#this person is clearly a self hating gnc woman

[pricklypear1997]

This is one of the most sexist and pointless disgusting comments I’ve ever had to respond to on YouTube… sweeties, THIS is why I am a radical feminist.

And my response. Like this shit literally makes me so angry. This person is arguing in a comment thread that argues for trans women in intimate female spaces such as locker rooms, bathrooms, etc oh, and trans women writing fiction about lesbian relationships… yuck.

[butchviking]

tbf there are women (like me) who when we put on makeup are fully aware that we are putting it on only to conform to gender norms and avoid social stigma. like yeah it’s different than women who have never worn makeup, but i feel like there’s more of a scale. i only wear it once or twice a month and honestly it makes me a little angry when i do. if/when i become more willing to take on the consequences of eschewing gender norms i will never wear it again

ok so that post was one i put in my queue when i was angry - bc u shouldnt argue on the internet when ur angry lmao and i do too often so sometimes i put shit in queue to discuss when ive calmed down. problem is my queue is currently over two weeks long so sometimes i forget exactly what prompted the post. HOWEVER.

if i recall correctly that was abt this attitude i see, more often than not from gender-conforming women, that gnc women who disidentify with their sex are. basically self-absorbed sexist idiots who, by disidentifying, are implying that all women except them must love the female gender role and must love being oppressed. like a ~im not like the other girls~ thing. but with 'not like the other girls' i think a lot of ppl are now coming to recognise that, yeah, sometimes it's a sexist statement bc one particular woman thinks she's sooooo much deeper and more human than the other women around her - but sometimes, it's because she can see very clearly that she's NOT like other women. and has felt ostracisation and loneliness about that nd has felt like there must be something wrong with her for being so unlike the typical women in her life. and with trans identity it's often the same thing.

i just can no longer make the space in my heart to sympathise with gender-conforming women who act like gnc women disidentifying w womanhood is some kind of personal attack on them, or on all women. women in makeup and heels who act like it's a slight against them for a gnc woman (who will pretty certainly have faced shit in her life for being gnc) to look at them and say. i'm not her. i'm not whatever she is. i must be something different because if that's what women are then i'm not one and i don't want to be one. it's an argument i'm so fucking tired of hearing and nine times out of ten i will stand w a gnc female who identifies as trans bc she doesn't see any room in the definition of womanhood for her any day before i stand w gender-conforming women who mock or belittle her for that.

i recognise there's a scale of gender conformity, and makeup was just one example, and i know not all women who wear makeup wear it all the time - but, as you say, it is a concession to avoid social stigma. so to me it's like. let she who is without sin cast the first stone. how's a woman who makes concessions to gender because she doesn't have the strength to face the repercussions of refusing to conform going to criticise other women for the concessions they make to get through the repercussions they are facing for refusing to conform.

and one extra point: you say 'it’s different than women who have never worn makeup' but, while i know there are such women out there (and by god, good for them), it's worth noting that for some women - for me, personally - they might have made concessions to gender at times. because they felt like it's what they had to do. what they were supposed to do. as a girl. as a woman. and sometimes, it's disidentifying with womanhood that makes them feel like they're ALLOWED to not do that shit anymore. for several years as a teen i shaved my legs & my pits, wore light makeup most days, even wore skirts and dresses at times. it made me feel like an alien. i hated it. but i'd always been given the message that it was just What Women Do and it's part of growing up that you have to get used to that. and when i discovered i didn't 'have to be a woman' there was a freedom in that for me. i could stop shaving. i never had to wear makeup. when someone told me i walked like a man or dressed like a man or talked like a man or whatever, it didn't have to be an insult. i could take pride in being as masculine and as free & unconstrained by the trappings of femininity as i liked. sure, that's a concession to gender in its own way. patriarchy isn't going to be overthrown by women only feeling comfortable with gender non-conformity when they convince themselves they aren't women. but patriarchy isn't going to be overthrown by women wearing heels and makeup so people will be nice to them, either. you're no better than us.

[the-based-brit]

are you no longer panphobic, aphobic, and nonbianaryphobic now /genq

Have you seen some of my latest posts?

I am a proud panphobe because I’m bi and pansexuality is a made up ahistorical sexual orientation used by bisexuals who are more woke than me to hate on me for being bi because they think I’m transphobic and bisexuality is just for cis people, which is a load of bullcrap. They clearly have internalised biphobia, otherwise they wouldn’t hate me so much for being bi.

I don’t care if you’re ace and I’m certainly not gonna discriminate against you for being ace, but I’m not afraid to tell you being ace doesn’t make you LGBT and it’s certainly not normal to be ace because most people are sexual, like it or not. If that makes me aphobic, I couldn’t care less.

Saying you’re nonbinary is just a polite way of saying you have a mental illness and you want attention. The first “nonbinary” person in the world said it was a sham: https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/03/10/i-was-americas-first-non-binary-person-it-was-all-a-sham/

Plus, enbies are mostly women going through a phase and attention-seeking. Like when Demi Lovato came as out as “nonbinary” and self-identified that way for a while, but stopped doing that not too long ago and now she’s back to being a regular cis woman. And she’s not the only woman who used the nonbinary label for clout.

And some are just retards that don’t understand the difference between gender and gender roles. They’re stupid enough to think clothes = gender, but normal people know putting on a pair of pants or makeup doesn’t make you a man or woman. That’s not how it works at all, and being GNC is different from being trans or “nonbinary”. When I was a kid, girls who acted like boys and liked things that are commonly associated with boys were just called tomboys. But a boy who plays with dolls in this day and age, or a girl who plays with action figures is automatically assumed by woke parents and teachers to be trans and put on puberty blockers which is just absolutely disgusting and it makes me glad people never did that when I was a child. I’m very lucky it wasn’t a thing back then, else I would have been one of those kids.

And I will absolutely die on this hill, whether you like it or not.

[shanhelingmoving]

laundry list of grievances of cdrama and/or danmei fandom

lets start with the obvious. the sheer amount of babying going on with characters, especially male characters. no theyre grown adults they arent your baby or your cinnamon roll or your son or smth. there's literally such a history of infantilizing chinese people to dehumanize them and yet all of you keep feeding into that.

also usually in tandem with that - the excessive horniness/oversexualisation of characters. it's genuinely like some of you haven't found a chinese person attractive before and suddenly need to prove that you're not racist because you're attracted to them, leading to the horniest tags on content. i promise i don't need to see that. doubly worse if its done in the same breath as calling them a baby.

the white lens that's applied to these works. whether its comparing cultivators to nobles/ aristocracy or calling cdrama characters elves because of what? historical clothing choices? long hair? sorry to break it to you tolkien didn't invent that. also the misinterpretation of culture and cultural norms and/or deciding to strip away context for your own (usually very white) interpretation. notable examples: modern aus where they've clearly never spoken to a chinese person in their life or the take where jin guangyao an honourary girlboss or saying huaisang is gnc

the forcing of gender roles onto mlm (calling one of them 'the woman/wife') and by extension forcing them into 'tops' or 'bottoms' based on that...like the more `feminized' one is the `bottom:.. and refusing to criticize the source material when it does that and continuing to feed into it

ive mentioned this before but the way theres literally such awful takes on censorship. yes there's something to say about how cdramas being censored means the most egregious fetishy stuff can't make it in, but saying stuff 'censorship fixed it' just shows you've forgotten Why censorship is there. in addition to that, the amount of jokes on 'can't believe this made it past censorship haha' why are you making light of homophobia.

a point brought up by an anon: "being convinced that criticism towards the heteronormativity/hypersexulisation in danmei is a "western" take, therefore it can't be criticised because its chinese media and somehow it makes the issues okay" I want to further comment on this with like...people saying that you're racist for criticizing authors like mxtx or priest because you're `refusing to engage with an asian author's text' please for the love of god give us more credit give asian people more credit it's so incredibly rude to say that asian people don't criticize awful parts of these works.

in addition to that, whenever the texts are criticized in general the defence of 'people are allowed to write unpleasant things/characters' is constantly brought up. however. when these characters are meant to be the main pairing/love interest that the reader is supposed to root for can it truly be said that they're just 'exploring the dynamic'. like pls this is clearly a genre that fetishizes mlm in particular already

when white people designate me (or my friends) as the Token Person Of Colour and like ask permission to do things. hello i (nor any other person) am not able to tell you if you can call an easian man 'a baby' i cannot decide that for you. furthermore i cannot decide that on behalf of every single chinese person

this post. fuck you.

fine i'll elaborate why is there 1k notes why would u rb a self-flagellating 1.5k word essay comparing white people and racism to bronies lol

in conclusion i hate it here and you all should pay me. thank you.

[npckingmo]

Hi still Losing My Mind over spn. Specifically transwoman sam. More specifically, transfemme nb sam.

I have a playlist I made and I'm like. Holy Shit.

So I think Sam is initially like Oh I'm A Woman so that means that she Has To Be 100% woman. Anything else would mean that's she's not genuine, right? Thinking of herself as the Exception To The Rule that is nb/other queer identities. If she's not Absolutely and One Hundred Percent a woman then she's clearly like. Messed up even more than she thought. Right? Right??

