#and i especially love the idea of her being an intersex trans person

[augment-techs]

For the character thing, and I’m sending like five of these with a few characters in each so XD

Trip

Vida

Ziggy

Oh~ I can live with that, guy.

favorite thing about them: Is an adorable ball of sunshine that provides the much needed fluff and nonsense that brings people on his team, and around him, up.

least favorite thing about them: That we never get any real background on him other than he is an alien, he is an empath with a little ability to see forward, his bestfriend is a robot owl. COME ON.

favorite line: “He’s not mean; he’s lonely.”

brOTP: I’m weirdly drawn to the idea of him being the little brother Wes never had. Especially because of that cowboy incident.

OTP: I suppose I should say Trip/Katie, but because of one very nice read on AO3, I am also enamored to Trip/Eric.

nOTP: If someone puts him and Lucas in a romantic scenario I am OUT.

random headcanon: Is probably the oldest person on his team, if not all of Time Force, because comic references to his planet from Trek implies his people live a long-ass time.

unpopular opinion: Him leaving Nadira with a pregnant woman, ALONE, was bullshit.

song i associate with them: Blinding Lights cover

favorite thing about them: Will throw down with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

least favorite thing about them: Nothing springs immediately to mind, though her early days as a Ranger were a little wince worthy.

favorite line: “You know I’d never hurt you.”

brOTP: Her and Nick, because they are both weirdly powerhouse material.

OTP: Vida/Chip/Xander.

nOTP: Incest shippers DNI. Also whoever thought it was an idea to write that one Daggeron fic with her; gross.

random headcanon: If she had gone full vampire, Leelee would have helped turned her back because she would have been the most insufferable thing in the Underworld.

unpopular opinion: I don’t really get a lesbian vibe off of her?

song i associate with them: A Neverending Dream, by Cascada

favorite thing about them: He is both a baby and ex-mafia and oftentimes the only thing keeping Dillon sane and human and SOFT. Also he’s good for Dr. K, I guess.

least favorite thing about them: NOTHING.

favorite line: “You talk too much.”

brOTP: Him and Summer are lovely together and you cannot change my mind that he has let her paint his nails on multiple occasions.

OTP: Dillon/Ziggy. I am basic, they are gay. (Also Ziggy/Spike in that AU, you know the one; the chaos and LOVE.)

nOTP: I’m sorry, I know their actors got married, but somehow the idea of Ziggy and Dr. K as anything more than friends or siblings makes me gag.

random headcanon: He can sew and crochet and is constantly making stuff for the orphanage he came from.

unpopular opinion: I don’t know if this is popular or unpopular, but while I’ve seen an awful lot of Trans!Ziggy out there, for some reason the idea of him being intersex feels more...more, because of the hellscape they live in. (Also I started reading up on RPM after seeing that tumblr post about the intersex caterpillar called Chicken Nugget and it just...stuck.)

song i associate with them: Bad Reputation.

#ask fill #prompt fill #just remember that turnabout is fair play~ #boom! comics power rangers #power rangers RPM #power rangers mystic force #power rangers time force #Ziggy Grover #Vida Rocca #Trip Regis

[erigold13261]

hey uhh what are your lgbt headcanons for the interns

Nothing is set in stone for me. I see other people’s ideas that I like and change up in my head a lot so anything I say here can probably change. Also I was gonna draw the characters with their flags or something but considering I can’t decide, I am just gonna ramble.

Norma: I’ve seen people call her a lesbian, which I like a lot, but I can also see her as asexual or at least aromantic. An aro lesbian seems like a nice fit for her. I can also see her as either a cis woman or trans woman, keeping the she/her pronouns.

Lizzie: I think I saw someone use all pronouns for Lizzie and I honestly love that. So like for me, He/It/They/She, mainly It/They with He/She being put in every so often. I’ll probably forget about this tho, but I really like that as an idea! Gender-wise would probably be either agender, genderfluid, or nonbinary. I’m liking agender. For sexuality... hmmm, this one I’m not sure about, I’d honestly like it to be asexual as well, but that I just because I really like Lizzie and want to project onto them, but also being pan or bi is something they could definitely be!

Morris: He/Him for Morris, and probably gay, or bi/pan/omni leaning a bit to the masc side, tho he probably doesn’t realize that yet. I can see him being pretty fluid and open in his sexuality, willing to try new things when he can. Um, probably a cis man, could be nonbinary.

Adam: Either a straight trans man, or an intersex person who likes women. Pronouns would probably be mainly he/him but he’d experiment with other pronouns and neopronouns, especially with Lizzie. Trying new things to see what sticks or doesn’t. Honestly I can see Adam trying yo/yoself pronouns for a while, maybe they stick or not, idk.

Sam: Definitely a neopronoun user. Has a whole list. Any pronouns work for Sam, except maybe it/its pronouns. So like, the standard she/her/they, but also things like ze/xir/mew/star. I can even see them using emojis when texting as pronouns. Literally just have fun with pronouns with Sam, she’d love it. And xe’d be aromantic but wanting a queer platonic relationship someday. With gender they would still identify as a woman, but does not care about gendered terms being used on them though likes it when people mix things up for fun instead of just using the same identifiers for xir.

Gisu: Trans woman. She/her. Either like straight or poly. Or like polyamorous but only attracted to guys, something like that. She can appreciate a woman’s beauty, and could romantically date one, but is sexually attracted to guys, or at the very least masc people. I don’t know if I am explaining this right. Though, honestly in some interpretations of Gisu I can see her being aromantic or just unlabelled. The only reason I am leaning towards the first part is because I am starting to come around to the Gisu/Dion ship, though her being aromantic and dating Dion is something that is definitely possible. Like Sam, she could want a queer platonic relationship with guys.

Raz: Raz is technically an intern so I’ll add... him? I’ll be honest, I saw Raz as a cis man (boy? considering Raz is younger would boy be a better word? idk), but then I started seeing trans Raz, both transmasc and transfem. And I really like both of those ideas. Kinda leaning a bit more towards the transmasc idea, but honestly transfem Raz where she realizes she’s a woman later in life and has Lilly to help is something really nice to think about. So Raz’s gender is in the air for me, but I do think Raz would like women at the very least, either just women or both genders (and anything inbetween). So Raz either Raz being straight (transmasc), a lesbian (transfem), or bisexual works for me. Transmac Raz would be he/him for a long time and then go to he/they at some point, while transfem Raz would start off as she/they and then go entirely to she/her.

#psychonauts #noart #eritalks #erithinks #asks #this ask took a long time to answer #just because i literally could not think of anything #i didn't want to just make stuff up #that i didn't really care for #but after seeing some other people give their takes #i am happy with what i have here

[dark-arts-and-crafts-universe]

Farina is Not Her Mother (One-Shot)

Farina is Not Her Mother

(This story is set fifteen years before the canon’s present day, in the main Dark Arts and Crafts universe.)

Farina Baker doesn’t want to be like her mother. She’s known that since she was old enough to see other, happier families. Farina Baker’s youngest child is a girl. That one comes as a bit of a surprise. She wants to do right by her children, so she looks for answers. But when the people most eager to help have sinister intentions, Farina will have to decide for herself what being a good mother really means.

Or, a cis woman tries to learn about trans people for the sake of her transgender daughter. Other cis people do not help.

-

Word count: 1,612

Content warnings: Hi, all. If you’re new to this universe, it’s usually a lot lighter and funnier than this particular story, we promise. This one discusses a fair number of Real Life Issues, isn’t especially comedic, and might be a hard read for trans readers in particular.

To be clear, I am a transgender author, and while this story is not exactly about my own experiences, it draws from things I dealt with growing up and the way trans issues were talked about in the media at the time. It does have a happy ending, I promise. But I can’t guarantee it’s going to be a perfect story that lands for every trans person--there is a more detailed content warning under the read-more so you can decide if this story is right for you. If not, that’s fine. We understand. For those who do read further, we hope you enjoy.

Longer content warning: this is a story about a cis character, Farina Baker, first learning that her daughter Rosedaisy is transgender. She starts out with a somewhat transphobic perspective on the matter, and is briefly in touch with Mumsnet-type bigots about the topic. Even in the worst moments, Farina is motivated by genuine love for her daughter, she does not take any actions within the story to impede Rose’s transition or harm her mental health, and by the end of the story she is a firm ally. But that does not change the fact that some elements of this story might be upsetting to trans readers, and I hope this warning lets you make an informed decision about whether you will continue.

Other specific warnings include references to the idea that transition is “mutilation”, references to the demonization of trans-affirming parents, references to bad faith actors weaponizing intersex issues against trans people, Mumsnet-style groupthink, mentions of magical non-consensual body modification, minor dissociative symptoms.

I would also like to note that, though the story is told through Farina’s perspective at the time she had just learned Rose is a trans girl, the narrative will not be misgendering or deadnaming Rosedaisy in this story. It is a creative conceit and we stand by it.

-

When Farina tells people she is a professional chef raising four children, their immediate reaction tends to be sympathy.

“Kids are so picky,” they opine. “I bet you spend a lot of time making them try new foods.”

Farina doesn’t understand it at all. As a chef, she knows that children’s taste buds work differently from adults’ and adjusts her recipes accordingly. And as a mother (and former child), she knows that force is the absolute worst way to build a loving, safe relationship with one’s children.

When her kids don’t want to try a new food, Farina sits down and asks if they can try it, just once, for her. Sometimes they say yes, and like it. Farina thanks them for being brave, but doesn’t make a fuss over how they thought they wouldn’t like it. Sometimes they say yes, and hate it. Farina thanks them for being brave, and doesn’t make them try it again. Sometimes they just say no. Farina thanks them for telling her, and doesn’t ask them again. 

Farina’s kids are smart. They know what they like, and are willing to give things a chance when they know she won’t make them do anything they truly hate. And when she doesn’t push, she finds that her kids usually come around on their own. Farina trusts her kids. She doesn’t understand why other parents won’t.

When Farina’s youngest told her she was a girl, Farina wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t know much about this sort of thing, and it seemed like an awfully big decision for a six-year-old to be making. Farina put on her adult face, and said she would have to get back to her about that, sweetie, and didn’t let on that inside she was in a panic.

The first few internet searches didn’t do much to soothe her worry. There was information about mental diagnoses, and sexual perversion (Rosedaisy was six, what the fuck?). But what scared her most were the stories about mothers mutilating their children. That was what it was, one forum informed her. Mothers wanted their children to be girls like them, so they forced children to mutilate their bodies for their own sick amusement.

Farina wasn’t quite sure how long she spent staring at the screen after that. Because. Because though what her mother did to her wasn’t ‘mutilation’, exactly--she did decide that Farina had to grow up a very certain way. She did warp Farina’s body, magically, to fit that exact mold. Technically, Farina didn’t even know if she was supposed to have been born a boy, and she wasn’t sure how she’d ever find out.

Farina didn’t want to be her mother.

