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carpathxanridge · 3 years

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i just remembered something that i want 2 share because it relates to how a gender-based understanding of sexuality is not only illogical but leads to feelings of shame and confusion for ssa people.

in all of my experience of hearing online that lesbians can be attracted to dick, that genital preferences are transphobic, etc. it never personally got to me. that’s not to say that it didn’t make me walk on eggshells with my language, or fear rejection and ostracism from my community... it did. but i guess because the argument that lesbians can/should like dick is so transparently homophobic and comically identical to entitled male lesbophobia and conservative conversion therapy rhetoric, it never really impacted my own understanding of/security in my sexuality. i never for a second bought that not being attracted to dick was a genital fetish.

however, what did impact me was the flip side of this logic: that since trans men aren’t women, including trans men in lesbian sexuality is transphobic. my first relationship was with a trans man, but we started dating when he identified as nonbinary. and there’s a lot of reasons why that relationship fucked me up and was unhealthy, but when he came out as trans i didn’t believe that i’d been in a relationship with a man the whole time, or that either the relationship or my sexual orientation was null. i wouldn’t say it out loud, but i knew that this was true because he was female regardless of his gender identity.

but then over the years, my friends would tease me or side-eye me over that past relationship. at the time, my friend told me that i’d never kissed a girl before, and kind of mocked me for my lack of lesbian experience. and although i kind of agreed that those first kisses didn’t “count” for other personal reasons, i didn’t appreciate the comparison of my traumatizing first relationship with someone who i had a lot of genuine love for, to her differently traumatizing first relationship with a man. because i knew i never would’ve been able to feel that way (as complicated as it was) about a man! and she was projecting her own embarrassment about having been with a man before onto my first literally homosexual relationship in a way that made me very uncomfortable.

and yet even knowing that she was in the wrong and my relationship was not the literal same as dating a man, it still made me feel like crap. like i was somehow even more wrong for how i felt about an experience that already held a lot of baggage. like because my first relationship was deemed nullified, i myself was somehow an embarrassment. and this wasn’t the only time i was made to feel this way. once, i told my friend about how a girl i’d had a huge crush on came out as trans. and he insinuated that i had a fetish for trans guys, saying that it was a “weird pattern.” that made me feel so suddenly ashamed and wrong, in a way that genital fetish accusations never did when they came from the other side. and i also internalized similar sentiments just from being on tumblr. nothing was more transphobic and invalidating than a lesbian saying “i date cis women and trans guys,” and that absolutely couldn’t be me.

so when i developed a crush on a post-t trans guy last year, by then i was like “maybe this is a weird trend.” i knew i couldn’t pursue a relationship with him, because that would be pretty sus, and it was a minor and innocent enough crush that i probably wouldn’t have pursued it either way. but it caused me a lot of confusion and shame, because i just couldn’t make my feelings go away. it was a constant back and forth between berating myself for not perceiving him as male, and convincing myself that maybe i’m actually bisexual. i agonized over whether it counts as misgendering if i just allowed myself to have a crush on him while identifying as a lesbian. any moment as small as him smiling at me and me thinking “cute,” i would later obsess over. i have ocd, so it was very easy for my brain to latch onto this as a point of obsession. (especially because much of my ocd is moral scrupulosity-based, and we all know that the trans community uses a lot of guilt and moral accusation to coerce acceptance of their belief system.)

i think i only just processed exactly how hurtful those experiences were for me, and how much shame it created. it’s one thing to be called an evil pussy-loving dyke for your absence of attraction to men. but to be called a chaser or fetishist for active, present attraction is hard to ignore. just like being attracted to straight girls, when you already know your feelings are likely unwanted it’s even more hurtful to be compared to men’s sexual predation and fetishism. but being attracted to trans men is a perfectly natural expression of lesbian sexuality, and isn’t inherently predatory or wrong. and there are some trans men who feel connected to lesbian sexuality or identify as lesbians. gender identity-based understanding of sexuality invalidates lesbian experience. it is harmful and homophobic! and i won’t be made to feel guilty for my sexuality :)

#might delete later #but ugh this really fucked me up #radykal rambles

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bookfreaky · 3 years

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LOVE DOING - The Analysis

Intro:

I try to never analyse my work while still working on it, because I believe that the painting must be born from an image in your head, or a feeling, and not from a concrete idea. That is the foundation of abstractionism. Then when you’re finished and you are kind of star-gazing your own work, you try to find what made you create all that, what made you use that colour or this shape. I did that and I saw that all the dots were connected in the same theme: Love.

Love as a broad concept and my experience with that. I think love is a very liquid sentiment, like water, it takes the shape of its every container you put it, but pretty much it’s still love. That same impulse is there. It can be like water also in the way it reflects the sun light, how it changes colours and distorts shapes. Love can be illusory; it can be lysergic but it can also be the answer to many simple questions in life. In its gas form it can be contagious and performative as it inhabits imagination, but it can also become solid when under pressure, just like water becomes ice under high pressures. In difficult situations, the love you feel for that person may be the only thing that keeps you going. I experienced that, and I think many people did too with so many people getting ill and dying during the Covid pandemic.

Like water it nurtures, like water it drowns. Love can be represented as a substance, like it just did, but also it persists as an action, an abstract action at so, an actual verb. In abstractionism, it’s to be said that colour is verb while shape is noun (I won’t remember to said that), for that reason I focused in this collection mainly in two colours in their variations, red and blue. Without the political branding aesthetic, red is seen in psychoanalysis as a active colour, the colour of human blood. Blue could be described as a “calmer” colour, but not so lacking in action. As Rebecca Solnit said, I quote:

“Water is colourless, shallow water appears to be the colour of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance.”

So I dedicate this four paintings to the people I love and whomever loves things, but also to all the feelings that come about with love. Some of these paintings are capable of calming me and I could keep looking at them for hours, forgetting about myself. Others make me feel angsty, uncomfortable and looking at them oblige me to think about my own existence and fear my future.

I really hope you look at the paintings before you read the whole thing, and suffer through the same. Thank you.

Love Escaping Into the Blue:

This one was the first painting I made, before I imagined it to be a collection, and it was born from the experience of decompressing love from a place of deep passion; where you are taken by this sudden and enormous sadness but also relief. I felt free, really. I read this biology paper from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, called “Light in the Deep Sea”, and it explains that there’s some uniformity of colour in the ocean animals according to how deep in the water they inhabit. Animals living in the great depths of the sea, between 6,000 and 11,000 meters deep, have commonly a very vivid red colour, but closer to the surface of the water, between 200 and 1,000 meters deep, most animals are silver and grey. That’s because in this depth the brightness of sunlight is fragmented into a blue colour, and grey reflects the blue light creating the illusion that the animal is, in fact, blue. A Blue Whale is actually grey, not blue.

[Seadevil Fish (Cryptosaras couesii), left. Blue Whale (Balaenoptera musculus), right.]

The painting shows a leak of red coming into blue and bluer space, which is this feeling of infatuation and selfish desire, possession, fear and jealousy that is very red in colour and has connotations of violence and anger, moving into a place that is not so deep in the water but clearer and wider as the open sea, illuminated by this navy-blue light. It’s like you can finally breathe and see that your love is still there, but it has changed. In hope by being closer to the atmosphere it is also somehow closer to the divine. I imagine some people might feel lost when love escapes into the blue, and I get this sensation too, but it’s about loving freely, learning how not to feel love so deeply into ourselves, but widely like the ocean.

Love Growing in the Pit of the Stomach:

When I looked at this painting in particular after it was done, I had this sensation of angst that was difficult for me to name. It’s about desire, it’s about this feeling growing inside of you that you know it will be something more than what you want, but what you need. I’ve become obsessed with the image of holes, looking like they are piercing the canvas; I think they show this emptiness I feel, like a window showing how hollow I am inside, but also, they give me this satisfying feeling by looking at them, like opening a wound and poking a bubble. I think this emptiness comes from the idea most trans women cannot take away from the back of their heads, which is if you do or do not have a “female genitalia”. Gender in our culture is very centred around genitals and biological sex, for centuries being a woman has been defined by the person who’s able to carry a man’s child. There is this little fantasy of mine where women have this little hole in them that can swallow the world. The idea of it, for me, has grown into a very real desire very much like the desire for sex. Actually, very close to sex too. But the roots growing out of the hole, in green and blue, represent pain and fear, because I’m not sure if I’m okay with the idea of having to undergo a surgical procedure to fulfil this fantasy, neither I am sure if it is a fantasy or a need.

Most of my work resembles yonic shapes (resembling the form of a vulva), either in this work or in former ones, and it’s never intentional, it sort of just slips from my subconscious. I believe that the vulva, as well as the womb, are under-shadowed symbols of power. Phallic shapes are very common in art and what-not, they are usually associated with offense and aggression. Like when school boys draw a dick on the toilet stalls as if marking their territory. The vulva, however, is never quite portrayed like that.

I read about this Japanese visual artist, Megumi Igarashi, who made several pieces of art shaped after her own vagina, including a yellow vagina-boat (which I absolutely loved) and she got arrested and fined for “obscenity”. I think that for her subversive art-form she should be considered a national hero. Many man-made constructions are phallic images, look at the Washington Obelisk, or the Eiffel Tower, but in nature we most commonly find yonic shapes, like the Grand Canyon.

There is a profound violence in desiring this, feeling as if a part of your own anatomy is lacking, but you can’t grow it naturally, you can’t do it in a god-intended way. The bright red colour represents violence and sex, and in this case both. It’s way more complicated than the concept of having kids and being a mom, it’s a lot more than to be seen as sexual beings, and sexuality, and to feel loved; it’s about symbols of power and somehow getting that denied. It’s about learning how to love this new body, a body that is foreign, infertile, obscene and unconventional. That love is hard to achieve and it is violent because women, and especially trans women, have been taught to hate their bodies.

Love Falls In The Bathroom:

This one took the longest to finish and left me with the most unsure brush-strokes, much perhaps because it isn’t based off on an idea but on a memory, on dream. In three more years I’ll be the same age my mother had and she had me, 29 years old. Somehow it feels like a looming date. Having kids and getting pregnant, specifically, have been sporadic subjects of therapy sessions – the antithesis is always the same: you are not lesser of a woman for not being able to get pregnant, you can still be a mom through other means, you are not even sure if you want kids or marriage, you can always adopt – Those answers feel reasonable, but none of them ever could appease the deep feeling of something missing in me, like something is perpetually wrong with me. Then I understood that in this painting, I was trying to evoke these feelings. Love and grief.

[My mother, pregnant with me, in the 90s.]

My friends tell me I seem to be older than I actually am, and sometimes I wonder if that’s not because I had never been a happy child. I feel like I had my childhood robbed from me. I mean, I had an okay, comfortable childhood, and a problematic teenage-hood, but I never had a girlhood. I am still grieving it. I had been assigned male at birth, I’m still grieving that too.

In July of this year, I experienced a very vivid dream, in which although short all the images and the sensations were, felt very real. I was taking a shower in my bathroom, I close off the water, wrap myself around a towel, my usual pink one, and when I’m stepping out of the shower stall I fell. I hit my right elbow against the toilet lid as I fell with my legs open in opposite directions, a sharp pain struck me under my thighs, close to my groin, and a light string of blood followed right after that. It wasn’t menstruation blood, thin and clear red, but thick and dark. It was all very quick but I knew, right then, right there, exactly everything that was happening. I was pregnant, 13 weeks, alone in the bathroom floor, surrounded by blood. I wonder how many days of my recent life, how many hours a day, I am really just sitting down alone on my bathroom’s floor surrounded by blood. I woke up and it still felt very real. I had spent the next two days very quiet, not wanting to speak to anyone. I wanted to tell someone as soon as I was back from the dream, but I couldn’t do it. I wanted to call someone, a friend, anyone, and say “I lost it. I lost my baby”. I realised then, in that post-dreamy state, that I have been silently grieving for a lot of things, things I haven’t yet allowed myself to grieve for. Things I still did not have a chance.