Obviously not from our view, but like. Sam SERIOUSLY second-guessing herself. Thinking she has to perform feminity as is typical in order to be considered a Real Trans Person(tm). But she knows she CANT perform typical feminity--her height and her broad shoulders and everything ELSE she hates about herself--so at first, she thinks she is faking it somehow. It takes a long time before she's comfortable basically changing nothing about herself except some light makeup, long skirts on occasion, growing out her hair, she/her pronouns in-house, etc. Eventually, she's fine with that. It's enough, and shes happier now.

Until Dean realizes he's trans, too.

Dean is...complicated. being wholly seperated from your own personhood leaves him with this sickening disparity between his performed masculinity and his Actual Gender (masc obviously, but performed and Felt are very different). Having Gender Talks around and eventually WITH dean makes them all come to some revelations. (Cas is more or less Unfazed, but very supportive. He has never lived by the binary and doesn't really Get their need to confirm to it, it really doesn't matter That much but if they care, he cares)

Sam is forced to confront some issues about herself through this. Dean is very masc, but with a lot of femme-coded things he enjoys a lot! Nail polish and cooking for the family, the color pink, taylor swift etc etc. Sam...isn't sure how to think. Because once dean starts actually finding gender euphoria and ENJOYING IT, sam starts to realize she could be...happier. Like that. Not holding herself hostage in here own brain for not being The Perfect Woman 100% Of The Time.

So she starts, instead of feeling guilt and self-hate for not conforming to binary womanhood, allowing herself to enjoy the things she Actually Enjoys. And if that looks like an oversized carhartt jacket? Well, who cares!

I want to point out that very little happens externally, here. Sam has already Acted like this for a while, but has never let herself Enjoy things that make her gender euphoric. There's a MONUMENTAL difference in doing something because you feel like you have no other choice, and CHOOSING to do something that you actively enjoy/allowing yourself to enjoy it without self-guilt.

Dean's Trans Revelation really brings her feelings to the forefront and forces her to confront them. Also I think she knows perfectly well that other queer identities exist--the difference is that she never thought that she would "count". That her own gender experiences proved that she was somehow still Wrong, not that she could very simply be nb/gnc AND a woman. (yes I know those aren't interchangeable identities. I just think that those are two things sam has to acknowledge in herself, which is relevant.)

Anyway I love sam and she's amazing. She's also a lesbian and gets married to eileen. She drops the Winchester name. After long talks and introspection, she can finally accept herself and is SO HAPPY!!!!

[werevulvi]

Perhaps it's not so special to just be a woman. Half the population is. So what? But to me it is a huge thing. To even be able to say those words "I am a woman." They feel magnetic somehow, clinging to my tongue. It's like the word "woman" has a texture in my mouth like no other word does, vibrating at a different frequency. As if it's poisonous to taste. Yet I taste it, yet I say it. And I will keep saying it until I've cleansed it, no matter how long it takes. No matter how annoyingly repetitive and unnecessary it may sound to you.

It is a big deal to me, because up until age 29, I never spoke of myself using that word. Not even once. To then pick it up, for the first time, at age 29... was huge. And it's been 2 years since then now, but I'm still struggling with it, and it's still huge. I still don't understand why it's so hard for me to hold and hold onto that word, yet I am fiercely protective of it. I toss it away, then pick it up again, remorseful and protective of it. And I do that again and again. For each time I pick it up again, it's as if I understand its value a little bit more. All the significance, trauma, love, pain and curiosity it carries. It is mine, and no matter how hard it is to hold... I refuse to ever truly let go of it.

I may not look like a woman, I may not even want to! But why does it matter? Why should it matter what a woman looks like? Am I taking it too far, with the masculinity, the beard and bald head? Am I pushing my idea of freedom for women's expression too far? "Yes, women can be masc and gnc, BUT..." is what I keep hearing. But what? "...but you're taking it too far by looking like a whole ass man" is what I feel like the rest of the sentence, which they do not speak, is. Perhaps I'm wrong, I can't read minds. But sometimes I feel like people's minds are so loud that I can't not hear their thoughts.

I get a lot of backlash for every time I state myself as a woman, with my obnoxious reluctance to pass as my true identity. It's difficult to properly word that, what I actually mean. Perhaps I mean to say that I refuse to look like the traditional ideal of what people expect a woman to roughly wanna look like, whether that be masculine or feminine, as long as it's clearly recognisably female in some way or another. And my "true identity" has nothing to do with my personality, or my preferred expression, but only my deep down true love for being bio female. Thus, my "reluctance to pass" is indeed my desire to keep and maintain my transition traits, and my "true identity" is my womanhood, but I don't mean it in the same way TRA's do.

That true love for being female, isn't an ideal, but rather something much closer to my survival instinct.

It's that feeling of wanting to protect yourself when in danger. It's that instant self defense you act on without thinking when you feel like you're being threatened. It's that instant reaction of removing yourself from danger the split second it touches you, your body. It doesn't matter which part of you that danger touches, whether it be your hand, knee, your love handles, scarred chest, hairy face or your genitals. No matter what part of you is touched by that danger, you will instinctively protect it. It's in that instinct that I found love for my female nature, in my instinct to protect it from harm. I found it beyond my survival instinct, because no matter what part of me is ever touched by danger, my subconscious mind recognises it as not just lovable and worthy of protection and care, but also as part of the whole. This means, that deep down I'm not just loving myself... I also know that I am whole. No matter how many parts of me are cut off or distorted... I will always be whole.

I don't always feel aware of that like in my frontal lobe, but damn, my reptile brain knows it and won't ever question it.

With that, I found that my dysphoria is a shallow creation of my frontal lobe, and that it's in contradiction of my survival instinct. Being suicidal and/or self-harming is similar to this. Even wanting to die, always came second to my survival instinct. That is probably why I never succeeded to kill myself, and also why I never succeeded to truly hate my body. This does NOT mean that such horrible suffering as dysphoria or whatever feelings lead to self harm, is somehow not real. That is not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying it's a kind of cognitive dissonance, which messes with the very core of your core instincts, and that... I think, makes such psychological issues especially harmful.

And I also mean that my self love may not always have been accessible to me on surface level, but that despite that, it has always been innate.

And with that said... having found my innate self-love, and invited it to my frontal lobe... that is sorta why I can't really regret my medical transition. Even though I still have days when I struggle. Because I can't think of my body as broken anymore. Not since I found that deep, deep, VERY deep down I view myself as whole, lovable, valuable, and worthy of respect, love and safety... no matter what ever happens to me. Because my body is me, and there is no true disconnect between my sense of self and my flesh. Only on surface level there can sometimes be disconnect.

Kinda like the branches on a tree may be disconnected at the crown, but deeper down they all share the same trunk. I see myself in a similar manner. That at the top of the tree is most of my conscious thoughts, feelings, memories, etc, as well as all the various parts of my body. Or that is what my frontal lobe is aware of. That is how I perceive myself on surface level, as a scattered mess of branches, twigs, leaves and what not, each representing aspect of me, seemingly chaotic and all disconnected. But I'm also partially aware of what's going on deeper within my mind. I'm aware of the trunk that connects all branches, twigs, leaves, etc, and I'm also aware of the roots. Not directly aware, but I sense it like an inkling. I can sense that not only is there a trunk and roots deep down that connects to all twigs, and all twigs to each other, but also there in lies my knowledge that no matter how many of my twigs are left intact... the tree will always be a whole tree.

And it doesn't matter what I look like, or what troubles my body has gone through. Survival will always be the first priority. And my self-love IS equal to my instinct to survive. Because the reason I will always come to my own rescue whenever faced with danger or threat, or perceived danger/threat, is because I love myself. Self-love is the first move before I'm even saving myself from the danger, before that split second reaction takes place. That is how fast, instant and innate my self-love is. It was too obvious to even be aware of, for most of my life.

I think that's why is was so hard for me to find my self love. Because well... it was more deeply buried than my survival instinct itself, which I thought must be the innermost core aspect of my existence. But I was wrong about that. Self-love goes even deeper than survival. THAT is the innermost core aspect. Or so I believe. Can't think of anything that would possibly go even deeper than that.

But also, although I am the most aware on my self-love in moments my survival instinct takes over, I am also aware of it in other moments.

This is also why I can't get rid of my transition traits such as my facial hair. Because finding that true self-love from deep within my core, basically made me fuse all my aspects and physical traits together into a complete wholeness. All needs to be protected and loved. Every twig, every leaf. Sacrificing bits and pieces of me that are not damaging to my health, is self harm and goes against my survival instinct/self-love. It does not matter if the parts of me are in their natural state or medically/cosmetically altered. Even if those parts of me are inconvenient for my social life.

You know how a people who get organ transplants, their bodies try to reject the new organ because their immune system regards it as foreign? Well, this is kinda like that, but the exact opposite. My body/immune system/whatever-the-fuck regards my transition traits as heakthy parts of my original body, and thus to be protected at all costs. Loss of them will result in pain and grief. Just like losing any other part of my body would. And why? Because we mourn the loss of what we love, and what we regard as "ours" and as important, whole, healthy, lovable.

