#especially in a world that we saw in season 1 was really divided by gender | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

gendercynicalgrantaire · 3 years

Note

A little bit ago I saw you make a comment about how radfems fail to realize there are trans normies. I've been thinking about it and I wanted to ask, other than yourself, do you know very many trans people irl who are normies who don't have any explicitly homophobic or misogynist ideas about gender and sexuality? I know they exist. But I've been disappointed by more than 1 transman who I thought cared about me and respected me as a lesbian when we really got into discussions about sexual orientation. Like I try not to become jaded but its really hard when I have trans friends I trusted for a long time and then they tell me same sex attraction is harmful or that gender roles are innate (ie: "I know I'm not a woman bc I don't vibe with xyz stereotype that I believe is true for every other woman I meet unless she identifies otherwise". I don't think every trans person is a actively toxic or anything but I feel like homophobia and misogyny is so rampant and explicit from the trans community in current year it's really hard not to be jaded as a defense mechanism.

Hi! So I found the post you were talking about. The intention I was trying to communicate wasn’t so much that normie trans people are unproblematic in their views of gender, but more so that there are trans people out in the world just trying to live their lives who aren’t narcissistic manipulators like a lot of internet TRAs might come off as.

When I call trans people “trans normies,” I’m defining that as trans people who are mostly not online and mostly not involved in trans discourse. And trans normies, like other kinds of normie, sadly tend to have some unexamined assumptions about how things work based on the dominant culture they were raised in.

Most of the trans people I know irl fall into one of two categories: the ones I meet at PFLAG meetings or trans-centric spaces, and the very rare ones encountered out in the wild. I’m going to hazard a guess that most trans normies are the latter-- they tend not to run in circles with many other trans people, and they also tend to be more interested in passing to blend in, both of which make them more difficult to find. They, like me, tend not to really run in the “trans community.” And admittedly, it’s even rarer that I meet a visibly trans person in the wild that I grow close enough to that I learn all about their gender philosophy, because I too have internalized assumptions about other trans people’s feelings that make me jaded against them (I’m trying not to fall into the idea that I’m “not like other troons” lol), and I’m trying to work through it to find and see if there are ones who have gender philosophies I can vibe with.

Most trans people whose gender philosophies I have heard, then, are the ones I meet in PFLAG and trans-centric groups. So probably a little less normie, but there are still normies mixed in there. And I’m not gonna lie, some of the ideas I hear make me cringe a little or feel like they would quickly fall apart if poked at. I don’t know if there’s a single trans philosophy out there that’s going to satisfy the gender critical community. But what I can say for trans people is that the vast majority of them that I have met irl believe in the following (paraphrased):

- If someone’s sexuality/dating pool excludes me, that’s their business. It can be a little disheartening knowing how small my dating pool is, but trying to convince people who don’t want to date trans people to date trans people is not a solution. I want a partner who loves me for me, not one who pretends to love me for woke points.

- XYZ stereotype does not mean that someone is a man/woman/nonbinary. (Insert just about anything in the XYZ. The trans and nonbinary people I meet in real life are also some of the most pro-gnc-cis-people people I know.)

- I am consciously aware of how I make cis people uncomfortable, and I make a conscious effort to mitigate that discomfort to the best of my ability while still living authentically and keeping myself safe.

- Cis women can have their own spaces. It doesn’t concern me.

- Obviously there are issues that only impact natal females and ones that only impact natal males.

- I understand that I have the biology of a certain sex. I might be uncomfortable with having a body of that kind, maybe even to the point where I don’t like to use the anatomical terms to describe my body in contexts where I can avoid it, but I’m obviously different from a [cis man/cis woman]. If I didn’t understand that, I wouldn’t be calling myself transgender.

I make these points because of their relationship with gc discourse. It’s inconvenient for gendercrits and radfems to acknowledge that there are trans people who feel this way. It’s even more inconvenient to know that the number of trans people who feel this way is not insignificant and thereby easy to dismiss.

In particular, I want to focus on the second point: stereotypes do not a gender make. Because honestly, most of the trans women at the PFLAG meetings aren’t talking about how they played with dolls as kids or how they just love being expected to wear make-up (often in an effort to pass, because unfortunately our gendered society does turn make-up into a tool for reading as female), and the trans men there run the gamut from hyper-masc to fairly feminine. There are a variety of trans philosophies I’ve listened to that stray away from the idea that simple gender stereotypes make a gender.

