#i like to imagine the last statue is of a trans man

[abstract-academia]

Statues I saw at the Met

#i like to imagine the last statue is of a trans man #i don’t think that’s the case but still it is beautiful regardless #original photos #dark academia #dark academic #the met #metropolitan museum of art #statues #light academia #aesthetic #photography #art

[anystalker707]

〰۰࿐·˚.𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟.۰࿐·˚〰

MASTERLIST INDEX

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ONE PIECE MASTERLIST 2

࿐ RORONOA ZORO

〰 Little Secrets | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Zoro always insists a little too much that they stop by a specific island then disappears until they need to leave again. What's going on? Tags: Sub! zoro, dom! reader, embarrassed zoro, pet names, fluff.

〰 Self care night with him | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons for spending some self care nights with each of them boys ♡ Tags: Zoro is a good bf.

〰 Him with an s/o who works out | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons for how he acts about you working out cuz you wanna be strong too !! Tags: Zoro is a cool gym bro / Squeezing Zoro's tit / Really tiny bits of suggestive content, nothing clear or relevant

〰 When he's a damn tease | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about him teasing you because he knows you secretly like him Tags: He's just in love and needy for attention / Show off Zoro / His smug ass posture doesn't last long / Poor boy, but he's very sweet / Dom reader, sorta

〰 It's going nowhere [1/2] | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: You were a slave to the Celestial Dragons, saved by Zoro, who decided to make you part of the crew and help you adjust to the new life. Tags: Loving Zoro / Very boyfriend content / Fluffy ending <3

↳ 〰 I'm going nowhere [2/2] | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: (...) It's the first time you see Zoro get so wounded and pass out after a battle. Tags: Reader is very caring / Zoro recognizes it, so he makes sure to pamper reader / Very fluffy

〰 "Show me how to kiss?" | Zoro x [gn] reader | Headcanons + Oneshots

Summary: Two sets of headcanons: one in which you ask Zoro to show you what it is like to kiss and another one in which he's the one to ask. Tags: Shy Zoro / Fluffy and loving / Also sorta funny

〰 Him with a defiant s/o | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about how they act when you're stubborn af. Tags: Zoro is a little desperate / he's very boyfriend

〰 You've done it before | Zoro x [male, amab] Reader | Imagine

Summary: It's nice making Zoro regret teasing you all week long. How many orgasms in a row can he handle? Tags: Smut / Overstimulation / Fingering / Oral Fixation / Penetration / Zoro likes it.

〰 Admiring your top surgery scars | Zoro x [ftm] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about them admiring your top surgery scars Tags: He is very loving and sweet about it Poor Zoro someone give him a hug

〰 I knew it | [OPLA] Zoro x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Zoro likes you, and his feelings are clearly returned, but both of you seem oblivious to it. Tags: Clingy Zoro / But he sucks at expressing his feelings / he's dumb and grumpy but also very loving / Usopp thinks he's funny

〰 i could be your puppet | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Objectifying/Using Tags: Oral / semi-public / Cums easily, poor boy !!!

〰 Weak spot | Zoro x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Oral Fixation Tags: Oral / sloppy / lots of spit / no plot / he's absolutely wrecked / his titt gets bitten !!

〰 Selfish | Zoro x [gn, afab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Caught Tags: Oral / sloppy / Zoro eats you out / Transmasc friendly / use of 'pussy' tho / Some overstim

〰 Intoxicated | [trans, ftm] Roronoa Zoro x [gn, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Gagged / Submission Tags: pussy drunk reader / reader gets turned on after seeing him go wild

〰 aching pleasure | Roronoa Zoro x [gender-neutral, amab] Reader

Kinktober prompt: Sadomasochism Tags: bottom zoro / he's also a good boy! / squeeze his tits / penetration / hair tugging / back scratching

〰 triplicated [1/2] | Zoro x [gn, amab] Reader x Law | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Monster fucking + Hierophilia + 3some Tags: AU / Demon Zoro / Priest Law / man has 3 cocks and manages to bottom / not proofread !

↳ 〰 triplicated [2/2] | Zoro x [gn, amab] Reader x Law | Oneshot

Summary: Zoro's grumpy and needy. Tags: AU / Demon Zoro / Priest Law / man has 3 cocks and manages to bottom / law tops him this time

࿐ VINSMOKE SANJI

〰 Anything? Anything | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: It was a simple request for Sanji that turned into an absolute teasing mess. Tags: Very boyfriend content / Sanji using lipstick / Lots of affection.

