#specter campaign writings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

abtrusion · 6 months

Text

Theories of the holy shit what did I just see back there on the street?

Because transmisogyny makes them so impossible to ignore, for at least the last 70 years transfeminized people have served as key material of Anglo-American gender/queer/trans theories, as laundered through anthropology, sexology, and uncited personal witnessing. The anaemic denial of this fact through snappy and surface-level distinctions between ‘queer’ and ‘trans’ and between different transfeminized groups has made it functionally impossible for these theories to seriously account for transf* life, and this failure is highly productive, because it allows for the continued use of both ‘premodern’ ‘third gender’ and ‘postmodern’ transgenderism as lobotomized material for the theories of other people. The last century of gender theoretic development has revolved around slowly refining methods of extracting transfeminized peoples’ insight, forgetting and re-introducing them to their field over and over again to frame them as perpetual novelties, leading to a pernicious form of feminist amnesia that repeats over and over again.

1 . MARGARET MEAD (1949)

The work begins with Margaret Mead, the ‘most famous anthropologist of our century’ (Behar and Gordon 1996), who made her career studying indigenous groups in Samoa and New Guinea, then joined the larger anthropological effort to inform the US Government’s genocidal re-education campaigns against Indigenous American tribes. She later enjoyed a prodigious career as a public intellectual and shifted to more explicitly feminist writing which extensively influenced the movements of the 60s and 70s. Mead argued that essentially all sex-gender roles were culturally determined, and used the specter of the transfeminized homosexual-transvestite both to make that argument and to advocate for gender abolition.

This can be seen most clearly in Mead’s 1949 book Male and Female: a Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. Mead chronologically traces individual gender development through an ethnographic-sexological narrative, beginning with ‘first learnings’ that a child receives primarily through observation. Then the family comes in, and the transvestite comes with it, existing as the primary motive (alongside Freudian sexual attachment) which motivates gendered socialization:

Too great softness, too great passivity, in the male and he will not become a man. The American Plains Indians, valuing courage in battle above all other qualities, watched their little boys with desperate intensity, and drove a fair number of them to give up the struggle and assume women’s dress. (Mead 1949)

Mead argues that “fear that boys will be feminine in behavior may drive many boys into taking refuge in explicit femininity,” but makes a distinction between this identification and what she calls ‘full transvestitism,’ the culturally-specific recognition of that status. This differential leads her to conclude that the physical traits seen as markers of ‘gender inversion’ are culturally specific, and that what is understood as physical sex (then existing on a ‘spectrum’ model) is therefore partially socially determined.

For Mead, gender must be abolished precisely because of the fact that she could even make this argument. As she says,

Only a denial of life itself makes it possible to deny the interdependence of the sexes. Once that interdependence is recognized and traced in minute detail to the infant’s first experience of the contrast between the extra roughness of a shaven cheek and a deeper voice and his mother’s softer skin and higher voice, any programme which claims that the wholeness of one sex can be advanced without considering the other is automatically disallowed.

The desperate need to reproduce these distinctions, to make sex clear and visible and obvious, leads Mead to ultimately argue for a gender abolition that rests on complementary sex-roles. The main benefit of this approach for Mead is the complete eradication of sex-gender ‘confusion’ and its incarnation in transfeminized people, so associated precisely because of their intense usefulness as a tool for undermining sex-gender distinctions. So Mead sees the construction of physical and social gender by using transfeminized people as a lens, but because of her own disgust she can only fix gender by unseeing it again, by displacing gender to ‘real’ physical sex and protecting herself by breaking the tool. This, unsurprisingly, leaves her exactly where she started.

2. BETTY FRIEDAN (1963)

The feminist theorists that came after Mead directly confronted this reversion to ‘complementary sex’ logics, most notably in Betty Friedan’s foundational work The Feminine Mystique. Friedan discusses the ‘paradox’ of Mead’s influence, the strange combination of her exposure of ‘the infinite variety of sexual patterns and the enormous plasticity of human nature’ and her ‘glorification of women in the female role – as defined by their sexual biological function.’ In the middle, Friedan cites a page-long quote describing a point of ambivalent warning in Mead’s writing:

The difference between the two sexes is one of the important conditions upon which we have built the many varieties of human culture that give human beings dignity and stature… Sometimes one quality has been assigned to one sex, sometimes to the other. Now it is boys who are thought of as infinitely vulnerable and in need of special cherishing care, now it is girls… Some people think of women as too weak to work out of doors, others regard women as the appropriate bearers of heavy burdens “because their heads are stronger than men’s” … Some religions, including our European traditional religions, have assigned women an inferior role in the religious hierarchy, others have built their whole symbolic relationship with the supernatural world upon male imitations of the biological functions of women. (emph added by me)

...Are we dealing with a must that we dare not flout because it is rooted so deep in our biological mammalian nature that to flout it means individual and social disease? Or with a must that, although not so deeply rooted, still is so very socially convenient and so well tried that it would be uneconomical to flout it…

...We must also ask: What are the potentialities of sex differences? … If little boys have to meet and assimilate the early shock of knowing that they can never create a baby with the sureness and incontrovertibility that is a woman’s birthright, how does this make them more creatively ambitious, as well as more dependent upon achievement?

Friedan attributes this ultimate focus on sexual difference to Mead’s Freudianism: she argues that Mead’s need to approach culture and personality through sexual difference, combined with her anthropological understanding that ‘there are no true-for-every-culture sexual differences except those involved in the act of procreation’ (Friedan and Quindlen 1963), combines to cause her to inflate the cultural importance of the reproductive role of women. Friedan intensely rebukes this reification of reproduction as another component of the ‘feminine mystique’ (very close to the modern ‘divine feminine’), advocating for programs which enable women to reject the mystique and housewife status and to seek education and employment, to combat the problem ‘which had no name’ but takes shape through spikes in female ‘sex-hunger’ and ‘overt manifestations’ of passive male homosexuality, both understood as ‘children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers.’ In a paradoxical return to Freudianism, Friedan characterizes husbands unwilling to let their wives work as being seduced ‘by the infantile phantasy of having an ever-present mother’ (the Freudian homosexuality-signifier), associating antifeminism with passive homosexuality with femininity which the aspiring feminist has escaped, learning to compete “not as a woman, but as a human being.”

3. THE MULTIPLICATION OF TRANSFEMINIZED SUBJECTS

As we can see, transfeminized subjects are frequently used as signs of system collapse, hypervisible enough to be easy examples and potent enough to rhetorically corrode existing sex-gender systems in preparation for the author’s own vision. Once a piece is published, these examples are usually then forgotten, assumed as scaffolding for the real theory; but the rhetorical strawmen of these transfeminized subjects still remain, trapped implicitly in the text, and they bleed into one another with every new addition to the corpus, every call to action invoking a new transfeminized archetype.

So far we have seen Mead’s anthropological-orientalist framing of ‘transvestitism’ among the anthropological Other and Friedan’s psychological framing of ‘passive homosexuality’ in the United States. The increasing visibility of adult ‘transsexuality,’ somewhat disjoint from the developmental sexology Gill-Peterson (2017) discusses because of its visibility in high-profile cases like Christine Jorgensen, was likewise framed for theory. Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which described methods for observing ‘the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment,’ used an intersex woman named Agnes as an avenue to expose how everyday social facts are constructed. Agnes was an ideal exemplar because her insistence on getting HRT and being seen as a woman was considered psychologically normal: “Such insistence was not accompanied by clinically interesting ego defects. These persons contrast in many interesting ways with transvestites, trans-sexualists, and homosexuals.” Of course, Garfinkel was later notified that Agnes did not have an intersex condition, and he then noted that ‘this news turned the article into a feature of the same circumstances it reported, i.e. into a situated report.’

Anyways, now it’s time for yet another transfeminized subject: the ‘transsexually constructed lesbian feminist.’

4. JANICE RAYMOND (1979)

As with her predecessors, Raymond sees analytical power in her particular transfeminized group, arguing that “transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotypes in a role-defined society.” But she also has some concerns for ‘transsexual women,’ initially assumed heterosexual, none of which are particularly novel or interesting. Now that she’s writing in an environment dominated by Friedan’s mandate towards shedding femininity, feminist amnesia makes it novel to regurgitate Margaret Mead’s responses: that “male transsexualism may well be a graphic expression of the destruction that sex-role molding has wrought on men,” and that “men recognize the power that women have by virtue of female biology and the fact that this power, symbolized in giving birth, is not only procreative but multidimensionally creative” (Raymond 1979).

Her analysis of (new archetype) ‘transsexually-constructed lesbian feminism’ is much more interesting. While Raymond can understand heterosexual transsexual women as ‘reinforcing gender stereotyping’ by pulling primarily from medical archives already hegemonized by gatekeeping and passing requirements, the transsexual women in the lesbian-feminist movement achieved a certain degree of personal contact and visibility that undermined ‘hegemonizing’ logics. So Raymond uses three main arguments: an essentialist appeal to fundamental ‘maleness,’ a red-scare-esque appeal to transsexual lesbian feminists as ‘court eunuchs’ bent on monitoring and controlling feminist spaces, and finally, an argument that transsexual lesbian feminists are fundamentally epistemically corrosive to lesbian feminist spaces:

Whereas the lesbian-feminist crosses the boundary of her patriarchally imposed sex role, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist is a boundary violator. This violation is also profoundly mythic, for as Norman O. Brown writes of Dionysus, he as the ‘‘mad god who breaks down boundaries.’’

