#bc some ppl will misunderstand and misrepresent me no matter what i do or how i present myself | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thedeadflag · 3 years

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I’m so confused! I know it’s not your responsibility to educate me but in your post bringing awareness to the negative aspects of g!p fanfic you say

“Why do these g!p characters rarely if ever involve experiences reflective of trans/intersex women? Why are they so utterly cis and perisex-washed? Why do nearly all writers have zero idea that tucking is a thing? “

Doesn’t that answer your original question? The reason they don’t reflect those groups of ppl is bc g!p isn’t trying to represent those groups of people or else it WOULD be transphobic to limit them to one specific fetish right? it just refers to a canonically female character with the addition of a penis (I don’t argue the name “g!p” should be changed bc that’s a no brainer why that could be offensive). But the fanfic in general, how could it be harmful? I’ve noticed in my time reading it as a non binary person it’s given me great gender euphoria reading a reader insert where reader has a penis while being a femme representing person just bc that’s a reflection of my personal experience. I don’t see anywhere where g!p fanfic ever references or tries to emulate the experiences of trans or intersex people so how could it be offensive?

Sorry this is way too long I’m just very confused

I'm going to try and lay this out as politely as I can. It's after 3:30 in the morning here, so this could be a bit disjointed and rambling. More under the cut:

In real life, ~99.999999% of women with penises are trans women. Which puts us in a tricky situation of (A) being the only women with penises around for media involving women with penises to reflect back on, and (B) being in the lovely position of precious few people actually having had meaningful real life exposure to trans women, meaning (C.) all those stigmas and all that misinformation are going to purely affect us and it’s going to be uncritically gobbled up by the masses, since they don’t have any meaningful information to fill in the blanks with instead.

When we peer into the depths of femslash fandoms and see all these folks who aren't trans women writing about women with penises, and using cis women’s bodies as platforms for these penises, it’s the simplest thing.

I mean, some of those folks might actually be struggling and confused about why they’re into it, what the real appeal is, why they get off on it, why they might have some feelings about wanting a penis of their own…

…but from our vantage point, it’s really easy to gauge 99.99% of the time. We can generally see valid, legitimate yearning to have a penis pretty damn easily in a piece of art/writing, and we can also see when people who create this media are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization.

And 99.9% of the time, the creators are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization, and see trans women’s bodies as a perfect vehicle to tap into that, generally due to deeply held cissexist views that link us and our bodies and genitals directly to cis men, to maleness. As if penises are rooted in maleness and masculinity (which is absolutely not true).

And I have sympathy for NB folks (certainly TME ones who have reached out to me in the past about this) who might be struggling with that, but just because they’re non-binary, it doesn’t mean they get to appropriate our bodies and reproduce transmisogyny and trans fetishization in their attempts at feeling better. Shit doesn't work like that.

Because again, the only women with penises in this world, essentially, are trans women. Meaning any woman with a penis in media is a trans woman, implicitly or explicitly. Meaning that when people who aren’t us want to write us, intent doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if it’s just the writer’s fantasy, it’s still going to attach a variety of messages directly onto us.

And more often than not, due to cissexism, those messages are linking us to maleness, to toxic masculinity, etc..

While I do want to believe they're a fairly small minority, a lot of NB folks in fandom spaces like g!p characters in part because they see penises as male and the rest of the body as female and think that duality is interesting and would be comfortable, and is a nice balance of “both worlds” or a nice position “between male and female”, but that’s a wholly cissexist, transmisogynistic view to have, and it’s one that absolutely cannot be supported without directing sexual violence against trans women and invalidating our entire existence. Certainly not all NB folks into g!p like it for that reason, but holy shit a fair bit of them do and it’s weird and wrong and fetishistic.