She didn’t have to be, the forum assured her. She could protect her child from these feelings, from this urge. Both would pass, in time, if Farina was just firm. And at first, this seemed like a good idea. Being a parent did mean laying down the law sometimes. Whether or not they wanted to, kids still had to take baths, go to sleep on time, take their medicine. Farina could be firm on this. She just needed to explain to Rose why this was good for her, and Rose would accept it the same way she accepted the need for baths, bed, and cough syrup.

Except–

See, if that had been all these people told her, Farina might really have fallen for it. For a week or so, she did. The sick sense of relief that Farina was doing the right thing, that she wasn’t the monster her mother was, drowned out everything else. She listened with unquestioning trust when these strangers told her that transitioning would just earn Rosedaisy scorn and confusion from other children who could never understand. When they said she would regret it when she got older and couldn’t undo it. When they said the idea of “transgenderism” was caused by gender stereotypes, and that children just needed to be taught that you could be a boy and still like pink.

But then they tried to tell her about her own children.

It started with an innocent question from Farina, wondering what she should say to explain to Rose why trying to be a boy would be better, really. Rose was very certain of this, after all, and when she got this certain Farina had always needed clear and detailed reasoning to reach her.

They told her she didn’t have to explain. Farina just needed to stop the behavior. It didn’t matter if Rose understood. How could she understand? She was six. Six-year-olds didn’t understand anything, much less their own gender.

Farina was a professional chef who raised four kids. She chose to trust her kids when it came to the food they ate, and that trust had always been rewarded.

Vaughn used to refuse any food with tomato sauces. When Farina sat down with him, he explained that he hate-hate-hated the crunch he felt when he chewed the tomato chunks. They blended the sauces into a fine puree the next time, and now red sauce dishes were his favorite. Aislin told Farina she didn’t like curries because they made her mouth itchy. Farina scheduled a doctor’s appointment and it turned out Aislin was allergic to mustard. It had been a mild allergy, thank goodness, but what if it wasn’t? What if Farina forced Aislin to keep eating food that made her mouth itch, because she decided Aislin’s word wasn’t enough?

Farina went to Rosedaisy that night. She asked if being a boy was something Rose was able to try just once. And Rose, who had been asked this question a hundred times before about carrots, about new spices, about rice, thought about it and said, “No, Mom. I can’t. I don’t like it.”

And that was that. Farina called her husband home. She’d been putting it off while she tried to figure things out, but now she had no choice.

“I love you, Heliodor,” she told him when he got there. “I love you more than almost anything, but you need to stand with me on this a hundred percent, because this is about our kids and their happiness.” She explained what Rosedaisy had told her, and that she and Heliodor were going to help Rose live her life like a girl, even if it seemed strange or scary to him. The conversation wasn’t as bad as she’d been fearing. Heliodor also wasn’t an expert on this issue, but he got on board a lot faster than she had.

That just left the other kids.

Farina was firm. She laid down the law. Rosedaisy was a girl, and her siblings had to treat her like one. She was willing to explain why, but there would be no arguing with this rule. There hadn’t been arguing. Farina really shouldn’t have been surprised that the forum was wrong about that, too.

“You could’ve just asked me, Mom,” Vaughn (who was fifteen at the time) said. “I do a bunch of stuff with the LGBT club at school, they know tons about transgender people.”

Aislin (thirteen) was thrilled to have a sister. “It’s about time we fixed the gender imbalance in this house. You’re invited to Girls’ Night from now on, by the way.”

Lorcan (ten, nearly eleven) was quiet as always, but when Farina asked what he thought he just shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I kind of always figured she was a girl? It makes sense.”

It all went so much better than Farina had expected. And as she watched her kids on their weekly Girls’ Night, it hit her just how ridiculous she had been to entertain any part of what that forum had been saying.

They’d told her Rosedaisy must believe she was a girl because of regressive gender stereotypes. But Aislin had invented Girls’ Night back when she thought she was the only daughter in the family, and since it was no fun having a Girls’ Night with just one person, the others got to come anyways. There were makeovers and pillow fights, sure, but also poetry readings and camping with their dad in the backyard. Talking about science and history and whatever else interested them.

As for the boys--Vaughn’s two favorite things in the world were flowers and love, for goodness’ sake. He didn’t like makeup normally, but he also never complained about even the glitteriest, most pastel blushes Aislin put on him. Lorcan dragged his feet anytime someone asked him to be sociable, but on Girls’ Night, he spent the most time out of anyone in front of the mirror getting his eyeshadow exactly right.

(A few years later, when Lorcan asked her for permission to get his ears pierced, Farina had cautiously reminded him that if he was a girl like Rosedaisy or if he was nonbinary, that was fine with her. He had fixed her with the most exasperated look and said he knew that, mom, he was a guy who just wanted his ears pierced.)

No, Farina thought. Rosedaisy didn’t grow up in this house, in this family, and decide that she must be a girl because only girls could like pink. She didn’t even like pink all that much, or makeup. Despite that, her entire face lit up when Aislin turned to her newfound sister and announced she was going to give her “the princess look”.

It turned out, the only difference between the Rosedaisy that Farina thought was her youngest son, and the Rosedaisy who is her youngest daughter, is that her smile is so much brighter now. Farina can live with that.

Farina is not her mother.

#original fiction #writing #queer themes #short fiction #dark arts and crafts #rough ride but it ends happy #this is set in a fantasy universe technically #transphobia depictions cw #terf depictions cw #other cws in the readmore #farina #rosedaisy #lorcan's family #one-shots

[yamatonikado]

may I introduce to you the hc of momoe as intersex? I like the other gender/trans theories and narratives I do! But I also think her being an intersex person (identifying as trans or not) would make a lot of sense with her so desperately clinging onto her identity as a woman when other people challenge that 

#feel free to shoot me down but #yeah i mean i don't know many intersex people but everyone is different and how they react is different #wonder egg priority #momoe sawaki #i reworded it a bit bc i thought the old wording was a bit misleading #i really love the idea of momoe being intersex #and i especially love the idea of her being an intersex trans person #the way i worded it before made it sound like i was saying intersex ppl can't be trans (which was just bad wording on my part) #i think this is a better way to phrase what i was thinking at the time #i didnt realize my little blurbs/ quips would still be so popular and looking abck at it i worded it rlly poorly #edited 5.7

[doberbutts]

Feel free to ignore this ask but I'm too scared to say it off anon but like.... the absolute audacity of people to say "all problems trans men face are ACTUALLY misdirected transmisogyny and are about trans women" while ALSO insisting on using terms TMA vs TME is insane to me... Like, which is it? Are trans men all TMA or is transandrophobia a thing? Because it very literally cannot be both.

Well this is information from 10 years ago so take it with a grain of salt but like. When I was being taught trans theory as a scared 18yo in my college's GSA by a trans woman who was directly mentoring me, her opinion was that all trans people are affected by transmisogyny for exactly that reason, and that transmisogyny would literally be the correct word to describe what is now being called "transandrophobia" and "enbyphobia" and even parts of "intersex-phobia" because the problem is that our genders, our sexed bodies, and the way we related to the world causes oppression based on the intersection of misogyny and transphobia (as well as intersex-phobia and homophobia) (and a lil bit of racism to go with it especially for trans people of color and intersex people of color).

Again, this is back when the correct term was trans*gender, to include those who considered themselves outside of the binary but not transgender due to lack of interest in transitioning or lack of dysphoria or because their cultural understanding of gender does not include what American society would consider "transgender" or simply because. I... still know people to this day who fit under that label, and it seems those advocating for the removal of the asterisk have sort of left them behind. I understand that transmedicalism poisoned the waters, still don't love the immediate accusations that I was A Bad Person Oppressing Non-Binary People when the script flipped and suddenly the asterisk was not inclusive when my non-binary friends were very much thankful that I was still using it. Now I don't, and I had a few ask me about it, and when I explained they understood, but...

So like. A large part of my protest behind the whole TMA/TME thing is that I literally am listening to trans women, the trans woman who helped me gain the confidence to be who I am today, and that trans woman negated the idea of "trans men aren't affected by transmisogyny and thus are exempt from harm by it" literally before those terms even existed.

BTW this is why people keep stressing that we need to actually like. Take a moment and listen to and learn from our LGBT elders before running off at the mouth taking potshots at people who are part of this community an receive much of the same harms as everyone else.

And this is why when I learned those terms back in May my instant reaction was "uh... no?"

So like. We are. We are affected by transmisogyny. And if we're not allowed to use that word anymore, then we get to find a different word to use that describes our very real problems with both transphobia and misogyny. But we're not allowed to use that word because "misandry isn't real" (it is, MRAs are just using it wrong, again poisoning the waters literally never helped anyone) and we're not allowed to use that word because "OP had a personal dispute with Blogger A and his consensual sexual history makes me uncomfortable" and we're not allowed to use that word because "it looks like it's not a real word and anyway people who believe this is true are transmisogynists" and we're not allowed to use that word because "it's not the right time" so it's sounding an awful lot like people just don't want us talking about what we go through or finding support in each other to me.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

um hello :) i happened to find one of your posts about Animorphs and it said that it had queer rep? and i just wanted to ask about that cause that would be incredible (i seem to have overread that as a child) thanks a lot and have a nice day!

Does Animorphs have queer representation? As with a lot of 20th-century media, especially children's media, the short answer is "it's complicated."

What's canon:

In #40, two characters with male pronouns (Mertil and Gafinilan) are described as being devoted to each other to the point of death, and use a gesture when greeting each other that book #38 described as the andalite equivalent of kissing. The romantic nature of the relationship is — by the authors' own admission — as obvious as they could make it in a children's book written in 1999.

There are several instances of queering gender when morphing, most notably with Ax. When creating a human shape, Ax uses 50% girls' DNA and 50% boys' DNA to create a human body often described as "androgynous" or with similar terms. Ax states that he chooses to be male while in that morph because his identity is male (#4). The popular interpretation is thus that human-Ax is an intersex person with male gender.

There is plenty of other gender nonconformity. Tobias describes Rachel as "becoming... more herself" when turning into a male bald eagle (#13) and Rachel states that her male grizzly bear shape (which she chose to be male) is "letting out... a part of me that was always inside" (#7). Visser Three (who is male) stops to admire his own body while in the shape of a human female in a designer sundress (#23). Ax (#11), Tobias (#43), and Marco (#51) all take on the shapes of female primates and deliberately perform femininity at various points in the series. There are hundreds of other examples, but I want to mention Cassie's yeerk morph in #29 because we know that yeerks have at least three sexes and their genders have no human equivalent (#19), which is part of why they tend to use their hosts' pronouns and change pronouns when they change hosts (Visser).

What's Word of God or fanon:

[Quick clarification: "Word of God" are statements from the author(s) about authorial intent that do not appear in canon; "fanon" is a fan reading of canon so widespread that it's assumed as default.]