Contrary to contemporary transmisogynistic discourse which frames trans lesbians as personal threats to women in lesbian-feminist spaces, this violation takes its form not in any particular act but in the act of passing, the deconstructive question this existence seemingly automatically places on lesbian-feminist spaces:

One of the most constraining questions that transsexuals, and, in particular, transsexually constructed lesbian-feminists, pose is the question of self-definition—who is a woman, who is a lesbian-feminist? But, of course, they pose the question on their terms, and we are faced with answering it.

Raymond notes with some frustration that this transsexual question has been discussed ‘out of proportion to their actual numbers,’ using up valuable feminist energy, and frames this as a symptom and crime of transsexual lesbianism itself. The trans question is transsexual women; like the theorists before her, she sees transfeminized people as a gaping hole in the gendered world, but now they’re inside her house, feeding “off woman’s true energy source, i.e., her woman-identified self,” and inherently stand to break “the boundaries of what constitutes femaleness,” to dissolve lesbian-feminism itself.

I want to stress two main points in all of this. First, Raymond understands studying transsexualism as a crucial tool for answering ‘the question of what gender is’ and ‘how to challenge it.’ Second, Raymond’s anxiety about transsexual lesbian-feminists moves away from specific actions and towards the ‘penetration’ inherent in their existence in these spaces at all, the understanding that transsexual women are inherently corrosive to lesbian-feminist movements. These two points are clearly linked. Raymond understands transsexuality as a form of epistemic gender acid, something that can be useful at arm’s length but is deadly up close. Of course, the transfeminized people she discusses were not necessarily invested in asking the Trans Question themselves; trans women attended lesbian-feminist events like Michfest before and after their trans exclusion policies, and regardless of ‘passing’ many people enjoyed a form of don’t ask don’t tell (Tagonist 1997). But within these spaces, the Trans* Question long predated the actual existence of transfeminized people – so once they arrived, the Question and person were fundamentally linked. Trans theorists have negotiated this association extensively, but that’s not the topic of this essay, so I’ll leave you with some sources (Stryker 1994; Stone 1992) and move to Butler.

5. JUDITH BUTLER (1990)

This work has been done already by Vivian Namaste (2020), who argues that “contemporary discussions of Anglo-American feminist theory, exemplified in Butler’s work, begin with the Transgender Question as a way to narrow our focus to the constitution, reproduction, and resignification of gender.” This singular focus on the ‘Transgender Question’ has made it functionally impossible for Anglo-American feminist theory to consider the outsized role of work, particularly sex work, in motivating the discrimination and violence against transfeminized people of color: “framing violence against transsexual prostitutes as ‘gender violence’ is a radical recuperation of these events and their causal nature-a violence at the level of epistemology itself.”

Namaste attributes this focus on featureless ‘gender violence’ to a crippling lack of empiricism, a lack of researcher-subject equity, and an exclusion of subject knowledges. She provides an effective power-based solution to this epistemic violence – that feminist theorists should talk with the subjects of their theory and give them some measure of power in the transaction – a sort of endpoint analysis which means she doesn’t need to consider too much of the internals of the system she’s challenging. That’s a good idea for her work, but with the benefit of history we can move differently. The next section synthesizes Butler, Friedan, Mead, and Raymond together to provide a functionalist analysis of the feminist theoretic use of transfeminized people. What are the benefits of using transfeminized people as an epistemic tool in feminist theory? What are the dangers of using this epistemic tool, and how does feminist theory manage those dangers?

6. PATTERNS OF EXTRACTION AND DEFENSE

Looking past Butler and further into the past reveals that transfeminized people have been crucial not just to the feminist theory of the past 20 years, but have served as exemplars as far back as the 1940s. The ‘Trans* Question,’ which frames transfeminized people as the most visible signifier and most horrifying symptom of social gender, has been cyclically used in a form of feminist cultural amnesia:

A transfeminized group serves as a hypervisible example to 'deconstruct' social gender

Transfeminized deconstruction bloats beyond itself, undermining 'sex traits' or 'femaleness' or some other foundational category of feminist analysis.

Reconstruction of gender as 'biological sex,' alliance between feminist theorists and men of all stripes by arguing that post-gender eradication of transfeminized people will (a) allow men to be feminine without becoming women or (b) destroy femininity entirely.

New-generation feminist theorists realize their predecessors have reinvented social gender. Return to (1).

As Margaret Mead’s work shows, the use of transfeminized groups to deconstruct both physical and social gender has been observed regardless of transmedicalization. This helical pattern has a few general properties:

Each cycle introduces a distinct transfeminized group, positioning it against prior groups as uniquely suitable for analysis, but simultaneously blurs the new group into the existing melange.

This "Trans* Queston" is almost entirely devoid of group-specific context and rooted in transmisogyny, which positions them as horrifying and visible symptoms of social gender.

Each "Trans* Question" initially exposes social gender, but constantly threatens to dissolve other categories or even the theorist's own writing as socially constructed, against the theorist's will.

Each new cycle demonstrates near-complete historical amnesia as to the relevance of transfeminized people in the prior theoretical move.

So the “Trans* Question” allows for the basic feminist move, asserting that gender is socially constructed, but if improperly controlled it stands to dissolve virtually any definition feminist theorists try to build. To be clear, I do not believe in the total deconstruction of categories – you need definitions, even ones you acknowledge as imprecise, to say anything at all. But transfeminized people probably have pretty solid ideas about gender, having to, you know, live with it. The alienated ‘Trans Question*’ has none of this insight, appearing instead as a gaping epistemic hole in the world, and so feminist theorists are forced to come up with complicated quarantining measures to keep the Question from spilling over.

What jeopardizes feminist theory’s use of the Question? One answer (among many) comes by looking at Mead, who concluded that physical characteristics seen as ‘sex traits’ were socially constructed by looking at the culture-specific construction of what she called ‘full transvestitism.’ In this case, the Question undermined sex when the social position of transfeminized subjects were seen as simultaneously normative and anti-normative, existing in some normative ‘social’ role while being understood as distinct from non-transfeminized subjects via another ‘natural’ axis. The fact that these splits were made differently across different transfeminized groups undermined the distinction between social and ‘natural/biological’ aspects of gender, and because the alienated Question provides no means of making anything solid out of any of this, Mead retreated to the womb.

So understanding that the Question allows for the deconstruction of gender, and that it overgrows when multiple (studied as) semi-normative transfeminized groups are cross-compared with one another, we can consider aspects of contemporary feministqueertrans theory that enforce the epistemic isolation and normativization/antinormativization of transfeminized groups. The knots this ties in feminist theories seem relevant both to the ‘why does trans theory exist’ question posed by Chu & Drager (2019) and to the challenges and limitations of applying queer/trans theory to groups outside the anglosphere (Chiang 2021, Savci 2021). I’ll discuss that more in another essay.

SOURCES

Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon. 1996. Women Writing Culture. First Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chiang, Howard. 2021. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific. Columbia University Press.

Chu, Andrea Long, and Emmett Harsin Drager. 2019. “After Trans Studies.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 6 (1): 103–16. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7253524.

Friedan, Betty, and Anna Quindlen. 1963. The Feminine Mystique. Reprint edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. 1st edition. Cambridge Oxford Malden,MA: Polity.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2017. “Implanting Plasticity into Sex and Trans/Gender.” Angelaki 22 (2): 47–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2017.1322818.

Mead, Margaret. 1949. Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World. First Edition. William Morrow.

Namaste, Viviane. 2020. “Undoing Theory: The ‘Transgender Question’ and the Epistemic Violence of Anglo-American Feminist Theory.” In Feminist Theory Reader, edited by Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, and Emek Ergun, 5th edition. New York, NY London: Routledge.

Raymond, Janice G. 1979. The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. New York: Teachers College Press.

Savci, Evren. 2021. Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam. Durham (N.C.): Duke University Press Books.

Stone, Sandy. 1992. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 10 (2 (29)): 150–76. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10-2_29-150.

Stryker, Susan. 1994. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 1 (3): 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1-3-237.

Tagonist, Anne. 1997. “Sister Subverter Diary August ’97.” Unapologetic: The Journal of Irresponsible Gender.

#transmisogyny #trans #transgender #my writing

203 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 6 days

Text

During the first half of the 1980s, in the early days of the HIV pandemic, one ethnic group in the United States faced particularly inhumane and biased treatment. Haitian immigrants, unfairly blamed as the originators or leading propagators of the virus, were lumped into the “Four Hs” of people said to be at a high risk for AIDS: “homosexuals, heroin users, hemophiliacs, and Haitians.” To help contain the virus, the prominent right-wing commentator William F. Buckley argued in a 1986 article in the New York Times that people with AIDS should be tattooed to keep the public safe from contact with them.

In a horrifying throwback to that era, the notion of Haitians representing a public health threat has been revived in the current U.S. presidential campaign season. Most prominently, during last week’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald Trump repeated a baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in the small city of Springfield, Ohio, are eating other people’s household pets. It’s bad enough that Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, have made these vile and unfounded claims. But Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, has also warned that Haitians are spreading HIV.

(Asterisks, footnotes, and even parentheses are usually ill-suited to column writing, but one must wonder whether Trump and Vance are aware of the irony of raising animal abuse claims when one of their most important surrogates, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has acknowledged that he dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park years ago; one of Kennedy’s daughters has also said that he once severed a whale head and brought it home.)

After nearly a week of discussion and uproar about the groundless statements about Haitians eating pets, Vance finally admitted on Sunday what people familiar with the facts suspected all along: He had “created” the claims against the Haitian community of Springfield outright to focus national attention on what the Republican Party sees as one of its most potent election issues, immigration.