〰 Maybe unrequited feelings | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: The way he treated you made you wonder if he didn't like you, but it seems to be quite the opposite. Tags: Sanji is just a babygirl / Shy Sanji.

〰 Self care night with him | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons for spending some self care nights with each of them boys ♡ Tags: Babygirl Sanji as usual.

〰 Him with an s/o who works out | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons for how he acts about you working out cuz you wanna be strong too !! Tags: Sanji is a simp ! / Sanji knows nothing but he's excited / Really tiny bits of suggestive content, nothing clear or relevant

〰 When he's a damn tease | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about him teasing you because he knows you secretly like him (there are two versions) Tags: version 1 has gentleman sanji treating you like a royalty while you're shy / in version 2, he is that too, but you make him flustered

〰 Giving him the silent treatment | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Headcanons + Imagine

Summary: You end up giving Sanji a silence treatment after the latest events. Tags: Sanji is very boyfriend / But also very dramatic / Just a little lack of communication

〰 Tea at 9pm | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: You're not aware the cook had feelings for you. Tags: babygirl sanji / wholesome relationship / reader is a writer who keeps a journal with the crew's adventures / extremely fluffy ending

〰 "Show me how to kiss?" | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Imagines

Summary: Two imagines one in which you ask Sanji to show you what it is like to kiss and another one in which he's the one to ask. Tags: Gentleman Sanji !! / Also babygirl Sanji, ofc / Very sweet, y'kno / Sanji can't help himself / You can't either, but it's nice seeing him caving in / Very romantic

〰 Him with a defiant s/o | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about how they act when you're stubborn af. Tags: Sanji is very soft about it / He is doing his best, but

〰 Admiring your top surgery scars | Sanji x [ftm] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about them admiring your top surgery scars Tags: He is very loving and sweet about it / Sanji is all careful and delicate

〰 Together? | [OPLA] Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Hanging out after a busy night at Baratie. Tags: Bitter sweet / Sanji is very long / Boyfriend material / Sanji needs to hear some truths

〰 Denial | [OPLA] Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Reader likes Sanji, but they're in denial. Tags: Bitter sweet / Sanji is very loving / Boyfriend material

〰 Healing | [OPLA] Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Reader seems burnt out, so Sanji does his best to help his partner feel better Tags: Boyfriend material Sanji (the usual / lots of fluff

〰 Love bites | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Biting Tags: Clingy Sanji / He's very vocal / Cums untouched

〰 Dolled up | Sanji x [male, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Crossdressing Tags: He wears pretty lingerie / Demanding, but he's a bottom / He's very vocal / Just a princess

↳ 〰 Dolled up [2/2] | Sanji x [male, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Sanji wants another encounter with you. Tags: He wears pretty lingeries / Demanding, but he's a bottom / He's gets eaten out / Just a princess / a PILLOW princess

〰 A little show | Sanji x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Obedience Tags: he's so lovely / masturbation / dirty talking (?)

〰 Cherry lips | [trans, mtf] Vinsmoke Sanji x [amab] Reader

Kinktober prompt: Mirror + Clothes on Tags: she's so cute, ok / she's a good girl / penetration / she's pre-transition / cotaggecore sanji !

࿐ MONKEY D. LUFFY

〰 This is gonna be good | Luffy x [gn, afab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Dacryphilia Tags: Transmasc friendly / Use of 'pussy' tho / Oral / Overstimulation / Penetration

〰 Relax, sweetheart | Luffy x [male, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Inexperience Tags: Whiny (bottom) Luffy / He's needy ! / Overstimulation / Penetration

〰 Can you feel it? | Luffy x [gn, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Size kink Tags: bottom luffy / belly bulge / overstimulation / size difference / fingering / cum as lube / riding / cock drunk

࿐ PORTGAS D. ACE

〰 Promise me | Ace x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: It almost feels like love at first sight, feelings playing with you while you fall for someone that can't stay Tags: Ace is very soft / Boyfriend content Ace / Fluffy af / Some little angst by the end.

〰 Self care night with him | Ace x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons for spending some self care nights with each of them boys ♡ Tags: Bf material Ace.