Marco is bisexual. This became fanon when readers pointed out he flirts heavily with Jake (calling him "hey, handsome" in #21, sending an email about his "big manly shoulders" and "piercing brown eyes" in #16, etc.) and to a lesser extent both Tobias and Ax. It became Word of God when co-ghost-writer Michael Grant tweeted that [sic] "Marco was bi <- Canon." Author K.A. Applegate has since confirmed on Reddit that she likes and supports bisexual Marco.

Tobias is trans, genderqueer, and/or gender dysphoric. This has been fanon since the series was first released. Many trans and enby fans see themselves in Tobias's struggle to find a body that fits who he is, while also being fed up with society's expectations about the type of body he "should" want. It's intensely wish-fulfilling to read about Tobias's ability simply to decide to be male in some situations (e.g. MM3), to decide it's easier to be female in others (e.g. #43), and to have the kind of body with no obvious gender that tends to get "it" pronouns (e.g. #3) the other 99% of the time. It's Word of God because K.A. Applegate has stated repeatedly that she's deeply honored by this fan response, that she wishes she could've made it canon, and that "as the proud mother of a trans daughter," she would love to write the books over with a canonically trans Tobias.

Mertil and Gafinilan are married. This one's a true fanon in that every fan work I've ever seen to contain either character treats them as a couple by default, to the point where any fan work that did interpret them as platonic would have to explain why that decision was made. It was always authorial intent (Applegate and Grant have both stated this) and it's as close to being canon as the authors could make it.

In conclusion? It's complicated.

The very idea of "your identity and your body are fluid" was always going to challenge gender determinism and heterosexism, and K.A. Applegate (and her ghosts) have always embraced that reality. The books are, by the authors' own admission, as queer as they could get away with being, and they do repeatedly raise challenges about the ideas of gender and sexuality being at all fixed. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean there is an explicit statement anywhere in the text that "Marco is bisexual" or "Ax is intersex" spelled out in so many words. I agree with Applegate that, by contemporary standards, the representation falls frustratingly short.

So that's neither a "yes" nor a "no"; make of it what you will.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #k.a. applegate #queer representation #genderqueer #trans tobias #bisexual marco #mert and gaf #q word #intersex ax #anyone who can read 63 books about characters swapping genders like shirts and NOT start to suspect sex roles are fake #must be reading a different series than i am

[d3nt4l-d4m4g3]

More Academic Bullshittery,

Had to give a presentation in religion. It was on the historian Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, which is a history of European women's spirituality in the middle ages, especially concerning the symbol of food. Bynum notices that women have distinct patterns in their spiritualities. for example, men often had "revelations" that led them to the religious life later on, while women's spirituality often grew steadily from childhood onward. Women were more likely to see themselves and men as a human whole, and men were likely to incorporate "dualism"— that male and female are opposite and complementary, that male is to female as spirit is to flesh.

These revelations are pretty crazy and backed up by a dense wealth of sources. Naturally, I tied them to radical feminism. Naturally bc 1. I'm studying radfem anyway and 2. Bynum's contemporaries, whom she often cites, are also radical feminists. Having a radfem background contextualizes the book In the time it was written as well as the historical period it focuses on.

There's this woman in my class who really I want to like. It's a constant disappointment to me that I can't stomach bullshit the way I used to. She's a "gender studies" major.

She tells me, "One critique of Bynum's work is that she uses an essentialist idea of what men and women are."

Great start. I said, "Yeah, Bynum's work is based on the theory that our bodies produce our realities, and men's and women's bodies are qualitatively different from each other, so, it's natural that they would produce different realities. But two of those realities are distinct. Right? and so they produce two distinct general realities."

She said, " But actually, there are 63 separate human sexes. There have been studies. scientific studies."

I said, "I disagree with you."

She said, "It's not something you can exactly "disagree with." It's a scientific study. they found—so far!!—at least 63 different variations on human hormone cycles."

me: "Yes, all materialities, the variables of which are infinite, produce different realities".

What I should have said here is that despite this being the case, there are still two different sets of sex characteristics, and in intersex people these characteristics are merely a mix of the two. I didn't say that. I sputtered. How the hell was I gonna continue my presentation about the difference between male and female spiritualities when I couldn't get anyone to acknowledge sex in the first place?

The woman left the class (my teacher had informally excused us.) Only four people continued the discussion, all female. We actually had a great discussion about the relationship between fasting, anorexia, and spirituality, and about how Jesus was female (being created of mary's flesh alone), and how female spiritual spaces were essential to creating female spirituality. Another woman who had read the book all the way through brought up the same fascinations and revelations that I had. I remembered, "Yes. this makes sense to both of us because we are women. I am not strange. I am one of many."

I was relieved that the conversation was going smoothly again, despite being on thin ice. My teacher, who was mostly a bystander due to her poor internet, said, "I'm amazed and really surprised at how personal you took this book. it really seemed to resonate with you.

And another girl in my class, a she/they, said, "Well, this class itself... and this group in particular (she meant the four women and my female professor who were participating in the conversation) are all AFAB and I've noticed that the discussion and class is completely different. And refreshing. That's so interesting."

Another girl said, "even at this (liberal arts) college, we mostly have to read...male writers. I'm bored. why aren't we reading more women along this line? This is amazing!"

Why? To me, it's clear. Women along these lines are radical feminists. Female historians were feminists, and feminists at that time were radical, who fundamentally believed in sex as the root of oppression. But radical feminist literature is not allowed to be taught in schools, even gender studies courses, in order, allegedly, to preserve the "safety" of trans students. And all it does is uphold a patriarchal education, which men love.

#radfem #terf safe #academia #gender identity #radical feminism #caroline walker bynum

[unrestedjade]

Baseless Ferengi headcanons no one asked for and that get increasingly queer-navel-gazing and self indulgent because the horrible space goblins have consumed my brain:

- Mobile ears, because if hearing is so well developed and important to them they should be able to aim those big stupid radar dishes. Also because then they can emote with them and that's cute. THE AESTHETIC IS PARAMOUNT.

- Since they canonically sharpen their teeth with chew sticks and sharpeners, their teeth must grow continuously. So I submit: subcultures that let certain teeth grow out as a fashion/political statement. Ferengi punks and anarchists with 5" tusks. Ferengi with all their teeth filed flat (mom and dad HATE it).

- Corollary to the above, most of their teeth are crooked. At the least, they don't share our fetish for straight teeth. What if their teeth are deciduous, and there's no point in trying to force them into perfect alignment, since they'll just fall out and get replaced? So like, sharks but their teeth can also grow longer with no limit. WHAT HAST EVOLUTION WROUGHT ON FERENGINAR :V

- Parents nagging their kids to sharpen their teeth "or they'll grow up into your brain and you'll die :)"

- Personal space? Don't know her.

Okay I need a cut because there's too many now. WHOLE SOCIETY OF GAY HOMOPHOBIC UNCLES AND AUNTS GO I HAVE A PROBLEM

- I can't remember who on here put forth the idea of them having retractable claws but Yes. :3

- Pushing back against the worst canon episode a bit but: relative ear size being the only obvious sexually dimorphic trait, and even that having enough of a gray area that the only way to be 100% sure you're talking to a male or female Ferengi is if you do a blood test. Unless they're intersex! *shrug emoji*

- This is why they're so fanatical about gender conformity and their Victorian "separate spheres" attitude to men and women's roles. Capitalist patriarchy is fragile! And as artificial to Ferengi as it ever was to Humans! (self-indulgenceeeee about gender shiiiiit)

- You know how with domesticated rabbits, the rabbit getting groomed and paid attention to is the boss? Yeah. Go ahead and paint your bestie's nails, just don't be surprised if she cops a little bit of an attitude with you from then on.

- Their fight/flight/freeze/fawn instincts skew heavily toward the last three, and what a lot of other species read as annoying sucking up is the Ferengi in question feeling anxious and unsafe. Especially if they don't feel integrated into the group. Even being at the bottom of the pecking order is better than not being in the flock at all.

- If they DO opt for fight, it's ugly and typically their last resort. Bites or scratches will get infected without intervention-- microbes that their immune system can handle could cause big trouble for aliens. You might wanna check for full or partial teeth that break off and get lodged in the wound, too.

- Too many of these are tooth related but I don't care. :B More teeth stuff: you know what else has teeth that grow constantly? Puffer fish. Likewise, Ferengi can chew up mollusk shells as easy as potato chips, and they need the minerals for their teeth. (Imagine grandpa Sisko offering Nog a crayfish for the first time and watching as he just...pops the whole damn thing in his mouth and crunches away...)

- Their staple foods seem to be grubs and other arthropods, high in protein and fat. I've unilaterally decided their cuisine also involves a lot of edible fungi, ferns, plant shoots and seeds. Gotta get those vitamins. Overall flavor profile leaning toward umami, vegetal, and fresh herbs, and pretty mild (or "delicate" if you wanna be snooty about it, which a Ferengi probably would let's be real).

- Not much sugary food. I'm basing this solely on Quark's aversion to root beer as "cloying". Which could definitely just be his personal preference, but most of the people I hear hating on root beer cite the actual sassafras/sarsaparilla flavor (saying it tastes like medicine) not the sweetness. Nog might be the weirdo outlier for being able to enjoy it.

- Their home planet isn't bright and sunny, so their eyes are better at discerning shades of gray in low light conditions, with relatively weak color vision. Which could explain why they dress Like That.

- Conversely, human music has a reputation for stinking on ice because a lot of it is juuuuust lightly dissonant or out of tune because we can't pick up flaws that small. Ferengi can, and it drives them up the *wall*.

- Music? So many different kinds. Traditionally, maybe lots of percussion and winds, and water as a common component of many instruments to alter pitch or tone. Polyphony out the ass. Some of the modern stuff is an impenetrable wall of sound if you're not a species with a lot of brain real estate devoted to processing sounds. Pick out one melody to follow at a time.

- Yes, back to teeth again I'm sorry. It's a sickness. At some point in their history, pre-chewing food was just something you did for your baby or great grandma as a matter of necessity. Possibly your baby gets an important boost to their immune system and gut biome from your spit. At some point takes on a more formal intimacy aspect and gradually drifted from something all adults and older kids do to something only women do. Your husband and older kids have perfectly functional teeth, but you love them, right? =_= (Think old memes about husbands being useless in the kitchen if little wifey isn't there to cook, but even more ridiculous. Ishka was right about everything but especially this. Thank you for making your family chew their own food, Ishka. Not all heroes wear capes. Or anything!)

- How did they get started on the whole men: clothed vs women: unclothed nonsense? My equally stupid idea: men just get cold easier. Those huge ears dissipate a ton of body heat. Cue Ferengi cliches like "jeez, we could be standing on the surface of the sun and my husband would put on another layer." At some point, again, this got codified and pushed to ridiculous extremes in the name of controlling women and keeping everyone in their assigned box, to the point that women just have to shiver if they really are too cold and men have to pass out from heat stroke if the alternative is going shirtless, because That Would Be Inappropriate.