One question that arises from this incident is why Haitians have been so frequently used as scapegoats for national problems and vehicles for scaremongering in the United States. As it turns out, anti-Haitian discrimination is a topic rich in history.

My first encounter with this was in the early 1990s, when I lived in Miami as a bureau chief for the New York Times covering the Caribbean and parts of Latin America. At a time of political instability, widespread violence, and the specter of famine in Haiti, the Clinton administration severely restricted Haitians’ ability to enter the United States as refugees or beneficiaries of political asylum. As coverage in one Florida newspaper summarized at the time, “Haitians picked up at sea will not be allowed into the United States, period.”

In that period, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted desperate Haitians en route to the United States and took them to the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and to other Caribbean Basin countries, where they sheltered in rudimentary camps awaiting processing and return to Haiti. Even those who wished to press claims of legitimate fear of persecution, a common benchmark for asylum, had to do so back in Haiti.

Living in Florida, what stood out to me as much as the restrictive spirit of these rules was how sharply the treatment of Haitians contrasted with that of a neighboring Caribbean people: Cubans, who fled their country for economic and political reasons the previous decade in the so-called Mariel Boatlift, a much larger exodus by sea. In 1984, four years after the arrival of many thousands of Cubans, Washington granted these refugees permanent legal status. (Between 1994 and 1996, however, the Clinton administration held around 30,000 intercepted Cubans at Guantanamo, breaking temporarily with a long-standing U.S. policy of receiving Cuban migrants with relatively open arms.)

Washington initially denied equal treatment to a smaller population of Haitians who also arrived in 1980, as it insisted they were ordinary economic refugees, not people facing political persecution. Only after pressure from human rights groups were Haitians allowed to apply for permanent residency under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

Americans have seldom paused to ponder what drives attitudes toward Haitians that are frequently at odds with those toward immigrants of other nearby nations. If his goal had been simply to stir up anti-immigration sentiment to boost the Republican ticket, Vance could have targeted people from a country that has contributed far more to illegal immigration lately—say, Venezuela or China. It is not as if Trump has not slandered other groups with unfounded claims. Indeed, he launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 with wild rhetoric about Mexico deliberately sending rapists to the United States.

A panel discussion on CNN last week may have captured some of the current Trump-Vance logic. One of the participants asked another why Trump had chosen Haitians—and not, say, Scandinavians—for his obnoxious tall tale. The other panelist, a conservative strategist, refused to speculate, leading the person who asked the question to answer it herself, attributing the decision to racism. Unlike Cubans, for example, who predominantly identify as white, around 95 percent of Haitians are Black.

Many popular attitudes toward race and immigration can be traced back to something called the Teutonic germ theory, a popular 19th-century interpretation that, despite its name, had nothing to do with microbes. As the historian Greg Grandin has written, this theory “held that what was good and strong about American institutions germinated in Europe, in ancient Saxon and Teutonic villages filled with freemen not yet subordinated to feudal lords.” Put simply, thoughts like this lie behind very old and uninspected ideas that still often associate “real” Americanism and hard work and virtue with Anglo-Saxonism.

For xenophobes and demagogic politicians such as Trump and Vance, who wish to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment for political gain, Haitians have come to represent a convenient and dramatic contrast to the proverbial Anglo-Saxon: Haitians, for reasons of their blackness, are an ideal “other.”

One other thing that most Americans don’t realize is how deep hostility and antagonism toward Haiti and Haitians run in U.S. history. Press coverage of Haiti routinely highlights its status as the “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” What reporters usually fail to state would be more helpful to understanding the country’s relationship with Washington: Haiti, after the United States, is the second-oldest republic in the hemisphere.

In the 1700s, French traders brought people in chains from Africa to Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was known at the time, to grow sugar and other lucrative commodities. The colony became a principal source of wealth for France, and experts say the production of enslaved human beings made Haiti the richest colony in the history of the world. Then, in 1791, one of the greatest events in modern history occurred. As I wrote in my book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, people brought from Africa revolted against their enslavement, and by turns defeated the great empires of the age—France, Spain, Britain, and then France again—to win their liberty.

In 1804, when France’s former chattel proclaimed the birth of Haiti, they did so with a constitution that outlawed slavery, a gigantic step in human enlightenment that preceded abolition in both Britain and the United States. What is more, the people of this newborn nation outlawed discrimination on the basis of race altogether, a revolutionary achievement that was still being fought for in the United States in my lifetime.

The Western response to Haitian liberation was a shameful one. France imposed onerous and long-lasting indemnities on Haiti for the supposed injury caused to it by the outbreak of human freedom. Meanwhile, Europe and the United States conspired to isolate Haiti diplomatically and economically. Washington’s preoccupation with Haiti was particularly dishonorable. Members of the Virginia planter class that predominated in U.S. politics worried that the example of Haitians could incite Black people in the American South to demand—and potentially fight for—their own liberation. They believed that stories about Haiti’s success should not be allowed to spread.

U.S. policy has long been tolerant to the idea of immigration from European countries, but much less so toward people from the so-called third world. Because of this bias, upheld in education and entertainment that normalizes European society and culture, popular opinion seems to ask, what do those other peoples have to do with us? In the case of Haiti, the answer is much more than many think. Reaching Trump and Vance with this message may be hopeless, but it is not too late for Americans to understand that they are not alone as the standard-bearers of freedom in their neighborhood, and that they haven’t always been on the right side. Haitians, too, have been pioneers of liberty, not only for themselves, but showing the way to others. It is time for us to treat them with respect and dignity.

28 notes · View notes

dickarchivist · 3 months

Text

I saw this post by @alamogirl80 and I needed to get my thoughts down, but didn't want to detract from their post so here's my addition to "Do you think clones are tactile and touch motivated because they were never held as babies?"

Short answer: yes I do, and Specter is the most touch needy out of Grave Squad.

Long Answer under the cut

I write my clone OCs Specter and Banshee like this especially. They're "twins" in my lore, and they're joined at the hip. So rarely are they apart. And when they're together, as long as they don't need to be professional, they're always touching in some way. Arm resting on a shoulder, slouching against each other, a quick reach out and touch.

They sleep mirroring each other when they're not in the same bunk. If you had a top down view of them, they'd always fit together as if they're holding one another. Specs and Ban, more often than not, sleep in the same bunk because it's hard for them to sleep without each other. If they can't share a bunk, they hold hands. If they can't hold hands, they wake up periodically and knock to make sure the other is still there.

For Specs especially, touch is important. He'd want to be held 24/7 if he could be. The comfort he gets from contact is so much, that he crosses his arms over his chest and holds himself just to keep anxiety down. He sways side to side, if you watch him close enough. Hugging himself and slowly swaying, as if to be rocked in the arms of a parent. He's done this since he was young.

Dax'Malkin holds the boys sometimes, when they let him. Dax held his children for most of their lives. He does the same for his clones without a second thought. Once, he caught Specs trembling after a particularly rough campaign, and without hesitation he just lifted this full grown man like a child and held him. Walked to a bench, put Specter under his chin, rubbed his back, and held him. They never talked about it after, but it meant a lot to Specter. He was the first one to call him "Buir Dax".

#from the archivist #grave squad clones #clone oc banshee #clone oc specter

16 notes · View notes

socialistsephardi · 1 month

Text

Another refrain I’ve been hearing repeatedly is the critique that protesting at the DNC “will only help Trump.” Harris herself leveled this argument at a campaign rally in Detroit when she sternly admonished pro-Palestinian protesters: “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” To be sure, it was an astonishingly tone-deaf and dismissive response to make in Michigan, the very birthplace of the Uncommitted Campaign. But on a more fundamental level, Harris’s response denied the very real impact of her own administration’s policies. As one of the protesters later put it, “When people are demanding a ceasefire and arms embargo and an end to the genocide and you say that we want Donald Trump to step in—it just shows a lack of accountability. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of responsibility and a lack of ownership.”

In essence, Harris’s comment was just the latest version of the “shut up and vote” message that the Democratic party routinely sends progressives during every election cycle. In an age of US-supported genocide, however, the cynical emptiness of this message has become patently, painfully obvious. As journalist Masha Gessen has rightly pointed out. “These voters are not choosing between Harris and Trump. They are choosing between their sense of themselves as moral beings if they vote for Harris and their sense of themselves if they vote for a third-party candidate or for no one at all.”

Of course those who will be protesting at the DNC next week do not want to see Trump elected in November. But even from a purely strategic point of view, what has a better chance of helping the Democrats fortunes in November? We know that a strong majority of American voters across the political spectrum support a permanent ceasefire in Gaza. What would be the more winning strategy: telling those who want to end a genocide to shut up, or exert real leadership that will bring about a ceasefire and an end to the threat of a devastating regional war?

…

Protest organizers have no illusions about the overwhelming militarized presence that will greet us when we gather next week. Federal authorities have divided the area surrounding the United Center, where the main speaking events of the convention will take place, into “soft” and “hard” zones – the latter being off limits to cars and non-credentialled delegates. But even in the soft zones, movement has been heavily restricted. The main protests have been given approved routes far from the convention site, and at one point goes through narrow residential side streets, that will be completely inadequate to handle thousands of protesters. While organizers have appealed the march route, as of this writing there has been no response from the city of Chicago.

When we talk about the potential for police violence next week, of course, the specter of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago looms very large. A great deal of ink has been spilled analyzing the differences and similarities between Chicago 1968 and Chicago 2024 – and while I’m loath to venture too far into this rabbit hole, there is one point of commonality I believe bears noting. In general, the mythos around the 1968 DNC protests tend to lay the blame for the Democrats’ defeat on the protest movement that “divided the party.” Often lost in this discussion is the fact that in 1968, those protests were directed toward a political party that had been prosecuting an increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. Today, as then, I find it deeply misguided to blame protesters and not the immoral policies of the Democratic party itself.

