themselves and their masculinity. Furthermore, many men tend to have a very muted form of masculinity.

What I mean by this is that a good portion of men don't feel like they have to be macho dudes, with big muscles, driving trucks, drinking beers with the bros, etc. Most men quite literally will just simply exist, and don't feel like they need to prove their masculinity. It's just a given.

By all means, if you want to be a guy who body-builds, works on trucks, drinks beers, and all that stuff, that's perfectly valid and you won't hear shit from other men about it.

But you're not really under any pressure to do this. There's a lot of men who have typically "feminine" interests, or act more androgynous, and their gender is never brought into question.

If you want to knit, bake, read books, or do any other "non macho" activity, you can.

You're masculine purely by the fact that you're a man.

None of the men in my life have been "macho" dudes, and their gender or heterosexuality are never, ever, doubted.

So to all you trans dudes out there, coming from an ex-dude, with a shit load of male friends, remember this: there's absolutely no rules to being a man. Be yourself, and people will act accordingly.