g!p emerged from the idea that women can't have penises, and drew on the transmisogyny and cissexism of tr*nny porn to structure that frame of desire and the core patterns and trends within these works. It's always been trans women's bodies being used as a vehicle, whether or not the writers of these fics are explicitly aware of it, because the trope itself still holds true to its original patterns and cissexism. It's not the name that's the problem, it's the content; changing the name would be a surface level change that wouldn't affect anything.

g!p objectifies women with penises (trans women). A woman with a penis is more than just a woman with a penis, but the use of the term and trope is literally to (A) remind people that women don't have penises, otherwise the g!p term wouldn't be needed if people actually accepted women with penises as women, and that (B) this is a story centered on a scenario where there's a woman with a penis, with key focus on that genitalia specifically. it's the drawing point, it's the lure, it's what everything is centered on. It is a means for folks to write lesbian sex while also writing about penis in vagina and getting off to it. It's also no surprise that the penises so clearly emulate cis men's penises in these works, that is by design.

As I’ve said many times before, if you’re only writing trans women’s bodies to showcase cis men’s penises, you’re not respecting the womanhood of trans women, and this ultimately has nothing inherent to do with penis-owning women, it has to do with (cis) men and their penises, because trans women are just being used as a vehicle to emulate them. When NB folks do the same thing, and imagining themselves as those g!p characters, they are ultimately embodying cis men, their maleness, and often toxic masculinity, in a way that feels safe and distanced enough for them, a shell that they often code as cisnormative due to their own unprocessed cissexism.

And trans women don’t deserve that.

You seem caught in the idea that if something doesn't directly perfectly reflect trans women, that it can't be linked to us., which ignores the long long history of media being used to misrepresent marginalized peoples and cast us in insulting, dehumanizing lights. You show a lack of understanding of the g!p trope and the long history of its usage across a few other names, even if the content and patterns remained the same. It shows a lack of understanding of tr*nny porn and transmisogynistic stigmas, which the trope draws heavily from.

I think we can all recognize that most 'lesbian' prn that's made does not represent actual lesbians, it's overwhelmingly catered to the male gaze. We can also recognize that this category of porn has led to a lot of harassment towards lesbians from cis men who at the very least want to believe lesbians are just like they are in the porn he watches, that lesbians just need the right man. Lesbians are being used as a vehicle for a fantasy that was created externally to them, and doesn't represent their realities.

It's the same kind of situation here. The way g!p fics play out overwhelmingly doesn't reflect trans women's realities, but they are inherently linked to us regardless, as we're the vehicles for those fantasies, as unrealistic and harmful as they may be.

g!p characters are built in our fetishized image that’s based on a deeply cissexist misunderstanding of us, of the gender binary, and of bodies in general.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough g!p fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep, but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was ultimately fetishistic, even if there was an undercurrent of sympathy and a lack of following certain common g!p patterns there that differentiated it from the norm.

If g!p fics were at all about reducing dysphoria or finding euphoria, then it wouldn’t be explicitly tied up in the performance of very specific sex acts, very specific forms of misogyny and toxic masculinity, very specific forms of sexual violence and exertion of sexual power, etc.

But it is.

So the notion that creating g!p fics helps NB folks? Nope. It CAN certainly prevent/delay those folks from facing a whole boatload of shit they’ve internalized, and coddle them at the expense of trans women.

Because if it was really about bodies and dysphoria/euphoria, there would be a considerable push (allying with out own) to end our fetishization and to represent us in and out of sexual contexts with accuracy, respect, and care. Because they wouldn’t care what sex acts were performed and what smut beats were hit, they’d just want to see someone with a body like their ideal being loved, being sexual, connecting, being authentic, etc. Which very much is not the case in the overwhelming majority of g!p fics. That's what we want, and it's not what g!p writers want, it's nothing they give a shit about.

Like, a ways back I started doing random pulls of g!p fics from various fandoms and assessing them for certain elements to provide some quantitative clarity. I started on The 100 here, and did OuaT here. Never finished the 100 one since the results leveled out and stayed pretty consistent as the sample size grew, so I didn't really see the point in continuing any further after about 140 fics when the data wasn't really changing much at all.