#antizionism #antizionist Jews #Chicago #dnc convention #rabbi brant #uspol

7 notes · View notes

frodo-with-glasses · 2 years

Note

Been thinking about a particular LOTR what-if scenario (because my D&D campaign took a turn into collaborative LOTR fanfiction), and I'm interested in your perspective on it if you have time . . .

Supposing Boromir somehow survived protecting Merry and Pippin, what effect would that have on Denethor?

Denethor's being fed despair by Sauron either way. But I have always read him as the news of Boromir's death being the thing that breaks him and makes him start to believe it. His grief is certainly a large part of what's informing his treatment of Faramir (though certainly not the only thing, as I think there's textual evidence that Denethor favored Boromir all along).

If Boromir didn't die . . . would Denethor still give into despair? Would he still send Faramir on a suicide mission — and if he did, and Faramir still suffered the same wounds, would Denethor still end up in his whole "all is lost; better to die on our own terms" spiral? Or would he have the presence of mind to see to the defense of the city?

How would he react to Aragorn, a man who has all the qualities Denethor disdains in Faramir but even more so, and who people are now saying is the rightful king (who even his own sons, even favored Boromir, are saying is Gondor's king returned)?

(He almost certainly wouldn't be a fan of Aragorn's plan to draw Sauron's eye away from Frodo. He probably would be greatly displeased that the Ring had been allowed to go across the River to Mordor at all, and even Boromir would have trouble convincing him otherwise.)

Thank you for letting me ramble in your askbox, haha. Don't feel pressured to answer if you don't want to or don't find the question as much as I do. (But if you do answer, I will be delighted.)

As much as the Gondor Dudes aren’t my personal hyperfixation in LotR, I am nonetheless a big fan of overthinking hypothetical situations, so this is right up my alley. :-D (Also, it’s really cool that you’re running an LotR-themed D&D campaign!! Sounds like a blast.)

To be honest, you hit pretty much every point I was going to touch on; Denethor’s despair and consequent insanity were certainly motivated, at least in part, by grief, so if you take the grief out of the equation then naturally the results are going to be at least slightly different. But we still have lots of other factors at play here: fighting a hopeless war, the looming specter of deposition, knowing that your allies just sent a nuke into the territory of the Enemy in the hands of a garden gnome so small you could punt him, and Prolonged Exposure to Cursed Artifact are still going to take their toll on Denethor’s mind. He will doubtless be more motivated to hold on to life while his favorite son is still alive, but even if he doesn't turn paranoid and filicidal, he’s still going to be Deeply Messed Up regardless.

So since I'm not getting any new ideas by looking at things from a Watsonian (in-universe) perspective, I'm gonna steer this in a Doylist (meta) direction and talk about implementation instead. The question I always ask myself with these sorts of "canon but a bit to the left" fanfictions is this:

What do you want out of the story? Do you want to:

A) Return to canon as quickly as possible? B) Change just one thing and see how far it butterfly-effects out? C) Find something somewhere in the middle?

Because the thing with "canon but a bit to the left" AUs that you can make pretty much anything work. It's a hypothetical situation. The question is how far away from canon you're willing to deviate. If I'm writing a "Boromir Lives" AU, I might go a couple of different directions, and the one I ultimately choose depends on personal preference and what I want out of the story.

Putting this under a read-more 'cause it's about to get long.

Option A: Canon, but like .5 degrees to the left

Ever since the battle at the Falls, Boromir has been following Aragorn and doing everything the Three Hunters (well, Four Hunters) do. When Pippin looks into the Palantir, Gandalf decides to take him to Minas Tirith right away, and Boromir, who's eager to get home and feels some responsibility for Pippin, volunteers to go with them.

(Yes I know that Shadowfax travels at ungodly fast speeds to get from Rohan to Gondor, but it's implied that lesser horses can keep up with their lord when they need to, so even if Boromir took a different horse they might still have been able to make it to Minas Tirith in a similar time.)

Denethor gives an enthusiastic welcome to Boromir and a far less enthusiastic welcome to Gandalf and Pippin. That welcome becomes less enthusiastic still in the ensuing conversation/interrogation, when he learns that they totally had the Ring but they sent it into Mordor instead of bringing it here. Boromir tries to reason with his father. Denethor is very disappointed with him. He blames Gandalf for corrupting his other son with all this foolishness, and treats Pippin with suspicion because of the whole prophecy with the Halfling, and the convo ends with hurt feelings all around.

I might need the War Nerds on this blog to correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it, the attempt to take back Osgiliath wasn't a completely useless suicide mission, at least in concept. It is a major river crossing, and controlling transportation routes is like War 101. If you make it hard for your enemy to cross the River, you make it hard for your enemy to get to your stronghold, and that's good. Not a bad idea on paper. The only problem was that Minas Tirith didn't have the manpower to pull it off.

(And also there were Nazgul.)

Anyway, the point is, it's almost logical enough that you might be able to get away with Denethor ordering the Osgiliath offensive even without the grief-induced paranoia. Besides, there's still other paranoia in play: so far as Denethor is concerned, the Ring is walking into enemy hands, his son and most trusted captain has turned against him, and Gandalf is already planning a coup.

So here's what I'm thinking. Keep the Osgiliath battle, but send Boromir out there as well. Boromir and brother bravely bear the baleful battle, before their butts are badly beat and they get bit by the Black Breath. Dad feels bad, his boasts bashed as his boys' bodies burn with fever. Battle bears down on the beleaguered bourgeoisie, but their bereaved bigwig is barely bothered, too busy building bier bonfires.

…Sorry, I don't know where that came from.

Anyway, the point is, this puts us squarely back where we'd be at this point in canon: Denethor thinks he’s about to lose his family, his city, and his kingdom, and consumed by despair he decides that it's better to die on his own terms than in the hands of the Enemy. You can pretty much just follow canon from here and copy-paste Boromir with whatever is happening to Faramir.

(Except, of course, for the whole "falling in love with Eowyn" thing. But hey! Boromir was in Rohan! He and Eowyn probably know each other already! So they might have some fun conversations in the Houses of Healing.)

This is the route I would take if you want to stick as close to canon as possible and still keep Boromir alive. If adherence to the narrative is not your biggest concern, however:

Option B: Go stupid, go crazy

Boromir doesn't die. What does that change?

Well, everything, if you let it.

Let's say Boromir does return to Minas Tirith with Gandalf and Pippin like I suggested above. Let's say he's able to talk his father into begrudgingly going along with their unorthodox plan to save the world. Let's say Denethor doesn't call for the almost-but-not-quite-entirely-completely-a-suicide-mission to Osgiliath and instead puts Boromir and Faramir to work strengthening the defenses of the Minas Tirith. By time the Battle of Pelennor Fields rolls around, Denethor—now no longer occupied by the family barbecue—is available to direct defense of the city, with both sons acting as his captains.

Awesome! All this is great stuff, right?

Well, yes. So far.

The problem is that we lose so many great moments with other characters in the process. Pippin's pell mell run to find Gandalf. Beregond abandoning his post to protect Faramir. Eowyn and Merry, who slayed the Witch King together because Gandalf was too busy putting out fires (literally!) to get down there and do it himself. Aragorn, proving that "the hands of a king are the hands of a healer"! And if Faramir and Eowyn hadn't both suffered the Black Breath, they wouldn't both have been forced to stay behind as everyone else went to fight at the Black Gate, and they wouldn't have fallen in love in the same way.

This is not a statement meant to push your decision one way or another, but it's just a fact of the decision: If you dispense with Denethor's paranoia, and the insanity, and the murder arson, then you dispense with a lot of the other cool moments in this book. The question you've got to ask yourself is if that's a price you're willing to pay, and if not, how you can work around it.

Anyway, back to Pelennor Fields. I want you to imagine that Denethor is standing at the wall, watching the battle raging below him. It's not going well. The reinforcements from Rohan arrived, but they're barely hanging on. And to his dismay, he sees a fleet of black dots which could only be Corsair ships sailing up the river.

The foremost ship unfurls a banner, with the Tree of Gondor glittering on it.

And the army that pours out of them absolutely wrecks shop with Sauron's forces.

Is Denethor feeling relief? Yes. But is he feeling dread and apprehension and anger too? Also yes. He knows what this is. It's a challenge to his power waiting to happen. All his suspicions about Gandalf's ulterior motives are coming true: he has found someone to supplant him, and whether or not this kid is the true Heir of Isildur, the darn upstart's already gone all dramatic and made a war hero out of himself. Whoop-de-frickin'-do.

And then, he sees Aragorn's face.

And he's livid.

Fun fact: Appendix A tells us that Aragorn actually worked for Denethor’s dad, Ecthelion, for a long time. Aragorn went by a different name, of course, but he was so competent and so well-liked that he became Ecthelion's most trusted and honored captain, to the point that the Steward liked Aragorn more than he liked Denethor. We don't just have history here. We have beef. It's a little bit of a Tony Stark, Howard Stark, Steve Rogers situation where it’s like “Dad liked you more than he liked me and I’m his own son”.

You’d better bet your bottom dollar that when Denethor’s childhood rival rocks up to Minas Tirith, flying a banner made by an elven princess and carrying the Sword that Was Broken on his belt like he's somebody important, it doesn’t matter if Boromir and Faramir and Imrahil and everybody else in Minas Tirith likes him and happily falls in line behind him; Denethor is still gonna take one look at his face and go, “oh. it’s YOU. I freakin' HATE you.”

