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#sometimes cis people will b like
shojoboy · 9 months
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Being Bisexual is sooo cool we can be any gender and be attracted to any gender any amount, we lovvvvve women and nonbinary people and men and even if we only ever date or fuck one of those we are still Bisexual. We aren't "half straight, half gay", because that's not how sexuality works. Sometimes it feels like we don't have our own community but tbh that's because, the Gay community? We in there. The Lesbian community? We in there. Trans community??? We in there!!!!!!!!!!!! Yippee!!!!!
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man i just realized how much people going "(insert company) or (insert game) is so gay and progressive!!!" pisses me off
#because half the time its like. not as good as people make it out to be#and people will chalk up every criticism of the game as people being homophobic because its such a gay series#hey guys i dont think gearbox is actually all that progressive.#i think the company that openly misgenders their nonbinary character in multiple official materials (on twitter. the lore book. the comic#on the b/l3 website) and claimed a character was nonbinary only to backtrack and say theyre cis despite the literal ceo saying they were nb#and them saying a character was a lesbian only to backtrack and for their best trans rep be a recolored lilith model they made an angry#brown trans man and the fact they keep ignoring their wlw and focus almost solely on mlm couples in these games is not great#im so tired of seeing everyone in a 6 mile radius in that fandom suck gearbox's dick and act like b/lands is the epitome of gay rep#and that if you dont like the series youre homophobic#seeing people claim that gearbox is the only company that deserves its gay pride icon during pride month makes my blood boil#especially when a lot of the lgbt rep is..... bad or it got retconned#i promise you people who dont like b/orderlands arent moustache twirling evil homophobes the series just kind of sucks sometimes#theres genuine shit thats bad and stuff thats badly written and theres bad gameplay mechanics#if i ever have to see people claim that people only dislike b/orderlands because of how queer it is again i think i'll blow up#im not even gonna complain abt ANOTHER video game series that a lot of people say is soooo queer because like. i also have a lot of#opinions on that and i dont wanna get launched into orbit by someone
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anothera · 10 months
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Julia Shaw's book on bisexuality is a treasure and managed to capture how I (cis-girlie) still feel queer with my gender in a way i had never thought about it
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[ID: "I think the most important thing anyone should understand about bisexual women is that it's not just bisexual in terms of what you like, it's also bisexual in terms of who you are. Sometimes I feel like a boy, sometimes I feel like a girl. And I can't describe it more than that. Sometimes I feel really macho, sometimes I feel as feminine as Scarlett O'Hara. You know, it just changes from day to day and maybe it's partly a mood swing can affect it, but honestly, like, I mean sometimes I'll be dressed in combat fatigues, the next day I'll be wearing like a mini-dress and high heels."
This is a confusing feeling. It is not literally feeling that you are another gender, at least not for me. It's more that I feel like I'm a mix of what society has decided are masculine and feminine characteristics. My sexual attraction and gender both work this way, with fluctuating fondness, and not necessarily linked to one another. Some days I only have eyes for women and other feminine-looking humans, but I also feel and dress like an incredibly feminine woman... like our feminine softness could combine and become the most powerful thing in the universe. Other days I feel and dress masculine, and even though I'm partnered with a man that feeling is not one of homosexuality. Other days still, when I'm snuggled into my partner, I have an image of us as a stereotypical heteronormative couple from a romantic comedy.
Consistent with this, Rosie Nelson found that bisexual people see gender and sexuality as connected. Nelson, who identifies as a 'bisexual non-binary femme', specifically concluded from their research that 'Plurisexuals see their hender and sexuality as connected, and many reference the way they transform outfits and impressions through feminization and masculinization.' This is exactly what I do when I play with my look. It can be hard to make the complexity of what I'm feeling translate into something that others can see.]
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feralhogs · 1 year
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3liza · 10 months
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i get asked a lot if certain breast sizes or shapes are "normal" and let me tell you right now, the answer is basically always "yes"!
we only see one shape of breasts on tv (think C-D cup "HBO titties") and maybe two or three types in porn if you see porn, and maybe 3-4 types in contemporary and historical art. and this sucks because it makes everyone else feel like their boobs are weird. they're probably not weird.
because breasts are made mostly of fat, which is squishy and only partially influenced by muscle and skeletal attachments, they can be basically any size or shape, and they CHANGE more or less constantly throughout your life. they are sensitive to hormonal, environmental, body compositional and pressure-based influences. they will continue to change size and shape until you die. i have a mild collagen disorder which makes me stretchier than other people in some ways and my breasts will change shape visibly if i don't wear a bra for a day. some people's breasts are so dense they wouldnt move at all even if you kept them squished or pulled for many hours at a time. human fat and skin is SO malleable and variable and it's a big reason we're such an interesting-looking species.
this link is a little website with some pictures of SOME different shapes of breasts, and for as varied as it is, it's actually still very limited in scope. it's focused on helping people find bras that fit but you can ignore that part if you want and just get an idea of some different shapes boobs can be, in a non-porn and non-medical context. they can be even more shapes than this. this gallery is intentionally in b&w and has been contrast-balanced to make everyone about the same color but different breast shapes are strongly genetic and will pop up in different locales and lineages. your boobs will often resemble those of your relatives (but not always).
it takes a long time for breasts to reach their "adult" shape, and it happens closer to about age 25-27 for many people than 18-20. a lot of medical literature will repeat the claim that women are "physically mature" by the age of 15-18, and this just isn't really true. if you are on HRT, please keep in mind that the average cis woman can start experiencing hormonal puberty when she's 9-12, and major changes can keep occurring until she's 25 or older. I'm AFAB, and my boobs went through a final growth change when i was 27! and i started the first stages of puberty (way before my first period, which is called "menarche" [men-ARK-ee]) when i was about 9. that's not outside the bounds of normalcy at all, average age of first period is about 12.5 years, and puberty itself starts a few years before that.
some of the later Tanner stages are related to gravity as well as fat accumulation, and sometimes they require a certain period of time to "settle" the very high, pointy puberty breasts down into more adult breast shapes. this takes time. the timelines doctors give HRT patients about breast growth are really weird to me as someone who grew breasts myself. sometimes i see people on HRT get worried about their breast growth not being big enough or adult enough after only a couple years, when the average cis woman's breasts take much longer than that (remember: started age 9, finished age 27!!) to mature and settle, and i just want people to not worry too much. i post about this regularly because i want people to see it. I've heard from many trans women that their actual doctors told them that they would get most or all of their breast growth within 2-3 years. that's not true for everyone, possibly for most people.
and by the way, breasts are almost never perfectly symmetrical. they are sisters, not twins. most people have one breast that's visibly larger if you look closely, and often even if you don't look closely. many people have one breast that's even a cup size larger, or more. some people only grow one breast at all, and don't have fat tissue on the other side. sometimes you start with mostly-matched boobs but they become different over time. all these situations are "normal", in that they occur to many many people and are almost never related to health problems or functional concerns.
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pearwaldorf · 25 days
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I have been trying to write this on and off for a while. I figure the second anniversary of the show is as fine an occasion as any to shove it out into the world. It is not everything I want to say about it, but I think the important bits are there.