- Marriages default to five years, but they're also the only avenue for women to have their own household or any stability. Plus their religion places no emphasis on purity save for pure adherence to the free market and the RoA. So, curveball to the rest of their patriarchal bullshit: female virginity isn't a concern in the least. Bring it up and they'll rightly side-eye you.

- Family law is absolutely bonkers and lawyers that specialize in it make BANK. I feel like custody would default to the father usually but oh wait, the maternal grandfather has a legal stake in this, too, and your next father-in-law is asking HOW many kids are you dragging into my daughter's house, etc etc. Growing up with a full sibling is way rarer than growing up with half or stepsiblings, since it usually takes both men and women two or three tries to find someone they vibe with. (Not love, unless you're super cringe.)

- A misogynistic society is a homophobic society. Imo those flavors of shittiness just come in pairs. Homosexual behaviors are fine within certain parameters (aka "always have sex with the boss") but not on your own terms. To add spice, bisexuality is their most common mode (because I'm bi and these are my hcs for my fics I'm not writing, so there), but capitalism demands fresh grist for the mill so you better get het-married and pop out some kids you lowly peons. You have a choice so make the proper one. :)

- Corollary to the above, that doesn't keep all kinds of illicit "we're just friends with quid-pro-quo benefits for realsies" affairs of every stripe and every gender from going on everywhere. Many Ferengi have a lightbulb moment somewhere in early adulthood when they figure out their dad's business partner or the "auntie" who visited their mom every month had a little more going on.

- Plus there's way more gender non-conformity and varying degrees of trans-ing than the powers that be have a handle on. Pel isn't unique, even if most would have to somehow make it out into space to be able to thrive.

Damn a lot of these are just my personal bugbears plus THE GILDED AGE BUT WITH HAIRLESS SPACE RODENTS ain't they

- Women can't earn profit, okay. But lending or "lending" things to each other isn't commerce, riiiiiiight? To be assigned female is to master navigating a vast, dizzying barter/gift economy. Smart boys and men leverage this, too, and there are splinter sects that view this as the purest expression of the Great Material Continuum.

- Of course plenty of women make profit anyway, and just do their bast to dodge the FCA. The tough thing about insisting on using latinum as currency is that cash can be so hard to track, you know?

- Because of the RoA, guys are discouraged from doing favors or giving gifts without setting clear expectation of getting some return on investment. This can twist into an expression of friendship (and of course women do it too), and the ledger will keep cycling between debit and credit among friends for decades. A common mistake aliens make is to tell them recompense isn't needed without explaining why, or return their favor or present with something that zeroes out the debt. The Ferengi will assume you want to break off the friendship. (I cribbed this from dim memories of an African studies course I took in 2007 and whose textbook I know I still have but I can't frigging find it...)

- Flirting, they do a lot of it for a lot of reasons. Roddenberry made it clear that they're just straight up pretty horny, but there's no reason it can't pull double duty for building alliances with other people, smoothing over feuds or disagreements, or cementing friendships. Ferengi who are ace and/or sex-repulsed are possibly viewed similar to the way we'd view someone who's "not a hugger/not big on touching" and if they flirt just don't get offended if it doesn't go any further; aro Ferengi don't garner much comment aside from an occasional "wow how badass, never falling in love with anyone."

- where to even start on making sense of the Blessed Exchequer??? Like seriously, what is this literal prosperity gospel insanity, I need to force myself to re-read Rand and like, some Milton Friedman for this shit. Help.

- fuck I'm probably going to actually do that, RIP me...

#ds9 #star trek #meta #ferengi #i love them Too Much help #reliving my brief libertarian phase from high school from the opposite direction #my heart wants to make them simultaneously as queer and as repressed as possible #i didn't even make it to the goddamned blessed exchequer my head is too full #i will find beauty in this vulgarity if it kills me #this is too long #why did i spend my time this way

[mostly-mundane-atla]

I enjoy learning from your blog sm—ty for all you share. Especially since I’ve found there’s very few sources. Sry if you’ve talked about this before, but if you’re still open to answering questions I was wondering what the culture surrounding lgbt+ identities? You talked a bit about gender roles and co-husbands, but is homophobia still prevalent? (Would it be less so in-universe versus a modern au?) Also, if you’re willing to share any terminology (whether two-spirit is used?) used?

Alright, here's where things get a little tricky.

It's hard to really talk about queerness in other cultures because the idea that sexuality and attraction is an inherent part of your identity is not in any way universal. This is where you get a lot of people claiming certain historians and anthropologists are homophobic (and that's not to say some of them aren't but people tend to make really harsh assumptions without reading into what's actually being said) for saying that x or y doesn't mean this person was gay as we understand it. In a lot of cultures, the people you persue personal relationships with isn't a part of who you are, just something you do. So a man who prefered the companionship of other men, say in medieval England, would likely still marry a woman and have children to help him with work as he ages and take care of him when he's old. Does that mean he couldn't have a loving relationship with his wife, just because she wasn't a man and he wasn't attracted to her? No. Is it wrong if he wouldn't consider this not being himself, because he grew up in a world where attraction and sexuality is what you do rather than who you are? I can't really answer that.

And so you take this idea that romantic relationships are something you do rather than an ingrained part of your identity, and you add to that this concept practically unheard of nowadays that romance really isn't important. That doesn't mean that people never had romantic feelings or acted on them, just that this idea of courtly love, that being in love makes you a better person and thus is inherently righteous, was never a part of the culture. You got together with someone because you weren't related and they were someone you didn't mind surviving and having kids with, not strictly because you were in love with them. And then, unlike medieval England, sex was not something to be considered shameful or sinful, and definitely didn't have to be exclusive between spouses.

There was a bit off accidental accuracy in Kya saying that sort of thing isn't talked about in the comics. You wouldn't hear stories about a romantic love between two men or two women, but you also wouldn't really hear about romantic love between a woman and a man; not unless that was your parents' or grandparents' experience and they shared that with you. The important loves are considered to be between family members. You'll notice in Inuit stories a lot that if a girl is kidnapped and force into a marriage, it's her brother who rescues her, not her sweetheart.

I'm sure there would be some prejudiced people, because let's face it, you can't please them all. But I think the main reason you wouldn't see many gay couples as we understand them to be would have more to do with needing children without access to artificial insemination, as well as very different and comparatively irreverent attitudes toward sex and romance. (In fact, I'm reminded of a story this elder woman shared when my class went to learn a bit about Native cultures back in elementary school. She and her friend left their village and started living among white people. They were still learning English and these two white men, friends themselves, were friendly with them and helped them out, not just that first day, but over the course of, I wanna say some months? Anyway, one of them proposed to the lady telling us this story and the other to her friend. The men had fallen in love and already considered themselves in romantic relationships with these women. The women got a good laugh out of this because they hadn't realized that being so personal and familiar and generally happy to be around someone could be interpreted as romantic interest. Their response to these guys was basically "sure, why not" because romantic feelings or no, they genuinely enjoyed their company.)

If we wanna talk gender, the cultural understanding there is a little different there too. Sipiniq is Inuktittut for "baby that changed its sex at birth" which, as far as I understand, has been used for both intersex and trans people. I can't find anything on the way they specifically were seen by the community, let alone regional specifics but to speak on gender as a whole the cultures are interesting for a few reasons. Inupiat names and third person pronouns aren't gendered. You are named after a person to carry on their soul, and this person is not guaranteed to be your gender. So if you're afab, no one is calling you "she" as opposed to "he" because that's not how the language works and a few people might actually call you "grandpa" or "uncle" because that's who you were named after and that's whose soul is kept in your body. You might be seen as having the body of a man or woman, and the limitations that come with it, but that which makes you yourself is not a gendered thing. King Islanders even had a Messenger Feast tradition where women would dress as men and men would dress as women. They had masks for it and everything.

Queerness is such a nebulous thing and so often we approach it with such a limited understanding, insisting ours is the only right way to treat it. Sometimes the answer to "well were they gay/trans?" can only be "it's complicated" and we all have to be more okay with that. Not every culture has the same concept of or places the same importance on sexuality, romance, or gender.

#eskimo on main #response #that elder's story is legit in case anyone doubts it #it sounds like a 1950s musical movie but it actually happened

[yikesharringrove]

Quick q for your mango verse. Female alphas, do they carry?(and if they do carry, is it stigmatized?) and how does a female alpha/female omega pair produce pups? (Do they adopt?) (You mentiondd earlier that the only secondary gender to be determined by birth was a male omega, so I got curious) sorry/not sorry for making you expand this lovely universe of yours

I went in so DEEP this is all my thoughts on this universe and the gender/secondary gender politics of it.

Honestly, because this started as a drabble, I put SUCH little thought into it, lol, but as I’ve written, there have been more and more I’ve been dwelling on.

I’m gonna put it under the cut bc I talk genitals and stuff. Don’t want anyone to get uncomfy.

Here’s the Mango Masterlist, I’m gonna maybe put this somewhere in there. Maybe at the top.

So yes, how I always like to think of ABO is that male omegas have some combination of penis/vagina because I once read one where that was the case and I was like, hell yeah. It just kind of clicked into my brain.

Especially for this one, I’m not usually into mpreg unless it makes more sense for me, biologically, so like a trans person getting pregnant (which someone tagged the Mango series as trans!steve, which could TOTALLY work) or as I’ve written Steve, more on the intersex scale. I just think it’s interesting to bring this side of gender politics that very much exists into it and make it more.

HOWEVER, Steve can DEFINITELY be read as a trans man with a clit dick, so honestly, whatever you want. 

So, my original plan, when I introduced Robin, was to have her being a female alpha a kind of euphemism for her being a lesbian, and most omegas are female in this universe. My original thought was that female alphas would have a penis, but then I was asked to write about Nancy (and look me in the eyeballs and tell me that girl is NOT an alpha) so I was like, nvm and decided to scrap that, it also sets male omegas even further apart, as they are the only secondary gender to have a difference in external genitalia. I decided that when I wrote the part of them getting harassed.

So what I was thinking, was that Robin’s queerness comes in with her being attracted to other women, obvs, but also being attracted to other female alphas.

I think that with ABO, since they are these other secondary genders, there would be an even wider range of sexuality than in real life, so you could have omega women that are attracted to only alpha males, or only alpha females, or both or neither, etc, etc. Maybe a beta male that’s attracted to women, be they alpha or omega or beta. There are two different levels to sexuality alone that would be interesting to bring into play.

I think for Steve, he likes alphas. Doesn’t care male or female.

To me, for this universe, Steve is perfect for Billy. He likes the idea of omegas, but prefers males. Maybe he only dated male betas before he met Steve, so when he finds a male omega and it’s like he’s hit the Holy fucking Grail.

Nancy is an alpha that prefers betas, she likes to be more dominant, but doesn’t want someone to be completely reliant on her.

You bring up a SUPER interesting point, and I do really like the idea of. The world I've set up definitely caters more to alphas, but I think that there would be some kind of stigma against alpha women. I think a metaphor for it would be like, alpha males are the white cishet men of the world, they get away with everything and get it handed to them on a silver platter. There’s a LOT of privilege there. Alpha women are like white cishet women, they lose some of the privileges the men have, but they still have it WAY better than most.