Whether this colors their ongoing relationship "coolly polite" or "passive-aggressive" or "outright hostile" depends on how vindictive you want to write Denethor. Because let's be honest, bro could totally order Aragorn to leave Minas Tirith and he would; Aragorn knows he's not the king yet, and he's humble enough to accept orders while the Steward is still in charge (as bass-ackwards as that is). But the thing is that Aragorn has the support of the people, and banishing him isn't gonna change that; if anything, it will probably garner sympathy for him, cause the people of Minas Tirith to distrust their leader, and maybe result in fracturing the loyalties of the populous.

So here's what you've got, okay.

You now have a David and Saul situation.

Think about it. Charismatic, upright war hero, beloved by everyone he meets, serving under the suspicious and deeply disturbed incumbent ruler who knows the newcomer is gonna boot him off the throne. You can't live with him: 'cause he's gonna boot you off the throne. But you can't live without him: 'cause you're in desperate need of his particular set of skills, and you'd be incredibly unwise to do away with him and earn the ire of the public. So you put up with him. And put on a show of liking him. And maybe chuck a spear at his head while he's playing the harp to calm down your possibly demonic fits.

But that's just Saul, so let's get back to Denethor.

The next step, in the book, is obviously the Battle of the Black Gate. And, obviously, Denethor is gonna think this military equivalent of knocking on the door of an axe murderer and threatening him with a pea shooter is a terrible idea, because it is. But the whole point—Aragorn and Gandalf and Boromir and Faramir and Imrahil and everyone else insists—is to distract Sauron long enough that the Ring-bearer can succeed in his mission. The plan isn't to win, it's to be bait.

Now you have a few options.

Denethor can, once again, begrudgingly go along with it, showing that he's slowly changing in heart. Perhaps Aragorn's humility is winning him over. Perhaps Boromir's impassioned pleas are getting through. In any case, you have a pretty good set-up for a redemption arc here, which could be interesting if you want to go down that road.

Alternatively, this could be the moment that Denethor entirely gives in to despair and basically says "fine, if you guys wanna go kill yourselves, I'll just be over here doing the exact same thing", and he tries to make Steward a la flambé. (Whether or not he succeeds is up to you, but I will say that this would be a pretty easy way to settle the succession crisis.)

Alternatively still, Denethor could publicly denounce the whole idea as stupid and order the people of Minas Tirith to stay put and defend the city, at the same time that Aragorn and the rest are urging those same people to come with them for one last stand. Now every eligible fighter in the city has to make a choice. Who will they follow? Lord Denethor, or Lord Elfstone? The people are divided. Factions are made. (This might be the moment that a certain member of the Guard sees Faramir standing with Lord Elfstone and decides, for the first time in his life, to break the rules.) In any case, the force that travels to the Black Gate is far smaller than it would have been if not for Denethor's interference.

If you go with the first option, it's a quicker road to a happy ending. Aragorn returns victorious, he and Denethor reconcile, and Aragorn honors the Steward and puts him in a place of high esteem. Everyone in Minas Tirith likes this, including Boromir and Faramir, and everyone lives happily ever after.

If you go with the second option, Denethor has either successfully or unsuccessfully attempted sudoku, which should probably disqualify him from public leadership either way. If he succeeded in barbecuing himself, it's the tragedy of a man who never got to see the upcoming victory; if he failed, it's the tragedy of a man whose mind was so utterly broken by the Enemy that he couldn't enjoy it.

If you go with the third option, congratulations; after Aragorn gets back, you still have to deal with the succession crisis. But I've waffled on for long enough and have basically no ideas how you'd handle this post-story, so I'm not gonna go down that road any further.

Option C: Pitch straight down the middle

Now what I've just presented are the two most extreme possibilities of a "Boromir Lives" AU that exist in my brain, but they're far from the only options. This thing is a spectrum. There are a potentially infinite number of possible storylines, some closer to canon, some further away.

If you like parts of one but not the other, you can mix and match. Take an exit ramp from the AU and get back on canon wherever you want, or just don't and see where it takes you. All I've done is present the furthest extremes I could think of to help shake up the ol' creative juices.

(I would have explored the possibility of Boromir arriving on the corsair ships with Aragorn instead of a few days earlier with Gandalf and Pippin, but that didn't change much except for Boromir having less opportunities to talk his dad down from bad decisions. So do with that what you will.)

Conclusion

I have no idea if this was the kind of answer you were looking for, but I guess I'm just returning rambling for rambling, LOL! In any case, I hope this helped, and if not, I hope it was a fun read.

But there is one more thing I can do for you, before I wish you good luck in your D&D endeavors, and that's turn it over to everyone else who reads this blog and see what they think!

HEY YOU GUYS! If Boromir lived, how would that effect Denethor's psyche?? Reblog with your thoughts!

#asked and answered #faramir #denethor #boromir lives au #lord of the rings #lotr #my writing #in which i ramble about probable story trajectories for WAY too long

80 notes · View notes

apple-grass-and-smiles · 3 days

Text

First Sentence Game

I promised you I'd do this, @sisterofficerlucychen. It's only been 10 days, which is kind of a record for me.

Rules: Share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written less than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway.

Tagging (hopefully I'm not misremembering that any of you write fic) @chenlucys, @violetsandmagpies, @daisyejones, @whitesunlars, and @electricbluebutterflies.

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

Bearing the Unbearable Weight (The Rookie):

In the days immediately after the break-up (the collapse of her world) Lucy logs a record number of hours at the LAPD shooting range.

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

Nothing More Than His Wife (The Rookie):

The new Mrs. Tim Bradford is haunted by a ghost. It follows her everywhere, popping up in the most random spots. The ghost is at the nearby Korean food truck, in her husband’s car, hanging out in the park they had a picnic at. The ghost is not a particularly malicious one, but Mrs. Bradford can’t help but feel like she’ll never measure up against it, against the specter of Lucy Chen.

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

i used to know my place was the spot next to you (now I'm searching the room for an empty seat) (The Rookie):

The hardest part of Lucy’s day is going to bed. Two weeks earlier, before the breakup, when going to bed meant making funny faces at Tim as they brushed their teeth together and slow kisses and cuddling, it had been the highlight of most days. She had looked forward to bed. Now she brushes her teeth alone and crawls into a bed that is just hers. Or almost just hers.

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

How I Show I Love You (The Rookie):

Tim doesn’t know the last time he spent time doing something solely because he enjoyed it (other than watching a couple hours of football each week). Never mind doing something fun with another person. And certainly never with a rookie who hadn’t even passed their one-year mark. But he also hasn’t trained someone like Chen before.

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

i get along without you some nights (Prodigal Son):

The Christmas tree was already up when Martin was… (Jessica was still trying to find the polite term for it, trying different ones on) taken away. Normally Jessica insisted on no hints of Christmas in the home until the Thanksgiving dinner had been cleared from the table, but Malcolm had campaigned valiantly to put it up early. As per usual, Ainsley had joined in, asking Jessica to make an exception to her rule and then Martin had given Jessica that look, the one that had been crumbling her resolve since the day they met.

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

Cotard's Delusion (or the Process of Being Resurrected) (The Rookie):

I am dead. It’s the only thought ringing in Lucy’s mind as she closes her eyes, leans her head forward, finding no place to rest in the barrel Caleb has determined will be her last resting place.

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

Dirtying the Slates (The Rookie):

So, Bishop and Lopez, or mostly Lopez, rig the roundup so Tim wins. Interesting , Lucy thought. She twirled her ring on her finger for half a moment, considering if it was her place to comment or not, before throwing caution to the wind and interjecting. “Wait, uh, are you guys trying to rig it so that Tim wins?” (Rule one of getting information in an interrogation: start with a question you already know the answer to.)

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

Wrapped Around Your Finger (Like a Ring) (The Rookie):

Chen would not stop messing with her ring and Tim was a matter of seconds from using his TO Voice to go and confiscate it. Even winning the round-up (again) hadn’t put him in a good enough mood that the reflection from the light of the food trucks bouncing off the opal ring wouldn’t annoy him. Chen clearly was not aware that her rhythmic movements meant he was hit in the eye by a reflected ray of light every four seconds.

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

In Search of Air (The Rookie):

During her sophomore year of college, Lucy had had to memorize all of the symptoms of a panic attack as listed in the DSM-V. Technically the assignment was just to learn four or five of the 13 listed in the manual, but Lucy, ever the perfectionist, had been determined to memorize them all, to always be just that much better at psychology than the people around her. So, when she found herself once again locking herself in one of Mid-Wilshire precinct’s utility closets, it was that list of 13 symptoms she thought back on.

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

Through a Glass Darkly (Prodigal Son):

Malcolm Whitly's favorite color has always been red. It’s warm and bright and passionate, just like him. It’s the first color you notice in any crowd. It calls out to you and then pulls you headfirst into its world. His father had a red sweater when Malcolm was about 10. It was the softest thing Malcolm had ever felt. Martin said he had had to throw it out one night after spilling tea on it, but Malcolm had always loved that sweater. He still does. He has spent the intervening years searching for one that was similar so he could buy one for himself. He has loved the color for almost three decades now with absolutely no sign of his opinion changing any time in the near future. Red reminds Malcolm of his father and he loves his father.

Malcolm Bright's favorite color has been blue most of his life. It’s calming and stable and peaceful, all the things he strives to be. It’s a color that can fade into the background when needed but also draw your eye if you’re looking for it. It’s always there to be beside you when you need it.