Lastly, media influences people. I've read countless posts and comments from people who use fanfiction as a sex ed guide, in essence. Which is ridiculous, but I also know sex ed curricula often isn't very accurate or extensive in a lot of areas, so people take what they can get. Representation in media can be powerful, and when it overwhelmingly misrepresents people, that's also powerful. Just because fandom is a bit smaller than televised media, it doesn't make that impact any lesser, certainly not for those whose primary media intake is within fandom.

Virtually all trans representation in f/f fanfiction is misrepresentative of us. That has a cost in how people understand us, how people react to us, and how people treat us. Not just online, but in physical spaces, and in intimate settings.

I invite you to read that post you referenced again, or perhaps this longer one which is a response to a trans guy who seemed to feel something similar to you with this trope.

All I can do is lay it out there and try to explain this. It's up to you how you handle this. All I know is whenever there's a big surge in g!p in a fandom, trans women generally leave it en masse, because it's a very clear and consistent message that we're not valued, respected, and that people value getting off on us over finding community with us.

#g!p #creative responsibility #trans fetishization #trans representation #intersex fetishization #intersex representation #genitals tw #genital mention tw #intersexism #transmisogyny #fandom meta #long post #cissexism #t slur tw #media representation #media literacy

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trickstarbrave · 3 years

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big hot topic on tiktok that has been talked abt often that i wanna throw my two cents in abt the discussion but will do so here bc its going to be way easier than condensing it in 60 seconds and ppl will get even more mad abt it on there. under a cut so you can just not look if you don’t want to as it’s probably long and no one likes this discussion

disclaimer: im not jewish. culturally or religiously at all. so i do not have the best of insight of jewish folklore and i will mainly be repeating what i have heard jewish ppl say on it but you listening to jewish ppl on it will invariably be way more helpful. ultimately i am not talking to make an argument for or against lilith worship bc i can’t make that call, mainly just that arguments for it i see tend to be deeply flawed. ive seen jewish people who say they don’t care if people worship her and ive seen jewish people who are very much against it and frankly no one needs my non jewish ass giving them permission on it, i just don’t like some of the harmful arguments and at times BLATANT anti-Semitism i see in the discussions

“lilith isn’t a closed practice!!! she cant be closed!!! she’s a being/deity we can all recognize!!!”

this i feel starts with a misunderstanding of what “closed practice” means. a closed practice is a very broad term to describe any practices, typically spiritually in nature that are not freely shared 100% openly, usually due to trying to preserve cultural or religious practices. you can learn about most of them--if you go to a primary source. many people of closed practices are open about talking about it and teaching it to people who are interested, and some cannot due to years of oppression and theft of those said practices. some require initiation, and a lot of them are passed down with heavy cultural ties. and most importantly “closed practice” is a relatively new understanding of cultural preservation after colonization.

judaism isn’t a ‘fully closed’ religion, but it does have a set conversion order in place, and typically while converting you will learn under a rabbi or teacher. a lot of jewish mysticism, magic, and folklore are passed down culturally, so even converts may take a very long time to learn all the ins and outs of it. and a lot of times jewish practices, beliefs, texts, and folklore has been wholesale stolen by western new-age spiritualists, occultists throughout the ages, and demonized by people who seek to harm jewish people as a whole.

the pure fact of the matter is that unless you are learning from jewish people theres going to be a lot of things about lilith you don’t know. your understanding outside of the cultural jewish understanding of her is very different, yet you are the one who also constantly equates them as the same being with the same stories, with some modifications. yet time and time again whenever a jewish person would express anxiety over it (as she can be viewed as a very HARMFUL spirit to jewish people and not a deity for them) you talk over them and call them sexist, and when they try to correct you over misunderstandings of her stories you tell them you know more than them.