It is a human impulse to be seen. To be told, through art, you are not alone. It is universal, but of special importance to people who are not well-represented in media (i.e. everybody who isn’t cis, white, able-bodied, skinny, and conventionally attractive).   
This show speaks to me as a queer person who figured things out later than most of my peers. (Not quite as late as Ed and Stede but not terribly far off either.) It’s not super common to see queer media address this, and I didn’t realize how much I needed that reassurance until I got it. That it’s okay to find these things any time in your life. To be told “A queer is never late, they’re always fashionably on-time.” 
They’re not my first canon queer ship. But they are the first ones where I knew it was true from the get-go. Multiple people assured me this was the case. And yet, I still didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own two eyes. This experience is not unusual for fans around my age.  
After I finished up season one, I laid in bed and cried. It’s not something I thought would affect me so much, but it feels like a weight I’d carried so long I didn’t realize it wasn’t supposed to be part of me is gone.
One of the reasons people unfamiliar with the fandom seem to think it’s absolutely crazy (which some of it is, to be fair, but every fandom has that) is the way fans of the show get extremely super intense about it. It took me a few weeks to realize this is a trauma response. I’m not even sure “trauma” is the right word. It doesn’t interfere with my day to day function, but it lasted for years. Decades. So it was definitely something that fucked me up. And in the way you can only start to see something as you’re moving past it, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get my head around this. (I don’t know if I have anything to say about it yet. Maybe I need more time to sit with it.)
I know this sounds contrary, but I’m really glad David Jenkins does not come from fandom. Sometimes it’s good to know where a line is, and others it’s better to not know there’s a line at all. And this is, sad to say, remarkable to somebody who has had to deal with this for so long. With so many writers and showrunners aware of the line, and getting right up next to it, but never crossing it.
Imagine doing a show with a queer romance and not understanding why this was received with such emotion and fervor, because it’s just two people in love right? What blissful ignorance that this needed to be explained to him! And then he listened to people’s experiences with queerbaiting, and went “Oh my god you thought I was going to do WHAT?” And then you go “Huh. That is really fucked up.” 
The problem with being told something enough, even though you know it’s wrong, is you start to believe it regardless. All the excuses and hedging. It’s so very difficult to do they tell us, when we hear from queer creators how they had fight tooth and nail to make it as gay as it already was. 
And then comes Jenks, just yeeting it out there: majority queer and (not and/or. and) POC cast, an openly non-binary person playing an openly non-binary character. The ability to not have to make one queer (and/or) POC character speak for everybody, so you can inject a tiny bit of nuance into the conversation. The way you can tell more kinds of stories, like the one where the smol angry internalized homophobe comes into his own with the support of a queer community, even though he was a giant fucking asshole to them before.
So many people were like “You can just DO that? It’s really that easy?” And wasn’t that a fucking Situation, to have that curtain pulled aside. What next? Majority POC casts with stories about POC written by POC? Absolute madness. (Please please watch The Brothers Sun on Netflix. It’s so fucking good.) 
And people will scoff and say “Of course a cishet(?) white man would be able to get this pushed through.” But do they usually? The thing I don’t think people understand about allies is they use their privilege to wedge the door open. You still have to do the work to get through, but at least you have a place to start. And it really fucking matters.
The press keeps trying to tell me The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin is the OFMD substitute we need while we float in the gravy basket. I’m sure it’s a perfectly fine show, but I don’t know who has watched OFMD and decided the itch we needed scratched was anachronistic historical comedy.
I want stories written by people that reflect their lived experiences, with actors and crew committed to bringing that to life. And I would like streamers and studios to commit to giving them a chance, and marketing them properly so people know they exist. 
You can keep people satisficed with scraps for only so long. At some point, somebody is going to give them a whole seven course dinner and people will wonder why they’ve been putting up with starving this entire time.
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radkindoffeminist · 1 year
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Things I really want TRAs to get through their fucking skulls.
B*tch, c*nt, and wh*re are misogynistic slurs. This isn’t something I am ever going to debate. These are derogatory terms used specifically against women and using them against women doesn’t make them less of a slur. Using them because ‘in some places c*nt isn’t a slur’ doesn’t make them less of a slur. Also, I’m literally fucking British and have lived in Scotland for some years now so before you start with the whole ‘but in some places it’s completely normalised and used commonly’: it’s not. I have heard some men use it to insult their friends, but it’s not thrown around constantly and is still typically used to degrade women.
R*tard is an ableist slur which should also never be used. (And, to be honest, lots of radfems need to learn this one too.)
We don’t want trans people dead. We don’t want them to struggle and be without help. We just disagree on the help that they should get. You think the only way to help them is to validate their gender and help them to change their entire body in the hope that might make them feel better. We think that mental health support designed to help them cope with their body issues is a much more effective form of support. No situation involves killing them or letting them all commit suicide. We want those who are genuinely struggling to get help.
Slight caveat to the point above: the males who fetishise womanhood and being a lesbian and who aren’t struggling with their body and their identity but just get off to being in a dress and want lesbians to fuck them? They don’t deserve help. They’re pornsick men. But the ones who really are struggling and just trying to get by do need help.
Your community is homophobic as shit. Saying that it’s just a ‘small minority’ who support genital preferences and say rejecting trans people is transphobic and call lesbians TERFs for not liking dick does not fix the problem and only serves to diminish what those who have been at the receiving end of this hateful and homophobic rhetoric have been through. You need to start speaking up against this rhetoric and telling people that it’s not fucking okay. You need to start taking a stand anytime someone says lesbians need to learn to like (girl)dick or to have a sexless relationship with a trans woman to be inclusive or uses the term genital preference (certainly if they’re saying it’s wrong/that people can learn to get over a ‘preference’; but even saying that it’s okay is homophobic because an inherent sexuality is not a preference).
Your community is misogynistic. Even ignoring the fact that the idea that trans women are women and that they know exactly what womanhood is like is misogynistic in and of itself, trans ideology is deeply misogynistic. It’s not okay to use misogynistic slurs, even against women you don’t like. It’s not okay to send rape threats to women, even ones you don’t like. It’s deeply misogynistic to blame all transphobia on TERFs when it’s men who are typically in charge of laws being changed and men who are the ones going around assaulting and mustering trans women. And it’s deeply misogynistic to tell women to get the fuck over themselves and learn to deal with having trans women in their spaces. Women built female spaces for a reason and you are completely ignoring our sex-based oppression which is deeply misogynistic.
Oh, and trans inclusive language? That’s misogynistic to. Forcing women to refer to themselves by their organs and functions especially when women have been seen as little more than their organs/reproductive abilities; making this language completely inaccessible to many women, especially those who speak English as a second language; forcing this language almost exclusively on women while men are still called men (or sometimes just cis men to be a little more specific); and telling any woman who has a problem with it, regardless of their reasoning, to get over themselves? That’s all deeply misogynistic.