Love Lost In Imagination:

This one is the only one what doesn’t forecast red and blue colours, but instead in red and blue paint mixed together in a royal purple colour. It was the last one I made, and it’s the one that differs the most in shape. I like to imagine it was love in it’s gas form, vaping inside your brain like Nitrous-oxide, with white-coloured cloud shapes and yellow peacock eye-feathers. It’s about how sometimes love can only exist in imagination, how we often elaborate better scenarios in our heads, and we think “what if things were different?”. I believe to be okay to fantasize, anyway the utopia is what moves us towards a reality, but sometimes we can get lost in imagination, and in questioning the same questions over and over. “What if I hadn’t done this and done that?”; “What if I hadn’t said no?”; “What if I had stayed longer to watch that movie?”; “What if had come out as trans earlier?”; “What if I had become a professional writer?”; “What if I had born a woman?”. Is love real if it perpetrates only in thought?

I would be more than happy to quote some of Saint Augustine here, and his theological virtues, love being one of them, but I wouldn’t like to make this essay even longer and complicated.

I think to myself sometimes, when was it that I started to prefer having peace then pleasure. My head has always been very noisy, very noisy, and I wanted it to stop. Now it feels like I’m constantly too quiet about everything. That somehow, like the Little Mermaid by Hans Christensen Andersen, when transitioning into a woman I exchanged my legs (my body) for my voice, and now I can’t voice or even pinpoint what I want. I’m just so tired. So, so tired. My mental health hasn’t been great for more than one year, and the pandemic didn’t help. I’m constantly anxious around people, even the closest ones to me (especially the closest ones to me), I’ve been eating like a bird and sleeping like a cat. Still, sometimes I imagine what future I would like, and I imagine myself living somewhere with open space, trees, breeding horses just like my grandfather did, space for dogs, musical instruments and the kids. Space for being big.

The painting makes me think that sometimes I can only love myself in this imaginary place. Otherwise, it just looks slightly like a chicken’s head. You decide.

- Original work, G.L. Alódio.

#art #art analysis #art essey #personal #my own #painting

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werevulvi · 3 years

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I kinda just wanted to make a rant, to lay out why I feel so iffy about trans women and hopefully get a better understanding of my own feelings and what the fuck is brewing under that surface. There has to be a reason. This post is analytical drivel, not a debate, but by all means, feel free to respond or otherwise talk to me about this. Let's take it from the beginning and then go from there.

Part 1 Detransition:

So, I began detransitioning roughly 2 years ago. That's where my feelings about the trans community as a whole began to shift, and with that my feelings about trans women. At that time, I was still active in a truscum group and came out as detrans there, after having been known and looked up to as a trans man there for over a year. At first I was accepted, but when I started having doubts about wanting to get rid of my beard, and felt like I wanted to embrace my body hair and deep voice... people there started acting like shit towards me. They told me that my biological sex still being female did not matter, that I was essentially a man and had to detrans medically to be considered a woman again. That hurt badly.

Shortly after that, I was also told that because I was medically transitioned, trans women were "more female" than me. That was like the last drop that made the goblet pour over. Fuming, I started saying that I'm more of a woman than trans women can ever be, even if I keep a full beard, because they'll never be truly biologically female, no matter how much surgery they got. I was hurting by their cruel words, so I stuck it where it would hurt them the same. (I’ve always an “eye for an eye” sorta person.) That's when people started telling me that I hate trans women, but I felt like that was a misunderstanding. That I was just acting out, out of sadness, grief, anger, panic, and having my gender denied for the sake of validating trans women's genders.

But were they right?

Part 2 Gender critical thought:

Over time, I got exceedingly gender critical and fell into radblr. I also read/watched content that "exposed" transgenderism as a scam, most of which was articles and youtube videos from conservative right wing people, and Christians. I had joined an fb group for detransitioners, and the creator, a "born again" Christian detrans man, happily shared all the many sources he had on how transgender was all a scam from the start of its movement. I felt somewhat sick consuming those links, but probably equally intrigued. But at the same time, I kept a foot in the trans community, starving for attention, even though I was never good enough for them anymore, unless I lied and said I'm not a woman. What a sick twist of fate, I felt.

Part 3a Sexuality, from a lesbian view:

Sometime around that, I struggled with my sexuality and after a lot on inner search, I came to the conclusion I was a lesbian. I felt as though I was only attracted to the same sex as myself, including trans men, but felt nothing worth praising towards males, including trans women. That led to yet another rabbit hole that I tumbled down into. I became convinced that majority of trans women were lesbophobic predators, and I had some shit luck on dating apps. Most people who approached me there were gnc males; transvestites and trans women. I almost went on a date with a good-looking trans woman whom I had mistaken for female, because I felt guilty for having lost attraction to her the moment she told me she's trans and post-op. Luckily she canceled our date for unrelated reasons. I felt like because she was attractive to me before I knew she's trans, but felt completely uninterested in her after the fact, I couldn't possibly be attracted to trans women.

Part 3b Sexuality, from a bisexual view:

That, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. But I kept asking myself why. Especially since I realised my error in my sexuality calculations, and upon correction discovered I'm actually bisexual after all. I still find women and transitioned females attractive, and in addition to that also men in general, and some vaguely transitioned males. Except from trans women. That odd little inconvenience stood out as a sore thumb which I couldn't stop scratching. Why? I kept asking myself. Why not trans women?

My question dug deeper than just to attraction. I don't think I feel iffy about trans women because I'm not attracted to them. I think it's the other way around.

I never had to convince myself to be attracted to trans men. I discovered early on in my own transition that some other trans men were really hot. That was it. I later on dated a trans man whom I was head over heals in love with. That confirmed it. I've been questioning my attraction to standard men and women far more than I ever questioned my attraction to trans men. It was that obvious, that clear. However, when it comes to trans women I was always the complete opposite. That no matter how I twisted and turned it, I only ever felt revulsion at the thought of being sexual or romantic with a trans woman. No matter how well or badly they passed, no matter how aesthetically pleasing or how charming their personalities.

I wanna clarify that I'm not at all forcing myself to be into trans women. I'm just trying to understand why, so that I'll no longer feel bad about my lack of attraction to them. Because I cannot accept things which I do not understand.

Part 3c Sexuality, digging for answers:

At first I thought, maybe I'm just not all that attracted to femininity. It's not like I typically get super into hyper-feminine natal women either, and fake tits and faces with a ton of plastic surgery has always made me queezy. No, I seem to have a strong preference for masculinity in partners, regardless if they're butches, other masc bi women, trans men or kinda standard masc natal men. So then it just kinda makes sense that trans women, whom are often hyper-feminine, just don't fit that image. Except... that one trans woman I almost went on a date with... she looked like a butch. I mistook her for a natal woman partly because she had short hair, no makeup and wore what looked like men's clothing, but I could see she had hips and tits, and her face looked naturally female. But I still wasn't into her, because she's trans.

Then I thought... okay, that one checks out, but maybe I'm just creeped out neo-vaginas? Yeah, that must be it! I'm almost equally creeped out by neo-penises too, but most trans men don't get bottom surgery anyway, so it hasn't been much on my mind. But then I thought: okay, but what about trans women who choose to not get bottom surgery then? I am attracted to dick. Nope, still uneasy at that thought. I started comparing men who are just very feminine, to trans women, and noticed yeah I don't actually feel half as iffy about men who are just feminine. A man in a dress and makeup can actually be very hot, to me. And I've always preferred long hair on men. But I prefer them still looking clearly male underneath that, although I don't mind a few androgynous features here and there. But I’m only into it if they don’t act like their affinity for femininity makes them women or non-binary, or if they’re feminine in a way that mocks or sexualises womanhood. So I’m not into tacky transvestites in over-sexualised lingerie. At least try to be tactful and elegant, please. So, it’s not male femininity per se that puts me off. If there’s any femininity I’m actually into, it’s male femininity. Because gender non-conformity is attractive to me. And I love the idea of being a strong female protector and girlboss of a gentle, delicate, feminine man. At least I like fantasising about that. (But enough about my daydreams.)

Part 4a Womanhood, biology and identity:

Somewhere after having gotten that far in my digging, I started getting close to finding my sore spot: trans women's view on womanhood.

As for myself, my own view of womanhood is completely detached from femininity. I'm just like... I can even have a full beard and bass voice, a flat and hairy chest, and still be a woman. Because I'm simply bio female. Trans women tend to very often think that they need to "pass" and with that comes a certain look: high voice, no facial hair, no body hair, big breasts, curvy hips, etc. All of which are features that I'm dysphoric about having on my own body, but admire in other natal women. But on trans women, it's like I feel uncomfortable about those kinda features on them. Like to me being a woman is just dealing with having developed that way, or not dealing with having developed that way. Where as for them it seems to be actually striving for developing that way, and I guess that causes my brain to short circuit. Cannot comprehend.

Part 4b Womanhood, fragility and validation:

My womanhood is kinda fragile. I admit that. I'm quite insecure as a woman, because of my transition and masculinity. I feel like most of my womanhood has been lost, which although I'm fine with, I still grieve. I grieve it because I was a bit of an idiot when I first transitioned and had not yet processed my trauma - not because I regret looking like a man. It's complicated, but basically... I feel as though my womanhood is hanging by a thread, which is my genitals, reproductive system and chromosomes; all of which are either mostly hidden or always invisible.

I'm often met with disbelief and disagreement. People either saying "You're not a woman because you can't possibly be female. You look too male." or "You're not a woman because you medically transitioned. You having a uterus is not enough to make you a woman." and it gets to me. And then there are trans women... some of whom do not even need to put on a wig to be instantly validated as women by just identifying as such. Others thinking that because I look like a man, they refuse to think of me as a woman. And that... pisses me off.

There have been a few trans women who in some utterly failed attempt at being supportive of me have said I'm like a nonbinary person who is half male and half female. That's not a lot better, but thanks for trying... I guess.

Part 4c Womanhood, dysphoria and misogyny:

I think that might be what gets to me about trans women. All of it. This entire list of things. That some of them are lesbophobic predators and have absurd claims of what being female is, that others mock womanhood, and yet others view themselves as somehow more female than I am. The genital factor and the slight creepiness of plastic surgery. Their view of womanhood as an identity and my view of it as a biological sex. I keep ending up in fights with trans women about these sorta things. I can't keep a lid on my frustrations no matter how hard I try to just see them as people with dysphoria and opinions that are different from mine. I cannot find any fucking solidarity between myself, as a dysphoric natal woman, and trans women. I feel like they're making mockery of my sex, my dysphoria and my struggles with misogyny, as well as making me feel like shit about something that I love about my body: my transition. I have no common grounds with them, and whenever they try to find solidarity in stuff like misogyny, I feel like they don't even know what the fuck they're talking about. I have a huge bone to pick with them, on multiple levels, and I don't even know where to start or where it ends.

Part 4d Womanhood, jealousy:

But a lot of it comes from jealousy. And I think it's mutual. I'm jealous of their ability to access female only spaces despite being male, which I cannot access despite being female. I'm jealous of their ability to be accepted as women. And on the other side, I think they're jealous of my reproductive ability, and my female socialisation, which I'm not like super hyped about myself, although I do love my pussy (she gives me great orgasms.) I'm jealous of their ability to claim womanhood without even trying to pass as female, because people are quicker to accept the woman-gender-identity than the woman-bio-sex. But likewise, ironically, I sense that they're jealous of that I can claim the "woman lane" despite looking convincingly male, because I'll always be biologically female, no matter how insible my sex is.

They cannot see me as a woman, because of my transition, without looking at themselves as men, no matter how far they transition. And I cannot see them as women, no matter how far they transition, without labeling myself as a man, because of my own transition. I think that about nails it.