Deep down I do not care as much about such things as having a functional social life. Deep down, I care much more about things like keeping myself whole, safe, healthy and loved. Getting rid of my beard goes against that. Even just shaving it goes against that. My subconscious mind regards such an act as self harm.

Does this make sense to you? That it has nothing to do with "gender," be it manhood, womanhood, dysphoria, femininity or masculinity. It has to do with self-love, self-respect and survival. And that is a hell of a lot more important than being read or respected as a woman by others. No matter how much it hurts, because respecting and reclaiming myself as a woman is also highly important to me. Thus, I have to find a way to be open and honest with myself as a woman, without further harming myself.

I know this is deep and complicated spiritual shit, but I'm just trying to explain something which I think is probably very important. This discovery I had changed my life dramatically. So am I trying to teach self-love? No, I dunno. I don't think I can do that. I don't think anyone can. Perhaps I'm just trying to show a possibility.

I also need to clarify that despite knowing I love myself deep down now, I still struggle to stay connected to that aspect of my brain. And when I'm disconnected from it, I override my survival instinct and it misinterprets itself. Basically I fall out of order and act in a self destructive way, thinking it's self protection when it's actually the opposite. With that I understand that my self-love and my survival instinct are dependent on each other and need to be in harmony with each other to really keep me alive, safe and healthy. And although I'm now sometimes aware of this bond deep with myself, I'm still in imbalance. Because I still confuse self destruction for survival sometimes. When I skip meals, when I stay up too late, when I ruminate, when I smoke cigarettes, when I skip exercising, when I let my dirty dishes mould, etc. So simply being aware isn't quite enough, but it got me very far ahead of myself.

Also, trivial matters and superficial woes still get to me. I'm still human. I'm still fallible. Which is okay, but also frustrating. And that is basically why I love being a woman, while at the same time I also still struggle to accept myself as a woman, because it does include accepting being too norm-breaking for the society that I live in to accept me. And that hurts. It's a challenge that I'm not gonna overcome over night, just because I found the most important key to my healing. It's still just a key, a framework or an attitude - not a cure or some kinda magical spell. It's highly valuable and extremely important, but I still need to properly work through my emotions and learn how to navigate my social issues.

But what I feel my self-love is doing to help me, is carrying me through all this, and soothing me when I most need it. It makes my struggle worth it, and it makes me see a hell of a lot more of my potential than I was ever aware of before. The only backside of it is... well, it seems it does get to my head sometimes, and causing me some mild narcissistic tendencies. It sometimes makes me impatient hearing people with low self-esteem go on and on about how worthless they feel. That isn't great, I know. I'm working on fixing that error too.

By Werevulvi, dated November 29th, 2020.

[drake-the-incubus]

What’s Bad for You is Good for Me

Or otherwise called, conflicting needs in representation. Which is most certainly a thing.

Sometimes we have specific needs ton representation that isn’t met due to certain circumstances. Recently I posted something about how Lazy Eyes are portrayed as inherently ableist, despite the fact I grew up with it being incredibly disabling and being treated poorly for having one, and in a discussion with other people, have been told they feel the same way.

Today, I saw a post about how someone being transphobic, complained about how trans characters gave him dysphoria. While he was incredibly transphobic about him, I realized that there’s intersectionality on representation no one really talks about.

We don’t talk about how it’s weird to define representation as good and bad depending on how stereotyped it looks. We just sort of do it.

Like, for example, a flamboyantly gay, gender-nonconforming man who is very open about his sexuality and might even be sexual. This is considered a horrible stereotype. I... I've known gay men like that who genuinely enjoyed the nice representation of those characters.

I think the issue is the difference between how it's played off, and why it's being done. And I'll use a few examples.

Power Puff Girls has the Devil who suspiciously borders on a transmisogynistic and homophobic stereotype, being a villain. The femininity that the character displays is part of the villainous routine, and there's not much to the character outside of this. When the character feels like it, he drops his femininity to become masculine and aggressive. Top it off with being the devil, it's pretty bad. This is bad representation, if not for the villain part, then for the fact that there's no substance to it at all.

Which is actually what the problem with representation usually is. It's two-dimensional, and it's villanizing. The character is not only that way because it makes them more villainous, but it also helps make us look horrifying to the viewers.

What changes when you include Lil Nas X's recent release, MONTERO (Call me by your name)? It's a form of self-expression and it's inherently fighting back against the need to sanitize oneself for an oppressing class. It's fighting back against the idea that in order to exist, we need to be pure. To be accepted into heaven we atone for being gay. It's a rejection of Modern Religion and society's base treatment of us.

And it's necessary. We can't have the soft, loving, sanitized rep. It can suit plenty of us. Being accepted into heaven- in spite of our flaw of being gay? I've been told that before- isn't what everyone wants. In order to have reached acceptance, we must not readily display the "bad" part of ourselves.

If a straight woman was to want for a dude, it's highly more accepted than if a man were to do it. Regardless of the man's input?

I can't go to a conversation, openly as a trans man, and discuss my attraction to men as a man, and not get shut down, "because it's weird" but I do have to sit there and hear talk about anime boobs. Sometimes for hours. Because you know, that's acceptable in society, me liking men as a dude isn't.

And the thing is, neither is bad. A gay man being openly sexual and open about his sexuality in media, so long as it's not his defining trait and he's not demonized for it in the media- aka villainizing a gay man who is flamboyantly gay and gnc is very common- it's good.

A gay man who is soft, caring and understanding for his partner, emotionally mature and shies away from his sexuality is also good. It's not representation I need, but for younger audiences it is.

A gay man who is selective in his men vs a man who isn't. We need both.

Representation makes us feel human. Like we're not horrible for existing, and one set is never going to be enough.

For example. I'm a very androgynous trans man. I wear dresses and makeup.

I enjoy the feminine trans characters because they can exist and so can I. I also enjoy the masculine trans characters.

I hate the written trans experience and I absolutely cannot stand fanfiction regarding trans man, regardless of which it is.

It's dysphoria-inducing. Why? Because it focuses on the aspect of being trans rather than the aspect of existing as a man, and those aspects tend to center around dysphoria or being AFAB. Either way, the experience is uncomfortable for me to interact with and can really bother me.

That form of representation isn't for me. I live the trans experience. I don't need it in my media. I want a person who lives the average life and happens to be trans. Where being trans isn't the center of the story.

Other people need it the exact opposite, and if being trans isn't integral it bothers them. They feel like being trans is on a higher level of their identity and their rep needs to reflect that.

In fact, I talked to another trans friend of mine, who said that the kind of stories that focus on the body being AFAB was reaffirming to them and it helped them along. They loved content like that. Where as I couldn't bear it, it caused me issues and I saw it personally as harmful.

The thing about rep isn't actually the stereotypes, most of the time. IE a feminine trans man character isn't bad rep, so long as he's an actual human being.

I also think the person making it and the intent behind the character are important.

Example 1: A cis woman who makes a trans woman villain the epitome of masculinity who is pretending to be a woman, and is defeated by a woman, is just bad rep.

Why? Because a) it targets and puts down another minority to uplift women. b) it intentionally tries to erase trans women from being women. c) it reinforces the stereotype that trans women are just men trying to pretend to be women and are inherently violent. d) it demonized masculine trans women who may have been denied- or do not want- to medically transition.

Example 2: Created by someone who is LGBT+ with input from a trans man. A trans man is flamboyantly gay, talks about how much he loves men quite a lot, and is known for being fairly feminine. He enjoys hobbies such as boating and fishing, and his story is about connecting with his community and accepting himself as a person without needing to give a part of himself up.

Is example 2 real? I hope it is, I'd enjoy that. But this is good rep. Yes, it plays on stereotypes, but this is a person. Their story is about their identity and they have traits outside of the stereotype. For a flamboyantly gay trans man, this would be perfect. If you challenged toxic masculinity in the movie and addressed how trans men feel the need to overperform into toxic masculinity for acceptance and how it ruins our connections with our emotions, it would be pretty great.

Example 3: Created based on a real person. A character who is clearly autistic, and struggles with communication, who acts childish and clearly has a prominent lazy eye. This character struggles with tasks but gets them right. This is done with input and the person's input

Bad Rep?

If you said yes you'd be wrong. A character based on a real human being can't be bad representation. Because a) they're human, and b) there's a nuance to people that needs to be addressed.

Human beings will never be a monolith and having a monolith idea of representation to show oppressors what we're like ignores the fact of human diversity.

I can only speak for myself. This means the topic of race and how to handle racial issues in media vs the sanitization of the culture people of colour have, is not one I can speak on, and I wish I could have input on it.

I'll add if I'm not cohesive enough, it's usually because of Autism and possible Comorbid ADHD fighting each other.

If someone better at the topic can handle this, feel free to reblog and add on, I'll reblog additions and reply to any concerns made.