More often the story is one of alienation -- alienation from one’s body, from one’s appearance, and/or especially from society. And this alienation usually disappears (or at least fades into background noise) once transition has been undertaken. The trans person in question might not always have a satisfactory explanation for why that is -- and again, I don’t think any explanation fits the radfem/gc ideal -- but it is distinct from the rhetoric “wigs and dresses don’t make you a woman,” “lack of those things doesn’t make you a man,” which trans people are generally well aware of. This is what I hear most often from other trans people regardless of sexuality, mental health history, class, or any other dividing lines that gendercrits like to use to explain trans people away as simple, easily dismissible categories (think Blanchardianism).

Hmm...I hope that answers your question? I know I probably went off the rails there. Again, I can’t claim that trans normies can’t be problematic, or even that most of them aren’t problematic. Most normies in general are problematic because they tend to live less examined lives. But I also know there are trans people out there willing to listen to and calmly discuss the other side of things, especially if their viewpoint is just parroting what they’ve generally heard from the mainstream side of trans discourse.

In that regard, you’ll have the most luck with passing trans people and trans people who’ve been settled into their identity for a while. Non-passing and newly-out trans people tend to be defensive and self-conscious in a way that more seasoned and socially integrated trans people just aren’t. That’s another post in and of itself though. If a trans friend of yours says something along the lines of “I know I'm not a woman bc I don't vibe with xyz stereotype that I believe is true for every other woman I meet unless she identifies otherwise” (if they use that wording -- not sure if that second part is what they actually say or just the implication you’re picking up on, but chances are they don’t think every woman vibes with it and just need that pointed out) but they also seem like a chill person and you feel safe doing so, don’t be afraid to calmly and casually bring up a point of disagreement. It might not be something they fiercely cling to or have even really thought through all that much.

#i also know multiple exclusively-female-attracted trans women who just don't label their sexuality because they know they're not lesbians #so maybe this is just to say that trans people's conceptions of themselves and transgenderism run a really wide spectrum #and there are bound to be ones with bad takes but those takes can't be applied to the whole of trans people #okay i'll stop now lol

3 notes · View notes

go-lookaway · 5 years

Link

I’ve commented before on how Walter White’s corruption influenced what I’m doing here with Davis. Truth be told, I had always kind of disliked how suddenly he was exposed, right as he was about to retire and get away with everything. This chapter takes it a step further. Obtuse as it was, theoretically WW could have guessed the the writing in the book was evidence against him and hidden it better or destroyed it. Davis here... could not possibly have had any idea Wizardmon was showing up... and yet, I couldn’t imagine her exposure going any other way. The ghost just cannonically knew things he shouldn’t have been able to know. Maybe he saw Myotismon possess Owikawa and followed them after that, but how did he know what the Golden Radiance was? If he ever got a chance to show himself to the digidestined, Davis’s goose was cooked.

Of course, he didn’t necessarily have to get that chance.... more on that latter.

TK’s scene here was the last to be finished, on the same night as the Davis one. I had a minor stickup deciding what to have June cook for TK. This chapter was released on thanksgiving on fanfiction.net, because that holiday gave me the answer. I figured a turkey dinner would be thematic for the plurality of readers who would see the chapter that day. Unfortunately, I rushed through editing the chapter to get it released then, resulting in a couple of major mistakes. The first, pertaining to the TK scene, I’ve decided isn’t so bad after-all. TK was originally intended to have a “Wow, Matt is better than I remember him!” moment to parallel Tai’s perception of Davis as Kari. That scene is meant to occur at the same time as the the cannon scene where Matt trolls TK with rotten hyper-spicy food, the contrast to the fancy dinner June is making being deliberate. Of course, TK doesn’t know about that in this continuity, and, given the family reunion that’s happening, he’s probably going to be extremely happy with “Matt” no matter what. I briefly considered retconing the scene after I posted it, but I decided against it.

One retcon decided to go forward with pertains to the other scene. That Upamon and Poromon did not digivole when they cannonically did is deliberate; they are meant to be put at ease by the champion level “Gatomon” volunteering to do it for them. That they would not digivolve at all in that scene, as they did in the original fanfiction.net release, I have decided is problematic. It’s hard to argue that a body stealer isn’t at least as dangerous as a ghost, and danger is the trigger for champion and lower digivolution. More importantly, once Veemon defeats Pegasusmon he otherwise has control of the room, making the decision to flee to the Digital World make a lot less sense. The AO3 release, which should be out within a few hours of this tumblr post, will will have them digivolve to rookie right before Pegususmon is defeated and armor digivolve right after. The fanfiction.net version will be retconed to match this immediately after the AO3 release.