So as I’m thinking about it, maybe because the way an alpha presents is their knot coming in, maybe when a female alpha presents, something similar happens where her clitoris enlarges. Because alpha males are rare, many alpha women date beta or alpha men, however, I think it’d be seen as kind of a pussy move by the world at large if a male alpha were to be with a female alpha.

Does any of this make sense? I honestly don’t know.

There are a lot of things I’ve thought about that I haven’t found a way of putting into the story since they are just snippets of time, but I thought it would be interesting to delve into Steve’s experience as a male omega, like maybe when he was born his parents could’ve had him undergo surgery and hormonal therapy to have him live as a female omega, as sometimes parents of intersex people do (which is something I DO NOT agree with, let people live) but they ultimately chose not to, which could then be reflected in how Steve’s mom tried to make amends after they moved to California.

This was a long tangent and didn’t answer a single thing you asked.

Female alphas carrying: I think yes, they can carry, but I think many would not want to. Part of the typical omega biology is wanting to carry pups, to nest and take care of life. I think many alpha women would choose not to have pups. They may feel the desire to reproduce, but don’t ultimately wouldn’t want to actually get pregnant. Maybe there is a well-established culture of omega surrogates. For female alphas that choose to carry, I think they would be looked at as lesser, like maybe they are with a male alpha, and she is seen as a lesser alpha for submitting to her man’s primal urge to impregnate, even though it was a decision they both made.

I think in this universe, female alphas/female omegas can’t procreate together, but as I mentioned, maybe there is a strong culture of surrogacy like many male alphas donate sperm and many female omegas are willing to act as surrogates for those that can’t procreate on their own, and having a surrogate or using a sperm donor is seen as fairly normal.

There is still a large sense of homophobia, as the stigma Billy and Steve face is largely that Steve is a guy, but that also has an air of anti-intersex or transphobia, seeing as the real rub is that he is a male omega, it’s the combination of the two that people are mostly discriminatory against. I think in terms of stigma, male alpha with a male omega is like, BAD, and then from most stigmatized to widely accepted and celebrated would be male alpha with male alpha, male beta, female alpha, female beta, female omega. 

To use an analogy from modern-day, a person may be accepting of a gay couple, but if they find out one of the people in the couple is a gay trans man, then they are transphobic and problematic about that.

Steve also is faced with transphobia and anti-intersex moments in the form of people asking him about his genitals. That is something that many trans and intersex people are harassed with and it’s disgusting, but I think that would be many people’s go-to form of harassment with him, like the guys in part 26.

As I mentioned, Robin may face discrimination from being a female alpha, being a female alpha attracted to women, but it is more the combination of being attracted to female + alpha that creates the same homophobia she would face in real life 1980s.

(I also was going to go into how transness may work in this ‘verse, since I think being under the trans umbrella would come into play with both sets of gender, and a person could be non-tertiary (? like non-binary but with 3 established gender roles) but this post is already so long if anyone wants to know my thoughts, feel free to reach out.)

I hope this kind of explained somethings, I went on long tangents without really answering your actual questions, and I kinda feel like J.K. Rowling not mentioning any of this stuff because it’s not a part of Harry’s journey, but this has been where my brain is at in terms of writing this drabble series. The more it progresses, the more I think about certain aspects of it, and I think a LOT about how gender and sexual politics would be established in this world.

As always, if I have said or done something harmful and problematic, please come and start a discussion with me, I am always willing to learn and I understand that in talking about certain things I do not experience, I can get stuff wrong and be insensitive.

#yikes talks #yikes writes #mango

[ladyloveandjustice]

Summer 2019 Anime Overview: Carole and Tuesday (final episodes)

I ended up having a lot more to say about Carole and Tuesday’s second season than I thought I did! It delved into some pretty varied and complex issues, after all. I did an EXTREMELY brief review/reaction( to the first half/season of the show you can see here. This review continues from that but is much more involved.

Carole and Tuesday (second half/ episodes 13-24)

Carole and Tuesday’s second half really expands its scope and goes all-out into the zone of social commentary in a way that I didn’t expect. Dang. I’m definitely impressed. There were hints of this in the first part, with Carole being a refugee from Earth who had very limited means and opportunities, while Tuesday came from a privileged background but ran away to escape a mother who cared more about her political career and public approval than her children’s well-being.

The second half delves into this much more, and condemns the policies of deportation and general public attitudes towards refugees and undocumented immigrants. Since the part of Mars our protagonists live inhabit pretty clearly meant to be analogous to New York, the plotline definitely meant to be a criticism of what’s going on in American politics right now. Of course Japan also notoriously has a lot of problems accepting immigrants and I think Watanabe and the rest of the staff probably wanted to say something about that too. 

Tuesday’s mom is able to climb the political ranks by calling for deportation of refugees on Mars- and in a chillingly accurate bit of commentary, she does this  solely to gain popularity with the public, and an even richer white man who has a corporate monopoly easily flouts laws and ethics to push her campaign. Black people are shown to be the first ones targeted for deportation and the black men who speak out are “made an example of”. The show doesn’t go so far to have anyone be killed (which is for the best, it’s unnecessary to go that far to make the point), police brutality is depicted and condemned, one man is targeted and beaten a bit despite not physically resisting, and a pair of men simply walking on the street are manhandled and arrested for “obstructing officers” despite doing absolutely nothing illegal. These marginalized folks continue to bravely fight back, even releasing protest raps from jail. And it’s pointed out to Tuesday that her mom is targeting people who are like her best friend and maybe she should step up and do something about it.

All of that is really good, and the show is firmly on the side of the minorities fighting back, and is all about how art should be used to challenge and reject oppression. It encourages diversity, unity, and takes a stand against persecution of immigrants, forced deportation and censorship. And how the show does this witha multi-cultural cast and a lot of developed characters from different backgrounds is great- there’s a love for all different kinds of music and acknowledgement that music owes everything to people of color. I especially appreciated the show going out of it’s way to depict how rap is often a tool for resistance.

That said, while the show’s message is positive and I appreciate its optimism and good intentions, the ending felt a little too neat and overly simplistic.It might be reductive to say the show goes so far to say racism can be solved if you sing a song, it’s more like “yeah use music to resist!” but the way the police are SO EASILY talked out of violence when they come to shut things down, the neat and simple way the political situation is resolved, and ALL the prison guards being willing to help out minorities in jail with no argument- yeah, I think it’s fair to say it wouldn’t go that smoothly in real life. However, the show seems to sincerely trying to send a message of hope, even if the execution is a little simplistic and lacking. 

The show is just sort of messy when it comes to its plot, themes and issues in general- I’d say it tries to do a little too much, so every arc is left feeling kind of underdeveloped and a lot of things are just...dropped. There are several examples of this.

Two mothers are both major characters in the show, and the show tries to make a connection there and say something about motherhood at the last second, but it’s muddled and contradictory. It’s stated that mothers can either chain you down or give you guidance and freedom, which is true, but we’re ONLY shown awful moms throughout the show, who have a large negative impact on their childrens’ life and hardly any positive impact, so celebrating motherhood at all feels bizarre. 

And the idea that this one mom isn’t all bad and maybe can be reasoned with is jarring since there aren’t any examples in the show of her postively affecting her child or being a good mom in the past. It’s so muddled I don’t know if I can say the show crosses over into abuse apologism (it’s at least made clear that if that mom doesn’t take her one chance to start to make amends, the kids will step aside and let her be taken down) but it really edges on it, and this is definitely something the show should have developed more and executed better

Another really muddled plot element with a lot of weird implications was the whole “martian androgyny syndrome” thing. It didn’t tun out as badly as I feared it might, but it was really hard to say why it was even there or what the show was trying to do with it. 

Basically, being on Mars can lead to some sort of vague condition where your sex changes I guess? And maybe it’s eventually fatal for some reason? And maybe the medication that treats it (by trying to stop the change? by addressing side effects? it’s not clear what it even does) causes uncontrollable anger??? That last part is especially uncertain because it’s only stated once by a person who might be trying to justify their abusive behavior BUT it’s also true that out of the three groups introduced in the show who have the syndrome, the people who (probably) take the meds have explosive tempers while the person who explicitly doesn’t is calm so????

 Anyway, the syndrome isn’t presented as uniformly negative, the calm person who doesn’t take the meds is a good person who is okay with their condition and they identify as non-binary and make a nice speech about it. But they’re also, y’know, dying, so. Again, it’s really unclear why this is even a plot element since it goes nowhere and gets explored so little and what is actually even going on with the syndrome and the medication is SO VAGUE. It doesn’t help that 2/3 of the people afflicted look like stereotypical anime caricatures of trans women. The idea that being intersex/getting a sex change/whatever is supposed to be happening is a death sentence isn’t great either.

And that kind of extends to the character arcs, relationships and plot in general a bit- there were a lot of things that were underdeveloped and muddled, which made the characters a little hard to connect to. Even the sci-fi aesthetic felt a little half-baked- I guess it’s a alternate history because we’re in Mars but Instagram is still a thing and modern singers are being referenced, but exactly how this world works went pretty underexplored. At least the text at the encourages viewers to use their creativity and continue the story themselves, so even the show itself is telling ficcers to get on it and make sense of this mess, okay. (Seriously though, I always enjoy seeing pro writers inviting the viewers to continue their story. Let those fic flags fly!)

Carole and Tuesday is definitely not perfect, but it’s entertaining, warm, visually beautiful and bursting with a love and respect for music. It’s features awesome tunes and varied and intriguing characters. The pro-diversity message that extends support for the marginalized and especially immigrants and refugees is very needed in these troubled times, and it’s theme of unity is very sweet

It’s an thought-provoking show clearly made with a lot love and largely positive intentions, so if you can handle the mixed and concerning implications of some of the more muddled bits, I encourage checking it out. 

#summer 2019 anime #carole and tuesday #carole & tuesday #shinichiro watanabe #watanabe shinichiro #anime overview #my reviews #reviews #review

[werevulvi]

Not the anon you replied to but I think the nonbinary argument falls apart for me because no one can be truly sexless nor a hermaphrodite person so this idea that they "should" be is like someone feeling they should be a minotaur or a fairy. It's so disconnected and almost entitled to bend reality that it grates on me, especially when its combined with some flavor of "but it's not a mental illness!".Even from a health pov there is no viable HRT that makes u both. And no gonads+no HRT = bad

Well, that's alright. I might just not see it from the same perspective as you. I don't really view nonbinary as one specific thing, but rather as on a greyscale kinda between male and female. It is not saying that mixing male and female traits on the same body in various ways necessarily "makes" a new gender, or truly sexless. The "gender" is merely personal interpretation.

I still battle this with myself, so it's difficult to talk about, but since I'm the only nonbinary person who's brain I know well enough to speak of... I guess I'll try.