Self-ID will be dangerous. I don’t care what stupid reasoning you come up with it not being dangerous because it will be. Men have and will continue to pretend to be women to access those spaces and creep on women because self-ID means that all they have to do is claim that they’re a woman and suddenly it’s transphobic for them to not be allowed to enter. There is no ‘you can tell the difference’ because it doesn’t matter what your personal opinion of that person is: if they say that they are a woman, they have to be allowed into women’s spaces and creepy men will abuse that. (And, no, you can’t argue that trans women ‘have always used women’s spaces and it’s been fine’ because we both know that we live in a different time now. It’s no long a very, very small number of trans people who genuinely tried their hardest to pass as the opposite sex. So unless you’re happy to exclude non-transitioning and non-passing trans people from the spaces which match their ‘gender’, these are the only options.)
Keeping spaces sex-segregated is the only viable alternative to self-ID for most public spaces. I’m happy to hear any ideas of how you’re going to make sure that only trans women can access women’s spaces and that cis men will never be able abuse self-ID to get in, but I don’t think such a solution exists. Therefore, I will continue to defend these spaces being sex-segregated because that’s the best way to ensure that the women in these spaces are safe from the abuses of males.
Continuing to scream that we’re so worried about sharing spaces with trans women ignores what you’re actually asking for in regards to self-ID. As above, literally any person will be able to say ‘I’m a woman’ and access these spaces so while you may focus on the ‘genuine’ trans women who just want to use the bathroom and be more comfortable than they would be in the male spaces, we worried about every single male abusing the existence of self-ID in order to abuse women. Remember what self-ID is: anyone can identify as any gender at any time just by claiming that they are that gender.
‘You shouldn’t be scared of public bathrooms because the bathroom in your home is gender neutral’ is the stupidest fucking argument. Like, I’m sorry, but how fucking idiotic do you have to be to think that comparing a private and public space is not only a good idea but will also support your point? You share a bathroom in your house with people you choose to live with and invite over; you share a public bathroom with strangers. Do you not understand that people can be comfortable sharing a space with family and friends, but uncomfortable sharing with literal fucking strangers who don’t always have the best intentions???
Saying women are adult human females or that they have vaginas does not reduce women down to their organs and you are ignorant as shit is you continue to repeat this lie. Reducing someone to their organs (or any other feature) means that you think the only important/significant thing about them, that you view them as being only of value because of this feature. You know like conservatives saying that women are only valuable/useful for sex and giving birth to children? That’s what reducing women to their organs really means. Stating the common characteristic shared by a certain group does not mean you view the whole group as being valued for that one thing. It’s why no one says that lesbians are female homosexuals reduces lesbians to their sexuality: because, in this case, we recognise that we are stating the shared characteristic that lesbians have.
Radfems don’t believe in gender as a concept. If you’re talking about how radfems believe sex = gender then your argument is already flawed. If you’re talking about radfems believing in gender in any way then your argument is already flawed. We believe in the existence of biological sex and recognise its impact on people in current society, fighting for rights of women who are discriminated against on the basis of their sex. We use the words women and girls which describe people of the female sex based upon their age: adults are women and minors are girls. Men and boys work similarly. These terms are therefore sex-based, not gendered/gender-based. We believe that, functionally, gender is a set of misogynistic stereotypes which tells people (though especially women) how they are supposed to act and serves no purpose in society other than to make people continually question themselves and force people into little boxes. We believe that TRAs and conservatives have gone two different ways with gender and both are harmful: conservatives telling people that they must follow gender roles based on their biological sex and TRAs telling people to identify with a gender based upon what gender roles they like/take up.
Define woman. Please. All we want is a coherent definition of woman which doesn’t rely on stereotypes, debunked brain sex, circular reasoning, or calling it ‘a feeling’. No one has ever been able to give us a coherent definition.
Yeah, brain sex has been debunked after some fucking massive studies into it. Turns out, it was always rooted in misogyny and most of the previous studies were basically just confirmation bias to ‘prove’ that men and women are ‘wired differently’ to give a scientific foundation to all the misogynistic stereotypes surrounding women. Once you account for brain size, we’re really not all that different after all. So no, a trans woman cannot just be born with a female brain; a trans man cannot just be born with a male brain. No such thing exists.
Which argument do you want: there is absolutely no difference between cis and trans people and therefore many people have probably had crushes on trans people without knowing it OR trans people are in danger of being abused/raped/murdered specifically because they’re trans? Because the first argument would suggest that trans people could never be targeted for being trans because people will always see them as their chosen gender and the only people who would know that they’re trans is people that they’ve told but the latter point means trans people are targeted because people can see that they’re trans and therefore many/most trans people don’t pass and so it’s unlikely that people have had all these crushes on trans people because it’s fairly obvious that they’re trans? Because I’m willing to admit that some trans people really do pass and I would not know that they’re trans unless directly told, but the percentage who pass that well is minuscule and hardly representative of all trans people.
Your community is racist. Stop leaning on the whole ‘black women had their womanhood denied from them like trans women are’. Black women weren’t seen as women because they were seen as less than human; they were still viewed as female which is why they were raped and forced through pregnancies. Stop saying that attributes we say are more likely to be found in men are more commonly found in black women therefore we see black women as men. That’s an argument used in bad faith and you know it. Like please learn the difference between ‘more commonly found’ and ‘exclusively found’.
Your community is intersexist. Intersex people are not pawns to be used in your argument. Like 0.1% of the population having a condition which genuinely makes their biological sex more complicated than male or female does not disprove the sex binary and, if anything, the fact that these people struggle with many health problems and are typically infertile goes to show that the sex binary does exist. Moreover, if gender is completely different from sex then conditions which make your biological sex complicated/mixed should say nothing about gender. (And yes, I said 0.1% of the population even though intersex conditions occur at a higher rate than that because most intersex conditions don’t make your sex more complicated than male or female so only a small percentage of intersex conditions overall make people’s biological sex complicated.)
Shut the fuck about PCOS. My condition is not to be used in your arguments. Radfems have never used my condition against me or called me less of a woman for it, so you don’t get to say I’m less female for it either or tell me that you somehow know that radfems see PCOS sufferers that way. You’re the one who abused the existence of my condition and implies that I’m not fully female to make some backwards arguments. You’re the ones abusing the existence of my condition.
Going one step further than PCOS, shut up about women without a uterus or ovaries or post-menopausal women. We know they’re fucking women, dipshits. They’re still adult human females, just ones who are older, went through some trauma which resulted in surgical removal of their sex organs, or had a developmental issue in utero which resulted in them not developing certain organs. (See that I said developmental issue? Because you know what we call people who didn’t grow a uterus but that’s not a problem/issue at all? Men.)
A lot of your views of gender are based on stereotypes. A lot more than you’re willing to admit. You can try to pretend that you’re above all the stereotypes and I’m certain that you genuinely believe that you are, but no one has been able to define woman without referring to brain sex (which is normally just down to stereotypes and debunked anyway) or just straight up stereotypes. And so many people list various stereotypes as one of the reasons they knew that they were trans or non-binary. Even when people say that they don’t ‘feel connected to womanhood’ or whatever as a reason why they’re NB, it’s often because they’re androgynous or not completely feminine 100% of the time. They won’t ever admit that as being the reason, but you can see from how they speak about womanhood and their disconnect to it that it’s true.