with closed practices what doesn’t matter is your bloodline or your skin, it is about the information you have access culturally, and that information may be kept from people like you so that the faith in question can be preserved because it has been threatened. and yes, jewish people have had their cultural, spiritual, and religious practices threatened. it isn’t about keeping you out because they don’t like you, its about the fact that you don’t know everything and the way you are going to learn it will be difficult and very different. ive seen white voodou workers who are actual recognized practioners (sorry for the lack of proper terminology on this i know they have proper words/titles but i dont know them), and they didn’t just look up whatever they could find online, they had to seek out a priest to learn from, and it took a lot of time and training.

there is a way to approach closed religious/spiritual practices, and someone saying ‘this is closed’ is not them saying ‘go away you cant even look at or be interested in this thing it is not for and never will be for people like YOU’. and ultimately HOW you go about approaching it will be decided by someone in that culture, and not however you feel would be the best way to do it as an outsider.

“how could so many people, if they aren’t actually contacting the “real lilith” be wrong? if shes from a closed practice she couldn’t reach out to so many people right? so they aren’t doing anything disrespectful”

spirits, deities, and other entities from closed practices do reach out to outsiders on occasion and the correct course for dealing with that is to immediately find a person of religious/spiritual authority and trying to work with that person to better understand why. again the point above: you do not have the cultural knowledge to work with them, you do not understand how to identify them, what practices best suit them, the multitudes of stories around them, and history of them working with humans. if you actually value them as an entity it is imperative you understand from a PRIMARY source all of this information, not just second and third hand accounts of outsiders.

and also a lot of colonizers have claimed to be personally connected or contacted by entities from a closed practice and use that as an excuse to not only not learn, but speak as an authority figure about them. there are people who claim to work with shinto spirits with absolutely 0 actual knowledge on shintoism yet feel like they have an authority to speak on it. there are people who claim to have been contacted by voodou, hoodou, and vodun spirits/entities and know nothing about it yet speak as authority figures on it. i’ve seen someone do it for a polynesian god. they did not care about actual learning, they cared about their own beliefs, validating those said already existing beliefs, and getting validation online. am i saying everyone is doing this with lilith? no. but saying “people wouldnt just lie/be wrong right?” yeah. yeah it happens all the time.

“they don’t even like her, they fear her, she’s a demon to them and is actually from babylonia, we are NOT worshipping the same version as her and they don’t even want anything to do with her so why does it matter”

in terms of actual cultural study a lot of jewish and christian stories are born from the cultures their people have had contact with. historically yes, jewish people have been in babylonia, assyria, and that area, and have made cultural exchanges with those people. a lot of cultural sharing has occured throughout history, but the jewish tellings of the stories have particularly jewish cultural knowledge and heritage in them. also we frankly do not have a lot of concrete surviving stories of lili, lilu, and lilitu, so i know you are not basing the meat and bones of your practice on those unless you have access to that cultural knowledge that not even archaeologists and anthropologists even know exists. most of it is on middle ages mysticism that developed her further based on jewish folklore and religious stories.

also just because a culture doesn’t worship and revere a spirit doesn’t mean it is yours for the adopting and taking. we see this with the cannibalistic spirit i will not name from algonquin tribes and shapeshifting spirits/witches i also will not name from navajo. these are not spirits you’re supposed to mention or talk about, and even more so because their culture has such intense, negative stories around them means you should probably give it a little more thought.

the last point i am going to make is the general, overt anti-semitism i see. stop comparing judaism to christianity. stop saying they are evil and misrepresent her because judaism is inherently sexist. stop saying they are oppressing your culturally christian raised ass. stop saying jewish people have no culture of their own and its “all stolen from pagan traditions” (which are somehow all equally open for you to take from too i suppose, as though middle eastern practices are exactly the same cultural weight as all white european ones)

again im not for the forceful closing of practices and i cannot give you fucking permission as i sure as shit do not know but i don’t think any of you even understand what “closed practice” means and why jewish people might have even the slightest misgivings about you working with or worshipping her and it really shows. if you have been heavily studying the occult, jewish traditions, and are doing so respectfully then i sure as hell am not here to argue with you about it so don’t come at me for it. what i am saying is a lot of people who do not have that and are absolutely disrespectful towards judaism and jewish people as a whole really keep making an ass of themselves on witchtok and are absolutely insufferable towards any jewish person who voices their thoughts and feelings on it, and i have a problem with that.