#I swear this was supposed to post on 9/14 but apparently I saved it as a draft instead #thank you for the tag ivy you're precious #this is an amusing thing because so much of my fic is still on FFN #so this tag makes me go through almost half my A03 archive #but it still feels like it doesn't touch on much of my writing #silence emily #emily does stuff (shocker)#didn't we use to have a way to do horizontal lines in posts? I swear I'm not making that up who took that feature away?#also shout out to through a glass darkly which I still feel is probably my magnum opus; glad you made the cut my dear #also this reminded me that I have no memory of half my rookie fic #I've got clear memories of writing most of my fics but I think most of my rookie stuff might as well be written by someone else #like I wrote I used to know my place was a spot next to you recently and Ivy and I discussed it extensively and I know I labored over it #but that entire piece doesn't exist in my head #also Cotard's easily the piece I am most protective over that's one that's just my heart pulled from my chest #and I routinely worry about how it's received

3 notes · View notes

dionysus-complex · 1 year

Text

'There was something especially devastating about the wave of anti–“PC” journalism in the absolutely open contempt it displayed, and propagated, for every tool that has been so painstakingly assembled in the resistance against these devaluations. Through raucously orchestrated, electronically amplified campaigns of mock-incredulous scorn, intellectual and artistic as well as political possibilities, skills, ambitions, and knowledges have been laid waste with a relishing wantonness. No great difficulty in recognizing those aspects of the anti–“PC” craze that are functioning as covers for a rightist ideological putsch; but it has surprised me that so few people seem to view the recent developments as, among other things, part of an overarching history of anti-intellectualism: anti-intellectualism left as well as right. No twentieth-century political movement, after all, can afford not to play the card of populism, whether or not the popular welfare is what it has mainly at heart (indeed, perhaps especially where it is least so). And anti-intellectual pogroms, like anti-Semitic or queer-bashing ones, are quick, efficient, distracting, and almost universally understood signifiers for a populist solidarity that may boil down to nothing by the time it reaches the soup pot. It takes care and intellectual scrupulosity to forge an egalitarian politics not founded on such telegraphic slanders. Rightists today like to invoke the threatening specter of a propaganda ridden socialist realism, but both they and the anti-intellectuals of the left might meditate on why the Nazis’ campaign against “degenerate art” (Jewish, gay, modernist) was couched, as their own arguments are, in terms of assuring the instant, unmediated, and universal accessibility of all the sign systems of art (Goebbels even banning all art criticism in 1936, on the grounds that art is self-explanatory). It’s hard to tell which assumption is more insultingly wrong: that the People (always considered, of course, as a monolithic unit) have no need and no faculty for engaging with work that is untransparent; or that the work most genuinely expressive of the People would be so univocal and so limpidly vacant as quite to obviate the labors and pleasures of interpretation. Anti-intellectuals today, at any rate, are happy to dispense with the interpretive process and depend instead on appeals to the supposedly self-evident: legislating against “patently offensive” art (no second looks allowed); citing titles as if they were texts; appealing to potted summaries and garbled trots as if they were variorum editions in the original Aramaic. The most self evident things, as always, are taken—as if unanswerably—to be the shaming risibility of any form of oblique or obscure expression; and the flat inadmissability of openly queer articulation.

These histories of anti-intellectualism cut across the “political correctness” debate in complicated ways. The term “politically correct” originated, after all, in the mockery by which experimentally and theoretically minded feminists, queers, and leftists (of every color, class, and sexuality) fought back against the stultifications of feminist and left anti-intellectualism. The hectoring, would-be populist derision that difficult, ambitious, or sexually charged writing today encounters from the right is not always very different from the reception it has already met with from the left. It seems as if many academic feminists and leftists must be grinding their teeth at the way the right has willy-nilly conjoined their discursive fate with that of theorists and “deconstructionists”—just as, to be fair, many theorists who have betrayed no previous interest in the politics of class, race, gender, or sexuality may be more than bemused at turning up under the headings of “Marxism” or “multiculturalism.” The right’s success in grouping so many, so contestative, movements under the rubric “politically correct” is a coup of cynical slovenliness unmatched since the artistic and academic purges of Germany and Russia in the thirties.'

(Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer and Now," in Tendencies, 16-17 - published 1994)

#long post but holy shit #weird how this is 30 years old and if you replace 'political correctness' with 'wokeness' this could have been written yesterday #eve kosofsky sedgwick

14 notes · View notes

gay-ghostwriter · 8 months

Text

Alright, since @insomnia-vixen was nice enough to ask, I'm gonna list off five facts about the four OCs I'm currently obsessed with

Roddy Usher: (Nevermore)

-Based on Fall Of The House Of Usher

-He was the sheltered gay son of an aristocrat who died of a heart attack when his father found the love letters he was writing to another boy

-His Specter form is a gargoyle! He has wings, super strength, and earth bending powers. He looks like a big stone demon, like Goliath from Gargoyles but pointier.

-Crybaby, doesn't like conflict. Would probably avoid making friends with either Annabel Lee or Lenore because of this. Gun to my head, he'd probably go with Annabel, he's very easy to manipulate.

-The first memory he regained was of his sister, Madeline. He took one look at his dorm room and had a flashback to sharing a room with her while they were growing up. Still misses her.

Caraway, a.k.a. Renard Ruse, a.k.a. Marian Drew, a.k.a. Prince Lagrys: (Dungeons & Dragons 5e)

-Changeling Arcane Trickster, Caraway is his real name and the others are just aliases

-Renard Ruse is a phantom thief with a French accent. It's a title passed down from father to son, kind of like Dread Pirate Roberts. Caraway is the first changeling to ever inherit this title, the others have been humans.

-He grew up as an orphan living on the streets of Neverwinter. The previous Renard caught him trying to pick his pocket and decided to adopt him.

-Has extreme daddy issues, imposter syndrome and species dysphoria. Desperately wants to be a "real boy" and for someone to love him.

-He has an unrequited crush on my boyfriend's D&D character from the same campaign, Drazna the Elf Wizard.

Faris Bazuzi: (Percy Jackson/Riordanverse)

-Son of Aphrodite, 18 years old. Stars in a hanahaki fanfic I'm gonna write one day.

-Fat and hairy/bear, has body image issues

-Can charmspeak people into confessing things to him, kind of like Lucifer from the Lucifer show (yes I'm that cringe)

-Deeply in love with his boyfriend, Duke, a son of Hephaestus who keeps trying to impress him with new weapons he forged.

-Loves romance movies, cries easily

Rashid Al-Hashim: (Castlevania Nocturne)

-Sorcerer and vampire hunter from the Ottoman Empire

-His mother is a jinniyah, a female genie, while his father was a human. This has given him magical powers, including a prolonged lifespan. He's much older than he looks.

-Can fly, turn invisible and control fire. He cannot grant wishes, and gets annoyed when people ask.

-Stubborn and often comes off as rude because he speaks overly formal. This is just how he learned english.

-Made friends with Alucard during a long and crazy adventure I haven't though of yet

#my ocs #shut up andy

2 notes · View notes

stephenjaymorrisblog · 1 year

Text

The Need to Breed

Stephen Jay morris

9/10/2023

Have you heard the latest conspiracy theory spewed by Marjorie Taylor Greene? It’s a doozy. What’s going to happen is that President Biden will drop out of the presidential race because of health problems, and the Democratic Party will replace him with Michelle Obama as their nominee. The media loves Right wing conspiracies because they are so absurd and bizarre. These idiotic theories have outright ruined it for legitimate conspiracy theories from the Left. You don’t hear the latter anymore because the establishment media suppresses and ignores them. The Left consistently has documented research data at their disposal, supporting any such theories, which can be accessed by anyone who wants to see it. But, as for the Right wing Chuds? They make the shit up! They have childlike imaginations that their minions find cute and entertaining, and validating. So, the media broadcasts all the Right wing’s conspiracies via press releases.

Americans regard conspiracy theories as if they are jokes. Plus, Americans can’t distinguish Left wing conspiracy theories from Right wing ones. The American people laughed at the John Birtch Society in the 60’s. Now, White, working class Christians believe everything that Qanon says!

There is nothing wrong with theories; they are at the heart of the scientific process. A hypothesis leads to a conclusion. However, it must be proven with evidence, or it is disproven. Do the Chuds subscribe to that? Fuck, no! They believe in faith; that God told it to them in a dream. Therefore, it must be true!

I stopped believing in conspiracies years ago. People write you off as a nut case. If you are perceived as such, people will hold their ears and walk away from you.

Guess what? In the secrecy of my own mind, I still develop theories. I will expose one of them here.

The question in my mind is: why are White Christians so opposed to abortion, birth control, and all types of contraception? Is it because of the Ten Commandments? No. What is the racial common denominator of the Fundamentalist Evangelical movement? They are all White, Anglo Saxion protestants. They fear that White people are becoming a minority in the United States of America. They are latent White supremacists. So, what is it they claim is killing off the White race? War? Poverty? Natural disasters and pandemics? No—none of this. They are threatened by sex! Interracial sex. Interfaith marriages. Have you seen the “woke” commercials featuring Black and White couples? My God! These illustrate clearly why the White population is decreasing!

There is a campaign afoot for a White Baby Boom. And, you can’t have a baby boom with the specter of abortion and condoms everywhere! It doesn’t matter if the child is illegitimate or born within the confines of marriage, if it is a White baby, it must be saved! Do you really, REALLY feel that Christians have compassion for the health of a fetus? Well…they do, but only if the fetus is White. “But how can you tell if the fetus is White?” you ask. The fetus will be wearing a Make America Great Again cap and have a tattoo on its arm. What if the fetus is Black? The Christians will then form a prayer circle and pray for a miscarriage.