〰 Him with an s/o who works out | Ace x [gn] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons for how he acts about you working out cuz you wanna be strong too !! Tags: Ace is lazy af / Take care of Ace / Really tiny bits of suggestive content, nothing clear or relevant

〰 Way too hot | Ace x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Ace can't keep his hands off you after you finish working out. Tags: Ace is annoying (/pos) <3 / needy bf / someone hold him, please / absolute dogboy

〰 Water Water Fruit | Ace x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Ace finds out you actually got a Devil Fruit after he falls from the ship straight into the sea. Tags: He's a dumbass (affectionate) / Kinda male implied reader, if you squint

〰 Admiral, my Admiral | Ace x [gn] Admiral! Reader | Headcanons + Imagine

Summary: An unusual relationship that starts with a deal. Tags: no talk to him (ace) he angy / he gets to be babied tho / um, there's angst if you don't mind

〰 A little reminder | Ace x [male, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Do you need a reminder about who you belong to? Ace is glad to help. Tags: Jealous Ace / Rough / Oral / Chest fixation / Bruises

〰 Admiring your top surgery scars | Ace x [ftm] Reader | Headcanons

Summary: Headcanons about them admiring your top surgery scars Tags: He is very loving and sweet about it / Ace is totally boyfriend material

〰 Do I have a chance? | Ace x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: Ace is just trying to get you to like him. Tags: he's so. ace. / Marco just sits back and eats popcorn while watching it happen

〰 Got ya | Marine! Ace x Pirate! [amab/male] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: The rear admiral has a favorite pirate, apparently. Tags: Rough / Bruises / Overstimulation / Hate fucking / Dom-sub dynamics / Dom Ace / Very light dacryphilia / Objectifying

〰 I wasn't asking | Ace x [male, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Riding Tags: Dom-sub dynamics / Bottom Ace / Ace is a good boy

〰 Just that, nothing more | Ace x [gn, afab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Cockwarming Tags: Whiny Ace / He also wants a lot of attention / Transmasc friendly

〰 Outdoors | [afab] Ace x [male, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Outdoors Tags: pussy eating / riding / ace is a good boy

〰 I need you with me | Ace x [gender neutral] Reader | Oneshot

Summary: After the Marineford events, all that Ace needs is some love. Tags: ace is recovering, so he needs you to be gentle / he's so sweet / lots of fluff / universe in which ace survived marineford

࿐ KILLER

〰 Boom! | Killer x [gn] Reader | Headcanons + imagines

Summary: It literally goes like “says he likes crazy girls, but hates when i act crazy" Tags: Fluffy and funny / Thank god for big men / lots of reader sitting on his lap

࿐ YAMATO

〰 'cause i'm on my knees | Yamato x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Orgasm control + Feet Tags: Dom-Sub Dynamics / Sub Yamato / He's very vocal / Begs a lot

࿐ VINSMOKE NIJI

〰 Playing with fire | Niji x [gn, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Hate fucking + Semi-public Tags: He's very vocal / Against a wall / Some insults, nothing serious

〰 Playing with fire | Niji x [gn, afab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Hate fucking + Semi-public Tags: Transmasc friendly / He's very vocal / Against a wall / Some insults, nothing serious

࿐ TRAFALGAR LAW

〰 Make me feel good | Law x [gn, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Comfort fuck + Praises Tags: Dom-Sub undertones / Petnames / Penetration

〰 Jealous? Me? | Trafalgar Law x [gender-neutral, afab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Jealous sex Tags: Transmasc friendly / Dom-Sub undertones / Penetration / Strap game / Bottom law !

〰 only for me us | Law x [gn, afab] Reader x Kid | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: cucking Tags: Transmasc friendly / use of 'pussy' / Penetration / Exhibitionism

〰 Tough guy? Where? | [ftm] Law x [gn] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: handcuffed Tags: Law gets his pussy eaten / good for him / sea-prism stone handcuffs

〰 triplicated [1/2] | Zoro x [gn, amab] Reader x Law | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Monster fucking + Hierophilia + 3some Tags: AU / Demon Zoro / Priest Law / man has 3 cocks and manages to bottom / not proofread !