Part 5 Conclusions:

I don't think it's true hatred, but rather insecurities both from myself and from them. Because we cannot both exist as women under the same ideology. One of us has to be considered a man, and neither of us is willing to fold on that. Ultimately... I am a threat to their womanhood, as much as they are a threat to my womanhood. And that tension is so thick... not even a knife could cut it. I guess the sad thing is though, that I think that tension is unnecessary. I am so unlike trans women that we could potentially bond based on how different we are. Because there is a lot of similarity in those differences, if you really think about it.

But no, I do not wish them harm in any way. Despite the vast array of insults I sometimes hurl their way. That is really just in response to them insulting me. I do not think they're doing anything wrong by transitioning, or even necessarily by identifying as women. I think, if they had just been more like "I can see you as a woman despite having transitioned, because deep down you like being female and having a pussy... kinda like I'm a woman because I wanna have a pussy, despite having been born male" I would have been much quicker to embrace them. Because that, I could get behind; but they can't.

So, there is no solidarity. It remains an endless fight. But I feel like it's not just on my part. I have tried. I do try. But they're not willing to meet me halfway, and that makes me go to attack in self-defense, which makes then go to attack in self-defense.

#my stick up my arse about trans women #its hurt not hate #rant #analytical drivel #gender critical #radfem safe #detransition

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azdoine · 5 years

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So let’s talk about them fairies.

In Homestuck, magic is broadly a cipher for queerness. This connection is first introduced when John gets his magic tricks from a book about a homoerotic relationship between two men:

"It's really amazing how hard it is to find a sausage-sized piece of a guy on the floor of a room that dark and smoky."

"I wanted to ask if he was sure about this, performing in broad daylight. He was used to working in dark rooms. It was usually the first thing out of his mouth when he would queer a trick."

The motif continues -- Roxy, who “loves wizards”, is attracted to John, the closeted amateur magician who retcons events, making them unhappen in the manner of a wizard, and she falls in love with Dirk, a gay man, as well as Calliope, the transgender wizard of Oz. And so on and so forth.

Naturally, more complex relationships with magic signify more complex relationships with queerness. Rose hates her mother’s apparently-performative obsession with wizards, but she also keeps and writes personal slash fiction tales about them, and she performs her own sorceries as a lesbian. Eridan, who orbits around magic without accepting it openly, is basically a misogynistic incel, but he also canonically dresses in feminine clothing in death. The continual deconstruction of magic as something unreal or conceptually incoherent, even as it clings to a tangible presence within the text, replicates and signifies the marginalization, recuperation, and erasure of queerness by homophobia and transphobia.

One magical figure in Homestuck that I want to talk about is the fairy; as a particular magical identity, and thus as a symbol for a particular queer identity, I believe it casts an important light on several character and story arcs.

Andrew Hussie is at least plausibly aware of historical marginalizations and oppressions, as evinced by the deliberate use of e.g. ‘octoroon’ terminology in Sassacre’s texts. With that in mind, how might the specific historical use of ‘fairy’ terminology inform the various fairies we see in Homestuck?

In Gay New York, George Chauncey characterizes the historical fairy as follows, placing them in the context of male homosexuality:

The determinative criterion in the identification of men as fairies was not the extent of their same-sex desire or activity (their "sexuality"). but rather the gender persona and status they assumed. It was only the men who assumed the sexual and other cultural roles ascribed to women who identified themselves -- and were identified by others -- as fairies. The fairies' sexual desire for men was not regarded as the singular characteristic that distinguished them from other men, as is generally the case for gay men today. That desire was seen as simply one aspect of a much more comprehensive gender role inversion (or reversal), which they were also expected to manifest through the adoption of effeminate dress and mannerisms; they were thus often called inverts (who had "inverted" their gender) rather than homosexuals in technical language.

With reference to Chauncey and others, Emma Heaney likewise characterizes the fairy as such in The New Woman, placing them in the context of trans femininity:

Trans feminine genders were legible and understood in the period. Fairies and girl-boys were not only viewed as “crossing” from man and woman, but as trans feminine people, whose conditions of life were set by their association with cis women... Fairies were viewed as interchangeable with cis women in sexual and domestic pairings, and their femininity established the contrasting “normalness” of their masculine partners...

This non-determining relation between genitals and sex did not lead to the breakdown of the categories “man” and “woman” or the evacuation of meaning from these terms. Rather, fairies simply occupied the social role of women during this time. This operation extended to a popular recognition of the way trans femininity conditioned the interpretation and thus the experience of cis women.

The historical fairy, then, and the conventional fairy by extension, serves as a signifier for homosexuality, gender non-conformity, crossdressing, transgender ‘gender inversion’, and/or queerness in general -- particularly in those assigned male at birth, but again, also in general.

Who are the fairies we see in Homestuck, and where do we see them?

Well, the primary fairies we see in Homestuck are the trolls, of course. In folklore, troll mythology emerged from a different culture, but trolls inhabit a similar order of mythology to the fair folk, as nature spirits and as friends or foes to humanity. In Homestuck, the trolls who achieve god tier status also obtain fairy wings; for trolls, godhood is inextricably entangled with butterfly and fairy symbolism.

Metamorphosis is clearly a significant part of troll biology, and therefore ingrained in their mythology. They've got cocoons everywhere, and are often likened to insects through biological terms. The wings have nothing (we know of) to do with troll adulthood. But have a lot to do with their perception of what ascension should be, which is the culmination of a pupation process. Which is why some may look to fairies as an ideal, or rule them out as fiction on account of the ideal they represent. Ascended trolls in this game are essentially magical fairies.

The confluence between troll feyhood and divinity, as a kind of godlike expression of metamorphosis, takes us back to the queer concept of the fairy as sexually fluid and transformed, as well as the sexual fluidity of the trolls. Through SBURB, the trolls are enabled to ascend to a distinctly queer godhood, coming to embody the same divine androgyny as the cherubs do; in particular, through an epic coming-of-age, the trolls are given the opportunity to “grow sideways” instead of growing up, quite literally developing laterally and stepping outside of the normal process of physical maturation for their species.

As Kathryn Stockton says in The Queer Child, with reference to Edelman’s No Future:

...the figure of the child as the emblem of parents’ (impossible) continuity spawns delusional visions. These are visions of the seamless reproduction of oneself, whose future is always represented by (one’s) children. Thus “the future” and “our children” are always bound together in a kind of frightening (and hermetically sealed) “reproductive futurism”: a “social consensus” that... has been made “impossible to refuse”... If in any context there is “no baby” and thus “no future,” “then the blame must fall on the fatal lure of sterile, narcissistic enjoyments understood as inherently destructive of meaning”—enjoyments dramatically laid at the door of homosexuals.

I coin the term “sideways growth” to refer to... something that locates energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive.

Reading fairy tiering as a kind of queer apotheosis -- and thus, as a kind of deviation from the reproduction of the future -- is difficult precisely because it serves as a mechanic in a game about the reproduction of the cosmos, but I would argue that the reading is less counter-intuitive than it seems. The trolls are intrinsically queer by the human standards that center the comic: even as the trolls reproduce, their form of reproduction itself negates the reproduction of a conventional and heterosexual human future, and and it destroys the nuclear family unit.

To be clear, on Beforus and Alternia, the trolls are still entwined and bound within a kind of reproductive social matrix, and SBURB reifies this matrix, abusing childhood itself as the site of the production of the future. But god tiering -- and fairy tiering in particular -- is an entirely superfluous mechanic. It is not necessary for the completion of the game, nor does it exist as a linear extension of the echeladder that is much closer to the core of SBURB’s gameplay. It allows all ascended children to personally perpetuate their own existences beyond their inevitable deaths, rather than perpetuating the existence of the cosmos at large.

God tiering is thus a form of sideways or nonlinear character advancement that exists apart from the demands placed upon children by the game: it is a form of sideways or nonlinear growth and self-actualization that exists apart from the reproductive demands placed upon the young by society. Fairy tiering simply literalizes this metaphor, allowing the queer troll children both to grow sideways and to come to embody hyperreal symbols of queerness.

All of this is particularly evident in practice. Fairy symbolism surrounds many of the trolls, particularly insofar as they serve as “fairy godmothers” to the beta kids, but our primary and most explicit fairies are Vriska and Aradia, simply because they’re the only beta trolls to god tier in the alpha timeline:

Aradia herself is surrounded by death at all times, but her morbid obsession is shaped by her embodiment and her state of being. As a ghost, deceased herself, she is imprisoned wholly by the teleology of reproductive futurism, and thus she is hollowed out into a manifestation of SBURB’s inevitability:

Aradia’s ultimate resurrection as a fairy -- after she has already fulfilled her cosmogenic role and helped her team to complete their session -- thus constitutes her transcendence of her role in the perpetuation of existence. Her metamorphosis allows her to transcend her old role as a temporal lynchpin in SBURB’s reproductive futurism, and having so ascended, she leaves for a sempiternity in the dream bubbles; she rejects the future in favor of the alternatives of the dreaming and the dead, growing sideways on multiple levels.

Vriska likewise has a complicated relationship with SBURB, one inextricably influenced and foreshadowed by her history as an experienced FLARPer and augmented reality gamer. For Vriska, who was recruited by her caretaker and mother figure to prey upon other children, FLARP was nothing less than a way for her to fulfill those demands:

The narratives of FLARP thus constitute a fantastic representation and allegory for the more fundamental social realities of Vriska’s hellish life -- and the lives of others -- given form through augmented reality, as video games are wont to be in Homestuck. But at the same time, through FLARP, Vriska is able to attempt to recuperate some noble identity for herself:

Vriska is able to shuck off the reality of her situation as a victim and a cog in an overwhelming cycle of abuse, becoming the person she wants to be: strong, powerful, and in control of herself and her life as an adult and a glorious scoundrel. The equally-overwhelming fakeness attribute of this persona is irrelevant, because Vriska has made this persona real enough for herself, seizing strength, power, and control on every front.

It’s only natural that she also sees SBURB as another meaningless game to exploit...

...because to her, it is. It’s just another reality for her to navigate, and thus another site for her to attempt to extract something for herself. Where every other god tier we see is murdered through the will of another, and then god tiers almost incidentally or accidentally, Vriska deliberately fairy tiers with full knowledge and awareness, in an ultimate act of excess as a power gamer, abusing and mastering the system around her for her own benefit. Her fairy tiering is inextricable from her disrespect, exploitation, and subversion of the cosmogenic order for her own pleasure.

And naturally, like Aradia, Vriska dies and is laterally exiled to the dream bubbles. In the dream bubbles, we see the alpha trolls who god tiered in the alpha timeline -- Meenah, the Thief of Life who only has vitality in taking it from others, manipulating Life without really creating it anew, and Aranea in particular. Aranea is not only Vriska’s ancestor, who informs her aspirations and character; she’s also her ectodoppelganger from across the Scratch, and a true fairy archetype:

As a god tier Sylph, Aranea is an explicit fairy on multiple levels, and she aspires to ‘heal’ the timeline she occupies. Her power as a fairy is that which empowers her to divert the timeline; her fairy status is that which subverts the reproductive futurism of SBURB and the teleology of the alpha timeline, allowing the sideways growth of an offshoot to supercede the inevitable forward growth of the alpha. Aranea’s sideways development is so absolute that when she and her plans falter, a literal plot hole -- with all of the story-breaking power it allows -- is required to bring the alpha timeline back into a forward order.

Fairy tiering is implicated in sideways growth on every level, but I think I’ve said enough about that in particular -- there’s a lot more to be said, and much more interesting things to say, about fairies and queer subtext in Homestuck.

Let’s go back to the revenge cycle among the beta trolls, with an eye upon the fairy as a queer figure.

The beta revenge cycle begins with various sessions of FLARP between Aradia, Vriska, Tavros, and Terezi; at some point in these games, Vriska uses mind control to force Tavros to jump off of a cliff.

