It's so interesting and so exceedingly frustrating how agab is being utilized now within the queer community as a way to isolate and sort nonbinary and genderqueer folks into binary boxes that determine their moral purity levels, and their authority to do and write and exist.
The way nonbinary writers are being put under accusation of fetishizing gay men while their AGAB is continually brought up in a way that feels like queer-space-approved misgendering.
The way feminist circles that are supposedly trans-inclusive will use the word AFAB in a way that implicitly but intentionally isolates nonbinary people who aren't AFAB from joining. It's for women*.
The way the language is already flawed and leaves out intersex folks from the conversations while focusing on a binary of sex that isn't truthful.
The constant obsessing over whether someone is AFAB or AMAB and whether or not that gives them the privilege to join, do, write, or be present in certain spaces really really concerns me. How are we supposed to dismantle a binary system of gender if we can't even move past forcibly assigning and focusing on people's genders assigned at birth?
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can i say something. sometimes i actually do think that considering dana as tim's mom/his parent actually does immensely flatten the complexity of their relationship and try force it into unnecessary nuclear roles in a way to assume that her importance to him must be that of parent and child when in reality they can have a meaningful relationship and importance to each other without needing to be slotted into neat parent & child roles + it trends toward the tendency to see moms as replaceable beings in a child's life especially in comparison to how fathers are usually considered sacred and irreplaceable.
because dana and tim have a very interesting relationship in canon which they themselves define as explicitly Not parent & child several times (at the start of the jack and dana relationship, at their wedding, and the time tim specifically said that even though dana wasn't his mom, at some point she became more than just his dad's girlfriend, she became family to him). and dana is very supportive & kind to tim. she helps manage his relationship to jack sometimes. but she doesn't have to be his mom to do any of that & that's important!! because they can be family without her having to be his mom! she's not his mom just because she's standing in a woman shaped next to his dad! and the emphasis fandom puts on dana as tim's mom does trend towards this sometimes. dana was jack's girlfriend/wife for 20 years of comics & therefore filled the necessary role of "tim's mother figure" despite thr fact that the comics themselves & their relationship in them always presented as dana is jack's wife, dana is not tim's mom, dana and tim have a positive and important relationship despite that (and, might i say, is an excellent and kind presentation of the experience of gaining a new 20something year old as a stepmother when you're 14, where the stepmother in question is a good addition to the child's life & doesn't push the boundaries of her expected role in it). and when it does get flattened into "dana is tim's" mom, it does take away from the important ultimately chosen family aspect of it. it doesn't need to be defined or clear cut. they can just be dana and tim.
+ there is something in the way that fandom uncritically just accepts & also kind of pushes the status quo of a woman character being created to fill a hole/role left by another woman character with barely a consideration that the initial woman character was may be capable of leaving a potentially unfillable narrative impact on those she left behind after she dies. why does a child have to get a new mother after the old one dies, when there's not the same expectation that his father would need to be replaced in the same situation, that any man near his mother is automatically his dad now. like idk, if it had been janet who lived and she married devlin davenport and he became tim's stepfather, there'd probably be no insistence that he was tim's dad. but because dana is a woman, there's an insistence she has to be tim's mom despite canon saying that's not how they want to define their relationship. hell even compare the replacement of bruce as tim's dad after jack dies...the relationship is paternal and loving but still with the greatest respect to the spectre of the Dead Dad, whose loss will Forever be Enshrined and Bruce will be Tim's parent now out of Respect for Jack with all the Honor of a Man Taking Responsibility for his Friend's Son but despite this he will never be Jack, Jack has an Untouchable Place. (i know this is not always true in fanon, where they can't wait to replace parents with a shiny new dad, however. in canon, compare to the absolute lip service they paid janet before slotting dana into her empty narrative role & then she becomes a non-presence & the way that to fandom that automatically makes dana mom, even as she and tim are explicitly trying to define their relationship as non-paternal because dana still fills the missing mom role by virtue of being there). when you say dana is tim's mom, it doesn't just flatten the complexity, it also diminishes janet's ability to hold a sancrosanct Role from a narrative aspect as women are never allowed to do.
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Cornelia Parker: ‘Subconscious of a Monument’ (2001) Earth excavated from underneath the Leaning Tower of Pisa
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