Not everything is a fucking dog whistle! A dogwhistle is an inconspicuous term/phrase/symbol which a group uses and only those who are within the group recognise. Like how 88 is a white supremacist number because H is the 8th letter of the alphabet so it’s HH which is Heil Hitler or how ‘I just want the trains to run on time’ is a fascist phrase because it refers to people saying that Mussolini was bad but at least he got the trains to run on time. The only thing that might be considered a radfem dog whistle is TIM/TIF, not because it has a secret double meaning that only we recognise, but because it’s a term which radfems typically use and often isn’t understood outside of radfem circles. It stands for Trans Identified Male/Female and we mean exactly that. We don’t have things that secretly mean that trans people should die. We say exactly what we mean but you just choose to believe the secret meaning you made up over what we are directly telling you, probably because ‘I hate all trans people and I want them to all die’ isn’t something we say.
Saying that we only care about what genitals we have is a simplification of our views which is basically incorrect and used to ignore all our actual issues while making us out to look like creeps. Do you also not understand the homophobic history behind it? Being used against gay people to ask why they were so obsessed with what genitals someone had and why they couldn’t be with the opposite sex? (I’ll answer that: of course you don’t give a shit because you don’t care about homophobia or using homophobic rhetoric which supports your ideology.) We don’t actually care about if someone has a dick or vagina. We care about the fact that the dick havers were raised with male socialisation and that means that they experience life differently from us. We care about the fact that the penis owners are much more likely to abuse women and that far too many will do whatever it takes to be around vulnerable women so that they can abuse them. We care about the fact that we have faced specific issues because we have vaginas both directly (eg: menstruation and childbirth) and indirectly (eg: period stigma, medical misogyny, catcalling, and other forms of discrimination) and we want spaces away from the very people who uphold this misogynistic system to be able to discuss our issues openly. But you constantly ignore all of these issues and make it out to be just about genitals because you ignore our arguments and want to make it out like we’re fucking idiots.
‘Here’s six women. One of them is a trans woman. Guess who’ Isn’t the argument that you think it is. Firstly, literally no one is saying that trans people cannot pass at all. No one. Of course we understand that SOME trans people do pass really well and we would never be able to differentiate them from actual women. Secondly, just because they appear like women doesn’t make them women. They are still biologically male and hence a man. It really doesn’t matter how feminine or well passing they are; they’re men. Thirdly, it is not representative of all trans people. Yes, some people pass well but the photos you show are almost exclusively of rich models who are wearing heavy makeup and who’ve had extensive work done which isn’t accessible to most trans people and you’re basically telling them that if they can’t pass so well then they must not be women. Isn’t that wrong by your own ideology? Fourthly, you really going to do that and then accuse us of saying that women must be feminine? Really? And finally, this is almost always used as a trap against us, hence why we often refuse to respond, but you’re not proving anything. You’re not fighting against any of our arguments; you just think you’re fighting against the whole sexual dimorphism and generally being able to tell women and men apart but being able to generally do something doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptions? Exceptions don’t make the rule.
I’m not here to argue about what I would believe in some theoretical utopia. I’m here to argue about what is happening in reality. I’ve heard the line ‘but would sex be important if we lived in a society which didn’t discriminate against people by their sex/gender aside from when medically necessary?’ way too much. And the answer is no, but we don’t live in that world and that world is not going to exist within my lifetime at the very least, probably not for centuries. We live in a world where women are treated differently because of their sex. We live in a world where period stigma and medical misogyny and catcalling and rape and domestic violence and devaluation of women’s labour all exist, among other deeply misogynistic issues. So me fighting to get people to recognise that sex is an important characteristic and defending it’s legal protections is not because I deeply believe that it should be an important thing, but because the way in which women are treated by society, particularly at the hands of men, shows that we have built a world in which someone’s sex is an important characteristic and which will affect many aspect of our lives and hence we need to recognise the reality of the world in which we live in. If the end goal is to build a world in which sex is irrelevant outside of medicine then we first need to recognise why it’s not a reality now and work to fix that rather than pretending that everyone’s going to go along with us and misogyny will completely disappear overnight or arguing the what-ifs of this purely theoretical world that we will not live to see.
Radical feminism is about freeing women from their sex-based oppression and fighting for sex-based rights. As a result, males of all genders all inherently excluded from our feminism. To say that we exclude trans people completely is ignoring the fact that trans men and AFAB non-binary people are included in our fight for women’s rights because, regardless of how they identify, they have and will continue to be oppressed on the basis of their sex and they deserve rights to protect them from that discrimination. Your unhappiness that we’re only including people on the basis of their sex is not my fucking problem. Your unhappiness over trans women specifically not being included is not my fucking problem. Movements which seek to free people from their oppression don’t owe it to you to include everyone, they only have to include the oppressed people that they are fighting for. Your inability to understand that is not my fucking problem and only goes to show your entitlement.
If you don’t argue with me in good faith, don’t except me to argue in good faith either. If you’re going to twist my words, ignore what I say, tell me my sources are wrong with no evidence (or tell me that it’s not a source you like/trust enough), and refuse to respond to many of my points then don’t expect me to do the same. I have tried way too many times to argue in good faith only to end up having my points ignored, my sources dismissed, my words twisted if not just straight up having words put into my mouth. If you are not going to be open minded when you talk to me, don’t expect me to put the time in to explain things to you. If you are rude or dismissive or ignoring me or not asking questions, I’m not going to put in all the mental and emotional labour to explain concepts to you and you have not ‘won’ the argument if I have enough and stop responding. You are not owed our time and effort and you should never expect it just because you claim that you ‘really want to learn’.
Please learn some critical thinking skills. I know radfems say this all the time, but I really mean it. If not to understand radfems more, but to be critical of literally all the information that you absorb. I am tired of explaining to people that just because you don’t like or trust the source (like the Daily Mail) doesn’t mean that the actual story itself is untrue. Newspapers like this are incredibly bias and will publish stories which feed into their specific narrative, but it doesn’t mean that what they publish is actually false? Unless you can actually find a source which can tell me that whatever story I’m showing you never happened/was objectively false, I’m going to keep using it. A story which goes against your beliefs doesn’t make it a fake. Biases in newspapers come from the stories which they choose to publish (or not publish), the details they focus on, and the wording they use. My favourite example of this is a few years back when every newspaper was publishing articles about how the Labour and Tory proposed budgets were never going to work/actually balance because the assumptions they used weren’t right. The Daily Mail, however, published only that Labour’s proposed budget wasn’t going to work. Was the story correct? Yes. Did they purposefully leave out information which therefore gave a bias perspective of the two budgets? Absolutely. If you throw everything out which has any biases (which was a thing a TRA I argued with claimed you should do and said that was what they were taught to do), you would have to throw out literally everything ever written. Instead, it’s significantly better to be critical of what you read and understand what biases are in place and why.