[bidonica]

Now that I finished watching Pose I can safely say that I liked it, sometimes you need a show that is gentle to its characters even when tragedy and despair are looming around the corner (if you look at what happened to most of the people who were in Paris is Burning it’s hella depressing and Pose is basically Paris is Burning fanfiction).

(spoilers for the finale behind the jump)

 I also liked how Stan/Angel developed, or better, didn’t develop - the series does a good “show, don’t tell” job in highlighting how he is blinded by his own privilege. In Stan’s mind, of course Angel would want to leave her life for a semblance of bourgeois security; he spent like, half an hour in a world that wasn’t tailored around him - a white middle class male - and was terrified. I hope for Angel’s sake that their relationship really ends there, but at the same time I would hate to lose sight of Patty and her path towards self realization.

My favorite character, however, ended up being Elektra. What an ICON. I’ve read people criticizing Dominique Jackson’s performance as stiff but it’s so clearly an act Elektra keeps up; she’s always in character. She’s an uneducated black kid assigned male at birth who grew up into the sophisticated woman she dreamed to be. Also kind of an insufferable bitch, so dedicated to living her fantasy she can be selfish and irresponsible about it, but with SUCH charisma. Elektra is clearly the kind of person who makes “legendary” sound like an accurate descriptor and not just hyperbole.

Really, my only real criticism is that... everyone is so beautiful. If you look at Paris is Burning, or Nan Goldin’s photos, trans people living at the edges of society at the time looked more unpolished, the make up style was harsher in the 80′s compared to the perfectly blended hues we’ve come to expect today, especially by drag/gnc performers. And I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I got a bit distracted by how flawless everyone’s hair and makeup was, even when they weren’t walking at the balls. But that’s a minor flaw in a show so heartwarming and highly watchable.

[pinkcloudsnightlightbell-remade]

[This post really doesn’t make sense but you should deffo have some experience with the game Resident Evil 2 : Biohazard (2019) -- here’s a short livestream of the 30-minute demo by some cool video journalists and a H U G E L Y Y influential horror gamer’s video of the demo, as well. (And here’s a favourite artist who is probably the very one you can blame for me wasting your time/gushing sm lol...) ]

Input/commentary is sincerely, absolutely, and aggressively, encouraged! ! 

Leon Scott Kennedy is nooooooooooot supposed to be any heterosexual woman`s fantasy because he is bisexual let me get into it

👉 First like the whole thing with Ada manipulating him? 

GOLD

but it’s unfair to Leon who’s actually incredibly...human?

And the other thing is that (and I probably have made it really clear) Resident Evil and the fandom are so ... weird and racist but I like seeing all the changes from the remake as well as (to a lesser degree) backtracking through the games where Leon’s appeared

I love seeing him in 2019 being completely off-the-bat friendly towards Claire and then flirting -- and it being okay with me???? I went ahead and looked up tags on here and @/mikaeled had a drawing of the RE 2 protagonists 

The first protagonist, Claire, is drawn with the bi flag colours

The second protagonist, Leon, got the ace flag

THAT made me want to tap into fandom a little bit more and I went on Twitter and Pixiv and got to see some weird fantasies of being a really controlling Leon but on the other hand saw amazing depictions of Claire being in a loving relationship with a Leon whose kindness lined up with my first exposure of him. (The other day I had a similar experience looking up lesbian/bi claire redfield on this hellsite and someone wrote that Claire is a lesbian -- big big yes -- but added in the tags that “Leon is a trans bi guy!”)

So.

Why not get into it a bit while I’m overcaffeinated?

👉 Leon and Ada is ... weird and people can read weird, bad things into it especialllllllllly if you consider “yellow fever” but it can also be smth super cute where a bi guy and a really cool girl he meets allows him to survive the events of RE 2 (1998) because she is literally mourning the death of her boyfriend in Umbrella. I think that Capcom unbeknownst to their demonic loudmouth staff have created some really thoughtful chances for representation and that helped them get so big--so Ada and Leon are good

But like...

Claire is right there! Leon and Claire become friends like that and tbh they make my bisexual heart melt as individuals. As a couple I feel hope imagining the ways they’d buck the trend of alienation and the threat of abuse...I feel like I care nothing for the fandoms, the creators, and even a majority of the games’ plot points, but here Leon and Claire are, making me feel so much pride because they show that there’s a way for men and women to be ... healthy while in love. They’re the couple that’d be great peer parents (Shirley is a big part of their game they’re protagonists of, and I love how she is written both in 1998 and 2019 which parallels how Moira Burton is written--and completely diverges from the tragedy of the pigeonholey writing of Ashley Graham) and then while they’re wonderful supports to Shirley and are intimately “””together””” in many aspects of life I believe that they’re the type to not even date because the intimate devotion and protection or sticktoitiveness of a friendship ends up building first, because it matters more. Which is not to say that when they do get into a relationship it’s anything but one that is rare.

It’d be r.a.r.e.!!

look at this ... fucked me up 

👉 In regards to this rare kind of love, the key isn’t sympathy or understanding and cooperation even through struggles ranging from PTSD to personality clashes through the years, nor is it chemistry and attractiveness (yeah I will go on record that they’re for better or worse based off of Caucasian models who are paid to be taken pictures of in real life and it fucking shows like I’d be a dishonest bisexual if not just a bad bisexual if I said I didn’t wanna ram both of them into a mattress shut up).To me it’s how Claire is as much of a hero as a typical Die Hard movie hero and YET no more of a hero compared to Leon who is, very clearly, atypical. That’s the biggest part. I love the atypicality. Leon’s seen as hot but approachable and even “a little baby who’s an incompetent rookie cop” but he isn’t... the usual cop, a.k.a. a batt*rer and a **pist and a vio*ent threat and a pig... He’s known to be a soft kind person in the remake.... so to me... 

I love him for Claire but I love the possibility that Leon Scott Kennedy’s bi and gender-nonconforming, and asexual (being demisexual) and not-cisgender and completely proud. I love that he could be this and he IS as good as this ...and he supports lesbians and bi women and alll trans and gnc and nb people unequivocally, maybe,,? Yes? Sbshshdjdjd 

Granted this is all a LOT. Let me defend myself and say that perhaps this is a hyperfixation for me but I’m the type that likes to mix into some of the emotions a tiny nugget of logic so let me make the disclaimer that, ya boi isn't an easy 'n convenient character that's hot into which I as a reader can insert myself... For me I’ve pieced something together that brings comfort and makes some sense. I like to think that he is a survivor of gay-bashing, ostracization, financial abuse, emotional abuse, ****, humiliation, public threats, familial bullshit such as custody battles and gaslighting and is transgender but he’s proud... he’s proudly trans and perhaps he is touchaverse and in terms of sexuality is bi/pansexual while in terms of who he has dated before it’s very messy as he is very aggressively misandrist and hates men and perhaps he’s very stone when he is in a mewd -- and perhaps transphobia makes him go into a rage and he has actually gotten in lots of trouble before as a kid which came back to bite him and he’s lost family and found family and best friends and the loss really hurt and made his choice to go to police academy ring hollow by the end of his training and made him a big believe in social justice and in defending people who society left behind and in therapy and self-change and in accountability (he ISN’T a selfinsert prOMISE!!) but he’s been through a lot aaaaaaaa lotttttt like idk hes just a dude sure

he’s just a dude.b,ut theres a reason zombies don;t faze him!

LOVE THAT. That part.

👉 to sum up: i support the remake fans not being uncritical and loving on the cast of characters and leon specifically! there’s a reason he recently bucked the trend of masculinity and (21 years of fandom and 21 years of problematic annoying fans, perhaps also writers, aside) has always been objectifiable, that is, seen as hot/a sidepiece/specifically desirable for women--but just /: not /: women /: as in /: Women slash str8s /: . . . .RETCH lmao he’s a gun toting hero that is very atypical but not in a disempowering manner -- rather, in an empathetic and emotional one and I want to see the RE2 protagonists heal through a life changing care and tender friendship rather than bonding through liferuining catastrophes 💓💓💓but what I am trying to say in the end is that they are so inspiring both together and as individual protegonists due to their abiliy to weather thru struggles that I as a qtwoc immigrant in America can identify with🤧 

[📍]  tl;dr   -- - 💓cute pan pew pew man is loving and cute ! :> also claire is 💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓💓 so cute...........................pls support/refute my theory

[thesquidwizard]

I was told reading  Philosophical problems with blah blah blah would answer why making 500 genders would solve gender stereotypes I am petty and affable so I read it

If you want my opinions and my mind slowly melting i am kindly putting this under a read more cuz its fucking long as shit

the TLDR is : this drivel doesnt mention the problems of gender stereotypes or neogenders at all its just some guy wanking on why women need to give up their spaces because he thinks their wrong and annoying ( Kathleen Stock especially)