On the subject of mistakes, there are three major ones I regret for the story as a whole.The first two pertain to June. The spelling of her name is the first one. I’ve said before that the dub names are meant to be nicknames for the characters in this continuity, and that elongating “Jun” to “June” doesn’t make sense as a nickname, so I ignored the dub name for her despite using dub names for everyone else. I realized the problem with that during the writing of this chapter. For some reason, I had thought that Joe’s Japanese name was “Jounouchi” as with Joey Wheeler in Yu-Gi-Oh. Reading his wiki article, however, it turns out his original named is just... “Jo.” That does not work as “Joe” for the same reason “June” doesn’t. If I had known that starting the fanfic, I would have either used dub names for everyone or made a similar exception for Jo. As it stand, I’m kind of embarrassed. For what it’s worth, I did get a decent meta joke out of it for Jun’s guesses about his name and nickname.

The second Jun based regret is that I don’t feel I adequately explored her relationship with Tai. In chapters 5 and 6 she is shown to hold him in contempt, implicitly out jealousy for the better relationship he has with Davis. I wish I had done something else with it that between then and now. Chapter 8 would have been a great place for it with Jun staying in Tai’s house as Kari, but it just didn’t fit in with the way I was structuring that chapter. I wish I had made it work, or found somewhere else to explore it. This jealousy is meant to play into her sibling rivalry with Davis, ala her chapter 6 line “Am I not good enough of an older sibling for you?”

Technically, the last big mistake also involves June, but it goes well beyond her. I wish I had handled pronouns with our gender bent people differently. Matt and Kari, I mostly have no regrets with. Despite being gender bent, they still identfity as a boy and a girl receptively. There is a potential complication with how they refer to the digimon though. Renamon said, in Tamers, that digimon are not divided into gender, despite that season using gendered pronouns to refer to digimon. Fusion also latter has digimon reproduce sexually. The latter could be justified by just saying its a different continuity, but there is still the former problem. To reconcile of this, my headcannon is that digimon do possess physical sex, but they do not possess gender identity and just use pronouns matching their sex for convenience. This makes sense to me, especially in the context of gender bender, because it seems like the transformations they go through digivolving ought to enduse more body dysphoria than changing sex would. Taking the Gatomon line as an example, it seems like there dramatically more difference between a puppy, a cat, an angel and a dragon than there is between a man and woman. If digimon experience body dysphoria the way humans do, they would go insane, ergo they don’t experience gender identity as we do either. This is why Veemon is willing to trade up to Gatomon’s body despite the sex difference; he doesn’t care about that one way or the other. Gatomon doesn’t care about being male either, though the many draw backs of a DemiVeemon’s body and this DemiVeemon’s life are more than enough to make her despise being in it anyway. That leads us into Jun and Davis; I had imagined them as having an attitude on gender akin to that of the digimon. I have heard irl people claim to have it, and it gave them the willingness to trade up between the sexes as Veemon. Matt and Kari, on the other hand, are experiencing gender dysphoria in their new bodies to go along with their other troubles.

Unfortunately, none of that is really reflected in how the characters refer to each other... other than Matt and Kari’s dsyphoira anyway. Theoretically, this logic should make for Davis, Jun, and the digimon referring to people by the pronouns of their bodies, but none of them do this. Davis does post-menarche; the symbolism of “becoming a woman” with the first period was to tempting to resist, but honestly that just makes things inconsistent rather than fix them in my mind... I did things the way I did up until then because I feared having my villains renounce their birth gender while their victims cling to it could be seen as transphobic... The more I think on that, though, the less I agree with it, the more ways I can think that I could have addressed it in-universe, and the more problems of that nature that I see with Davis “becoming a woman” as shown.

I’m considering a major retool to address these problems, though I doubt I will do it. I know I’ve said that before about the Chapter 1 retcon, but this would be much more substantial. If nothing else, I won’t touch them tonight.

#digimon #digimon 02 #body swap #body switch #Breaking Bad #corruption #dsyphoria #spoilers

0 notes

njawaidofficial · 6 years

Text

RuPaul’s Version Of LGBT History Erases Decades Of Trans Drag Queens

https://styleveryday.com/2018/03/09/rupauls-version-of-lgbt-history-erases-decades-of-trans-drag-queens/

RuPaul’s Version Of LGBT History Erases Decades Of Trans Drag Queens

The author performing in Brooklyn, New York.

Rebecca Smeyne / Via the culture whore

After yearning to do drag for nearly two decades in hiding, I had my makeup done for the first time at a MAC counter on Fifth Avenue in 2012. I had religiously watched Seasons 1–4 of RuPaul’s Drag Race in secret from inside the closet, and from listening to the queens bicker while they drank cocktails, I learned that a queen just starting out sought out a mother to teach her her skills. So, newly out and proud, I found myself in the chair of a makeup artist to whom a friend had referred me: a giant, shit-talking, off-duty blonde drag queen named Sweetie.