First off though, usually the point with nonbinary isn't to be a specific "third" sex, sexless or to be some mythological hermaphodite. Humans cannot become truly sexless or be both sexes for real, but at the same time females cannot become males or vice versa either. So is it pointless to transition (with hormones and surgery) at all then?

Because at the end of the day, we're all just bio males and bio females, regardless how we feel about it, and regardless if we transition or not. That's what the reality is. But wanting to look different and putting a gendered meaning into that difference, isn't necessarily wrong, bad or illogical to me.

Like I have a teddy tiger which I sometimes refer to as simply "my tiger" even though she's not a real tiger. Because the toy resembles a tiger, and was made to resemble a tiger, it's logical enough to call her a tiger, even though it might sometimes be important to specify that it's made of fabric. Likewise, a nonbinary person might just be a female who looks partially male and partially female, due to hormones and surgery, like myself. To then say that me looking both male and female and liking it "makes" me nonbinary is no more untrue than saying that the soft toy "is" a tiger.

Because I resemble a mix of both sexes, just like the soft toy resembles a tiger. I cannot produce both sperm and eggs so I am not of both sexes for real; and my tiger cannot roar nor scratch, and is not a living creature, thus it is not a real tiger. Often times we call things not only what they are, but also what they resemble. Especially when it comes to art and other creations, but really all sorts of things. Like comparing someone's red hair to fire, or calling my balcony during hot summer days a sauna, even though red hair is not actual flames and my balcony is not an actual sauna. Why? Because it help with communication. Parables are important to describe things or to make a point. I even made another parable to describe a parable, to prove a point with a parable, just now.

Granted that most nonbinary (and binary) trans people do not view themselves as a parable to the gender of the sex they consider themselves to be, but I do.

So, consider the fact that transition doesn't actually change the person's sex, only polishes the surface to either look like the opposite sex, and/or some ambiguous variant of both/neither sex, but it can still make that person feel better about themselves. Is it then pointless for them to do things that make them feel better and find ways to lead a more functional life, regardless of how redundant it might seem to you? Because to me, the point of transitioning is not to become something else (whether that be male, female, sexless or a hermaphrodite), but to reduce dysphoria to improve over all life quality for the dysphoric person. And yes, dysphoria is a mental illness. I wouldn't wanna argue against that. I view my dysphoria as the defect, not my sex. And no, transitioning doesn't help every dysphoric person, but I think it's pretty clear that it helps for some. So then there's just not that much of a difference between... say, transitioning with T and top surgery to live as a self-perceived man - and transitioning with only T to live as a self-perceived half man-half woman. Because neither of those two examples can truly become anything other than a female anyway, so why does it matter? It might not matter to you, but it probably matters to them.

Also, I don't think anyone "should" be of the other sex or some other variant either. I just think people can do whatever they want with their own bodies if it makes them happy, and call themselves whatever they want if they feel that's useful for them somehow.

Both males and females, as well as intersex conditions that look ambiguous exist. Fairies and minotaurs do not. Even if they might be loosely based on bulls and fireflies. I could literally fool people to believe that I'm both male and female by simply saying some stupid shit like "I was born with both a dick and a pussy" because a lot of people have heard that can be a thing, even though they would know it's rare, they likely know it's humanly possible in some way. Getting people to believe I'm a fairy or minotaur would probably be a lot harder, unless they’re 5 years old.

How much or what kind of dysphoria somehow has doesn't really matter, I think. Dysphoria is dysphoria. And yeah, I would at least be willing to possibly extend that non-dysphoric people who seem genuinely more satisfied with themselves post-transition. Because then so what, good for them.

But yeah, I know even I have an easier time accepting certain types of nonbinary more than other types. Someone wanting no genitals, I would personally find very concerning, but someone wanting both a dick and pussy, I wouldn't be nearly as worried about. Someone wanting physical changes that can realistically be acquired through hormones, surgery, etc, would not be as concerning for me as someone wanting... say for example a big beard but not a deeper voice, and start dabbling with testosterone anyway.

You're right that there is no hormone that makes you "both" but it's possible to look androgynous in various ways with the hormones available. Sure, I may pass as male, have a beard and flat chest, but I also have a curvy figure and a pussy. To me, that's kind of a way to look like "both" sexes at once. Not evenly, and not like a hermaphrodite stereotype, but it is a combination of male and female sex characteristics that together makes me look kinda half and half. How I "achieved" that was simply by first going through female puberty (naturally) and then taking testosterone (on standard, "full" dose) for a significant amount of time, and get a mastectomy. Totally doable. Although my personal results depend highly on my genetic as well, of course. For other variants of androgyny, some manage to achieve that with low dose hormones, or going off the hormones after a shorter time on them. Some also go on and off hormones (not sure how healthy that is though.) Not everyone gets their intended results, but I have seen many variants that have looked good to me. I’m not advocating for getting one’s gonads removed and then not take any sort of hrt, or doing hrt without a knowledgable doctor’s supervision.

So really all I can say is I'm generally okay-ish with the concept of nonbinary, but some aspects/variants of it does concern me, make me uncomfortable, make me roll my eyes, or even viscerally upset me. I'm still quicker to critisise nb than I am to defend it, however... I do both critisise and defend it.

Whether I want to admit it or not, I'm practically nonbinary myself, even though I scoff at the concept and can name a hundred things wrong with it. I don't wanna label myself that, though. I hate it.

Let me put it this way: In an ideal world I'd just exist as myself like this, take my testosterone just because I like it (and not because I'm x, y or z gender), dress however I want (without it being questioned to mean I wanna be x, y or z gender), and be openly proud about my bio sex being female (without people telling me they don't believe it), without having to label myself anything at all. Alternatively, I'd also be fine with carrying a label which doesn't exclude ANY of those things I like being/doing with my body, style, name, etc.

But thing is I don't live in an ideal world. I live in Sweden. And in Sweden, we call freaks like me nonbinary. Because women don't wanna take testosterone to look like bearded men in dresses, and (trans) men don't love being female. Only nonbinary people do. So I’m only really nonbinary because I don’t fit any other label, and well, most people I know/come across dislike it too.

At the end of the day my body is just me and I just am like this. It doesn't actually "mean" anything, other than that I had dysphoria and acted on it. I love being female and I love being transitioned. Thus, I feel like I am in some highly abstract and vague sense "a little bit of both" sexes, and I don't think that's a particularly strange conclusion to come to, given my situation. I don't mean it literally. It's just how I relate to my body, and it's how the world relates to me. Sure, far from everyone “reads” me as nonbinary, but the sheer number of people who have told me I should identify that way... is flabbergasting, seriously. It’s like 20+ people who told me that, unprompted. Both people I’ve known, and strangers.

So, as I'm reluctantly trying to slap the uncomfortable nonbinary label on my own ass... perhaps I "shouldn't" invalidate my own kind, while I'm at it. However, the only thing I'd kindly ask of others to "validate" about me is my humanity, and to respect my bodily autonomy. If others think of me as a man or woman, both or neither, I truly do not care. But would I ever truly advocate for the nonbinary community? No, I don't think so. For the most part it’s regressive and goes against my values. I'd rather have gender be done away with, because ultimately I think that's a much better goal... even though it’s a pipedream. We can all dream, right?

So I mean... I'm probably not the best person to come to for some solid argument in support of nonbinary.

[secretmarial]

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the KFC kids in general and their genders. Obviously all three are non-binary, and seem to prefer they/them, though Frisk only spent a day among monsters and is probably the youngest so they may pick out different pronouns at a later point. Anything from this point on is headcanon, do not feel as though I am trying to push my opinions on you!

Long post under the readmore!

Then I decided to start thinking about their assigned genders, just to get a better handle on backstory. Actually, that’s a lie. I saw that one galaxy brain meme about afab nb being perceived by other people, thought of Chara, and then when I thought about it I decided that being afab would give Chara maximum suffering and as much as I love them, suffering at the hands of humans is a major part of their personality. Note that I say afab would elicit maximum suffering because ‘male’ clothing is worn by basically everyone, while a-hole bios looking to force Chara to be a ‘good girl’ could shove them into dresses. (And also periods ohGod)

Chara now has problems with anything stereotypically feminine which they would hopefully address in therapy. MTT would of course be delighted to help them become more comfortable with the concept of dresses and makeup not meaning ‘girl’ though only at their own request. They end up a tendency to recoil from femininity so much that they overcorrect into masculinity. They do not identify as a male-nb, however, but as agender.

I decided Frisk is intersex because they seem to fill a role of ideal-Chara. Not to say that they are a replacement in any way shape or form, but it sort of ties in to Asriel saying that Frisk is the type of friend he wished he could have had. Frisk also achieves Chara’s goal of freeing monsterkind, and is compared to them on at least one occasion, besides the mistaken identity. It would almost make sense that Frisk would naturally have the kind of body Chara would be envious of. Also, I love the idea of Frisk growing up to have all of the secondary sex characteristics. They’re tall as heck, have broad shoulders, wide hips, curvy breasts, facial hair, ect, ect. I just want Frisk to be visibly, aggressively nb to anyone who looks at them.

I decided to have one kid for each assigned gender so Kris is amab. This is mostly to differentiate them from their siblings, since a lot of people want to say Kris is one, the other, or a fusion. That’s really all I have to say for them, at least until we get a better handle as to what exactly is happening in Deltarune. So this basically means that Chara and Kris are trans, while Frisk is technically cis. This throws Chara for a bit of a loop but they roll with it.

Frisk and Kris are both totally cool with dresses, makeup, and jewelry, though Frisk enjoys dressing up more than either of their fellow adopted siblings. This makes sharing a headspace with Chara a little awkward though, so they avoid it at first to keep from giving Chara dysphoria.

I also made decisions on deadnames, which I wasn’t originally going to share because they don’t matter but I’m going to be honest I’m a little proud of myself here. I decided that Chara’s deadname is Lucille, because of the similarity to Lucifer, as a shoutout to the demon that comes when you call its name. My dad has a snake named Lucifer and we call her Lucy, a common nickname for Lucille, so that’s where that came from. I also decided that young Chara didn’t originally know that nonbinary was a thing, they just knew they weren’t a girl. So, they figure, they have to be a boy, right? (Wrong) So they cut their hair short in the middle of the night (I recently decided that this is prompted by a nightmare, which I might expand on later, especially if anyone asks). Then they stare in the mirror and realize that they need a boy name, right? They consider (I considered) Luke, based on their original name, but then realized that they could use this opportunity to name themselves after the coolest guy ever, Jim Kirk! (Chara is a canon nerd, fight me) Except, James is kinda a boring name? And Kirk sounds weird. So during their short time identifying as male, Chara goes by the name Tiberius. They announce this to all of their classmates the next day. ‘But it sounds a little pretentious, you can call me Ty for short!’ Their parents and classmates and probably teachers all gave them hell for it, which is depressing. Then they eventually realize that, even if no one is really respecting their new male pronouns or any of it, ‘boy’ doesn’t fit any better than ‘girl’ did. So they just ditch the concept of gender as a whole. I like to think they gave themselves their name as they were climbing Mt. Ebott, and it became something of a mantra to them. ‘My name is Chara. My name is Chara.’ Then they fall and meet Asriel, and the first thing they blurt out after he asks if their okay is “My name is Chara!”