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Man i just.Why do DC fans prioritize trans Jason over the actual representation in his story.Yes yes yes he has tons of transmasc swag so there's this he/they weird goth tboy so true but in CANON,almost all his important people are poc or women and every one of his love interests is BOTH and they're......completely erased in trans Jason headcanons,as if they can't perfectly co-exist
I've seen literally ZERO posts of Duke included in 'All Batboys are trans' in all my years as a Batman fan when he's Jason's favorite brother.No Talia helping out with adjusting to his Lazarus Pit testosterone and surgeries combo when HER FAMILY OWNS IT and when SHE WAS THERE WHEN HE GOT THROWN IN.T4T Jaytemis/Jayrose?Nonexistent and nobody even aknowledges they're a part of his lore while also complaining about lack of female characters because they refuse to seek them out so they can focus on their female coded binary white boy.Him and Stephanie being transmasc/transfem solidarity as found trans siblings?I may as well be dreaming if i ever see get to see it.I can't even enjoy the ones of him with Dick and Damian unless it's just them because it's genuinely so upsetting to see Tim too but no Duke.And i'm not gonna touch on the all loads of smut that claim to be representation but are actually fetishizing with ZERO respect or care for his transmasculinity other than i hope y'all get over that internalized trans*phobia soon and that fuckass transmisogyny with your minus zero inclusion of transfems,be it canon girls or egg headcanons
It literally dosen't matter if you make Jason trans if you erase everything THAT'S ALREADY THERE.As a black trans femme,i don't want your whitewashed bullshit.Jason is already rep-He's poor and mentally ill with ptsd and implied cluster b disorder(s)and with the add on of the afrolatino side of the DC fandom claiming him i'm good with those but y'all erase THAT too by making him rich by Bruce given nepotism baby status and a million other things you've made up because you just can't stomach the thought of some peasent being your fave,you woobify him by downplaying his symptoms so he can be your lil bad boy bf you can fix with your coquettish wiles or whatever the fuck and you don't see him as afrolatino because of a connection and relatability like we do but because you think it adds 'spice' to him or are a snowbunny or both.He's still him if he's cis but he's not himself if dosen't have those traits i said because they're actually fucking canon and believe it or not,canon IS better sometimes and you'd know that if you bothered to read and watch it
Jason's story is NOT a trans metaphor.Jason's story is about grief and poverty and trauma and the poc and women and woc he loves and cherishes and this is why so many of us irl love him.It's not Jason's story if there's no Talia or Dick or Damian or Rose or Artemis or Stephanie or DUKE,who IS a Batboy,who IS a Robin,who IS Jason's FAVORITE,NONE of who are options for him but the people he actively CHOOSES to have as parts of his life.Jason's story is NOT about YOU.Not everything is
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minty-mumbles · 8 months
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I had a fic idea about queering the Chain into oblivion
What if every single member of the chain was a trans man, or at least transmasc in some form. Every single one except for Wild. (Could honestly be any of them, but I made it Wild because I like playing with Wild's gender)
Wild is the last to join the chain. as they so often are. It eventually comes out that Wild is not a trans man?? Apparently he's a cis man?? The rest of the chain are baffled by this, because why would there be an outlier to the pattern?? Seems strange.
Answer: There isn't an outlier, and Wild isn't cis.
Two ways this could play out:
A) Transfem egg but in a funny way.
No angst here. Wild simply hasn't had time to examine their gender closely, what with dying and saving the country and ect. I imagine it would go something like this:
One of the Links: Wild, you're cis?? Wild: Haha, yep! I'm a man. I mean sometimes when I'm in Gerudo town I really like when people see me as a woman, but I mean everybody feels that way!! Just your regular manly man here!!! :) Narrator: What the poor naive dingbat did not realize was that not everyone felt this way
Immediately the other Links are like. "Oh this one is trans. Just in the other direction... makes sense." Either they leave Wild alone and let them figure it out on their own, or (more likely) shenanigans ensue as they try to get Wild to realize that they're a girl
B) Wild is blatantly transfem/nonbinary in some way, and just prefers to pretend to be a man while traveling because it's safer
The rest of the chain is oblivious to this and ignores/dismisses the signs that Wild is a trans girl/has a weird gender.
Wild: *Standing there in a shirt that has "respect trans rights" printed on it in bold letters, is wearing a hat that says trans pride, and a trans flag around her neck like a scarf.* Rest of the chain, somehow missing the she/they pronoun pin on Wild's shirt: Hmmm, is this a cis man ally?
In this second scenario either: Wild knows the rest of the chain thinks they're cis and is utterly amused by it. They want to see how long it takes for the other heroes to realise.
Wild: I'm gay. Warriors: So you like men? Wild: haha no Warriors: I'm confused Wild: Then stay confused :)
OR: Wild has no idea that the chain doesn't know. They think that the chain calling them he/him pronouns is simply the others supporting their decision to pretend to be a man while traveling. Wild made an offhand comment about being trans shortly after they joined the chain, and assumed that tipped the others off. In reality, that comment only made the rest of the chain wonder why a cis man would have such intimate knowledge about the trans experience.
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wof-reworked · 2 months
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ok I can't stop thinking about the jade winglet, here's my gender hcs for all of them
Moonwatcher - she/they (nonbinary)
I feel like this is fun bc rn (in canon) her gender is just "anxiety" but like,,, one day in the future she gets to actually play around with it
like she captures a very specific type of person I've met who you go "oh I mean I know she's gay but she's probably cis..." and then you have like one real convo and find out they're like not only nonbinary but better at it then you
I think she should get to be butch when she's older. I think she deserves being a) massive compared to her two twink boyfriends and b) gnc as shit
Kinkajou- any/all (genderfluid +transfem)
Kinkajou strikes me as being like. totally ambivalent to gender. Kinkajou changes her pronouns based on how the fruit he ate for breakfast makes him feel. Kinkajou is better than you
I think she was like staunchly using she/her for a while bc it just felt right and like changes pronouns situationally- Rainwing village is she/her, Jade Academy is any/all, close friends it varies, etc etc
Qibli- he/they (transmasc)
Qibli's just always kind of known who he is, and has been like. pretty contentedly in his corner for a while. I think it's like- a pillar of stability for him of like "at least I know I'm (x)"
Proximity to Moonwatcher puts the they/them in there bc I think it's nice when ppl get more comfortable so they start branching out a lil bit :> Qibli has like. guy who says "he/they" because he doesn't mind they/them and wants his friends to feel supported y'know
Winter- he/him (cis + gnc)
Look I feel bad making him one of like. two cis ppl at JMA but like I think it's funny if he's cis but inflicts a status effect of gender envy on every trans person in his proximity
guy who does makeup flawlessly because "it's fun" and decimates your sense of identity as you wonder why the fuck god gave these gifts to a man
extra funny for the fact that as a dragonet he gets offended by the implication he's pretty. he gets over it eventually I think
Turtle- she/her or he/she/they (transwoman/trans)
See here. Otherwise I think she's like trans and this could go in like. any fucking direction ngl
transmasc turtle??? hell yeah !!! transfem turtle??? hell yeah !!! gender is whatever Turtle has going on and god knows if she knows it
last egg to crack bc Turtle is immune to self reflection that isn't anxiety and self loathing
"Haha everyone hates how other people refer to them and their gender what do you mean? :)" (entire jade winglet: cringing with worry)
Umber- he/him (cis)
cis and a lil insecure about it but like. he's just nice :)
he's like experimented with pronouns and gender and found none of them really stuck so like. cis+. cis (extended dlc). you know what I mean I hope
gonna be honest I'm lost for him bc I genuinely forget he was there bc he peaced out so fast. justice for my boy I want to know more !!!!!