On the literal level, this is just Vriska being pissy and needlessly cruel to Tavros -- both as the descendant of the man who loved and killed Vriska’s own ancestor, and as the boy who is too pathetic sensitive for Vriska’s playstyle. But Vriska’s cruelty is preceded by a particularly interesting monologue:

Rather than simply punishing Tavros or otherwise getting on with his torment, Vriska verbally solicits fairy behavior from him. Tavros dresses like Pupa Pan -- the child in arrested development, the proto-gay child, the fairy-child, the fairy-touched child -- and Vriska compliments him on the cuteness and appeal of his fairy presentation. She asserts, or assumes, or realizes that Tavros wants to be Pupa Pan, just like she wants to be Spinneret Mindfang, and she asks him to try flying with her; she asks him to try acting like the fairy child that (she thinks) he wants to be.

On the symbolic level, Vriska is pushing Tavros to join her in flight among the fairies, and thus, to come out of the closet as some kind of queer figure, or at least, to try queer behavior with her. She hurts him in the process -- perhaps because he isn’t queer, despite the fairy symbolism he surrounds himself with and aspires to, but the question of Tavros’ implied queerness is almost incidental to the reality of his pain at Vriska’s hands. If Tavros was ever going to grow wings and fly like Rufioh and Pupa Pan, it wasn’t going to be because he jumped off of a cliff, nor was he ever going to come out of the closet just because Vriska kicked the door down and pushed herself upon him.

Not that Tavros was ever going to get overwhelming sympathy for his victimization. The fairy subtext of Vriska’s violence against him was only reiterated when he first reached out for help, and he was turned away not simply because he was unsympathetic as a male victim of (sexualized) violence at the hands of a woman, but because he was a boy who had deliberately chosen to participate in femininity:

Tavros played a stupid game with an aggressive girls, and he won a stupid prize when she victimized him, but the equally fundamental victim-blaming at play is that in ‘playing a game for girls’ -- in attempting to take flight as a fairy child, and in attempting to enter the realm of the feminine and/or queer -- he got exactly what he was asking for.

After Tavros, we come to Vriska, and she doesn’t find her place in the beta revenge cycle any more fulfilling. Aradia takes vengeance upon Vriska for her brutality towards Tavros, and Aradia does so by confronting her with the ghosts of her victims:

On the literal level, this is also a straightforward act of revenge against Vriska: Vriska is tormented by the various trolls she has killed, subjecting her to a truly ironic and karmic comeuppance (and subjecting her in equal measure to a vicious retraumatization as a fellow victim of spidermom).

But Aradia’s revenge also has a unique meaning with relation to the fairy symbolism that surrounds these characters; Aradia is forcefully reminding Vriska that she’s not the Tinkerbell to Tavros’ Pupa Pan; in fact, she’s his Captain Hook.

Aradia confronts Vriska with the apparent bleak reality of her situation: that she’s a murderer and a pirate, a not a lost boy or fairy-child. It’s only natural that she destroyed Tavros instead of straightforwardly acting as his fairy guide, because she was never actually his fairy.

It’s hard to understate how emotionally devastating this is in a queer reading -- Aradia has contextualized Vriska solely as a child predator instead of the queer child that she is, and she has symbolically misgendered Vriska by stripping her of her fairy narratives. Vriska can cling to her pirate narratives, as she does quite a lot of going forward, but she still circles her fairy fantasies with Tavros, as she does when she meets Tavros in the game:

Vriska senselessly acts her fairy fantasies out no matter how impossible it seems for her to fulfill them, and no matter how unfulfilling they’ll be as a consequence.

She tries to unite Tavros with his shadow, (her perception of) his repressed true self, but she’s basically using him as a doll, and she knows it. It’s aggressive and masturbatory, and that’s exactly what she hates about her affection, at least on some level. She’s a trans girl who has been confronted with the reality that she’s being a creepy fucking chaser and acting like a stereotypical straight guy.

This desolation, the psychic amputation of Vriska’s fairy fantasies, is what Aradia has really done to Vriska. Aradia has denied Vriska’s right to be a queer figure in Tavros’ life, let alone anyone’s life, and she has reminded Vriska of just how shitty a queer role model she would be -- Aradia has told Vriska that she’s actually just a predator, just like her spider lusus, and she has psychologically and symbolically amputated Vriska of her claims to queerness.

This is something that Vriska really can’t forgive.

Vriska’s act of revenge against Aradia is -- yet again -- straighforward enough on the literal level. Encouraged by Doc Scratch -- as a man who gives voice to Vriska’s worst desires, or as a predator who manipulates her -- she takes a sliver of control of Sollux and pushes him to inebriate himself, before having him kill Aradia.

However, this is contextualized not only as violence within a relationship...

...but also as violence through Gemini.

Aradia has been assaulted by her partner, as contrived by Vriska, and she has also been assaulted by the duality of Gemini, which stands for the duality of like mirror images before it stands for the duality of opposites; it is the male twins in conjunction with one another, not the reconciliation of opposed principles in unity, as within the divine androgyne.

More explicitly stated, Aradia has been murdered or otherwise brutalized by Sollux, who serves as the lingering specter of intimate partner violence against fairies (i.e. trans femmes) and misogynistic masc4masc bullshit in general.

And having been so brutalized, Aradia is reduced to a shell of herself; in her vulnerability, she is first co-opted by the reproductive futurism of SBURB and then preyed upon by Equius.

The deeply autoerotic quality of Equius’ fixations -- as a man who dominates but wants to be dominated; as a man attracted to a robotic body who only finds fulfillment as an AI; as a man who tries to make the target of his affections akin to his corporeal blueblooded self, before finding fulfillment as a red sprite like her -- reveals the fundamental likeness between him and Aradia, as the target of his fixations, or at least, it suggests that he sees some kind of likeness between him and her, on some level.

The transmisogynistic images that inform Equius’ mythology -- the cybernetic male-mother, the hulking brute, the autoerotic autocastrator, etc -- also thus reinforce the notion that Aradia is subject to transmisogyny as a fairy, and Equius’ literal construction of her body for his pleasure positions him as one who abuses and exploits the transgender body, holding it to the constructed mold that pleases him.

Having destroyed Aradia even more thoroughly than Tavros, the revenge cycle turns yet again against Vriska, and Terezi punishes Vriska by proxy... by telling Doc Scratch, abuser of women and children, that Vriska is in the possession of his cue ball.

Doc Scratch detonates his cue ball, but in doing so he quite deliberately ends Vriska’s prospects as a fairy, rather than simply killing her. He continues Vriska’s amputation by literally taking her eye and arm, scarring her body and reifying her life story as the Captain Hook to Tavros’ Pupa Pan. He deliberately posits her as the symbolic antithesis to the fairy, he does so through the permanent destruction of her body so as to tell her that she will always be that antithesis, and he constructs her body so as to keep her from fulfilling the fairy ideal.

That Vriska is still able to recuperate her identity and make something truly fantastic of herself as a punk pirate is incidental to the reality of her pain at Doc Scratch’s hands. That Vriska crafts her pirate persona in the splitting image of Mindfang in particular, who is herself Aranea the fairy, reveals the bleak reality that Vriska is, in fact, still approaching the fairy archetype on some level, as closely as she realistically can, in spite of being shunted into another role. Vriska is far from femme, and she’s hardly heterosexual, but she’s still a fairy girl (i.e. a trans woman) on the symbolic level.

Most of all, Vriska serves as one of many middlemen in the equation, but both Aradia and Vriska are subject to bodily destruction at Doc Scratch’s abusive will, and both of them have their bodies reconstructed through cybernetics by Equius, leaving them open to his abuse, before ultimately finding bodily integrity and greater wholeness as god tier fairies.

(Speaking of which, remember when Tavros wasn’t able to bring himself to kill Vriska in order to god tier her?

This isn’t just Tavros’ failure to give Vriska a divine power-up, and it’s not just his refusal to reciprocate some kind of black romance fling with Vriska, sexual or otherwise -- it constitutes his ultimate failure or refusal to validate Vriska as a fairy! No wonder she’s so butthurt.)

To sum it all up, the beta cycle of revenge is almost entirely about maladjusted fairies -- maladjusted trans femmes and AMAB queers -- acting out and abusing each other in a conflict that spills over to hurt others, all under the direction and oversight of Doc Scratch’s predatory inclinations. Terezi might really be in it for something like justice, to avenge her friend, but Vriska, Aradia, and Tavros are also entangled in something even more intimate, violent, and personal.

TL;DR: trolls are gay, trans Vriska needs therapy

#homestuck #homestuck meta #homestuck analysis #effortpost #vriska #aradia #trans vriska #trans aradia #vriskourse #cw slurs #I guess

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beelzebubskeeper · 5 years

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On Transgender Discourse

To begin, can we please stop regurgitating the strawman transphobic things that Kalvin Garrah and others like him say. Please. He's grossly uneducated on real world trans issues and publicly shames and misgenders other trans people when they don't act/present like him. I advise y'all, especially young and impressionable trans and queer people, to get some other sources. Do some reading, look into gender studies, listen to Gender Non Conforming (GNC) and Nonbinary (NB) trans people and their experiences. I suggest reading or listening to work and poetry by Alok Vaid-Menon, a femme GNC performance artist who talks about their experiences as a trans femme person. I know how easy it is to listen to a charismatic and relatable trans person and have him validate some of your internalized or subconscious transphobia. Some of y'all won't listen to gnc and nb trans folks, so maybe hearing it from a binary trans person (who has been diagnosed with gender dysphoria by 2 psychologists) will somehow make it stick? I feel like I need to make this more comprehensive post about this because I haven’t really seen one and at this point the burden of educating is less than that of seeing blatant transphobia so often.

If you want to talk about resources I can tell you that the "trenders" are not why trans medicine is so difficult to access. Trans people are disproportionately discriminated against in the medical field. I go to the leaders in trans and lgbt health and it still takes me months to get in. But guess what, it's not because some secretly cis people are "stealing the resources" it's because the lgbt community is so heavily discriminated against within medicine that its the entire communities outlet and they are a set of less than 10 clinics serving the entirety of Chicago's lgbt community. I suggest looking at their site as well, as they talk about these disparities far better than I can, as well as having some more comprehensive information about trans health and identification. If “trends” are really hindering your access to medicine that much, wouldn’t it make more sense to make trans medicine more readily accessible? People who most of you would consider “actually trans” actively do have to lie to get hormones and surgeries because of the discrimination we as a community face.

If we're talking bare bones definitions, The World Health Organization defines transgender people as experiencing gender incongruence which is "characterized by a marked and persistent incongruence between an individual’s experienced gender and the assigned sex," according to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). I have personal opinions on dysphoria but hey I'm not about to tell people how they're allowed to identify, especially not by trying to clock them. Dysphoria is experienced as physically, mentally, and socially. Every single trans person experiences this to some different levels. For example you may be extremely socially dysphoric while not feeling any kind of physical dysphoria. You may have dysphoria surrounding your genitals and not your chest or vice versa. Some people can't or don't want to medically transition. Along with this, the notion that GNC and NB people don’t exist because of some unsourced claims to biology and the binary should be met with heavy scrutiny. The idea that human sex is binary is outdated when we look at intersex people who make up an estimated 1.7% of the population, though the estimation may be low. Most people who have disparities between chromosomes and their sexual presentation don’t ever know seeing as we don’t try to identify one’s chromosomes unless their is some other issue that could be linked to the chromosomes.

The myth about detransitioning is another straw man. Only about 1 percent of people detransition, and for those who do it’s for much more complicated reasons than they aren’t really trans. A lot of times these people have complications with insurance, hormones, and/or surgery. Sometimes people detransition because hormones weren’t the right move, or didn’t make them “pass” the way they want to. There is no cut and dry answer here.