This is just a thought experiment of mine. But all knowledge and objective truth comes from theory. Prove me wrong—I dare you!

#stephenjaymorris #poets on tumblr #american politics #baby boomers #anarchocommunism #anarchopunk #democrats #racism #conservatism

2 notes · View notes

wartakes · 1 year

Text

Some thoughts for today, May 25th, 2022 (OLD ESSAY)

This essay was originally posted on May 25th, 2022 (duh).

This was one of those ones I really struggled on a topic for, so I decided to reflect on the George Floyd uprisings and the state of things in the country through my personal and professional lens.

(Full essay below the cut)

Not gonna lie to you folks, I was really struggling with this one.

I truly had no idea what I was going to write about for this month’s essay – and I’ve been trying to think of a topic since the beginning of the month and been coming up short. Doesn’t help that I’ve been in a bit of a slump. As a warning up front: this may end up being one of my more emotional and wandering pieces, in addition to being less analytically rigorous than they usually are – but I still thought this one was worth writing and sharing with you all today.

I knew I wanted to write about something other than Ukraine. While that war is still very much active and very important, it’s entered a phase where the shift in the frontlines and fortunes of war are simultaneously relatively contained but constantly shifting day to day (I may do a check-in on where things are at in a future piece). I also knew I didn’t feel like doing a new entry in my “What Should it Look Like?” series right at this moment. In general, I’ve been in somewhat of a low ebb with my personal and creative endeavors the last few weeks, due to a variety of reasons – both in my personal life in events at the local, national, and international level. I’ve just felt drained and frustrated – as many of us have, I know.

It was when I was pacing the room trying to think of something that I really felt motivated to write about, it occurred to me that I was thinking about this all right around an important anniversary. If my timing works out, this essay should be released on May 25th: the day on which George Floyd – an unarmed black man – murdered by Minneapolis Police officers in 2020, kicking off a nation-wide uprising against police violence and impunity. Its also happening close to Memorial Day, and though the reflections I’m offering here aren’t exactly what Memorial Day was intended for, I think they still seem to fit the overall spirit of the idea.

Aside from the obvious reason why George Floyd’s murder and what followed matters to many people, it matters to me because that act and the response to it by so many people in the United States, and the response of the police and the state to them in turn, was what finally opened my eyes to what the country I lived in was really like. It made me come to terms with both that, and my true ideological tilt. It finally forced me to look at things in a new way after years of internal doubts about what I had thought I’d believed up until that point. It compelled me to question all my pre-existing beliefs, discard many, modify others, and double down on some. It was a personal watershed for me, much like it was a national one.

Two years after George Floyd’s death and the uprising that followed, we’ve experienced a LOT more history. The continuing COVID-19 pandemic (and our government’s – and other’s – failure to react to it), the 2020 election’s drama and the January 6th insurrection, systemic efforts to attack trans people, more and more mass shootings, consistently rising inflation and economic strife, and now the looming specter of Roe v. Wade being overturned and millions of women across the country losing their reproductive rights – and those are just all the events going on here in the United States. We’ve also witnessed America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan end in failure, with the Afghan people themselves suffering immensely on top of all the other suffering they’ve already experienced. We saw Israel’s most recent major attempt to cull the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. Now, we see Russia’s blatant attempts at imperialism in Ukraine flounder – killing and maiming thousands even as its campaign falters.

Obviously, the aforementioned list of events is not all-inclusive – either nationally or internationally – but you get the idea and I don’t want to drown you in even more sorrow. We’ve all been through a great deal the last couple years. It was with that in mind as I sat here with that anniversary approaching, with May 2022 alone being packed with soul crushing news – let alone the rest of the past two years: how do I feel? Two years on from “coming out of the closet” with my ideological beliefs, how do I feel about those beliefs, about the state of my country, about the state of the world, about the future, and more? Do I feel better about everything? Worse? So-so?

This may seem like something of a cop out, but compared to two years ago, I feel simultaneously better and worse about the future. On one hand, I feel more apprehensive about the immediate future and the challenges and horrors it has in store. Yet, when it comes to looking at things in the long run, I still maintain hope. Admittedly, part of this hope is fueled just by wanting to spite doomers and doomerism in general because I absolutely despise that outlook, but I do have some genuine reasons to be hopeful in the long run and I will be sharing those momentarily.

To be brutally honest, in the short term: I’m worried and discouraged. I see forces of reaction continuing to amass power in the United States while the supposed official opposition seems content to wring their hands, clutch their pearls and cry about “the rules” while the right-wing death cult is more than happy to circumvent said rules or outright break them without a second though or suffering consequences. Overseas, I’m also pessimistic. For example: while Ukrainians hold the line in their own country, I feel that Russia’s actions there may create far-reaching shockwaves that will cause additional crisis and conflict in their wake. Even as Russia’s efforts falter, I worry Putin’s invasion of Ukraine may potentially only be the first of a new wave of revanchism and attempts at conquest in the years to come, with existing conflicts still raging on in the background as well.

This is part of why I was struggling to write an essay this month – and also struggling with some of my other creative endeavors as well. It’s simply been hard to imagine a better world, when we’re living in an era of constant crisis, crumbling, and collapse. I frame many of these essays from the perspective of a United States – combined with other allies and partners – that have a more positive, constructive ideological bent. In the past few weeks, between all the events happening here in the United States alone, it’s been very hard to envision a better country, let alone a better world. It’s been next to impossible to contemplate that possibility lately.

But, again, I haven’t given up. As much as I’ve felt my soul has been trodden on in the past weeks, months, and years, I’ve still seen things that give me hope. That despite that constant feeling that we’re being pulverized into dust, people continue to fight for their most basic rights. Workers continuing to fight for their labor rights against mega corporations like Amazon and Starbucks – and winning crucial victories. More Progressive and Leftist voices gaining ground against the moribund establishment. Overseas, we see people fighting for themselves and their neighbors both against fascist invaders in the case of Ukraine, but also against fascist forces that have usurped power in Burma. While it doesn’t mean we can sit on our laurels, seeing these pockets of resistance and hope give us a reason to keep fighting ourselves.

In some of my darker moments over the past few years, I’ve openly wished I still had political blinders on, or that I could put them back on. That I was still ensconced in a snug, warm social liberal cocoon, inside of which I would maintain my blind faith that the system as it was would eventually right itself and everything would go “back to normal” and we’d all live happily ever after. A world that works just like it does on the West Wing or in Marvel movies (oh God, that made me think of an Aaron Sorkin Marvel movie and that is truly a cursed thought. Jesus).

But that’s impossible. Even if I really truly wanted to go back to living a lie (and I don’t think I do), Pandora’s Box has been opened in my brain and the brain of many others. I’ve been cursed with knowledge and now I must live with it; there’s no putting it back where it came from. But more importantly, that wouldn’t solve or help anything. Reverting back to my previous stage of delusion and denial as fascists continue to consolidate power both at home and abroad would be about as useful as being a doomer and just accepting that everything is written in stone and there is nothing we can do to stop it. So, much like with doomerism, even if I could wipe my brain clean and go back to my previous ignorance, I refuse to do so if only on principal.

The drawback to the world not being set in stone as doomers try to convince it is, is that we can never really know where its headed or what may happen next. We can make educated guesses, and sometimes we may even be right (even when we’d rather be wrong), but the only thing we can be sure of is that nothing is sure. This reality comes with its benefits and drawbacks: it is liberating that history is not actually written in stone because it means we still have the means to influence it and try and make a better world for ourselves, but also terrifying in that this means things could get even worse than they might already be if it was written in stone.

Being stuck in this tenuous position is also an exhausting one, physically and mentally. We are constantly trying to maintain that hope for the future and take inspiration and solace from the victories we do achieve, all while remaining on guard for the next bullshit that may come our way. All of this, of course, occurs as we’ve being battered (sometimes quite literally) by whatever bullshit has been dumped on us this particular day. I’ve seen friends and loved ones struggle to keep their heads above the proverbial water while dealing with life under these circumstances. I’ve struggled myself. We all have to various degrees and we all will continue to.

But (to bring you up from that previous, dour note), even as we struggle, we’re still here. We are still here, and we are still fighting, and so are billions of others across the world. One major thing that gives me hope is despite being worn down, despite being tired, anxious, and depressed on many days, I still feel a fire in my belly. I still feel anger: anger that it has to be this way. Anger that so many people I care about, that so many people in general, have to struggle just to exist in this day and age. I still feel anger at the inaction the powers that be exhibit in dealing with these issues, or anger at them actively working to prevent any change for the better. Despite everything, I still feel a drive to do something. I still want things to be different. That hasn’t been crushed out of me yet, nor has it been crushed out of others, and that gives me hope. The fact that despite being given so many reasons to, we all haven’t given up, gives me renewed hope.

We’re only just approaching the half-way point in 2022 and I feel we’re going to have a lot more bullshit to deal with here and abroad. I don’t have any specific or particular advice to give you on how to deal with everything going on (I wish I did), but I do have some general advice that I hope does something. First, make sure you’re taking care of yourself and those you immediately depend on. Do what you have to in order to make sure you’re as safe and secure as possible in regards to your basic needs and safety. Obviously, you absolutely should help your broader community as you’re able to do so, but make sure that you take care of yourself and keep on existing. Do that because A.) your life matters and you matter to people; and B.) because you’re no good to others who depend on you otherwise. This includes taking occasional breaks to “unplug” from the news and current events (something I’m trying to be better at). Obviously, you shouldn’t completely disconnect and go into grillpilled mode, but know when you need to log off for a bit and just not think about the world for a while and do it when necessary.