Kris was adopted by the Dreemurrs young enough that they might as well not have a deadname, because they don’t remember it at all, not even the faintest inkling of it. Actually it’s possible that they don’t, that their bios didn’t name them, if they were adopted from birth.

Frisk, oddly enough, does have something of a deadname, though it’s only really on a technicality. I have weirdly specific Frisk headcanons, which involve their homeless single father calling them by dozens of pet names, so often that they legitimately don't realize that one of them is their actual legal name. That one name?

Angel.

No I will not stop being ridiculous and making things deeper than they need to be, you can’t make me. Anyway, have a nice day and please feel free to shout at me about any of this I would love to discuss, as long as you’re discussion does not involve the KFC children having binary genders.

#undertale #mystuff #chara #chara dreemurr #frisk #kris #kfc gang #deltarune #lgbtq+ #nb #nonbinary #my stuff

[odaatlover]

Hey so I’m trying to explain to my best friend what it meants to be non-bianary. It’s hard because I identify as a cis woman & I want to be sensitive to nb folks. I also want to explain it correctly. When I tried she replied “well they obviously have to know if they are a man or a woman.” I told her not everyone feels like a man or a woman but I couldn’t elaborate. She just doesn’t understand. What do I say?

Even I have trouble explaining it. I just know I’m not a woman, but not a man either. I don’t want society to perceive me as either of those things because it feels wrong. But everyone’s experience is different, so I can only speak for myself. And I will explain this to the best of my ability based solely on my own experiences.

In order for your friend to understand that there can be a person who feels like neither woman nor man, she first has to detach genitals from gender, and understand that they are not dependent on one another. I think that’s where many people get stuck, especially cis people, because there are two main types of genitals — vagina or penis. If she can see a pre-op trans person as the gender they identify as (for example, if she can see a transwoman with a penis as a woman), then she’s already got this idea! Some people are born with both types of genitals, and so you’d think maybe they feel like both a woman and a man, but that’s not necessarily true. Some intersex people feel like one of the binary genders (woman or man) and take hormones and/or get surgery to match that identity. So genitals and sex do not equal gender.

Gender is a social construct. Women and men are treated differently by society in certain ways. And it has nothing to do with what’s in your pants, because how do people know what’s in your pants when you’re walking around? Identifying as a woman means that you want to be seen as a woman and treated as such. And identifying as a man means that you want to be seen as a man and treated like one. But what happens when you don’t want to be seen as either of those because neither of those things feel right? ...or as both? Or maybe one day you feel like you’re a man, and the next you feel like you’re a woman? What then? How do you choose when both feel equally incorrect...or equally correct?

For me personally, I feel like somewhere in between. When I stand with a group of women, I can relate to some things, but I don’t feel like one of them. I also feel that when I’m with a group of guys. It’s the same feeling your friend gets when she’s with a group of guys. She can relate in certain ways, and she can hang out with them, but she knows she’s not one of them. And it’s not because she doesn’t have a penis like they do, but because she is a woman and identifies as one. I get that feeling with both of the binary genders — that I am an outsider. If she still has trouble disconnecting genitals from gender, then ask her this...

Imagine you feel exactly the same way you do now, like your soul is the same, you still like the things you like and you still are who you are, but you wake up one day and you have a penis. And it’s not a temporary thing, you’re now stuck with it forever. This is your body now. Do you want to start living like a man now just because you have this new body part? Do you start going by he/him pronouns even though it feels wrong? Do you go into the men’s bathroom when going into the women’s bathroom feels right? What do you do then?

For some people, being called she/her and he/him pronouns feel equally wrong. And going into the women’s and the men’s bathroom feels equally wrong. And being called “ma’am” or “sir” feels equally wrong. And when you’re standing in a room and someone says “okay all women stand on this side of the room, and all men stand on the other side of the room” some people just truly don’t know where to go. And what’s in their pants, or on their chest, or what clothes they’re wearing, doesn’t matter. Gender is something inside you, not outside. You feel it in your soul, and everything you choose to do on the outside is a form of expression based on who you are and what feels like you. So, the outside (the body you’re born into) doesn’t determine the inside (your soul)...but rather, the inside determines the outside.

All humans are so similar in ways we don’t even realize. We try so hard to separate women and men into these two drastically different categories, but they’re not all that different. We all feel, we all bleed, we all love...we’re so similar. And no matter what body you’re born into, hormones can change it very easily. If a born female takes testosterone hormones, their voice changes, they grow body/facial hair, fat redistributes from the hips/thighs to the belly and other areas to give a straighter looking shape and strong jawline, the clitoris grows to look very similar to a small penis, they stop getting their period (for the most part), and their sex drive raises. And when someone born as a male takes estrogen hormones their body changes as well and they stop growing hair everywhere, and sometimes their penis shrinks, and fat changes to give a more curvy shape and soft looking face, and their sex drive lowers, and so on. Here are a couple of examples:

(A person born as a female who changed testosterone levels)

(A person born as a male who changed estrogen levels)

I don’t know either of these people and if they’ve had bottom surgery, but let’s assume they didn’t and they have the same genitals they were born with. If you saw these people on the street, you would assume the top person is a man and the bottom is a woman, despite what’s in their pants. Because these things such as body/face shape, hair, etc. are the things we use to determine woman or man...things that hormone levels create. And we treat that person a certain way based on that outer appearance (AKA, the amount of estrogen and testosterone in their bodies). So if you think about it, the fact that our bodies can change so easily just from changing hormone levels, means that we’re not all that different from each other. Separating “woman” and “man” from each other in such a drastic way is a societal idea, not a scientific, because anybody can look like a woman or a man without surgery no matter what sex (female or male) they’re born as. And so if that’s the case, and we can easily go back and forth, then doesn’t it make sense that some people can feel, and be, somewhere in between?

Some cis people will never get it because their body matches their gender identity, and so it’s very difficult to imagine the real possibility that for some people, it doesn’t. And that’s okay. It’s a lot to wrap your head around, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of patience for the idea to start to make sense, especially when we live in such a binary world. But everything is a spectrum, even gender. And just because you are on one of the very ends of that spectrum and you were born into a body with the right amount of hormone levels to match your identity, doesn’t mean that everyone is the same.

I hope this helps!

#nonbinary #gender #what is gender #what is nonbinary #enby

[alexsfictionaddiction]

Alex Recommends: May and June Books

I must apologise for the late arrival of this post. It should have been up days ago but I’ve been struggling to read much for the last month or so. My head has been very foggy and dark with all of the confusion, anxiety and hate that has been filling my news feeds and I’ve been filled with a desire to combat it. Before this month, I’d have run in the opposite direction from any kind of confrontation but recent events have given me the kick up the butt to actively do better. I’ve been calling out bigotry when I come across it and I’ve noticed that some people, notably my older relatives, haven’t necessarily reacted favorably to the changed, more outspoken Alex. It has been pretty daunting and I’ve worked myself up into fits of rage and tears several times over the last couple of months.

A lot of things have changed for me since my last Alex Recommends post. I’m currently temporarily living in Staffordshire with my boyfriend because my depression got too bad for me to stay at home for much longer. I missed him unbelievably much and I knew that spending some prolonged time with him would help -and it has. Both him and I have spent 12 weeks religiously following all of the rules, so we’re both extremely low-risk for catching and spreading COVID-19 and being together was something that we simply really needed to do. Please don’t hate me for it! In other news, I have also started writing again, which feels amazing. I’m now a few thousand words into a queer Rapunzel retelling that I have lots of ideas for. Maybe I’ll even post an extract or two, when I feel it’s ready to show you.

In the centre of the renewed energy of Black Lives Matter and the undeniable exposure of the horrors that is police brutality, the book blogging and BookTube worlds vowed to uplift Black voices. I wrote a very long, in-depth blog post full of Black-written books and Black book influencers. Please check it out to diversify your TBR and educate yourself on Black issues, which is what every white person should be doing now and always.

June was Pride Month and I tried my best to compile a series of recommendation posts in honour of it. These included gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, ace, pansexual and intersex lists. I’ve had some great feedback on this, so I hope you find some fantastic new reads. It felt especially poignant to put them together the same year that one of my childhood heroes came out as an ignorant trans-exclusive feminist. As a lifelong Harry Potter superfan and someone who has repeatedly publicly supported Rowling in the past, I feel the need to clarify where I now stand. I do not support or agree with a single thing that she has said in recent times with regard to transgender people. I’ve never felt my own status as a cisgender female threatened by trans people wanting more rights or believed that children or women were at risk due to their existence. 

I read her words more than once and struggled to find any semblance of the woman who wrote the books that have most defined my life. I’m hesitant to say that we can always successfully separate the art from the artist but I will say that it makes sense to me that the Rowling of 2020 is not the same Rowling that wrote Harry Potter. She was a destitute single mother when Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997 and of course, she is now a million worlds away from that lifestyle. It breaks my heart but it makes sense to me that she has changed beyond belief because her life has changed beyond belief. I’m not and never would make any excuses for her recent behaviour and I have stopped supporting her personally but I will not be getting rid of my Harry Potter books and I will undoubtedly re-read them several more times. However, I am now hugely reluctant to buy any more merchandise or special editions of the books, which saddens me but at the moment, it feels right. There is no coming back for her from this and I will make a conscious effort to keep Harry Potter and Rowling away from my future content. It can be really tough to admit that the people you once really admired aren’t great humans but it’s something that we all have to acknowledge in this case, in order to move forward with our own quests to become our best selves.

It didn’t feel right to post my May recommendations last month as I didn’t feel comfortable promoting my own content in the midst of boosting Black voices. So today I’m bringing you a bumper edition of Alex Recommends. Here are 10 books that I’ve enjoyed since the start of May that I’d love to share with you. Enjoy! -Love, Alex x

FICTION: Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Set in the affluent neighbourhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio in the 1990s, two families are brought together and pulled apart by the most intense, devastating circumstances. Dealing with issues of race, class, coming-of-age, motherhood and the dangers of perfection, Little Fires Everywhere is highly addictive and effecting. With characters who are so heartbreakingly real and a story that weaves its way to your very core, I couldn’t put it down and I’m still thinking about it over a month after finishing it. 

FICTION: Get A Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert

When coding nerd Chloe Brown almost dies, she makes a list of goals and vows to finally Get A Life. So she enlists tattooed redhead handyman and biker Red to teach her how. Cute, funny and ultimately life-affirming, this enemies-to-lovers rom-com was exactly the brand of light relief that I needed this month. The follow-up Take A Hint, Dani Brown focuses on a fake-dating situation with Chloe’s over-achieving academic sister and I can’t wait to get my hands on that.