This is a long one, I know but I also want to bring in caricatures because I think they’re really important. I would really rather not have to attach photos because it can be incredibly triggering for people and I want this to be as accessible a post as possible. All of the anti-tucute or anti-tender art and rhetoric I've seen directly mimics and refers back to classic TERF caricatures, except always inverted and targeting afab/dfab people. They’re given large breasts and dyed hair and “get mad if you misgender them” (as if being upset about being misgendered is a bad thing?) We need to unpack this, so lets begin. With these caricatures an outsider or cis person will read that all trans masculine people look or act like their caricature, or that it’s okay to discriminate against trans people who look a certain way. It’s also saying that you can “clock” or ID both “real” and “fake” trans people. It’s saying it’s not okay to be a trans man or trans masc person and have breasts or dyed hair or wear pride flags. Caricatures and rhetoric like this serves only to push away questioning trans people and actively dehumanize and degrade our trans family.

It’s not our job to vet and question other trans people, it’s not our job to try and find the secret cishets who’ve “snuck in” and kick them out. Our job is to support each other, to continue to try and educate ourselves, to try to understand the experiences of other LGBT people that are unlike our own, to give space to those questioning their identity. Giving people room to explore rather than shutting down young LGBT (or questioning) people isn’t going to help you face less discrimination. On the contrary you are merely adding to the transphobic rhetoric that already exists and validating -for example- TERF rhetoric and imagery. I’ve seen a spike in lgbt and specifically trans “flop” accounts dedicated to dehumanizing and humiliating trans people, which weaponizes transphobes. The running trend of “this is why cishet people don’t like us” is repulsive. Transphobia has and will continue to persist regardless of GNC and NB folks, and blaming them is, in my opinion, ridiculous. Stepping on other trans people in order to get cis acceptance is dangerous, and to be honest not particularly effective. Playing at “pick me” politics don’t really help anyone, but only serve to divide us, to encourage greater discrimination. Read here about internalized misogyny, as it articulates the same argument but within a different group of people. We operate within the margins as a community, i.e the term marginalized.

I would love to have other trans people way in, especially GNC and NB trans folks as I would like to avoid talking over y’all. I’m only one man, and I can only do so much. If I’ve made a mistake I’ll gladly listen to critique or correction! It’s necessary that we grow and learn from each other. I spent a long while composing this, as well as looking for sources, which are linked to various points in my post, that reflect my points. I’ll gladly add all of the sources separately at request if it will facilitate easier access. While anecdotal information is important, especially within understudied and marginalized groups, having empirical evidence is so important.

(Posted Tuesday March 26, 2019)

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drpepperhateblog · 6 years

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Riot Games Sexism: Source Collection

Article: Inside The Culture of Sexism at Riot Games

Some excerpts:

“Both male and female sources have described seeing unsolicited and unwelcome pictures of male genitalia from bosses or colleagues. One woman saw an e-mail thread about what it would be like to “penetrate her,” in which a colleague added that she’d be a good target to sleep with and not call again.”

“Another said a colleague once informed her, apparently as a compliment, that she was on a list getting passed around by senior leaders detailing who they’d sleep with.”

“One of Riot’s male senior leaders regularly grabbed his genitals, the source said, adding, “If he walked into a meeting with no women he’d just fart on someone’s face.””

In disbelief? Here are some witnesses, with both former and current employees confirming what’s happening:

Multiple tweets from MiniWhiteRabbit

“Multiple women confided in me about being sexually harassed at work. About their asses being slapped, being groped at parties, or being raped at Riot events.”

Riot Tiza tweet

“Tough to read this but this is dead on about some problems in our house.”

Xylese tweet

“I’m fortunate to have an incredibly supportive manager, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I have colleagues who’ve dealt w/ and still deal w/ this shit. I’ve had my own share of bad experiences here, too. I want that to change in Riot and in the industry.”

FFMirhi tweet

“I can assure you that the vast majority of testimonials in this article are true.”

Gogo Usagi tweet

“I worked there for 3 years and I'm still recovering, honestly.”

ScarizardPlays tweet

“I wanted to mostly be quiet and let other people speak but if my voice helps lend any credibility to the _staggering_ amount of sources cited here: this isn’t overblown ‘sensationalist kotaku garbage’ or whatever redditors love to say. Even the bits you can’t believe? it happened”

Yonah tweet

“I was so idealistic & hopeful when I joined Riot. I really believed the hype. And I left so broken I’ve been in therapy for years.”

Devongiehl tweet

“Happy to see all of this finally brought to light. I left three years ago, but Riot still has has a long way to go.”

DanielZKlein comment

“Sorry to state the obvious, but none of this is fucking acceptable. These people should at the very least have been put on a personal improvement plan or be fired. This is infuriating.”

UPDATE: Daniel Z Klein has further confirmed that the information in the article is true (link to multiple tweets), also confirmed what happened to Yonah (link), and made several retweets such as this:

“Not every single woman at a company has to have experience harassment for it to be real. The Kotaku piece was a result of months of thorough investigative journalism.”

In addition, there were questions raised about whether the person in the article could really have 16 game consoles plugged in. Here is proof that it’s true.

UPDATE 2: Riot Ghostcrawler comment on the controversy:

“One of the challenges of situations like this is that plenty of people have been fired for things that were described in the article. I have personally fired people for it (and I did it at Blizzard too). But you don't often go around communicating that fact, often times because you are trying to protect the victim of the harassment.

That is definitely not to say we have addressed every problem mentioned in the article.”

Not a current or former Rioter, but e-sports journalist Richard Lewis had something to say (tweet) about the article:

“Remember how I told you 2 years ago there was an inherent issue with sexism at Riot Games and we'd need to wait for the NDAs to start dropping off before the truth come out? Looks like today might be the day.”

Meagan-Marie tumblr post

Some excerpts:

“Soon I began to notice gendered language regularly being used among male Rioters to insult each other. Guys would tell each other “not to be such a girl” and call one another “p*ssies” quite regularly. They would casually refer to women as “b*tches” and say that “all women were crazy.” I also overheard a group discussing how a female professional made it far in the industry, suggesting she “sucked c*ck to get to the top.”

“I didn’t go out with colleagues after events because strip clubs seemed to be a common destination. Asking me what age I lost my virginity at was deemed appropriate conversation during a team dinner, and employees I didn’t know prodded into how my sex life worked in a long-distance relationship.”

“Rape became a punchline to jokes quite frequently, including one instance where an employee went on for several hours about how he was going to rape his male colleague, who was his hotel roommate. He was graphic in exactly how he was going to rape his roommate, who was a new hire, and it was obvious that the individual in question was extremely uncomfortable.”

“A senior staff member proceeded to repeatedly call me sexist for not being willing to room with a man I’d never met before. At first, I thought he was kidding, but he continued to make arguments to his point. I explained why I would be more comfortable sharing a room with another woman, and told him I wasn’t enjoying the conversation and would leave if I was continued to be called sexist. The conversation continued, with him eventually saying that my unwillingness to room with a man was the same as not hiring a woman due to her gender.”

“I regularly witnessed lewd comments about women passing by at events, discussing their level of attractiveness, whether someone would sleep with them, and guessing if they were the age of consent.”

“At least three times Riot Dublin employees made inappropriate comments via work email about a female cosplayer’s breasts (one they regularly worked with).”

“Cosplayers have also been called “tr*nnies” and “attention whores” by Riot employees at events.”

“In meetings, I was told that we shouldn’t put cosplayers on stage to play League live, because they are mostly women, and therefore not very good at the game.”

If there was any doubt of the validity of these stories, this tweet from Riot Games themselves washed them away:

UPDATE 3: Katie De Sousa tumblr post

“Not too long after I started at Riot, the topic of sexual harassment came up in a conversation among a few Rioters on the art team, I was there, just listening. They were talking about something that had happened to a woman there, and I had no context for it, but was surprised when one of the guys on the team claimed that “she liked the attention”. The subject was then laughed off. I later found out what actually happened, a female employee received super inappropriate texts from a lead. This group of dudebros laughed it off and made her the villain.”

“I also can’t help but think I would have felt more empowered if I wasn’t told by a male coworker that “Women don’t fit into a male hierarchy.” Maybe I would have been more inclined to strive for greatness if I wasn’t dismissively called a “pretty pretty princess” when my first champion, Jinx, did so well (among a bunch of other thinly veiled jealous verbal barbs). I actually went to a lead to express my frustration over this and he said “Yeah I can see why he’s acting like that, I mean I’m kind of jealous too.” What was that about women speaking up again?”

“Not too long into my career one of my male coworkers might have thought he was giving me a compliment when he decided to tell me about how great some of the guys thought my breasts were. I had made the foolish mistake of going to a Riot pool party, wearing a swimsuit, and swimming. I hope I don’t have to explain how violating that felt, at any rate I learned my lesson, and I never attended another.”

“My days might have been a bit easier to manage if I didn’t have to stifle my rage when a male coworker would explain to me how to make designs for women, and how to be a feminist. Realizing that they believe their opinion as a dude meant more than, I don’t know, my entire lifetime of experience as a woman?”

“Even the Riot Dames email group didn’t feel like a safe space, when we were discussing the lack of female characters in esports promos a senior lead decided to chime in and question whether women deserved to be represented, they haven’t really earned it yet, as pro LoL players were all male. Oh, and on the topic of men thinking women are inherently lesser and must prove otherwise, let’s discuss another gross habit: saying “you’re really good at _______ for a chick.””

UPDATE 4: Barry Hawkins blog post

“The sexual references by straight men directly towards other straight men were a more complicated issue. It would often be homosexual in nature, but could also be sexually aggressive toward your significant other. You might be talking to a leader about conflict with a peer, and they’d respond with “man, you’re acting like he had sex with your wife.” Or they might start a paragraph by saying “Now for instance, if I fucked your wife…” and then segue into what they were actually supposed to be saying. The homosexual variants would be things like “well if he sucked your dick, would you feel better about this?” or “it’s not like I’m asking you to suck my dick, but I’d be OK with it if you did.””

“The next day, one of my former direct reports and her direct report, both of whom I was actively mentoring, asked to speak with me as soon as I could. We met up right away, and they were visibly upset. One of them said to me, “There’s a rape joke in some of the recruiting material, and they’re saying it’s something that Brandon said at the offsite. Is that true? Did he say that?” I think I took a deep breath, followed by a long sigh. It was a simple question, with a simple answer, but with that answer came grave implications.“Yeah, he did.””

“I will never forget changing planes in San Francisco the following Monday. I pulled out my phone to check email, and found replies to the email I sent Brandon, but not only him. My original email had apparently become a thread with some folks in leadership. I recall it mentioning that hyper-sensitive people who didn’t understand intent were a problem we needed to address at Riot. I closed that email thread, and immediately below it there was a meeting invite titled “Riot Voice and Sense of Humor” set for when everyone returned from the company trip. The invite included the co-founders Marc (my boss) and Brandon, the head of Communications, the head of Legal, and myself.”

“The head of Legal did speak up and asked if we were concerned about legal liability. She was seated to my left, and I was seated on Brandon’s left, where he was at the head of table. Brandon extended his arm past me and held up his hand in front of her and hushed her, saying we were not going to talk about that.”

UPDATE 5: Riot Games Apology Statement: Our First Steps Forward

#riot games #league of legends #sexism #misogyny

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and-then-theres-that · 5 years

Text

Tumblr Community Guidelines

Since everyone is freaking out and obviously only wanting to read what they want to see, OR too lazy to actually click a link:

These go into effect on the 17th.

Community Guidelines

Please note: these new Community Guidelines will not go into effect until 2018-12-17

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(Wooooooh boy! The one everyone is up in arms about...I don’t see ANYTHING in here about banning obviously fake looking boobs. And honestly, if you draw the hyper-realistic stuff, that looks like it could be a REAL LIVE HUMAN BEING not everyone wants to find that when they go looking for a thing. I find it in the World of Warcraft rag all the time and it’s not what I want to see. Tag your shit...seriously. Admittedly it’s a fine line, but there’s a huge difference between anime porn and a shirtless guy drawing. I see nothing in there that says cartoony drawings are going.)

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(Oh thank god, can we do this to Instagram please?)

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(YAY!)

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Thanks for reading all of this, by the way. Welcome to Tumblr.