I could be persuaded for transman Umber ngl,,, it tempts me,,,,,,
Peril- she/her (trans woman)
On one hand I'm torn bc I think it almost doesn't make sense for her backstory BUT ON THE OTHER HAND the idea of Scarlet being supportive of Peril's identity and LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE is hysterical to me
though actually if we wanna get sad,,,, that 100% could be a manipulation tactic of Scarlet. "see I love you I even accept you" etc etc. now I just feel bad man
Peril's also in the same camp of Qibli of knowing this abt herself since she could think and being happy in it. She knows what she's about
BONUS:
Carnelian- she/they/he (transmasc)
Look butch can be a gender and sometimes you're a mean butch skywing idk what to tell you
wish she stayed alive bc her and Moon could've been legendary together. girl who will kill for you vs girl who desperately wants you to do anything else please we talked about this you can't solve your problems with murder
I think Carnelian's true gender is Skywing Patriot and idk how to put that in hc form but this is as best I've got
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communistkenobi · 1 year
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re: several recent discussions I’ve seen on here about the dangers of bio-essentialism, in the authoritarian personality the authors find over and over again that highly prejudiced individuals (ie those most likely to be fascists) believe very strongly in A) innate human differences that cannot be altered or negotiated, and B) their own personal ability to categorise people based on these differences with a high degree of precision. the highly prejudiced individual can “always tell” when they meet someone who belongs to an outgroup. This discussion is usually framed in the context of antisemitism, with prejudiced people insisting they can always tell when someone is Jewish, that it is impossible to hide.
There is also a section in the discussion chapters of the book about low-scoring individuals - people who are strongly anti-prejudice (or anti-antisemites, as the authors sometimes call them). These people are not just non-bigoted, but take a conscious stance against bigotry and respond with anger when asked leading questions by the interviewers about minorities. like, “what do you think about the Jewish problem in America?” is almost always answered with some version of “there is no Jewish problem,” or “it’s a Christian problem, not a Jewish problem,” which is not an answer to the question so much as it is a rejection of the question’s premise. This is contrasted with the responses from highly prejudiced people, who treat this question as if it’s completely reasonable and outline what they think “the problem” is, though they often attach qualifiers to it (“the Jews aren’t all bad”) to temper their bigotry. Which is to say, there is an understanding on the part of the low-scoring participants of the role rhetoric plays on prejudice - that “just asking questions” is not an innocent, apolitical act, but one that comes preloaded with assumptions on what you think the answers to these questions should be, or the types of answers you think should be produced.
And to place this in another context - the trans panic that is currently dominating right wing discourse - we can observe extremely similar behaviour. This is best exemplified by the common twitter joke of posting a picture of a cis woman and claiming she’s trans, just to watch transphobes reply with all the ways they can “clock” this woman and tell that she is “secretly” a man. and, it’s worth discussing, that bigots frequently and especially define “male” traits as those commonly found in black and brown cis women, that they are especially fixated on white femininity as the measuring stick by which to judge all other women. but we can see the way that this idea of essential difference in humans undergirds all reactionary thought - without essential ontological categories, you cannot advocate for a worldview that argues for the “good” groups to have dominance over the “bad” ones. But they never prove this base assumption! They point to the very fact of variation within human beings - whether that be skin colour, facial features, ability, sexual organs - and claim that these are indicative of some deeper worth (or lack thereof), but proof of that hierarchical view of variation is never provided.
Which is why when bigots claim they’re “just pointing out the facts,” or say shit like “oh so we can’t even say women and men are different now? We have to ignore biology?” this is an inherently bad faith question. They rhetorically marry “variation” with “measure of value,” and force you to now pivot to talking about the fact that like, human beings are different from one another, rhetorically ceding ground to the premise that human variation inherently determines the value of a human being.
And following this logic, the only way for us to achieve a perfectly equal society would be for us to live in a world where every human being looked and behaved the exact same. And like, uh, how exactly would we achieve this? Which set of parameters for appearance and behaviour would we be following? Who gets to decide what those parameters are? The ONLY logical conclusion to this essentialistic thinking is state sanctioned mass death and subjugation programmes, because there is no other way to get rid of ontologically “bad” people. These hierarchies only have value when they are socially and politically enforced. This is why you should be wary of anyone “just pointing out” that human beings have different physical characteristics. They are not pointing out a neutral biological fact about human genetic diversity, or sexual dimorphism.
edit: altered the spelling of anti-Semitism to antisemitism. Apologies for the improper spelling!
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anneapocalypse · 3 months
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I have really complex feelings about the idea (often implied or tacitly agreed to be true even when it's not stated outright) that realism in sex scenes (and specifically sex scenes in fanfiction because that's what I'm thinking about) is always preferable and desirable. That it's always better to be more realistic, and any kind of unrealistic or fictionalized portrayals of sex are inferior--or in some cases, worthy of contempt and an indication of the inexperience/immaturity/poor writing skills of the author.
I have mixed feelings about it because I do think there's a place for realism. There are things that add realism to sex scenes that I really enjoy. I enjoy watching certain characters communicate their desires and negotiate activities. In some scenarios I like seeing characters employ safer sex practices like barriers. I will always enjoy when an author takes the time to figure out a form of lubrication that's appropriate and believable in the setting! I can even enjoy when a character gets up to pee after sex before returning to bed to cuddle; it's a very human touch to the scene that can itself be comforting and enjoyable to read. I like it when people who have experience with certain types of sex create helpful guides to writing those things, offering details you might not think of or know about if you haven't had that type of sex. It gives authors more to work with! It's a tool. Realism is a tool, and one that can absolutely enrich scenes and make them more interesting and fun to read.
And at the same time, something really does rub me the wrong way when I see posts that express contempt for a realism gap in fanfiction and imply that anyone writing it that way must be a) stupid, b) inexperienced (while kind of implying that writing about sex when you haven't had sex is inherently a problem, which I object to fundamentally), and c) completely unaware that what they're writing isn't realistic, which kind of points back to A. It's less on the nose than it would have been like ten years ago, when a lot more people were willing to just come right out and mock "stupid girls writing stupid fanfic" (and all the assumptions that go along with that) but still... that tone lingers. I won't even get into some of the smug posts that used to circulate about anal sex that ended up coming across as "don't you know anal sex is GROSS" in a way that was kind of lowkey homophobic, intentionally or not. Nor am I going to get into the prevalence of queer people telling other queer people they're doing queerness Wrong (in fanfiction, in original writing, in life in general).
To bring a personal angle to this, I'm a nearly-40-year-old bisexual cis woman, married and monogamous, chronically ill, and with some lifelong undefined sensory issues that I don't have any kind of diagnosis for so I'll just call them that. For me personally, due mostly to sensory issues and some physiological quirks, sex can take a lot of energy. Sometimes it's just a lot of work! That doesn't mean I don't want it or enjoy it, or that my partner is failing in some way; I have an active and fun sex life with a very thoughtful and caring partner (and I am not looking for advice on this post, so let's not get sidetracked). There's just challenges! And sometimes I wish my own body made it easier!