I’d love to @ you lake-lady, but you blocked me for thought crimes and im to lazy to try to get around that ( if you actually read this before recommending it to me, you are very very strong and very very brainwashed)

the first 14 paragraphs are circle talk "GC feminists are wrong, i will prove their wrong, they think "this" it is wrong ill prove its wrong etc etc etc" if you survive that that, They focus on Kathleen Stock in their words "Stock presents an articulate, relatively comprehensive, and moderate form of gender-critical feminism" first: If Margie’s self-diagnosis (“I’m a boy”) is questioned by the therapist, the therapist can be construed as . . . “converting” . . . a trans child to a “cis” one. If, on the other hand, Margie’s self-diagnosis is affirmed unquestioningly, the therapist is effectively failing to affirm Margie in a sexual orientation of lesbianism; something which also looks like conversion by omission. (Stock, 2018e) -They spend 5 paragraphs explaining why Stocks hypothetical girl^ isnt converted to male heterosexualness by transitioning, and not affirming Marges Gender identity is Dangerous They do not address Stocks ACTUAL concern that Gender Affirming Therapy without any kind of therapy and research on GNC and SSA children is conversion by omission because it doesnt take into account if these feelings stem from gender stereotypes and homophobia. Stocks is not concerned that you are converting this girl straight( sex is real she would be SSA either way) she is concerned your transitioning her without affirming her sexuality and giving her support in the knowledge that being a lesbian is okay and perfectly normal.-

Next: concern about female-only spaces is about legal self-identification without any period of “living as a woman,” prior male socialisation in a way which exacerbates the tendency to violence against female bodies, and the fact that many self-identifying trans women . . . retain both male genitalia and a sexual orientation towards females. (stock) If the evidence shows (as, in fact, it is already showing) that some males—whether genuinely “truly” trans or just pretending—turn out to pose a threat to females, and it’s really hard to tell in advance which ones will, can’t we then make a social norm and/or law to exclude all [natal] males from female-only spaces . . . ? (also stock)

-Quotes are separated by garbage but this whole section is what we have all seen before " why must trans woman suffer, just because cis men hurt woman" except its really long it acknowledges male violence rates but refuses to acknowledge we have already seen men (and identified transwoman) taking advantage to hurt woman. This whole chunk is just SOME woman must be sacrificed for Trans feelings-

They do put: Finally, we know that some men who come into contact with children in their work will offend against them. Yet we do not exclude all men from working with children, even if using gender as a watershed would prevent those offenses. Why does the good of minimizing child sexual abuse not lead us inexorably to the conclusion that we must outlaw all male teachers and coaches? Because our practical reason recognizes complexity: We readily see that even the most highly desirable states of affairs (minimizing abuse of children) do not have simple, quasi-mechanistic implications for policy or decision-making, and that they do not justify the indiscriminate suppression of other goods (even less important ones, such as professional vocations).

-And id like to add with the rise in pedo crimes I am 100% down with separating men from children because i do not think any child should be endangered just to keep men in jobs.-

They also put this quote in:

there is clearly a difference between the experience of a child who is treated by others in way that are characteristic of boys and also feels like a boy, and a child who is treated by others in ways that are characteristic of boys whilst feeling that they are really a girl. (Finlayson et al., 2018)

-And are you sure? are you really sure? I feel like there might be differences between social conditioning, experience and feelings. A boy treated like a boy and a boy(who feels like a girl) treated like a boy are still experiencing being treated and raised like a boy?? one just has emotional differences  (is it internalized homophobia, Gender non conformity, a developed fetish?? who knows but they still experienced boyhood)-

-Next section says we cant make single stall or any other kind of netrual or trans bathrooms because its to hard? and it hurts trans feels reminding them that they have birth sexes because thats hate speech???-

also this: Our social world is arranged in a way that makes exclusion from the sex/gender they claim—on the basis of a lack of “authentic” belonging (Serano, 2007)—central to trans subordination. As with other forms of social subordination, trans exclusion has not only material dimensions (Blair & Hoskin, 2018; Hargie et al., 2017; Moolchaem et al., 2015; Movement Advancement Project and GLSEN, 2017; Rondón Garcia & Martin Romero, 2016; Serano, 2013; Stonewall, n.d.; Yona, 2015), but also discursive ones that work in accordance with the logic of so-called performatives. Performatives are utterances that do things with words: specifically, they accomplish something in the act of saying it (Austin, 1975). The classical example is marriage—in the act of declaring a couple married, a celebrant brings about a change in their normative status, provided the celebrant is the right person in the right circumstances. This presupposes a normative background (that is a set of laws, conventions, or other rules) governing all those matters: who qualifies as a legitimate celebrant, what the right circumstances are for the performative to do its work, what marriage status means in terms of spouses’ rights and obligations, etc.

-Celebrating a Marriage is celebrating a couples chosen form of representing their relationship publicly and adding each other to their legal family, how is that the same as letting men into woman's bathrooms because they have feelings??-

-Theres more babblery about subjugating trans people by not pretending biology is fake, and that saying they cant just taking womans rights and spaces is denying their reality and existence we find out the author is a gay(cis) man so why does he have opinions on womans spaces and issues who fucking knows ( he really likes the word unintelligible)-

-Im tired, Ive taken several breaks just to stay clear headed( mildly sane) and now we are onto why Trans inclusive practices dont threaten the concept of female, male, lesbian and gay. Okay buddy ole pal bring it on-

Stock (2018b) has also argued that trans inclusion on the ground of self-identification/declaration threatens “a secure understanding” of concepts intimately related to “woman”—namely, “female” and “lesbian.” It is hard to see this threat as a real one. After all, conceptually, “trans maleness” and “trans femaleness” presuppose “cis maleness” and “cis femaleness” as their other—namely, the case of female and male for which no transition, no reaching across, is required: the case of femaleness and maleness already on this side of (= “cis”) their sex.

-At some point i expect to find out Stock implied his dick is tiny or something " gender crit feminists are wrong im gonna argue with just this one" In this section he manages to be long winded and say nothing have a taste:

Stock (2019b) argues, correctly, that “sex [i.e., maleness and femaleness] is not determined by any single, unitary set of essential criteria,” and that “there is no single set of features a person must have in order to count as male or female.” She goes on to state that: (a) “you do still need to possess some” female (biological) sex characteristics to count as female; (b) that this is “a real, material condition upon sex-category-membership”; and (c) that “medical professionals [assigning sex]. . . rely upon an established methodology, aimed at capturing pre-existing biological facts” (Stock 2019b). Stock presents (a), (b), and (c) as if they were true without qualification. In fact, they only describe how, for very legitimate reasons, sex is understood and assigned within the discourses of biology and medicine; but our everyday usages of “male” and “female” may well be more capacious. It does not follow, of course, that there is no connection at all between these discursive domains—biology and the everyday. Rather, something like the biological meaning of “male” and “female” refer to the central cases of “male” and “female” as those terms feature in everyday usages. But those usages, if trans-inclusive (as they should be), will also cover, legitimately and usefully, noncentral cases of those selfsame terms.

-Yes you need to be female to be female, it doesnt matter what you look like how much you weigh your hobbies or tastes you just need to be female. Observed Biology is observed not assigned we dont pop out blank slates until someone says "ya this ones a girl"-

There really is no good reason to fear that such trans-inclusive practices will imperil “maleness” and “femaleness” as concepts. It is the very fact that those concepts have and will retain central cases that puts to rest any such fear. What makes something like the biological meanings of “male” and “female” the central cases of everyday usages of those words is “[o]rdinary-life truth seeking, a certain level of which is essential for survival”; this “involves a swift instinctive testing of innumerable kinds of coherence against innumerable kinds of extra-linguistic data” (Murdoch, 1992). Reproduction is a key aspect of human experience: The existence of each of us and the perpetuation of the human species presuppose it. The extra-linguistic reality of the dioecious configuration of human bodies, which is functional to human reproduction, means both that the concept of “female” and “male” are here to stay, and that their central cases will remain well-understood, even after we give up on trans-exclusionary attitudes, practices, and policies. To put it another way: trans-inclusive linguistic usages, policies, and so on, cannot threaten the distinction between the concepts of “male” and “female,” which hinges on the nondisposability of the central cases of those concepts.

For similar reasons, it is difficult to agree with Stock that characterizing as “gay” trans men attracted to men, and as “lesbian” trans women attracted to women, “leaves us with no linguistic resources to talk about that form of sexual orientation that continues to arouse the distinctive kind of bigotry known as homophobia” (Stock, 2019d). After all, our linguistic conventions make cissexual womanhood and manhood the central or paradigmatic cases of “womanhood” and “manhood”; cissexual (though not necessarily gender-conforming) lesbianism and male homosexuality the central or paradigmatic cases of “lesbianism” and “male homosexuality,” and so on. This will not change. First because of the prevalence of cissexual women/men and cissexual lesbians/gay men, in terms of sheer numbers, relative to trans women/men and trans lesbians/gay men. Second, because of the ways in which the concepts of “man,” “woman,” “gay,” “lesbian,” “cis,” and “trans” sit together with the concepts of “male” and “female,” which reference an extra-linguistic reality, of which, as we have already seen, we cannot but take notice. Given these linguistic and empirical facts, a trans-inclusive use of the terms “lesbian” and “gay” does not carry the dangers Stock (2019d) worries about.