Sweetie had pounds of mascara and permanently limp wrists, and was exactly the kind of gay who’d make my mom grasp my hand and pick up our pace when I was younger, were we to cross paths at the mall. As she painted huge shimmery eyelids on me, she gabbed about her life in New York, about RuPaul “before she was rich,” and the parties of the ’90s. She refused to teach me to glue down my eyebrows like I’d seen the girls on Drag Race do. By the time she got to my lips, I realized I was in the presence of New York drag royalty.

Before she finished, Sweetie leaned close to tell me that she knew about private clubs where girls like us could meet gentlemen who love us. Startled, I told her that I just wanted to do drag, not BE a woman.

“Honey, all of us want to BE women,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye and waving a powder brush at me like a magic wand, “or none of us would do this shit.”

That day, getting my makeup done by the late legend, I took my first glimpse into the world of drag as it exists outside of the Drag Race studio: one that predates Drag Race and the mainstream visibility of the art form by generations.

Those of us who work in drag were not surprised to hear RuPaul’s recent comments about trans inclusion (or in this case, exclusion) on Drag Race. In an interview with the Guardian this past weekend, she said that Peppermint, a trans woman and fan favorite who competed in (and nearly won) Season 9, had been allowed on Drag Race because she “didn’t get breast implants until after she left our show; she was identifying as a woman, but she hadn’t really transitioned. … You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body.” To imply that a trans woman isn’t really a woman until she has breast implants is to invoke the same mindset of ignorant conservatives who marginalize and demonize queer people every day.

Contestant Peppermint attends ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’- Season Premiere party on March 7, 2017 in New York City.

Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty Images

As RuPaul’s Drag Race was renewed season after season and its popularity heightened, the girls in New York began to notice that out trans women weren’t making it onto Drag Race — or if they did, it was only by sneaking by casting undetected. Rumors trickled down into the local scenes that being on hormone replacement therapy or having breast implants could disqualify you from getting your golden ticket to Drag Race fame. By the time the show made the jump to VH1 last year, exponentially increasing its audience, it was clear to us that Drag Race was choosing a specific and incomplete image of the art form to uphold. The drag queens favored most on the show weren’t only glamorous like RuPaul, witty like RuPaul, and meticulous like RuPaul — they were cis like RuPaul.

RuPaul is no stranger to backlash from the trans community. The show’s sixth season featured a mini challenge called “Shemale or Female,” in which RuPaul instructed the contestants to guess by looking at images of body parts whether those parts belonged to “a biological woman, or a psychological woman.” However, it wasn’t until RuPaul’s comments to the Guardian — which she later doubled down on in a tweet: “You can take performance enhancing drugs and still be an athlete, just not in the Olympics” — that she proved herself an outright transphobe. The ensuing backlash, which prompted responses from Peppermint and other Drag Race alums, led Ru to post a series of half-assed apologies.

As an art form, drag is a notoriously futile venture, but it also leads a lot of girls like me to discover our identities.

The problems with RuPaul’s comments are obvious and conspicuous. She told the Guardian that “drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.” Implying that men are capable of rejecting masculinity in a way that women are not is nearsighted to say the least, and her mention of “danger” is especially repulsive at a time when queer and trans women are raped and murdered in record numbers with every passing year. In what ways are drag queens who transform temporarily into women giving more of an “f-you to male-dominated culture” than trans women when they can at any time return to their place of privilege and power as men living in a patriarchal world?

If RuPaul sees her show as the Olympics of drag, she is thereby dangling her renown and prize money just out of reach of those she deems unworthy. Appearing on Drag Race has in fact become the only way to make a viable living off of drag. As an art form, drag is a notoriously futile venture, but it also leads a lot of girls like me to discover our identities. That’s what makes it especially frustrating that American trans women have been more or less disqualified from appearing at the Olympics — considering most of us who work in drag are about $100,000 away from feeling at home in our bodies.

RuPaul rose to prominence in drag at a time when there was less of a clear distinction between what constitutes a drag queen and a trans woman. Before the show made drag go mainstream, many drag queens’ lives involved a lot of staying home, their heads wrapped, gigantic sunglasses shrouding their bare faces, biding their time until their next chance to put on 30 pounds of hair and 50 pounds of jewels and own the fucking universe. It didn’t really matter how drag queens presented otherwise, or who their partners were, or even their birth names.