———————————-

That’s a huge blurb, sorry for all the people I flattened and NO I won’t be putting it behind a read more, no one will.

None of these rules are hard. In fact, they’re really simple.

Don’t post what isn’t yours.

Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not

Don’t scam people

Don’t spam post stupid shit

Don’t tag things that have nothing to do with the tag. (No more kpoppers in the Lee Pace tag!)

Don’t glorify self-harm, abuse or eating disorders.

Don’t bully people

Don’t threaten harming people because they’re not like you

Don’t post explicit, realistic sexual situations and try to call it art.

Don’t attempt sex with a minor, or try to phish for minors

....

Generally what these new guidelines are telling you to do is to BE A GENUINE, NICE PERSON AND DONT TREAT OTHERS LIKE SHIT!

Is that really difficult for some of you? FFS

#tumblr #guidelines #be a nice human #how hard is that to understand #tumblr exodus

2 notes · View notes

crimsonrevolt · 6 years

Photo

Congratulations Sass you’ve been accepted to Crimson Revolt as Cassandra Burke

↳ please refer to our character checklist

Sass, we’re so happy to see you return to the group! The development you’ve brought to Cassandra from her starting skeleton is amazing, and the passion you have for writing her is obvious in every part of your application. Your writing samples do a wonderful job of explaining Cassandra’s current position in the overall plot and exploring the way she’s been changed by the effects of the war, and we can’t wait to see what you do with her next!

*Your faceclaim change to Nina Dobrev has been accepted

application beneath the cut ( tw: PTSD, trauma, abuse, assault, knives, death )

OUT OF CHARACTER

INTRODUCTION

Hey, I’m Sass, twenty-four years old and from the GMT+1 timezone.

ACTIVITY

Oh, probably a 6-7/10. To be honest I do have days on which I can’t be online at all, because I do have a full-time job nowadays and other commitments, but I do intend to dedicate enough time to Cassandra to develop her further and fully push her into all the drama, all the good stuff.

TRIGGERS

*removed for privacy

HOW DID YOU FIND US?

Originally through the first admin and I’ve been a member ever since (well, with a two month hiatus?)

WHAT HARRY POTTER CHARACTER DO YOU IDENTIFY WITH MOST?

Probably with Fred Weasley. As a twin I’m constantly with my twin brother and I’m fiercely protective of him. Also I feel like out of us I’m the one who speaks first and I’m also more outgoing than my brother.

ANYTHING ELSE?

I’m just glad to be back, y’all.

IN CHARACTER

DESIRED CHARACTER

Cassandra – From the Greek name ��ασσανδρα (Kassandra), derived from possibly κεκασμαι (kekasmai) “to excel, to shine” and ανηρ (aner) “man” (genitive ανδρος). In Greek myth Cassandra was a Trojan princess, the daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances he cursed her so nobody would believe her prophecies.In the Middle Ages this name was common in England due to the popularity of medieval tales about the Trojan War. It subsequently became rare, but was revived in the 20th century. Morrigan – Derived from Irish Mór Ríoghain meaning “great queen”. In Irish myth she was a goddess of war and death who often took the form of a crow. Burke – Derived from Middle English burk meaning “fort or fortified town”. It was brought to Ireland in the 12th century by the Norman invader William FitzAdelm de Burgo.

BIRTHDAY / STAR SIGN

Novermber 5th 1957 – SCORPIO -- One of the most sensitive signs in the zodiac, Scorpio women feel their emotions intensely, though they may not always express them overtly. A water-ruled sign, Scorpio is symbolized by the submerged depths, like the pure waters flowing through an underground cave. But you may not see the currents or waves rippling through her facial expressions – much of what a Scorpio woman feels, she won’t always express overtly. Scorpios rule over the occult sciences, and the true meaning of the word “occult” is “hidden” – hence, the Scorpionic tendency toward secrecy and inscrutability. Only the most determined (and respectful) will be granted permission to explore the secret caverns within the heart of a Scorpio woman.

OCCUPATION

She used to be the co-owner of Borgin & Burkes, but is currently a neutral spy mostly affiliated with the Order of the Phoenix (but then again they threw her out, so it’s to being completely neutral again) I’d describe her as almost unemployed? Considering she’s still missing.

FACE CLAIM

Nina Dobrev

REASON FOR CHOSEN CHARACTER

I once described her as poison, and she is. I believe every character who’d been with her received their dose of poison and only some managed to find an antidote. It’s not meant in a seductive way, not entirely, but more or less like real poison. Everything she touches gets corrupted, even the most innocent minds, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s a master manipulator and someone who looks out for herself, most importantly. She’d been a Death Eater, a seductress, a liar, a fiancee, a friend, daughter, enemy – anything you can think of, but all she wants to be is a free woman, alive and happy. It’s the old tale of having a strong, flawed character, who has been through hell and survived, who promised herself to change the world for the better, who loved and spent days remembering her happiest moments before being thrown to the wolves again. I remember describing her as this cunning, calculating Femme Fatale with only selfish intentions, but she has grown and learned from her mistakes. She’s almost altruistic nowadays, at least when it comes to her friends.

This war and everything else is something she’d lived with, one of the few who actively lived through the horrors of war – but she has no regrets whatsoever. In fact, Cassandra feels like it’s her main goal to not only be free, but to help end this war. I just love her so much y’all.

PREFERRED SHIPS // CHARACTER SEXUALITY // GENDER & PRONOUNS

She’s experienced both in love and sex – and some might even say she’s one of the best. Cassandra’s biromantic/sexual and goes by she/her pronouns as a cis female.

For ships, well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I think I can’t really comment on that since a lot has changed over the past few months, so I’m not sure where new plots and ideas will lead to.

CREATE ONE (OR MORE!) OF THE FOLLOWING FOR YOUR CHARACTER

I have everything on my blog

Graphics, other stuff I made

IN CHARACTER QUESTIONNAIRE

♔ If you were able to invent one spell, potion, or charm, what would it do, what would you use it for or how would you use it? Feel free to name it:

“Easy. A spell that changes your personality permanently. Effective to hide or be someone else for a day, you know? In times like these it’s pretty effective and safe to just be a Muggle for a day or two.”

♔ You have to venture deep into the Forbidden Forest one night. Pick one other character and one object (muggle or magical), besides your wand, that you’d want with you:

“I’d say Orion Black since he’s experienced enough and would most likely survive on his own as well, so I’m not at all concerned. And as an object I’d probably choose a Portkey, just to make sure we’d find our way out immediately.”

♔ What kinds of decisions are the most difficult for you to make?

“Love. Always love – a bloody nightmare, I tell you.”

♔ What is one thing you would never want said about you?

“That I lived my life in vain, not really accomplishing anything.”

REACTION TO LAST EVENT DROP

Well, she did got captured. She wasn’t happy about being captured I can tell you all that much, also she wasn’t happy about being thrown out of the Order castle because others couldn’t warm up to her. She’s not really mad, but more or less frustrated. She did change and she’s not a Death Eater anymore, but there’s just no trust between the Order and Cassandra even though she did reveal her memories to Amos and the gang hoping it would make them trust her more. It worked on some, but not enough.

WRITING SAMPLE

1. – I AM RUINATION

April 4th 1979

trigger warnings: PTSD, trauma, abuse, assault, knives, death

“I am ruination,” her voice was merely a whisper, but the psychologist in front of her heard everything, every breath she took in their little zone, those four walls which were covered in a light grey, almost white tone. “How so, Miss Burke. Mrs. Rookwood?” he slowly tried to make sense out of her words, but he failed to understand her, as he should. “Burke, of course. I never actually married him. I couldn’t – not anymore,” Mr. Seymour, her psychologist, shook his head and gestured towards her engagement ring, which she still wore, polished everyday and kept clean over the past months. “A facade, that’s all,” she even wore Evan’s engagement ring, just because she loved the gem set between gold too much to ever take off the ring, at least for now. They were cruel reminders of what she’d endured, who she had to face in order to be free. She thoroughly pushed her thumb against her other hand, aggressively massaged the back of her hand to numb herself. “I never really cared if they were engagement rings or not – It’s already fucked up to know I have two,” she closed her eyes. “I wear them because they show me who I could’ve been if I hadn’t found the strength to follow my heart. I started to believe I had to follow my family’s path, that I have to believe in their lies, that I couldn’t be more than what they’d planned for me.” Cassandra took a deep sigh and she felt her throat contracting, resulting in her barely being able to breathe properly. “They judged me all my life and I let them. I thought I was a monster,” Cassandra watched Mr. Seymour and she realized, rather quickly, that she had to make him forget once they were done. “And you thought no one would understand? A typical case in Pureblood families. You felt like nobody would even dare to help you even if you’d have asked for it. But no one’s alone in this world, I hope you realize that.”

“But I’m ruination,” Cassandra muttered, gulping and shaking her head. “Everyone deserves to be saved, even if they believe they’re doomed. This isn’t the end, Miss Burke,” he was quickly cut off by Cass, who had now raised her voice slightly. “I have lead men to their death, I’ve risked the lives of the people that I love because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I endured immeasurable amounts of pain in return, just to keep them save. I still hear myself screaming, the Cruciatus curse running through my veins and I could never tell anyone about it, because it hurts so much, he broke me. I don’t want to live in pain – and I would’ve rather died than endure just one more second of the curse.” she breathed heavily. Mr. Seymour’s eyes widened in shock at how direct she was, something he hadn’t guessed from someone like her, especially not in front of an official psychologist for the Ministry. “The pain you’ve endured doesn’t define who you are and especially doesn’t mean you’re ruination. Others are, Miss Burke,” Cassandra tried to drown out her own screams, which were repeatedly resurfacing in her head. “The pain has shaped me to who I am now. The pain made me stronger.” “Yes, good.”

“I killed so many Halfbloods, Muggleborns and Purebloods, I lost count. I lured so many men to their deaths, that sometimes I feel like I’ve killed ten in a week, enemies, politicians, Muggles – for the sake of you-know-who and for the sake of my family. I sometimes wonder if Evan’s punishment was justified. He was right, you know? I’m currently playing my games, I haven’t leaned a thing. Nothing. I have scars to prove what I’ve endured, but I wonder if anything changed around me, except me.”

“You pity yourself – the hardships you’ve endured weigh you down. You need hope, love – you’re still here, you still breathe, that’s worth something.” Cassandra shook her head and chuckled slightly. “Do you honestly think those things will be my salvation? They’ve made me who I am in the first place. It’s the pain I cannot stand on its own, the memories. The sacrifices I’ve made until now have made me stronger, but I fear his judgement.” “Whose judgement?” “Amos. Amos Diggory?” He looked at her with a puzzled expression. “He has all my memories. He’ll see myself growing up, being formed into an obedient wife and Death Eater, how I’ve killed someone for the first time and how proud my father was. I never wanted to be such a problem, but I am. I have so much information stored as memories, but there’s also the pain and the darkness within he’ll finally see – and I don’t want to lose him, even if he said he’ll stay, those memories do not define who I am today.”

She took a deep breath. “He’ll see the pain, the love, the lust, everything. There’s so much you will never know, but he will. And I care more about his opinion than about yours.” Mr. Seymour leaned into his chair, slightly distancing himself from her, as if he tried to calm her down with that. “Do you know why I am here?” “Because they want to find out if I’m worth being pardoned. If my memories classify as worthy enough as exchange for my freedom?” “Precisely.” a quill next to his head wrote down every word they spoke, every stop, everything that could potentially be of use later on. As thoughts mixed inside of her head, Cassandra’s eyes fixed on different objects in the room, but never stayed there for too long as anxiety kicked in every few seconds. “And why are you here?” “Because I want to be free.” “There are few rules you need to keep in mind, but first – I’d like to enter your mind, so that I get a general understanding of what happened. You are not making any sense at the moment and I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed with my diagnosis – PTSD, illusions, Insomnia, nightmares and Bipolar Two Disorder, self-destructive behavior and thoughts. There’s a lot to consider, If we could only talk about the consequences and the severity–”severity? “I’m a murderess, Mr. Seymour, maybe I deserve everything that has had happened and maybe my broken relationships and fickle heart are just a result of who I was – they are a part of me. Maybe I deserve to feel empty, to be too broken to be loved. Maybe the person who did love me broke me in the end.” “You do not realize how toxic your mind will become if you do not let people in completely.” “Do you not listen?” she yelled at him, stood up and she could hot tears running down her cheeks. “I did and now I feel powerless, because I know they’ll only see a monster, the person I do not wish to be. I destroy everything and everyone I touch,” her hands shook as her fingertips reached for her mouth.