-I keep going back and checking the date this was published  in 2020 clearly this man has neither been online except to stalk Stock, nor talked to a human who actually believes what he is arguing against. No one is mad at transwoman for liking woman or vise versa its the kind of woman and men they go after and EXPECT romance and validation from ( ie lesbians and gay men, ie threatening what lesbian and gay mean in "inclusive" climates) fucking knob.-

I dunno if this is translated or the writer isnt english but he keeps using subordination where "opression" would be used and umm. anyway onto "Overemphasizing Sex-Based Subordination"

first he explains the difference between paranoid and paranoid structuralism there is so much fucking bullshit then we get to some quotes! that are bullshit-

Even assuming that the socialization of trans girls mirrors that of cis boys, the fact that trans girls do not identify with maleness can be expected to make a difference to the outcomes of such socialization (Finlayson et al., 2018).

-this guys back, love this guy doesnt know you dont fucking socialize yourself-

It is a mistake to treat “violence and discrimination against trans women . . . as if it were unconnected to that faced by cis women” (Finlayson et al., 2018).

 -Finlayson marry me your so smart, that big brain of yours is sooo sexy. Anyway transwoman and "cis" woman face violence from the same people.. Men. but it is not for the same reasons and most transwoman who face violence are brown and black sex workers( if your gonna care go wholesys not halfseys). As opposed to woman who face violence no matter their class, race, nationality, age.. etc etc etc-

Saying “Not giving people everything they desire is not a denial of their humanity” (Allen et al., 2019) amounts to an insensitive dismissal of the serious argument that trans exclusion is ipso facto harmful.

-I want an affordable home and access to food and water whenever i am hungry, you want me to pretend reality doesnt exist so your feefees dont get hurt-

The claim that women “are a culturally subordinated group . . . [while] at best, trans women are a distinct subordinated group; at worst . . . members of the dominant group” entirely discounts the ways in which sex, gender, and cis/trans status intersect. These intersections produce more complex, shifting, and context-dependent power relationships than are captured by the M > F formula.

-Sex based oppression is actually like jello, sometimes woman are less oppressed or oppressed slightly more to the left, I too can just kinda say words-

A dubious assumption underlies this statement: “[T]he fact that our concept-application [of, e.g., ‘woman’] might indirectly convey disadvantage towards some social groups [e.g., trans women] is not itself a reason to criticise the concept use, because the concept use has a further valuable point” (such as “to pick out a distinctive group, relative to recognisably important interests”) (Stock, 2019e). The dubious assumption here is that the “valuable point” of a restrictive use of the concept will be lost if the concept is broadened. The assumption is dubious because even in its broad, inclusive use, the concept retains a readily identifiable central case.

-Yes you dunder head if we start calling lizards mammals we lose the point of what makes a mammal a mammal, which complicates and endangers our way of researching and understanding mammals by making woman "whoever the fucks wants to be one" we loss the ability to easily talk about things that are exclusive to woman the more female language is edified the harder it is for females to unite to talk about womans issues, womans health, girls puberty, womans oppression etc etc.-

-my fuck i dont even care to learn this mans name and i have a personal hatred just for him, i hope ya'll have noticed he uses several different "sources" for his arguments and yet pins GC feminism on Stock alone. Anyway here we go into Doing Philosophy and Debating Policy in the Age of Social Media and Digital Platforms ( i think this man nuts every time he types out philosophy)-

my god we have brough Plato into this, Stocks must stand alone but we are at fucking plato, anyway this section actually has some brains in it there drivel but also truth:

Needless to say, in real-world face-to-face exchanges, unalloyed communicative action is known only by approximation. But there are very good reasons to think that the distance between the ideal (namely, communicative action) and the real is especially wide in the context of the quasi-spoken digital media used to construct (and respond to) the gender-critical case against trans inclusion. Stock (2019f) herself, discussing the reception of her arguments, has complained about countless “half-arsed takedown attempts” by “online philosophers,” crediting, conversely, philosophers she meets offline with “interesting, constructive, and charitable” objections. She also notes that social media siphons “users into paranoid, angry silos” (Stock, 2019d), and that “when reading disembodied words on a screen” it is “easy enough” to engage in “projection” (Stock, 2019a). Why and how do social media and allied platforms have this potential for distorting genuine communicative action?

First, they enable new manipulative communication practices, such as flaming and trolling. The popular support base of gender-critical academics makes ample use of these, though gender-critical scholars are also at the receiving end. Rather than using the quasi-spoken features of social media and allied platforms with a view to genuinely advancing understanding, online activists may exploit these features for strategic aims. Common techniques include drowning a post or blog with irrelevant comments; exposing the blogger to ridicule; deflecting attention from the point she made; forcing her to address spurious objections; pretextually professing a failure to understand, demanding endless further explanations; and so on. Some of these techniques are available in spoken exchanges, but social media and allied platforms magnify their power by enabling “widely-distributed individuals to organize and galvanize around issues of common interest [or] political advocacy” (Stewart, 2016); and by facilitating the use of nonverbal or nonargument-based, but effective, communicative devices, such as memes, gifs, and emoticons.

Another way in which these digital media distort genuine communicative action is by affecting the motivations of the blogger, or micro-blogger, herself. Specifically, they facilitate the interference with genuinely communicative goals (reaching understanding) by noncommunicative, strategic aims. I will discuss three: acquiring influence, career progression, and venting.

In traditional academic communicative practice, one’s recognition as an expert is supposed to follow from the credit that accrues to one as a result of the soundness of one’s research methods and arguments, judged through peer-review processes. But “in the era of social media there are now many different ways that a scientist can build their public profile; the publication of high-quality scientific papers being just one” (Hall, 2014). Veletsianos and Kimmons (2016) have found, by examining a large data set of education scholars’ participation on Twitter, that

being widely followed on social media is impacted by many factors that may have little to do with the quality of scholarly work . . . and . . . that participation and popularity may be impacted by a number of additional factors unrelated to scholarly merit (e.g., wit, controversy, longevity; p. 6).

-This section like every section goes on forever but we finally finally reach our conclusion-

Cooper (2019) has invoked a legal pluralist perspective to argue that it is possible, and may be desirable, for gender as conceived by gender-critical feminists (as “sex-based domination”) and gender as conceived in trans-affirming terms (as “identity diversity”) to coexist side-by-side in the law. Access to women’s spaces is just the kind of policy matter that need not choose between one conception of gender and the other: it can and should be granted on the basis of both. While a compelling feminist case has been made for inclusion (Finlayson et al., 2018), the best feminist case against inclusion suffers from a number of argumentative fallacies (Aristotle, n.d.), and is at odds with well-established and sound uses of practical reason. Many problems in gender-critical thought are consistent with the explanation that paranoid structuralism is too often presupposed in gender-critical work, rather than being treated, productively, as a hypothesis. The nature of the publication outlets favored by gender-critical feminists (social media, blogs, etc.) is also likely to be implicated in generating some of these problems.

I think one of the things i would like anyone who managed to read this entire thing to take away from this is that not ONCE were male bathrooms or male spaces mentioned, not once did this apparently "cis" gay man say that he welcomes and wants transmen in HIS spaces or that he has even thought about it

(((( also he didnt even mention neo genders so my original question 100% unanswered, even fuckface magee doesnt think demiboys are real. He doesnt want to or even mention solving sex based oppression he just wants woman to stop fighting to keep men out))))

[afearing]

since apparently theres no consequences for delivering unto this website extremely long and good takes i will present to you my hot take on the ace d'escourse, with no sources because I Dont Feel Like It. its more words than is reasonable bc i have been stewing in this for like 4 years and if i dont type it out at some point im going to fucking lose it. no, literally, it’s 3 pages long in word about shit no one cares about anymore. please remember to like and subscribe.

some background on me, i id’d as ace for something like 8 years, from the first time i read the wikipedia page on it back in maybe 2009 or thereabouts. i also id’d as aro for about a year in 2016. that is to say, i have a lot of compassion and understanding for asexual individuals and feel i understand the inclusionist side of the argument pretty well, as i never questioned inclusionism until maybe 2014 or so, when the discourse blew up. i took some time off tumblr because i was so fucking distraught to think that, as i id’d as aroace at the time, that i had to come to terms with not being lgbt. lol i was a little too attached to being ‘gay’ because... fun fact, past dumbass self... you are gay. anyway, i really dont want anyone to feel that i hate them, but after i cooled off a little bit i realized that the exclusionist take on asexuality just makes more sense. hopefully i can explain why clearly enough.

i really believe that what is understood as aphobia is 100% of the time simply a manifestation of our culture’s expectations surrounding sexuality. while “expectations surrounding sexuality” as a very broad topic does indeed cover both the lgbt community and people on the ace spectrum, facing these issues does NOT make a person lgbt. i subscribe to the idea that lgbt is for people targeted directly by homophobia and transphobia. ace issues ARE super important to talk about and the whole inclus/exclus nonsense is entirely because this discourse has been put under the wrong category. im aware that probably most people will not care that much about my opinion on the correct framing of asexual activism as i no longer id as ace but i think this is important for everyone. sexual expectations also weigh on straight individuals, especially women, and i’m going to describe a few examples to try to demonstrate why i believe both that it doesn’t make sense to consider asexuality lgbt as well as why it does make sense to frame it as an issue based mainly in misogyny.