So sometimes, when I'm writing smut which is definitionally for fun and primarily for me and my own enjoyment, I find myself caught between: do I want to make this character's experience of sex very realistic in a way that's relatable to me? or do I just want to indulge in the fantasy of sex being easy and low-effort?
At this very moment I'm having difficulty answering that question about some things! There's pros and cons to both, and I don't think either one is wrong. Because at the end of the day, my own enjoyment is the goal of this piece of fiction. It's self-indulgence either way. No matter what I write, these pixel people I'm writing about are not real and their sex scenes are still a fantasy. It's just a question of what kind of fantasy I want to indulge in.
There was a good post I saw recently about the fact that a lot of problematic tropes are problematic not inherently but by scale--in other words, because their prevalence reinforces ideas and narratives harmful to specific groups. And I will be the first to acknowledge that even in the realm of fanfiction--a sphere with relatively low impact on the culture at large--it can be frustrating to constantly run into the same tropes that we find unrelatable or just plain unenjoyable, whether it's rigid top/bottom roles or easy vaginal orgasms. I don't want to come across as like, scolding anyone for just being annoyed, or venting about that sort of thing. It's fine. Some people's forms of self-indulgence are irritating to me, and my self-indulgence is undoubtedly annoying to someone else. I also want to reiterate that talking about what is and isn't realistic in the context of fiction is fine and good and there's absolutely a place for it, and that I enjoy a lot of elements of realism in fiction. I just also want to leave room for fiction to be fantasy. I think that's okay. And everyone's gauge for just how much realism is enjoyable is going to be different. I think that's fine too.
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borrowmyshovel · 16 days
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so i ended up blocking the One Dipshit, you know the one, hangs around the transandrophobia tag to yell terf shit at anyone who dares say anything at all about transmasc oppression but he thinks it's fine because he doesn't believe it? yeah that guy. anyway I've been feeling like i blew him off in a way that doesn't look great for me or my side of the argument so to speak so uh
A. sometimes a piece of harmful rhetoric about a group contradicts another piece of harmful rhetoric about said group. "we can always tell" and "no one would be able to tell if they shut up about it" can both be opinions someone holds about a marginalised group without even recognising the contradiction because that's how bigotry works. It isn't logical.
B. it is sometimes easier to find examples of a hateful kind of rhetoric about trans people when it comes from other trans people. That's because trans people are the most likely to know and have opinions about other trans people. They are also most likely to use recognisable terminology while doing it. The kind of transphobia that develops within the trans community can look different from the kind that develops outside of it.
C. "transfems are the cause of all of transmascs problems" is terf shit. They don't typically phrase it like that but you'll forgive me for not including the words they actually use. Now, when a transmasc speaks about a problem, and someone pops up to be like "why are you viillainizing trans women", that's derived from the same terf shit. What is happening there is a kind of rhetorical shift where you accept the syllogism, but reject the conclusion, and work backwards from that. Or: "if trans men had problems, trans women would be the ones to blame. However trans women are innocent, therefore trans men don't have problems". The obvious alternate solution being that trans men can have problems without blaming trans women for them.
All of this to say: yes, it is mostly trans people talking about the idea that trans men have an easy time passing. That's because cis people don't generally think about shit like that. For the most part, they think of all trans people as some combination of circus freak and sex object. And out of the general population of trans people, transfems are a bit more likely to take the idea for granted, and transmascs are a bit more likely to question it, based on their own experiences. That's just... the way shit shakes out. It's not "the fault of trans women", that's a stupid way to think about it and it only serves to shut discussion down without actually fixing the problem. Which is fucking easy. Just don't spread misinformation about transition. Stop telling transfems they'll never pass, stop making transmascs feel like it's their fault if they don't, it's quick it's easy and it's free just stop it
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kittythelitter · 1 year
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Someone's probably written this already (and if so send me the link pls) but DPxDC where Trans!Danny is Talia and Bruce's first child, but because he's AFAB (and as an infant assumed by the league to grow to be a woman) he won't inherit, and Talia a) doesn't want her father to know that she "failed" and b) doesn't want to raise a child who can't be the heir, so she tells everyone the baby was stillborn (maybe including Bruce because there's that whole miscarriage plotline that idk where its from but I've heard it referenced) and gives him away. Bonus points if she doesn't want her father to be able to trace the baby so she gives him to someone to take to a location she is not told to leave him at a hospital or something.
And then years later Danny meets the Bats and he, like Damian, looks just like Bruce, in human form, and just like a weird eldritch Damian with white hair in ghost form.
(also not entirely related but my personal trans Danny headcanon is that even when human Danny is transitioning and maybe doesn't look like a cis guy, ghost Danny always looks like. Traditionally masculine, because that's the way Danny sees himself. It's the body he's meant to be in, in a way. Like idk if other trans people experience this but sometimes in my dreams I have a different face shape/body/hair that looks and feels like me, even if it doesn't reflect reality. Anyway)
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theshadowrealmitself · 2 months
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Thinking about the post I made about an omega getting transported to a universe without the a/b/o dynamics (unfortunately can’t reblog that original post with this addition cause both posts are gonna be scheduled) and I think a situation like that would really help give me what I want out of omegaverse
What I really want out of omegaverse is all the world building stuff, how a society and its people would function in that situation, but most of the time it’s a reimagining of intense misogyny, which is not my cup of tea
But I think a situation where a person goes from a society like that (without the omega hate) to a society where a/b/o isn’t a thing, would really highlight how different things would be
Technically the omegaverse society is different depending on the author, so I’m making up my own version, and adding in aliens:
Heats and ruts can cause health problems, the stress it puts on your body every month can lead to a ton of issues down the road, and honestly you just don’t wanna have your life be disrupted that much, so going on suppressants is common, especially for people who are single
But going off of suppressants can be deadly, and sometimes your suppressants can start being less effective as time goes on, so calling out of whatever to make sure you can go to the doctors and have that all figured out is not only normalized but also encouraged
(But now you’re suddenly in a universe where Humans don’t go through all that and you’re running out of suppressants and you’re just hoping the scientists, Vulcan ones who are strangely extremely interested in your heat suppressants and keep asking you about rut suppressants?, can quickly figure out how to make more)
Depending on the situation, scent blockers can be used (mostly in the maternity ward, so the medical staff don’t accidentally get their scent on the kids and accidentally cause the parents to instinctively think they’re trying to take away their kids), but it’s more of a personal preference
Alphas, omegas, and even betas can scent mark things, but alpha scents are usually just more noticeable because they tend to be more territorial and aggressive, doesn’t mean that omegas and betas aren’t scent marking things for the same reason, so just because you can’t smell an alpha around, doesn’t mean you aren’t encroaching on someone’s space, you can also tell people’s emotions from their scent
(You hate that in this new universe, no one can smell that you claimed stuff and you have to remember to verbalize it, you also hate that the only ones who can smell you are aliens who have to be weird about it because they aren’t used to Humans smelling like that)
I can never think of anything cool for betas and I hate that it’s usually just like “betas are usually just how Humans are irl”, so what, they don’t have cis guys that can get pregnant and cis women who can sire kids? boring! but I can’t think of anything fun for them!