FICTION: The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart by Margarita Montimore

Just before her 19th birthday at midnight on New Year’s Eve 1983, Oona Lockhart finds herself inexplicably in 2015 inside her 51-year-old body. She soon learns that every year on New Year’s Day, she will now find herself inside a random year of her life and she has no control over it. Seeing her through relationships, friendships and extreme wealth, this strange novel has echoes of Back To The Future and 13 Going On 30 with a final revelation that I certainly never saw coming.

NON-FICTION: The Five by Hallie Rubenhold

Atmospheric and engaging, The Five details the previously untold stories of Polly, Annie, Elisabeth, Kate and Mary-Jane -the women who lost their lives at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Full of fascinating research and heartbreaking accounts of what these women’s lives may have been like, Rubenhold paints a dark immersive portrait of Victorian London and gives voice to these tragic silenced lives. Although we can’t know for certain if these accounts are entirely accurate, they feel very plausible and in some ways, The Five exposes how little time has moved on, when it comes to the public portrayal of single, troubled women.

NON-FICTION: Unicorn by Amrou Al-Kadhi

From a childhood crush on Macaulay Culkin to how a teenage obsession with marine biology helped them realise their non-binary identity, Unicorn tells the story of how the obsessive perfectionist son of a strict Muslim Iraqi family became the gorgeous drag queen Glamrou. Packed full of humour, honesty and heart, this book will give you the strength and inspiration to harness what you were born with and be who you were always meant to be.

MIDDLE-GRADE: The Super Miraculous Journey of Freddie Yates by Jenny Pearson

When fact-obsessed Freddie’s grandmother dies, he discovers that the father he has never met may actually be alive and living in Wales. So he has no choice but to grab his best friends Ben and Charlie, leave his home in Andover and go to find his dad! I laughed so many times during this madcap adventure and I know the slapstick crazy humour will hit the middle-grade target audience just right. It’s also a wonderful depiction of small town Britain with a focus on the true meaning of family.

MIDDLE-GRADE: A Kind Of Spark by Elle McNicoll

When Addie learns about her hometown’s history of witch trials, she campaigns tirelessly to get a memorial for the women who lost their lives through it. This wonderfully beautiful novel gives a unique insight into the mind of an 11-year-old autistic girl with a huge heart. Busting myths about neurodiversity while tackling typical pre-teen drama, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry but most of all, you’ll close the book with a huge smile on your face. 

HISTORICAL FICTION: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

In 16th century Warwickshire, Agnes is a woman with a unique gift whose relationship with a young Latin tutor produces three children and a legacy that lasts for centuries. This enchanting, all-consuming account of the tragic story of Shakespeare’s lost son, the effects that rippled through the family and the play that was born from their pain will send a bullet straight through your heart. Wonderfully researched and beautifully written, Hamnet is worth all of the hype.

HISTORICAL FICTION: The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

When a vicious storm kills most of the men of Vardø, Norway, it’s up to the women to keep things going but a man with a murderous past is about to come down with an iron fist. At the heart of this dark tale of witch trials, grief and feminism, two women find something they’ve each been searching for within each other. Gorgeously written with a fantastically slow-burning queer romance, Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s first adult novel is an addictive, atmospheric read with a poignant, tearjerker of an ending.

SCI-FI: Q by Christina Dalcher

When one of Elena’s daughters manages to drop below the country’s desired Q number, she is sent away to one of the new state schools and Elena is about to find out something she’d really rather not know about the new system. Packed full of real social commentary and critique of life as we know it while painting a picture of how things could be even worse (yes, really!), this pulse-racing, horrifying sci-fi dystopian gripped me from the first page and refused to let me go. 

#book recommendations #recommended #recommendations #may #june #books #bookworm

[saraa-lancee]

So what issues would you like them to tackle that hasn’t already been done on the show before?

(I just want to say this is my first ask ever and I've been here since... God maybe 2013? So thank you!!)

I would LOVE to see a new dimension to sexuality. I'm also casually of the team that's "Sara herself should say Bisexual" because Bisexual has only been said once on screen and Nate said it casually.. We have a scene where Sara says tells Nurse Lindsay that Lesbian isn't a bad word yet the show kinda doesn't act that way about Bi. Bi erasure is an issue that would be interesting-- since Sara is with Ava, it would be neat to have some line of "i didn't pick a team" or just along the lines of Still Bi With A Woman.

(They also missed an opertunity with Charlie to use neutral pronouns of some kind)--> a discussion further on gender identity would be cool too. There are casual set ups for this with Charlie, like in the Shakespeare episode, but nothing is ever really taken completely seriously or honestly even explicitly. I would really enjoy a nonbinary or intersex narrative in this particular context because I feel like the team of legends (as the people the characters are) would fit really nicely with that. But it would be cool to have a trans character that Gideon helps? Because the arrowverse trans character (in Supergirl-- Nia) is already transitioned. It would be cool to have a transitioning characer in a really casual way even (a particular scenario would be New Character leaving sickbey while someone else walks in. Other person asked if New is feeling OK and New just says like "oh yeah, just my hormones.). But yeah anything with gender identity.

I always hunger for more disability stories, but based on how they Wrote Sara's blindness... yikes. I remember watching a panel or something on YouTube about how Caity was hoping that Sara was at least going to have a cane or be shown to struggle with some stuff, but the writers ignored all of that. So its kind of touchy based on that but I think it would be really neat to have someone with a prosthetic (or even just an amputation, someone born without a limb, etc.)-- it would be a beautiful narrative about 'Gideon can literally grow you a new arm' and that character firmly saying no, this is me, having this difference doesn't make me less, you aren't "fixing" me because I'm not broken, I like myself, etc, whatever.

I know that for me personally one of the best things about the show is that Sara and Ava don't have to come out, and everyone just treats them like normal, but I think some kind of homophobia narrative would be good, not to a big extent but just to the extent like in S1 when Kendra and Ray move in 1950s and that dynamic only with the girls. Like, for the show to acknowledge homophobia in such a direct way, as they did with interracial relationships. This beyond the obvious homophobia of the Nazis. (I personally can't think of an aspect where its implied, but sometimes I can miss or misinterpret implicated stuff like that).

I would love to see a return to POC cultures and narratives (narratives outside of racism) S1 with Kendra and Carter and the Egyptian culture aspect, Amaya and Zambesi aspect. We see a tad bit of this with Zari and the bollywood scene, and Japan post WW2, but they are more side aspects now. It would be neat to go to India or other places in southeast Asia (culturally), or Central/South America. Overall, I would just like to see more of that cultural aspect because human culture is something that interests me a lot and I feel like can be easily casually thrown in with time travel--- traditional clothes, buildings, and ideals (an example of the ideals is the discussion in feudal Japan about the cultures views on death).

I feel like there was a lot of potential with Hank and Sara to continue that discussion about women in power. Yes, we have discussed this before. We do it a lot in second season with the JSA and even Jonah Hex but I think Hank had a lot of potential to add a dimension to that discussion. (honestly see next paragraph for more). That whole episode with the Minotaur i would have loved if they'd been a bit more explicit with that-- yes, obviously a woman can be in charge (in Hanks mind) but he has the right to walk in there and take over because her experience doesn't matter and also we will do whatever he wants. Sara spends almost the whole time just rolling her eyes and bitting her tongue besides a light quip in the beginning asking if a girls ever punched him. in the past Sara has literally exerted dominance over men so I was just kind of disappointed with that dynamic. I love the character of Sara as an "unconventional woman" or a "strange friend" and I've noticed comments like that pretty much stopped after the 3rd season. I know some people hated those comments but I think they can be good. I enjoyed them and would like to see them again because it's literally just Sara being unapologetically herself, a strong woman, doing whatever she does, no matter how weird or unconventional it is. (Which is an integral part of Saras character to me)

BUT its also not necessarily "new" issues. Issues don't go away in real life-- we had multiple issues about Race in America with Jax, from different points in history (Slavery and the 1950s). Jax even mentions how he still experiences Rascism today. The issues don't go away and just because they are mentioned once doesn't mean they can't (and shouldn't) be examined from other points in history. IE just because the show has talked about it before doesn't mean we can't talk about it again from a different angle and/or perspective.

I see a lot of potential with Astra with the racism thing (people are nicer to me in literal Hell) but it also would have been interesting with Mona, to show a different type of racism would have been INCREDIBLE.

I also can think of maybe a scene or two that would have just been a nice touch with Zari (either one, but I have a soft spot for Zari 1.0, and I think with her life as an illegal Muslim would have been an enriching perspective) as a Muslim. They are very good to her character in the way that she obviously abstains from Liquor and Pork, and observes Ramadan. But one thing that would have been interesting is for Zari to experience early 2000s (or honesty still right now) xenophobia. Especially Z1 since being a Muslim is Illegal in 2045 there was a lot of emotional potential there. (Although I feel like I can understand why the writers didn't want to touch that because of current conflicts).

Since we're going to outer space (that was actually confirmed right? Or was it just hinted and I misread??), I think issues will have to be character driven rather than time period driven. But therin we have a lot of potential-- a race of aliens without distinct genders (wait, so your worth can be dictated based off of your genitals?? Plus sexuality stuff there), aliens confused about race (I don't understand some of your skins are different colors... and your people treat each other differently based on this?). We could introduce a matriarchal society, which the crew with Captain Lance feel particularly unphased by. Perhaps we have a completely pacifist society or aliens made of inorganic materials (debates about what constitutes as alive, what lives are meaningful, etc.) You get the idea(I adore star trek so you can imagine my glee thinking about some of those scenarios).

I think for me, the hard shift to comedy was at the expense of some of my favorite aspects of the show and also things that set it apart. This Found Family is so rewarding because they are all so so different but those differences enrich each other. They become better people and feel at home without having to change who they fundamentally are. And they are whoever they want to be. I feel like now the show has simply had an incredibly jarring tone shift thats trying too hard to be a comedy. (This one is just an opinion but a joke among all the serious is always just a lot more funny to me. I find myself laughing more at one liners and random stuff in the early seasons. Now it feels like 'ok, what's the next ridiculous thing.')

I think... humanity is pretty dark. But humanity also rises above. This is why I adore the episode from post WW2 Japan and to me it personally really stands out from other episodes in s4/s5. The idea of creating and destroying, pain and sadness locked inside, terror and hatred for the beings you share the planet with. That pain creates monsters. Sometimes by accident. (Sara's pain turned her into the version of herself she called a monster.). And also about embracing your passions (Mick hiding his writing). In that episode, we still have jokes about Godzilla. Garima appears and its hilarious. But it's also an incredibly powerful narrative about pain and fear and shame and gives a perspective that the western audience wouldnt... necessarily think about (the actual consequences and what the bomb actually literally did.).

That darkness makes the light so much more meaningful. If everything becomes light... than why are we still fighting?

Sorry if this is jumbled, I'm on mobile so.

Also, sorry if this is a rant or whatever. I am very passionate about this topic and oh boy if I was on a computer and had the time I'd probably repondd with a link to a doc.

#also im autistic but #that tone my guy #legends posting