call out post for myself, i use reddit, and i think the r/childfree community is a good example of what i think the framing should be like. although it’s acknowledged that not wanting children has larger social consequences for women, both men and women talk about their issues in the forum, including horrific accounts of reproductive coercion and rape, the intersections with race/being lgbt/ageism (although they could do a LOT better with intersectionality, many posters do touch upon it), profoundly cruel comments made by those who have/want children, difficulty finding an understanding relationship partner, discrimination at work, misunderstandings and even hatred from family and acquaintances, discrimination in healthcare, etc.

i think you can tell where i’m going with this. even though being childfree cuts against the expectations for sexuality in most societies, even though it leads to unfair judgment from others, and even though they face discrimination on the basis of the way they express their sexuality, childfree people do NOT frame parenthood/childfreedom as an axis of oppression, nor do they claim that their lack of desire for children makes them lgbt. it’s not even a question if straight childfree people are straight, because duh? nor if the presence of lgbt childfree people makes the whole community fall under the lgbt umbrella, because it obviously doesn’t.

to drive the point home, the reason why this is NOT an axis of oppression is because parents face a ton of issues as well! they also face reproductive coercion as well as judgment over the number of kids they have, constant scrutiny and moralization over every aspect of their parenthood style, judgment based on parents’ age/wealth/sexuality/marital or dating status/race, housing and employment discrimination, especially for mothers, the government hating poor parents and cutting their benefits, and more i’m sure i’m not thinking of. again, this is due to societal expectations of sexuality. to complete the analogy, people who aren’t ace face their own set of challenges and discrimination. part of homophobia/biphobia is tinged with hatred of our sexual attraction; no one except for straight white men is allowed to really express their sexuality without backlash, and even then there is this shame leading to a lack of proper sex ed and horribly unhealthy understandings of sexual attraction in a large portion of the populace. so calling aphobia an axis of oppression is just not right. and in addition, the large proportion of lgbt aces doesn’t make asexuality lgbt, that’s not how groups work.

some more on what i mean by ‘expectations around sexuality’... in terms of my experience in the US, there is some blueprint in many people’s minds of what a person should be like in terms of sexuality, and that is something like “cishet, abled man, who is neither ace nor aro, who gets laid regularly (but not to excess) starting no later than 18 and ending no later than 28 when he settles down with one cishet abled wife, also neither ace nor aro, who has only had sex with up to three committed boyfriends, and they have precisely two children, approximately two years apart in age, whom the parents can financially and emotionally support to the utmost, because they are also moderately to very well off, and the parents work under traditional gender roles to raise their children as conventionally as possible.” and if you deviate from this script in ANY way that’s viewed with moral panic and scrutiny by someone. and the connection to misogyny is that women are seen as sort of the bastions of sexual morality. we are punished especially harshly for nonconformity.

if you’re poor you’re fucked because either you don’t have kids or you can’t send them off to private schools and feed them fancy organic shit. if you’re lgbt or polyamorous or aro or ace? fucked! if you dare to reproduce as a disabled person, and if your disability impacts your parenthood, especially for women, you’re practically crucified even in liberal circles. if you have too few kids or too many (don’t you know only kids turn out weird? / how can you possibly raise 5 children properly?), if you have too much sex or too little, if you split up the work in your relationship not along gender lines, if you do unconventional things in your parenthood, like accept your trans kids or move a lot or any number of other things, the social judgment rains down like the fires of fucking hell. meaning practically no one can escape it!! huge bonus to the screaming crowd with pitchforks if you’re a person of color or a woman, mega ultra bonus to women of color.

but does that make everyone i just talked about lgbt? no! although every single one of the groups i mentioned is tangentially related through this issue, even though all of them face a lot of horrible problems and discrimination, that does not make those issues inherently lgbt. again, they are tangentially related and i could see a good case for solidarity among many of the groups mentioned; all of them are fighting for greater acceptance of different kinds of relationships, greater acceptance of seeking happiness and being who you are rather than pressuring everyone to conform as much as possible to the LifeScript. but all of those groups are equally related to the lgbt community - that is, tangentially only. just as you can be childfree and straight, a stay-at-home dad and straight, a straight woman of color, so too can you be polyamorous and straight, ace and straight, or aro and straight.

that’s it for my main point. ace and aro people? your lives are hard. i’m not going to downplay it in any way because i know there are a lot of people who actually hate your guts. fuck, i’ve seen people full-on shittalk asexuality, in the internet and real life, in the most blatant of ways, so it’s not just something you can necessarily escape by logging off. not as much so for aro people tbh but i predict as much once the Public gets more wind of your existence. i fully believe that you face a higher risk of sexual assault; discrimination in relationships, housing, and the workplace; horrible comments from everyone who thinks their shitty opinion on your sexuality and love life matters; and I believe you that that hurts and is terrible and that you deserve a place to discuss and provide support.

but. those issues are not exclusive to you. they’re not exclusive to lgbt people, or oppressed people, and so those issues don’t and cannot make you lgbt, nor do they make ace/aro vs. allo an axis of oppression. our communities intersect, yes, considerably, but you are not a subset of lgbt. perhaps our rhetoric can help you, but because straight ace and aro people exist you cannot and should not consider yourselves lgb+. i think you understand that the issues you face are a form of oppression, but they are the result of the toxic and misogynistic sex culture in this society, which, yes, targets lgbt people but also, practically everyone, including groups which are definitively absolutely not inherently lgbt, such as parents, gnc straight people, poc, disabled people, the list goes on.

to conclude, what really converted me to being an ace exclusionist was the example of a straight grey or demi ace. how could you possibly argue that someone who falls in love with the opposite gender only, but with more conditions or less frequently than someone not aspec, is lgb+, can call themselves queer, etc.? exactly what material reality does that person share with a gay or bi person? i think that their issues fall in line with aspec community issues but extremely clearly not at all with lgbt ones. 

the end but post script since i brought up orientation modifiers: perhaps it isn’t my place to say, but i don’t think that microlabels are very healthy and that it would make more sense for the ace community to work on expanding the idea of what sexuality is than to try to create a label to describe every single person’s experience of their sexuality. not that i think you should necessarily kick grey ace people out of the aspec community or that they’re not valid or whatever, but that perhaps it makes more sense to say that some people experience sexual attraction less frequently, and that’s alright. i don’t know.  i spent sophomore year of high school poring over those mogai blogs looking for some new orientation label that would make me go like, oh my god that’s me! and believing that if those labels helped people feel that way they weren’t doing any harm. but what actually finally made me feel like that was expanding my understanding of what attraction is and a better conception of lesbian issues and why i might feel so disconnected from my sexuality and why i might be obsessing over every interaction with a guy looking for signs i was attracted to him but feel super disgusted whenever they exhibited interest in me. i spent so long trying to go like maybe im cupioromantic lithsexual and feeling terrified that that i had such a weird and esoteric sexuality that no one could ever possibly understand enough to be in a relationship with me... like, ok dyke! i know a lot of people have had similar experiences and i don’t think i know a whole ton of people now in college who are still doing that, which makes me think those labels are more harmful than not. 

i guess that’s anecdotal but it’s easier for me to believe that a person could cling to those labels due to internalized homophobia than actually have a new form of sexuality heretofore undiscovered throughout all human history, but that’s just me. and so many of them just sound so unhealthy, like dreadsexual. i really wish people would work on expanding what not being asexual can mean and look like and i dont think there would be this drive to create these labels anymore. even demisexual which i think is probably the most mainstream conditional orientation, i think many people who have never heard of it and are perfectly content not to would describe the way they experience sexuality a similar way and just consider it normal. sexual attraction isn’t necessarily having your nethers set aflame upon first making eye contact with someone, it looks different for every person and it’s alright to just be how you are without making it part of your whole identity.

The End II. this is 2,200 words. if you read this far you’re a fucking mad l- *the academy cuts my mic line while looking directly at the camera like in the office*

[werevulvi]

I feel like I should get deeper into my choice to take on the nonbinary label. Is it based on misogyny? Yes. Absolutely, yes. But a woman simply protecting herself from misogyny is not complicit in the misogyny that she is forced to face. Radical feminists should know that, I think. However, I realise that I may have missed to communicate that clearly. Allow me to try better, and dig deeper into my wounds.

Identifying as nonbinary does give me a sense of relief, a sense of wholeness - a relief to be whoever I want and feel allowed to just exist as my authentic self, free from either fucked up gender stereotype, thgose of both men and women - which might sound good on the surface level... but looking deeper, through my radfem eyes, what it means, is this: Why do I feel like I cannot be my authentic self as a woman, all of a sudden? There we have it, the big bleeding wound in my heart, and that's what I feel a need to elaborate on. I'll stay out of the nonbinary tag this time. This isn't for them. (Although anyone can reblog, comment or give a like.) What do I actually want, for myself, if it wasn't for society? I wish to continue transitioning. I wanna go back on testosterone as I deeply miss it and I'm panicking about my body hair thinning out and decreasing. I do not want to lose it for the world! I'm holding onto every single one of my vanishing hairs, for dear life! At the same time, I still wish to get new boobs. I still miss them sorely and I just need to have those kinda body parts again. I feel broken without boobs, I panic without T. I cannot explain it. It's weird alright, but I don't give a fuck! Without societal imput that's just how I want to look and love looking like. It's just body mods. At core, that's what it is: just body modifications. You know that as radfems - I know it just as well.