#antisemitism #lilith #ultimately this is part of a larger debate of jewish mysticism inspired old school occult traditions #but i know most of the people arguing have very little knowledge on it #hence the bad argumentation #tiktok has limited character space and time so i figured it would just be better to write it out #basically my point boils down to 'i dont know if you can do this respectfully as i am not qualified to tell you how that looks'#'but i do know that THIS way of doing it absolutely is not'

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fruitzbat · 4 years

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'Like it truly has nothing to do with the callout. This is being presented in bad faith.' except yosb explicitly linked this drama to her podcast on twitter. the ppl you called out gave a thorough response to the situation when you misrepresented them and admitted that they made mistakes and apologized for misunderstandings. you are not holding racists accountable you are beating a dead horse. if it's still not enough block them bc youre clearly not going to be satisfied no matter what they do

Good morning!

I’m just gonna say “you are not holding racists accountable you are beating a dead horse” is an amazing thing to say to someone on Al Gore’s Internet in this year, 2020, especially in this context, because they’re obviously not being held accountable at all and you guys are STILL sending me weird messages just like this.

This is the first time that this situation has been publicly addressed -- there was an internal recognition in the chat, yes, but no, they have not been held accountable before. It is not a dead horse and, yes, they were right to apologize, even in the roundabout way they did.

I will keep saying this: the reason that they can get away with what they did and can write this off as “misrepresentation of facts” is a) the screencaps are mainly from the public chatroom or the mod chat. That is not an accident -- mainly because the more overtly racist shit was happening in private conversations as well -- on WhatsApp and iMessage, which they know I ultimately deleted. Hence another reason why I was posting DMs -- they encapsulated the weird microaggressive responses better than the responses in the public chatroom, but it also means that I have significantly less to work with than they do. We all know this, but the public does not and I will guess does not care.

If you’re looking at a lot of the material in the open letter, you’ll also notice that the “discrepancies” are frequently timeline ones. Alex is a lawyer and probably knows why and how that is specifically done to discredit the material claims of the matter, and is incredibly easy to do because they have the entire wealth of screencaps to choose from and know the exact dates because....it is in front of them.

As is obvious from the more recent screens, they are also banking on the fact that I’m not really all that well known and can’t get a lot of traction/don’t have the favor of the fandom to fall back on, which is clearly why you felt comfortable sending me this weirdly confrontational message telling me I exaggerated one of the hardest eight months of my life for clout. Do....do you people think I *enjoy* this? I’m in grad school and I have two jobs. Do you think I *like* reflecting on how shitty this all was? Do you think I *enjoy* waking up on a Sunday morning and seeing this in my inbox? No. I don’t.

yosb flat out said to me when I reached out to her that she wasn’t interested in doing an APH episode because she’s not particularly involved in the fandom, which most who follow her work could likely attest to. The reason this situation is “linked” is because I came to talk to her upon seeing the graphic on my feed and remembered that we had both been on the server when this was going down. Like.....that’s really it. I could even post screenshots of the beginning of our conversation?

I’m not sure I’m mad about it -- I am mad for yosb, but as for how *I* feel, it’s just an incredibly bizarre angle to take. And I think it’s interesting that they wrote an entire callout novel about yosb painting her as an opportunistic weirdo when they decided to redact the name of the entire white supremacist running around their chatroom. If we’re talking about “accountability”, that’s a weird choice. And if they REALLY want to play the “some of our mods aren’t white” angle, I don’t think scapegoating another Asian person is really the way to go, but y’all seem to really dig that.

#asks #anyway I'm turning off anon #Anonymous

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