“I’ve lost my friends, my family, everything – on one day, because I was too afraid to talk to them, because I couldn’t bear the idea of working for him, of being a puppet. I’m not a puppet. I’m a puppeteer and I guide those around me to their deaths, right? And I try, so hard, to be better, to move on. But I can’t handle the pain. I just want the pain to be gone. I want to be enough, just once. I’m just a woman, I was never enough for my father, nor for my friends. I let everyone down, I lie and fake a smile just so that they still see me as confident. I stopped being confident and happy the day I lost him. And I left parts of myself in others, hoping they’ll love and care for them and one day return them to me with theirs attached. They never did. I am nothing in their eyes. Just a wanton,” she quoted Evan on this and looked down onto her engagement ring. Panic filled her heart, but she was stopped by Mr. Seymour, who’d grabbed her hand and entered her mind, now facing every memory she ever had as she let him in and his spell. He saw her childhood, her teenager years, the way she loved Caradoc and lost him the day she’d agreed to follow her family’s path, her Dark Mark, Borgin & Burkes, her engagement to Evan and her near death experience – the way she loved Amos and how she tried to protect everyone from Evan, their hands around her throat, the lack of control, the knife slashing through her skin, her screams, the pain which she endured from the Cruciatus curse – everything at once. He immediately sat down again, clenching his jaw and looking up towards her. “And I just want to feel normal, but I will never be, which is why everything’s so bloody complicated. I’m a disaster. And I don’t want to ruin everything I have right now. Because one day I will, and they’ll leave the second they see my real face, find out I’m a monster.”

Cassandra brushed away the tears from her cheeks and shook her head. “I control others just because I can’t control myself. I wonder if I’m still a monster, if I’ll never change, but I want to. I want to change, please – I just don’t know where to start. I feel like I can’t move, I can’t breathe. And I just want to stop drowning and breathe, survive. I have people who protect me. Orion, Caradoc, Amos, Rodolphus, Charity, Benjy, —- but I want to be strong on my own! I used to be stronger, independent, a lot less afraid.”

Mr. Seymour relaxed, as if he hadn’t just seen an entire life playing in front of his eyes, the trauma, the pain, the joy, the love – as if nothing of it really mattered. “You consider yourself to be a monster, but you haven’t killed me yet. How’s that? That’s because you know I’ll help you. The first step to becoming better is seeking help, reach out to others. You are healing, you have friends and people that love you for who you are - - you just have to open your eyes, Miss Burke. And if you survive through the pain and prove yourself, then you’re the strongest person I know.”

“No,” Cassandra replied, recovering from her panic attack. “I am strongest when I know what I want – and right now I just want to be free and happy.” she whispered, her grip tightening around her wand. A blue light took away all his memories from the past hours and she ignited the quill, which was still writing every word – and every paper lit on fire. “and I know I don’t have to conquer my monsters, I just have to keep them on a leash, because they’ll never see another version of me, the one that’s suffering and alone – I will remain standing, strong and proud. They will never suspect the cracks if no one knows about them besides one, the one I love – and if I still feel… love, then how bad of a monster can I be?”

2. – BRAVE NEW WORLD

Ministry of Magic, Cassandra Burke’s secret Wizengamot trial, the dungeons Date: April 13th 1979

Wind blew through her hair as she entered the hidden passage through the Ministry, a hood loosely falling over her face as she was abruptly grabbed away from the sun and into the dark tunnels. She kept on walking, didn’t really know which step to take next – maybe she didn’t want to know. Arriving at the Wizengamot, a place her parents warned her about, the Dark Lord had warned her about, as well, now looked even more frightening than everything she’d dreamed of. A few wizards were placed on a podium, watching down on her, judging, making comments, whispering and shaking their head. One of the Aurors moved closer, and the former Death Eater immediately thought of Caradoc, who could’ve been here with her, who could’ve been the one to pull the hood away. With dark brown hair now falling behind her shoulders, Cassandra looked around freely, saw Dumbledore, judges, Bartemius Crouch Snr. and not many others, actually. In fact, she wondered why there wasn’t an entire courtroom filled with judges just waiting to drag her all the way to Azkaban. In total, however, she counted eight people. Eight to determine her innocence or her guilt. Others were judged from twenty or more, so what exactly happened in between then and now? Oh, she knew what happened, but didn’t dare to speak of him.

“The trial may begin,” Dumbledore spoke, his voice louder than ever, well, except the last time she’d heard him speak in Hogwarts. Before the trial could even begin properly, she was pushed down on the seat behind her and her hands were wrapped with a silken, glowing substance – a binding spell. While the Aurors removed her wand and went on with their procedures, Bartemius Crouch Snr. stood up, reading a script. “Cassandra Morrigan Burke, daughter of Aurora and Cormac Burke, stand accused of murder, assault, arson, theft, using unforgivable spells and high treason on many occasions. These crimes are, and will be, punished with a life-sentence in Azkaban. As a known member of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named and his army of dark wizards, you’re an enemy of the Ministry of Magic and therefore judged as an enemy of this court. How do you plead?”

Cassandra sighed, her breath shaky and her eyes searching for something or someone to focus on. Nothing, no one. “Guilty.” after confessing, however, her heart sped up, but her eyes weren’t trying to focus anymore. She kept staring towards Dumbledore, hoping her memories would have an effect. “You choose to help him all on your own. You didn’t care, you regret nothing. Even though your mouth’s moving, your lips are shaking, you’re not sorry at all,” Bartemius started. “You cast your first unforgivable curse at the age of sixteen as you killed your first victim for the Dark Lord.” he looked like a raging old man, incapable of keeping his temper in check, even before Dumbledore, who was in charge. Did Amos keep her memories? She started to shake in fear, but as Dumbledore spoke, she immediately froze. “It does seem like we’re making false assumptions. Our accusations are not too far off, in fact, they’re identical with what I’ve seen,” Dumbledore held the vial between his index and little finger, shaking her tears slightly, almost delicately. “I bear witness her accusations are all true, but she’s here to strike a deal.” Cassandra’s eyes closed in relief. This wasn’t the end, not yet, at least. “Immunity, a symbolic death if you will, in exchange for all information granted in this vial. The Order wishes the Ministry would accept or consider her offer.”

“I offered my memories for a reason. I want to be free,” she pleaded, but Bartemius already tried to silence her. “Silence!”

“I didn’t just offer my past, but several memories of Death Eater meetings and faces. Vast knowledge of dark magic acquired through training and my family’s history in that field. Tom Riddle worked for my grandfather.” “I said silence! You did kill Darius Shafiq, have you not? You lured him into a trap on November 2nd 1978, didn’t you? You assassinated Clara Wilson, a hit-witch, who worked for the Ministry, after she’d been tasked with the killing of an ally of yours, of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

“Darius was a Death Eater,” she then said, calmly. “I killed him because the Dark Lord knew he’d break.” Bartemius abruptly lost his voice and looked at Dumbledore, confused. She nodded towards the vial. “Everything you need to know’s contained in there. My entire life, my misdemeanors, my knowledge and relationships. I request you to have a look and judge for yourself. I’m willing to share them with you as I did with my link to the Order and Ministry before this trial.” She didn’t want to mention Amos directly. They’d find out sooner or later.

One week later

“Cassandra Morrigan Burke. You’ve been found guilty on all charges. Upon viewing your memories the Wizengamot decided to pardon your crimes and erase all evidence of this trial. Your memories will be stored to further the Ministry’s attempt in finding Death Eaters and stopping the war. Under oath we’ve agreed to never use your name outside of this court. You will be considered missing, if not dead after today. All your relatives will be told of your disappearance and your possible death in times of war. You’re free to leave.”

#lsrpg #marauders rpg #hp rp #nina dobrev rp

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liberalartssustainability · 3 years

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WALL-E: How issues of gender and sex have overtaken the real message

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMehSe7G5/

WALL-E is a 2008 animated Disney Pixar story following the journey of a little robot named WALL-E. The story is set 700 years into the future, at a time where consumerism and environmental neglect have turned the Earth into a wasteland filled to the brim with rubbish. Humanity does not inhabit Earth anymore and there are no people to be seen because the population was evacuated by a megacorporation called "Buy-n-Large", who governed Earth at the time. They left behind robots to clean up the mess humanity had made, but all had broken down except for one. The robots were named Waste Allocation Load-Lifter: Earth-class (or, WALL-E for short). The story goes on to show WALL-E meet Extra-terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator (or EVE for short), a research probe sent to Earth by humans. The two robots "fall in love" and embark on an adventure across space together. You may have noticed that I put quotation marks around the phrase "fall in love"… not because I'm quoting someone else, but rather because I don't know how two machines, two man-made objects, can feel human emotion. This leads us to the topic of this post: what gender are WALL-E and EVE?

Although some may find it controversial, gender itself is a social construct. Our sex is not, but our gender is, yet some see the two as interchangeable which can complicate discussions, such is the case with the robots in WALL-E. This week I saw a video on social media which addressed the idea that WALL-E is, in fact, non-binary. The person in the video recreated a hypothetical discussion between two people about why WALL-E is a boy and EVE is a girl, and what actually defines our gender. The dialogue goes back and forth, with one person experiencing what could be compared to moral dumbfounding [1]; individuals label the robots as a boy and a girl but when asked to give a reason, they struggle to find something concrete.

Somehow, despite no physical, biological signs that WALL-E is a boy (i.e. reproductive organs), he is labelled as such. He cannot reproduce sexually, he does not have a sex, yet he can have a gender? This prompted the response, in the video I watched, that WALL-E is a boy because of the way he looks - "[he] is square and does construction and EVE is feminine looking" - which in turn generates the idea that "gender is a matter of presentation and expression, not a matter of biology. The exchange goes on and on, you can imagine. Sex is something tangible, whereas gender is not. What I found interesting is that without EVE, if the story only followed WALL-E, it wouldn’t matter what gender the robot was, but as soon as a romantic subplot is introduced, "we suddenly become gender detectives". If WALL-E has no genitals, and we use the logic of those who say gender is only to do with biology, then WALL-E is non-binary and doesn't have a gender. I would argue that, as humans, our tendency to apply concepts such as "woman" and "man" to objects (in this case robots), is "indicative of the fact that gender is not inherently embedded in biology". We have been conditioned to make such associations.

However, you could argue that the reason we assign “girl” and “boy” to WALL-E and EVE is because of their names. Granted, this is also something we have been conditioned to think, and the idea that certain names correspond to individuals of a particular gender is also a social construct. Nevertheless, this seems like a more logical explanation for our assumptions. WALL-E sounds like “Wally”, a typically male name; EVE is usually a name for a female. The abbreviated names of the two robots already suggest to us what we should think in regards to gendering them. Whilst we may be able to escape the restrictive social construct of gender, we cannot escape that of names being associated with specific genders, this is something much harder to shift.

The love story runs on the backdrop of an Earth destroyed by the selfish actions of humans, it is effectively a dystopia. However, I think this key message is often lost in the light-hearted nature of robot love. Through focusing on and trivialising matters such as the gender of robots, we are essentially missing what I believe to be the whole point of the film. Cultural productions have the power to convey messages to a range of different people all over the world, and in this case the message is one which touches on our future and what could happen if we continue living the way we do. It can be easy to see this animated film as fiction, we think "this couldn't possibly happen", but the scary thing is, it could and it will if we do not think more intuitively about our consumptive patterns and what this could mean for the future of our planet. Our focus is drawn to the wrong area in this case, rather than debating the difference between what we perceive sex and gender to mean using animated robots, we should be more active in preventing the dystopian future we see created in WALL-E.