I love my body when it's masculinised yet retaining all of my originally female parts, such as curves, breasts and my pussy. That makes me feel very positively connected to my body; so to the point that it makes me feel entirely at peace with that I'm female, and very comfortable with that it makes me a woman. But I cannot be okay with being female if I had to be a traditional looking woman, or even a butch-looking woman. That is not ME, neither of those would be my authentic self. So, my medical transition deeply matters to me, as body mods, and I will not walk away from that. I believe that continuing my medical transition while still honouring my female body and womanhood is what is right for me personally. I understand that there is an issue with the beauty industry affecting me too, but I'm clearly not making myself beautiful for men - nor am I making myself ugly for them. What I'm doing is making myself beautiful for me, in an unconventional way, even though it makes me also ugly for most other lesbians. Can you understand then, from that perspective, how deeply important it is for me, that I willingly make such a sacrifice? (I'm already in a happy lesbian relationship, so maybe you can't, but alright.) I do not believe that I mod myself out of self hate. Not anymore, because I did in the past, and I believe that I can tell the difference between living as a man while actively attempting to escape one's female biology - and living as a male-passing woman while actively honouring my beautifully modified female body. You may think I'm mutilated, but I'd disagree. I am beautiful and my high self-esteem greatly surpasses such rudeness.

Is a heavily tattooed woman self-hating for her mods? I don't know what you may think, but if not, then neither am I with my beard and deep voice and future fake tits. An intentionally virilised (fancy word for masculinised, I like it quite a lot), modified woman is what I am, want to be and remain as. I do not have any "social dysphoria" accompanying my body/sex dysphoria since I recovered from my traumas, and thus I feel no need or wish what so ever to call myself a man, and I feel good calling myself what is true in science: female, girl, woman, she/her, lady, ma'am, miss, etc.

I believe that I have somehow managed, against all odds, with the help of radfems on tumblr... to balance transitioning my dysphoria with being a self-loving biological woman. Thank you for that. So what's the catch? I mentioned misogyny. Well, socially, as a male-passing, yet suspiciously curvy and overtly effeminately styled person - I have effectively lost my right to be a woman outside of radblr. I want you to understand this, especially other radfem's, so please listen carefully if you've got a few minutes, because this is important, as it absolutely has to do with both female oppression as well as trans ideology bullshit (and I'll try not to scream this time, but I can't make any promises, because this is deeply painful and upsetting to me.) Can't women take testosterone and like it and still be women? That's what's so complicated, and I need to be upfront and clear about why. Technically, yes of course that is possible. No one can or should stop women from taking T if they truly want a beard and permanently deep voice, right - but is it possible socially? No, in my experience it is not, and I will now try my best to explain to you what I mean by that, as it's kinda abstract. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, any female person claiming to want those physical features is going to be told that they then cannot be a woman. They are told that is incorrect thinking, that they are a trans man or nonbinary, that they have internalised transphobia or that they are indeed a "cis" woman but confused and should NOT take testosterone, implying that will make her dysphoric if she really is a woman. Because trans ideology says so.

Secondly, living as a male-passing woman who does not want to pass as female, was something that I found to be so difficult in practice that eventually it became too much for me. It isn't dysphoria-inducing, not at all. But it's very, very frustrating and constantly challenging. I can no longer access women's spaces so I have to put up with using the men's including locker rooms, convincing people of my still female sex is next to impossible (even doctors!), other women view me as a threat and an imposter, I'm frequently barred from lesbian spaces unless my girlfriend invites me to them first, I am frequently mistaken for being a poorly passing trans woman, and so on.

I'm effectively forced to either live as a trans woman (which I'd feel is degrading, untrue, and deceptive) or to claim a transmasculine label to at least be able to infer that I'm "afab" - but a WOMAN? No. Woman, in the eyes of society as it is today - cannot be a happily male-passing, dysphoric female. That is deemed an oxymoron. Gender has taken presendency over sex. People assume, wrongfully, that my "gender identity" is woman - and they assume, just as wrongfully, that my sex is male - and they make both those assumptions at once. They then refuse to accept that they are wrong, no matter how hard I have tried to explain it, over and over ad nauseum. I don't even understand why that keeps happening!

Therefore, I've come to the sad conclusion that I'm simply no longer welcome into society as a woman, based on my choice of looks, as I am indeed happily transitioned and do not wish to change what testosterone improved on my body. I completely refuse to. Not to be dramatic, but... I'd rather fucking die. My body is not a property of society. It is MY property. My ONLY true property. And I'll decorate it however I so damn well please. But what can I do about it, being treated like that? Realistically, in actuality, what CAN I possibly do about it? Honestly, not much. I can either suck it up and "admit" to being a man, or I can fight endlessly and keep explaining how I'm really a woman, or choose some kinda middle-road like nonbinary, but I cannot win that fight. Perhaps (hopefully) radical feminism can, but me, as a single, individual person? No, I cannot win that battle. I stand defenseless against a massive army, and that enemy has worn me out. I have essentially lost my right to be a woman, by being my authentic self. That is very, very sad. It scares me, it honestly mortifies me, but I have to deal with it somehow. I can't just slump down and cry about it, no matter how tempting that is.

I do not think that my experience with this is entirely unique. I believe I probably share it with tons of other gnc and/or male-passing women, but I am new to this.

I'm 30 years old, and have only lived as a male-passing woman for one and a half year. I grew up as a typically feminine girl, dysphoric about my sex traits, but never dysphoric about my feminine expression. My gnc mom taught me well, to separate sex from gender expression, and I thus never confused the two as I see sooo many other gnc and trans people do. I do not blame them, because so many people infer that my femininity=woman and my masculinity=man and that the sum of my whimsical androgyny equals nonbinary. But I cannot, do not, WILL NOT and have never in my life... seen it that way. However, big however, I STILL turned out dysphoric about my sex, despite being a happily feminine female, and lesbian at that, and that is something few seem to understand. I get that, I totally do. It's probably rare. Just see for yourself how empty the "dysphoric femme" tag is. Yes, it exists, with a whole whopping three posts. And I struggle to explain it.

It's very hard for me to live as a male-passing woman because it is entirely new for me and I'm struggling to adapt to facing this extreme level of misogyny. I break down from it, I do not know how to handle it. Perhaps most gnc/dysphoric women have lived with that crap since they were young tomboys, but I haven't, because I was never a tomboy. I suppose it will get easier, as much else does, and that is why I'm pretty sure that me using the nonbinary label now is only going to be temporary. Because I do not know how to deal with this. I'm sorry... I'm sorry for breaking down and admitting defeat, I'm so fucking sorry. I just want to be treated with the dignity and respect that I give to others, or at least just an ounce of politeness. So am I actually nonbinary, then, genderwise? No, I am not. Neither my choice of gender roles, nor my androgynous blob of a personality, not even my strange dysphoria is evidence of a nonbinary gender. If that’s how others see it: fine, but I cannot force myself to actually believe that THAT's what makes me nonbinary... No matter how much I keep getting that forced down my throat. All I do is choke on it. What I am is a woman, sex-wise, as I've always stated. Me taking on the nonbinary label is indeed a choice. A reluctant, but very deliberate, active choice.

Problem is that I cannot live authentically while at the same time calling myself what I literally am, without getting brutally punished for it. Yes, I believe the ones to blame for that... are the TRA's. Trans activism slowly changed society to overlook sex in favour of gender. I believe that is why I am being denied my womanhood, because it is based on my invisible sex. If you look clearly female in your day-to-day life, I do not think that you could possibly experience this. To clarify: I do not mind passing as male. In fact I like it quite a lot. What I do mind, is being treated like crap for who I am, and not being believed to be what I am. I had no idea that this would happen upon my detransition. I am shocked, and I am hurt. End notes: I wish that someday I can truly reclaim my womanhood, without having to change my body to fit societal standards, or claim a trans label to dodge the societal standards. I miss my womanhood, and I need it... but it has been snatched from my hands. The enemy won't let me have it back, unless I comply to the rules and (sell my soul to the patriarchy) turn myself into a conventionally attractive barbie doll - and my attempts to reclaim it without complying to those rules, are utterly futile. I am an incorrect female... deprived of my right to be a woman, and it hurts. Man, it hurts sooo bad!

Honestly I don't know what to do about it, but for now I need a breathing break from this constant battle, because my enemy has exhausted me. "Nonbinary" is such a breathing break. It is my retreat, but I will NOT surrender. Someday I will charge back into battle again, and shove down people's throats that I'm damn well a woman regardless of what they think of it. Because this bearded bitch ain't fucking dead yet!!!