Dorian Corey, of posthumous Paris is Burning fame, was a Goddess in the ballroom, her gowns festooned with feathers and 10-foot trains. Without an adoring crowd hanging on her every move, she was somewhat of a hermit, her only daylight coming from the bulbs of her vanity mirror, and with only cats or visitors (or eventually filmmakers) to keep her company. In the decades preceding Drag Race, queens like Corey were only renowned for their feminine presentations, and to most people they would never be known as anything other than “she.”

Before the internet, you wouldn’t be able to see a queen out of drag unless you knew her intimately; as a fan, all you’d know about her would be confined to what she presented at gigs. If you were to ask a performer about her gender identity, you wouldn’t investigate any further than simply asking, “are you full-time?” Hell, Ru herself wasn’t seen out of drag onscreen until a decade after she’d achieved mainstream fame and commercial success, in 1999’s But I’m a Cheerleader.

RuPaul in But I’m A Cheerleader.

Lionsgate

This is what we mean when we say that trans women were the pioneers of drag. Before the advent of Drag Race, participating in drag required you to sacrifice your manhood entirely, whereas nowadays we have a rich vocabulary when it comes to queer and trans identities and their associated expressions. The categories of what we now call “drag queens” or “trans women” weren’t so clearly divided, because the spotlight of the stage bore witness to all. For instance, drag legend Lady Bunny would respond with a high-pitched giggle if you called her transgender, but you will never, ever see her out of drag. Legendary women like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, pioneers of the LGBT rights movement, would likely identify as trans women today, but identified fiercely as drag queens in the ’60s and ’70s. At a time when LGBT people were fighting just to exist, it made no sense to split wig hairs.

Here’s the gag: Most straight people still can’t see the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman. They see effeminate gay men, drag queens, and trans women — all “faggots.” In a straight man’s world, there’s no need to tell us apart.

At a time when LGBT people were fighting just to exist, it made no sense to split wig hairs.

Because drag used to be totally inaccessible to the outside world, and is therefore missing from historical narratives of pop culture, RuPaul now represents our entire diverse community to the straight people willing to listen. Those with an open mind, who don’t think we’re all condemned to hell, will therefore see the entire spectrum of femme presentation through the lens of his show. By virtue of her decades of celebrity, RuPaul holds an immense amount of power. She’s not only exposing us to the public who had no prior access or insight into our world; she is literally writing LGBT history.

.RuPaul’s Drag Race’s rising popularity over the past 10 years has coincided with the evolution of social media and the rise of online queer discourse. For the first time, we see the 360 degree view of a drag queen’s life: every detail of their mundane off-duty lives. As marginalized queer people found each other on the internet, so arose the language to categorize our identities — who is a woman, who is a man, who’s in between, and who’s outside. We began to talk about a drag queen “as a boy” once we saw them in the workroom, or saw selfies of them out of drag on our feeds.

Drag queens used to have to exchange their sexuality for relative celebrity. At the clubs where they worked, they belonged onstage, not commingling or cruising amongst the commoners. But in large part thanks to Drag Race, queens can now be considered gay men with viable capital in the sexual marketplace. When preparing to compete, they don’t only plan glam looks for the runway, but also pack cute outfits for their male presentations during the interview and workroom scenes that comprise most of the show. Drag queens aren’t quite queens anymore — they’ve stepped down from the throne to become common gay men who have the impulse and the skills to transform their bodies temporarily into women. The notion that a drag queen is actually a man is one that RuPaul created and established in the zeitgeist with her career, and later with her show.

Now, by drawing a distinction between queens based only on whether the silicone bags hanging from their chests are on the outside or inside of their bodies — and by withholding her spotlight from people who literally aren’t man enough — RuPaul is not only erasing present-day trans queens from the history of drag, but also abandoning the decades-long deification of drag queens into honorary womanhood regardless of their everyday presentation.

It’s not just that the the fame and success that comes to a queen after appearing on Drag Race is being withheld from trans women who want their slice of the pie. It’s that trans women baked the pie, and RuPaul sold it to straight people.

Ru would probably be the first to agree that the primary tenet of drag is turning gender into a fart joke. Her most famous aphorism, after all, is that “we’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.” And yet somehow she can’t see that the diversity among drag performers — our different bodies, different lifestyles, different spirits — is what gives depth and breadth to our creed. To quote the reigning queen of Season 9, Sasha Velour: “That’s the real world of drag, like it or not.” The gender binary exists to enforce patriarchy and shackle queer people. By abiding by that binary so strictly in casting for the majority-boys’ club that is Drag Race, RuPaul purposefully erases the world she came from: a world that doesn’t categorize queens based on their body parts, and one where fierce trans women have always existed. ●

0 notes