Second piece of broad advice: just do what you can, with the understanding that it may not always be a lot but that it still contributes in some fashion. Whether its dealing with the threat of Roe v. Wade being overturned here at home, or its Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine what we can do to affect these things. There are things we can do, however small they might be, to help in some way. Do what you can to help but try not to beat yourself up over not being able to do more. Take a realistic view of your role in current events. Don’t let yourself succumb to despair thinking that there’s nothing you can do. If anything, harness any feelings of impotent rage to motivate yourself to do the things are you able of, and when you feel frustrated that there’s not more you can do, remember that we’re all in this for the long haul and that another chance will come for you to act. This will be a long war with many battles.

Alright, I think I’ve rambled about enough. I promise for the next essay I’ll try to do something that’s closer to my usual bread and butter of analysis on IR and war, but this was just something I felt compelled to write and get off my chest (especially as I was struggling for motivation on any other ideas currently). I hope maybe these thoughts and reflections are of some use to anyone who reads them. The last few years have been rough, but in a lot of ways I’m also very proud of myself and others for how we’ve dealt with it and that too gives me hope for the future. With that, before I talk too much more and find a reason to be a downer, I will leave you for now. Stay safe and stay motivated. One day, someday, we will make things better. I haven’t given up on that dream yet and I really hope you haven’t either.

#essay #War Takes #War Takes essay #socialism #leftism #democratic socialism #far-right #authoritarianism #anti-authoritarianism #george floyd #george floyd uprising #george floyd uprisings #george floyd protests

2 notes · View notes

adacademic · 1 year

Text

On Writing Minorities, from the Perspective of a Trans Woman of Color

Content Warning: Mention of Sexual Assault As a trans woman of color, a writer, and an avid player of tabletop RPGs both, I came to a realization about myself three years ago. Most of my characters in stories, most of my player characters in tabletop RPGs, and even the non-player characters my players interact with when I’m on the other side of the DM’s chair, almost all of them had two things in common. They were white, and they were cisgender. Sure, some of them were queer, most often bisexual, like myself. However, when it came to race and gender, it was difficult to put those two facets of myself into the characters I had created, no matter how similar to me they were.

Allow me, for a moment, to exposit. Dungeons and Dragons, easily the most prolific tabletop RPG, features a host of non-human races, or ��species,” as the game has recently begun to pivot to. Humans sit alongside Tolkien-esque elves and dwarves, as well as goblins and orcs. Such races are common enough in fantasy, but Dungeons and Dragons has one particularly standout race in its core rules which catches people’s eyes - Tieflings. Tieflings are, in the lore of the Forgotten Realms, Dungeons and Dragon’s flagship setting, humanoids who have a demonic or devilish ancestry, either due to a bloodline curse, a dealing with a devil in one’s family history, or a fiendish parent or grandparent. Such individuals are often marked with devilish traits - including horns, tails, and red skin.

The risk of including a race that is inherently demonic, of course, begs to be viewed in a light that suggests problematic racial attitudes. A race that has evil quite literally in its blood draws uncomfortable parallels to the ways in which real life peoples have been treated or viewed, and ostracized as a result. Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, have in the past decade made attempts to retcon “evil” races, including not only tieflings but orcs, goblins, and a host of others to be just as free to be good or evil as any other race[1]. However, a problem still remains - in the Forgotten Realms, Tieflings are nevertheless regarded with suspicion, and in this light, Tieflings become a stand-in for real life racial minorities. Dungeons and Dragons’ fan run wiki cites an official book which remarks that a number of Tieflings turn to crime, choosing to embrace their heritage or simply conceding to society’s view of them - an allegory which one could argue serves as a stand in for real life racial minorities disproportionately turning to crime as a result of fewer opportunities.

However, this allegory creates a new problem - tieflings, often times used as a stand in for racial minorities to create a form of “fantasy bigotry” that exists in one’s own Dungeons and Dragons setting, have undeniable ties to creatures who are by their nature cosmically fated to do evil. There is an uncomfortable specter that hangs over every plotline in a Dungeons and Dragons game where a party of adventurers meets a tiefling criminal wrongly accused of a crime they didn’t commit, because there is any reason at all to believe they might have some inclination towards evil. I myself am not guilty of this, having created tiefling characters who existed as oppressed minorities in the first Dungeons and Dragons campaign I ever ran. The first time I played as one in a game, I used a Tiefling to explore my experience becoming a racial outsider for the first time when I went to college, but found myself somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that despite this, I was intentionally playing into the general moral ambiguity of Tieflings in the setting.

This problem is what I will tentatively and selfishly call “the stand-in’s dilemma.” It is incredibly challenging to write characters who have some other quality as a stand-in for a real life thing, especially if that quality is belonging to a minority group. This problem is three-fold. First, it whitewashes a character, hiding their minority traits behind a plausibly deniable veneer which can be ignored to make the character more comfortably consumable to an audience that views the status of minorities as an uncomfortable social issue to be avoided. Secondly, it can problematize the character, creating unintentional connections that turn the character’s (allegorical) minority status into something which somehow justifies the in-universe bigotry. Lastly, I feel justifying a character’s minority status through a narrative in some ways devalues their quality of representation - not every trans character’s narrative should be about being trans, and not every black character’s narrative should be about their race. If these characters are not allowed to simply exist, the story can unintentionally peddle the idea that these characters' identities need to be narratively justified in order to belong in a story.

My first attempt at an allegorically trans character was a cis woman, the daughter of a well off family who was bitten by a vampire and turned into one herself, being hidden away by her family as a result, while they searched for a way to fix her. Unwilling to accept she needed to be fixed, she ran away from home, determined to escape her old life.

At the time, I was proud enough of the concept. She was in some ways trans-coded, in terms of behavior and attitude, and the broad strokes of her life felt, to me, to be a rough estimation of elements of my life. I showed it to a friend, asking for opinions, and he brought up something that stopped me in my tracks. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire Dracula can be read as a sexual predator, who takes what he wants - in his case, blood - by stealth or force. Much discussion has been had about how Dracula exists as an allegory for sexual abuse. In creating a character whose vampire-ness served as a stand-in for transness, I had unwittingly created a character who was also allegorically tied to sexual predation, a particularly common hateful stereotype levied against trans women, especially in the oft trotted out bathroom debate.

However, writing a character who is blatantly and plainly trans or non-white can come with its own challenges. A recent attempt at writing a character who was explicitly transgender resulted in one I was rather happy with, a brown-skinned trans girl who used vigilantism to exist as herself while living a double life at home with an unaccepting father, who resents her for her half-elf qualities, because of her absentee elven mother.. However, this, too, stumbles into the third problem I outlined in my so-called “stand-in’s dilemma.” Her transness is made plot relevant, in a way that sticks in my craw ever so slightly. I have considered alternate versions of the character, like one where she transitions, then turns to vigilantism later. In this version of the character, though, it feels like being trans is an unrelated, additional qualifier to the character, who is already a brown skinned half-elf, a vigilante, and a magic user besides.

A possible reason for this, I think, is that this is a form of bias I have internalized as a result of the realm of media discourse in which I grew up in, one populated by cishet white men who complained about the existence of people of color as “forced diversity”. It does not slip my mind, either, that her qualifiers are the things that set her apart from the norm - I subconsciously failed to mention, for example, her sexuality, or the fact that she is able bodied. Would a character who is white have less qualifiers, and justify more additional qualities elsewhere? Though I am aware of how problematic it is to demand that a minority character justify their existence, I cannot help but find myself discomforted by a character who simply exists this way - and even in this version, her race is made a major aspect of her character, one that must be explored to be justified as a quality of note. Perhaps it is simply because exploration and discovery of one’s gender identity is so tied up with the idea of transness, that it can’t not be a part of a character’s “origin story”, in my mind.

I share this conflict because I believe it is one which other writers face as well, and one which I believe that we, as writers, need to interrogate. I do not believe that it is wrong to want to explore characters through allegories, or in stories where character qualities are inherently tied to their minority identity. However, I feel it’s necessary to take stock of one’s feelings on race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of that ilk, because we must understand where our instincts and discomforts about exploring these topics come from. Personally, I feel I’m starved for transgender narratives in the media, and so I can’t deny a desire to see them explored further. However, I also think we should welcome and encourage these sorts of characters as background representation - offhand comments about a character’s transition, or even just an ID card with inconsistent information. It is valuable to see minority characters as people who exist in the world without needing to be defined by their identity, because it reduces the kinds of narratives we can explore in characters who look, act, or feel like us. When characters happen to be trans, rather than exist to be a trans narrative, we can explore trans characters who are instead defined by other aspects of their lives. When characters happen to be non-white, rather than exist to serve a narrative about what it’s like to not be white, we can see non-white characters being superheroes, fantasy heroes, scientists, or anything else.

If you walk away having read this post with one thing in your head, let it be this - representation works best, means the most, when it reaches the point where we don’t think about it. When these characters simply exist, to the point where we no longer sit up and instinctively message our friends about how trans-coded an alien character is, about how excited we are to see an Indian character in a video game, that is what I would define as a victory. I, for one, am fond of my trans half-elf, and I’ll be keeping her in her original iteration. But she will not be the only trans character in the story in which she exists.

How Dungeons and Dragons 5e Removing 'Evil Races' May Change the Game https://gamerant.com/dungeons-dragons-dnd-5e-evil-races-changes/

2. Tiefling | Forgotten Realms Wiki https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Tiefling

#dnd #dnd character #writing #creative writing #transfem #cw sa #cw sa mention

5 notes · View notes