- Jagoda C.

[1] moral dumbfounding - ‘the stubborn and puzzled maintenance of an [ethical] judgment without supporting reasons’ (Haidt et al., 2000, p. 1).

Haidt, J., Bjorklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason. Unpublished manuscript, University of Virginia.

Barrosse, R. V. “Is WALL-E Male or Female? - Featured Stories - Medium.”. 2018. last accessed 10 March, 2021. https://medium.com/s/story/wall-e-eve-the-great-gender-debate-407befd7d932#:~:text=As%20far%20as%20robots%20go,he%20can%20have%20a%20gender. ‌

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werevulvi · 5 years

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These pics are just to show my dented ribs, cause like... suffer with me? Also cause I feel strangely alright with what my chest looks like in these pics. But anyhow. On left pic I'm pointing at the centre where it goes in and then pops out again on both sides of the sternum/breastbone. And yes, that's my bone bending like that, not just fat or muscles. Likely from having pushed my breasts towards the centre in binders and sports bras. On the right pic I'm pointing at the big dent on the lower left side of my ribcage, which is right where the sports bra elastic goes. My lowest ribs then curve out much farther than they do on the other side. Putting pressure on either of those dented areas hurts a bit.

(The bump above my nipple on the right pic is literally just my pec muscle, so no need to worry about that one.) And yes I'm sucking in my stomach here only so that you can see my ribs better, I don’t normally do for photos. I've sure gotten hairy again since I stopped shaving my body, and I like the soft fluff! It’s dark brown, almost black, irl. Which is quite a contrast to my ivory skin. And yes my happy trail does connect with my chest hair, which almost connects with my beard but not quite. Those little tufts just above the scars on my chest are my actual nipple hairs, or used to be before the nips were relocated during top surgery. They're weirdly misplaced little hairs now, but that's why they're there. And yeah, 5 years post-op but the scars never became white. But let's get onto the topic. I've come across a new doubt about my wish to have breast reconstruction, which I'm already looking into and not brushing under any carpets. I do want to make as sure as I possibly can that I make the right decision about my chest this time, so I'm tackling every doubt I get about it. And that new doubts keep popping up from time to time, worries me too. Even though I sorted through all the previous ones. So what's it this time? Since I've started going flat in public a couple weeks ago or something (I think the last time I went out with boobs on was June 6th or around that date) I've noticed I seem to be less likely to be assumed to be a trans woman, and instead seen as just a gnc man. And strangely that actually feels better, mentally. It's still very far from ideal, but I feel it's the slightly better of the two evils.

What would be ideal? In a perfect (and highly unrealistic) world: I'd love it if people would just know I'm a female who's taken testosterone and/or see I'm a masculinised woman even if they can't figure out, or know, how. And without me having to change my body at all. But that is not how reality works and I know that people won't perceive me that way just because I want for them to.

So, without changing my body again I'm basically stuck having to choose between being perceived as either a "cis" man or a trans woman, depending on my presentation and style. (Cause apparently we are assuming "gender identity" and not just bio sex, these days.) Of course I don't have 100% control over which one of those I'll be read as, but I've come to notice that people do seem to be much more likely to "trans me" when I'm wearing my breast forms cause that is adding a female (not just feminine) trait to my otherwise male appearance... and they seem to be much more likely to think I'm simply a man (albeit gnc) when I go flat but still keep a feminine style. However, some still read me as a gnc man with boobs and some still read me as a trans woman without them.

Exactly why I seem to prefer being read as a whole ass man rather than as a trans woman, is complicated and not entirely nice, but basically this: Both trans women and "cis" men are bio male, and it's the assumption that I'm bio male that rubs me backwards, at the core of it.

However, being assumed to be a trans woman adds another layer to it. It makes me feel like people shove the gender ideology down my throat that is hard to wiggle myself out of, and it makes me feel like I'm perceived as a "fake" woman and a "fake" lesbian. A fraud, to be brutally honest. Whereas when I'm assumed to be simply a gnc man, the gender ideology is not being shoved down my throat, people don't comment on my assumed genitals, etc. But above all I'm more likely to be treated with respect, which feels hugely relieving.

But mostly what truly whacks my mind about being assumed to be MtF is that it makes me feel like I'm an imposter of an imposter. Double wrong. While when seen as a man, I merely feel like I'm simply an imposter. Plain wrong. And that, is exactly why I feel like "gnc man" is a better wrongful assumption than "trans woman" is. Cause two wrongs really don't make a right.

But regardlessly, I am not and will never be an actual man. I am an imposter, a male impersonator of modern times. But at the same time I believe I'm more authentic like this than I would be if I tried to force myself into acquiring a stereotypical "womanly" appearance. That would be a charade just as much, if not more. That was a long ramble about how I'm perceived again, but it's highly relevant to my doubt about getting breast reconstruction, just hear me out. Cause that, what I'm read as based on what's going on on my chest, was was made the doubt creep out from its shadows, just a few days ago. It has gotten me suddenly worrying I might not like it how I'd be perceived if I have permanent boobs on my chest that I wouldn't be able to hide. Cause no more binding, ever. I've fucked my ribs over enough for a lifetime. And of course, how fucking moot and dumb it would be to bind after breast reconstruction! The thing, however, is that if I actually prefer to be seen as a gnc man over being seen as a trans woman, and boobs being the tipping point between those two perceptions... that creates a thorn in my side, a doubt, a conflict even, about if breast reconstruction really is the right choice for me then.

Ever since I left my boobs at home those weeks ago, people have left me alone about my gender/sex. Out of all the 5 or 6 strangers that have come up and talked to me since then, zero have confronted me about my gender, sex or even my style. It is a relief to just be left alone about my body like that.

I'm also feeling slightly (possibly even increasingly) okay with my chest as it is. I do still regret my top surgery and I still miss having boobs, and it's definitely possible that I'm just disassociating from my chest being flat now, but... Yesterday I was even walking around in my neighbourhood wearing literally just a skirt, fem slippers, my lesbian necklace, red lipstick, and an open, flimsy tunic/cardigan. The wind grabbing it quite a lot means most of my chest showed, including nipples, and my neighbours could see it as I walked back and forth to the laundry house to clean my dirty clothes.

Is it weird? Well, I highly doubt I'd be reported for indecent exposure cause I'm at least 99% sure everyone in my neighbourhood thinks I'm male. Cause they certainly looked shocked at me when I first started going fem in my early detransition a year ago. I've only lived in this area since mid-transition, so no one here knows my history with that. Basically I can't imagine my neighbours think I'm somehow bio female, without slipping into the territory of wishful thinking. But it has gotten me thinking: when I don't shave anywhere, and don't wear boobs, knowing I can only pass as male that way... am I not technically "presenting male" then, despite being female and also so feminine in my style? I mean, up until the point I introduce myself as "Laura" that is. Also, last night I took a shower, and for the first time in... I dunno how many years, if ever... I actually enjoyed soaping and touching my chest in gentle, massaging and caressing ways. For but a glimpse of a moment, I could connect to it for probably the first time since top surgery, or ever, in a non-sexual way. It is indeed a breakthrough. It is also a hint of its possible true potential. That I could maybe at some point come to peace with it. Why do I feel so bad for regretting my transition? Cause even though I achieved a 100% passability, here I am, still dysphoric and miserable, missing the womanhood I traded away. Oh, what a fool I was. This irrevokable fate that seems like an impossible dream for the dysphoric, and I'm just pissing on it. I'm sorry, but I cannot appreciate having been transformed into a highly believable illusion of something I can never actually become and no longer want to be. I never thought it could hurt. I never knew it could hurt like this. Was I sold a lie? But back to my chest. I know getting new tits won't make me any more or less female, and it wouldn't make me pass as female either. What I'd want them for is personal comfort in the private, in both non-sexual and in sexual contexts, and vaguely also cause it would help me relate better and more positively to other women. I'm jealous of every pair of boobs I ever see, clothed or uncovered, and that hurts. But what makes me now hesitate, perhaps for real, is this new, gnawing inkling of a feeling that what if I'd miss having a flat chest? Sometimes I like the look of it, in the sense that it kinda goes with my otherwise male appearance and who doesn't/wouldn't like the feeling of a soothing breeze on their bare chest during a hot summer day? Cause it sure does feel good. Oh god, I wish I could just have the cake and eat it at the same time!

It's been 5 years since I had my top surgery, but did I ever truly try to make amends with it, before my detransition? No, I didn't. What I did was trying to force myself to like the result of it, and that's not a successful approach. Just like I didn't exactly manage to like being a woman when I during my teens tried to force myself to become fine with my female body after I had figured out I was likely a trans guy at age 15, and up until the point I said "fuck it" and began my social (and eventually medical) transition at age 19. During those 4 years my dysphoria only worsened, and I think my rabid attempt to force myself to like being female was part of why it only got worse. Forcing self-love is not the way to achieve it. It won't work. Just like you can't beat depression out of yourself, or any other issue, you can't beat dysphoria out of yourself either. That kind of force is actually more likely to make it worse instead, I believe. Cause it'll just strengthen your belief that it won't work. However, to gently and with compassion for yourself and your struggle try out different things, over a longer time and with lots of patience, to slowly accept and come to terms with it can lead to the dysphoria disappearing. To not punish yourself for still being dysphoric or for not "succeeding", but rather reward yourself for even just trying and for every little thing that may improve on the way. At least that's how I managed to accept and embrace being female in my late 20's despite having failed so miserably at it during my teens, because this time I didn't force it. I killed that dysphoria with kindness, quite literally.

Likewise, I think there is a chance I could come to accept and embrace my flat chest if I just stopped forcing myself to, and tried it with gentle self-care and curiosity, without pressure to achieve anything. If only I just want to and can be prepared to give myself that kind of care and patience, one more fucking time. Cause I've only got one body and I'm so fucking painfully aware of it now. I can't fuck it up again. Detransitioning requires so much more soul-searching and scrambling around in my brain for answers, self-care and patience, etc, than transitioning ever did. Well... that's why I ended up detransitioning, I think. Cause I didn't do a good job at truly looking into myself the first time around. Would I still have wanted to go on T if I had known everything I know now, though? Oh absolutely, but that's not the topic of today.

But whether I'll in the long run wanna live as a male-presenting woman incognito or later on down the road change my body in some way, I can't know for sure at this point. Perhaps I'm just not mentally ready yet to take that kind of leap. Or perhaps I don't ever want to present fully female again and may end up loving this look and contradiction as I grow more secure within myself and more confident. But either which way, I will have to follow this new doubt carefully and see where it takes me. Keep going flat for a while and see how it goes, and see if how I'm perceived really changes based on that and if that really feels better in the long run to be perceived as a man. To take advantage of this very hot summer to be shirtless also in public to test my comfort level with that, and if I'd miss that. To explore my flatness gently and with careful patience to see if it really is so bad. To ask my brain: what is this lingering doubt trying to tell me? I'll start with giving it this summer, then more time if needed. I'll still go to the surgery consultation that could happen anytime now. It's not like I'd have to get the surgery by just going to that consultation, cause I'll need to go through my trauma therapy first, and even if it's expected I'd go through with surgery after consultation, I can always cancel at any point. Also, being informed of what a surgeon can do for me and my specific chest, as well as getting my questions about the surgery answered, would surely be helpful in my decision-making as well. I mean, that's what surgery consultations are for. Because I still lean towards wanting it more than I lean towards maybe not wanting it, I think cautiously proceeding with my thumb close to the cancel button is not a bad idea.

#my pics #top surgery #detransition #regret #dysphoria #gender critical #surgery doubts #5 years post op #my dented ribs #venting #desisting

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