Claiming bites are a thing, but mostly a thing of the past, still, you never touch go near an omega’s through without explicit consent
(If another fucker tries to go near your neck again you’re losing it at them >:/)
Nests are a big thing, even outside of heats, and kids, and stuff, it’s just really beneficial to an omega to have a safe, soft, place they have complete control over, their instincts demand it
(Apparently nesting isn’t a normal fucking thing for Humans in this universe?? you can’t find the round mattress with the round frame that has a headboard that goes around a majority of the bed to kinda cocoon you anywhere, that’s like, the most basic thing you’d used to find in stores, and now you keep having to find specialty shops that cater to extraterrestrials to find anything remotely similar, or figure out how to replicate it yourself, this is so frustrating!!! you’re gonna be so much more frustrated when you try to find the other supplies needed for nesting)
Instead of heats and ruts being quick things, there’s still a lot of time and clarity before it hits them, so like, let’s say if it’s a default alpha/omega, the omega will obsess over their nest and get it just right while the alpha get their scent on everything else in the room to let everyone else know to fuck off (if it’s any other pairing, then whoever feels the most comfortable fighting if a trespasser comes by, [even though that almost never happens, but there’s always that instinctual worry that if will happen] is the one who gets their scent on everything else and makes sure the room they’re in is secure)
(I love the idea of this omega getting a temporary Vulcan partner because their heat came on quickly, and Vulcans understand their predicament, so the omega is stressing over their nest while the Vulcan is walking around, methodically trying to scent everything because they know that also serves to make the other person not scenting feel secure in that scenario, and then, because I feel like Vulcans are a little bit of control freaks (lovingly) the Vulcan goes over to fuss with the nest as well and the omega is strangely content with that)
That’s what I have for now, may add stuff later
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fayrobertsuk · 1 year
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Making Differences
Long post. tl;dr: you never know where your earnest words may end up, and what they might accomplish, so keep putting them out there. (Also: I wrote a guide to nonbinary identities a little over two years ago and I’m still very proud of it.)
Back in August 2020, I emailed my day job line manager: “Hey, so, I’ll be coming back to work [after the world’s worst-timed unpaid, year-long sabbatical] in three weeks... we should probably have a plan...?”
He agreed, and decided to do a long-overdue video call that week. In our defence, we’d had a lot of Other Things to think about in that period.
Approximately 15 seconds before the call connected, I remembered that my beard had been growing out for about 6-8 weeks by that point and was not something you could pass off as a trick of the light, if you were so minded. What would this nice, supportive, but ultimately cishet, Christian, family man have to say about my incontrovertibly gender non-conforming appearance? I’d never even told him about being non-binary, always swerving when conversation got close to the topic.
Arrgh.
As the video image expanded, he leaned into the screen, put one hand to his own hairy chin (very different from the clean-shaven man of memory) and said “Huh. It’s not as good as mine!”
Me: “Well, uh, hah, to be fair, you’ve had longer to, uh, develop yours.”
Him: “How long have you been growing yours then?”
I’m not sure that there could have been a better response, if I’m honest.
We moved onto different topics after that but, like a two-ring circus, I was chatting about the departmental shifts, the changes in personnel, how everyone was coping with permanently working from home... and thinking: “Could I finally come out completely at work? Like: COMPLETELY? Would that... I hadn’t even... what...?!” and said, just before signing off, with utter lack of articulacy, that it would be good to talk about, uh, pronouns, and changing them in work, sometime.
“Oh. Okay.”
We worked the mechanism out between us, me slowly revealing my new appearance to close colleagues one at a time, most of whom were either a) relieved that I wasn’t telling them I’d suffered horrendous burn scars (thanks for that very specific leap of imagination!), b) cis men complaining mildly that my beard was better, or c) having to be dragged back a step from the notion that I was transitioning to a man and would be changing my name, etc., d) or some combination of the above. And then we decided to use November 2020’s National Coming Out Day as a good point to aim for. I was already set to write an article about coming out as nonbinary for the organisation’s LGBT+ Network (due to be shared generally with anyone in the business who cared to read it or any of the others for that day – apparently mine made some people cry).
In the meantime, I searched out the announcement that a former colleague’s line manager had made to the business when she came out as trans and forwarded it to mine – here’s a good template, and yes: the annoucement coming from you will help legitimise it. At which point, it became clear that my boss and colleagues were going to need some further guidance from me.
“I was thinking of writing a thing about how to use pronouns...”
“Oh!” He was nakedly relieved. “Yes, pronouns. That would be great. Thanks!”
No problem. I knew how to use my own, and how to communicate that clearly. No worries. One page about ze/zir/zirself, with a general background on neopronouns. Coming right up.
It occurred to me that I didn’t know whether any of my (ostensibly uniformly cishet) colleagues had any idea why why someone would use third person singular pronouns other than she/her or he/him, so I added in a bit about nonbinary identities. A couple of pages should be fine, right? The nonbinary identity section grew, and split into subsections: definitions, history, legacy, how much more common such a thing is in cultures other than “Western” ones.
Maybe it needed more context. After all, to understand nonbinary, you probably need to understand binary trans identities. A new section blossomed.
In order to understand transgender identities, you need to understand gender identity. Okay. Another section. Let’s throw in all the definitions re: sex, gender, cis, trans, nonbinary... with some links to other resources.
You know what this needs? Diagrams (id in alt-text). And a contents page. And a glossary.
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Honestly, I’m amazed it’s only thirteen pages long...
Anyway, thing is: it’s gone a LOT further than any of us ever imagined. It started with people on Facebook saying “Well, I don’t understand [non-binary people/ the need for gender-neutral language]!” in various groups/ on other friend’s posts, so I’d sweetly offer them the guide. (Turns out treating what can look like huffy denial as a good faith request for more information (with bonus diagrams) gets many more positive results than you’d imagine.) Then I idly posted the link in a couple of more friendly places. And THEN it started getting weird. “Can I share this with my colleagues?” Sure. “Can I bring this to my kids’ school?” Go for it. “I’d like to circulate this as a resource at the NHS Trust I work for.” Uh. Okay! “So, I saw [the guide] on Twitter. Can [organisation I greatly admire] use that as guidance for our organisation?” Buh, uh, yeah! Please! “My wife is a prison psychiatrist, may I share it with her?” Blimey. By all means.
And then the more personal stories started coming back: “You made me realise something about myself.” “I shared this with my family and they understood.” “We’re in love and your paper helped me reconcile that.”
Wow.
This little guide has gone a lot further than I ever imagined it might.
Today a senior colleague told me, in passing:
fwiw I shared your pronoun guide with my (very old white cis hetero) choir and it has generated SO many good questions
so there are choir grandkiddos all over the world thanking you for their grandparents being more awesome
Which, considering I was braced for an awkward business change management conversation, was not where I was expecting to end up this afternoon, emotionally speaking.
If I was doing this from scratch now, I suspect there would be differences (a longer glossary; an excursion into intersex identities, maybe? definitely better diagrams...), but then, a lot of what I know now came from doing the research for the guide, so maybe not so much! But one thing is for sure: I’m never going to take the impact of words shared freely quite so lightly in future.
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