↳ 〰 triplicated [2/2] | Zoro x [gn, amab] Reader x Law | Oneshot

Summary: Zoro's grumpy and needy. Tags: AU / Demon Zoro / Priest Law / man has 3 cocks and manages to bottom / law tops him this time

࿐ CORAZÓN

〰 'missed you | Corazón x [gn, amab] Reader | Oneshot

Kinktober prompt: Over a desk Tags: bottom Cora / gets fucked during a call / he's whiny as hell / penetration, mainly

#one piece #one piece live action #opla #sanji x reader #zoro x reader #ace x reader #portgas d ace x reader #killer x reader #one piece x reader #monkey d luffy #nico robin #x male reader #x female reader

[cthulhusstepmom]

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD

ITS BEEN STARING US IN THE FACE THIS ENTIRE TIME COMRADES WE'RE FOOLS

GHOST IS THE MOTHERFUCKING HEADLESS HORSEMAN

imagine with me a monster au

Price: gargoyle. stony skin, nigh impenetrable but pieces can snap off. he lost a horn that way. during the day he's restricted mostly to the indoors or he'll turn into a statue. he has wings he most definitely has wings. he smokes because he likes the tickle of it and he despises getting wet cause it makes his joints ache and his skin swell. he eats a balanced diet, mostly birds and the occasional green thing(he prefers moss) and he needs to swallow rocks to help him digest.

Gaz: naga. I like the idea of him being a sassy little rattlesnake. he does have venom but he can control it so it's not like he's gnawing on a steak with enough punch to knock out a platoon. he does swallow prey whole, it's really fucking disconcerting, and he eats like once a week. not completely cold blooded but much below room temperature and he gets really slow. he gets crabby in the winter because nagas naturally hibernate. nagas will only bite as a last line of defense because their fangs are actually pretty fragile in comparison to most real snakes.

Soap: amalgamation(think Frankenstein's monster). he's technically undead but it's kind of confusing because he is a completely separate person than any of his parts (legislation on this is a bitch and it flip flops every election cycle). amalgamations are usually not purposely made, they can happen just about anywhere, usually in morgues, funeral homes, or graveyards(lots of them crawl out of mass graves). no one has ever seen an amalgamation naturally come together, despite hundreds of years of trying (the magic works with Toy Story rules) but they can also be purposely made(very fucking illegal and unethical). a lot of times amalgamations are pretty off-putting, most undead are, but Soap is just like the best parts of everybody crammed into one package. and he's trans cause I said so and it's thematic.

Ghost: people jokingly call him a horseman of the apocalypse but oh if only they knew. no one is quite sure what Ghost is, bets are mostly on amalgamation because of just the sheer number of scars he has when people catch a glimpse; it can look like he's literally sewn together(natural amalgamations have smooth seams, made amalgamations are usually sewn or stapled). those who know are aware that Simon Riley went missing as a human man and returned as Something Else. he was beheaded before they buried him, in a world of monsters Manuel Roba isn't going to take risks, kicked his head into the coffin with him before nailing it down and shoving it back into the earth. but now his head is gone, destroyed, ripped to bloody pulpy, bits, instead of his traitorous commanding officer, Ghost used his own jaw in his desperation to escape the grave as a newly wakened undead. everyone wants to see what's under the mask, see behind the black pits of the skull, but the ringing hollow truth is that there's nothing there. and there can't be, not anymore. he doesn't eat, but he will absorb the energy of those around him and it can affect his mood if there are strong emotions. over the years he's learned to control it, to only take a little from everyone but he can siphon all the energy out of a person (if they don't have much his power literally starts burning fat to convert it and consume it, it withers you from the inside out).

I will be writing this stay tuned

#Ghost arts and crafted a firm inner shell to the balaclava using a $20 beginner mold making kit meant for dildos + a foam head from walmart #he perceives the world around him a lot like those visualizations of LiDAR #and he can echolocate by making rumbling sounds that the human ear cant pick up #gaz and price can and it drives them nuts #proce knows it's ghost but the sound vibrates through his skin weird and gives him a headache #gaz has no fucking clue and hes pissed about it #gaz also has heat pits and his snake half is an Arizona Ridge Nosed Rattlesnake #because fuck it #why not #they don't even have rattlers in that backwards country #cod mw2 #headless horseman!ghost #amalgamation!soap #naga!gaz #gargoyle!price #simon ghost riley #john soap mactavish #kyle gaz garrick #john price #monster au

[french-unknown]

𝐇𝐈 !

I just came to you to tell you about a trope that really annoys me in BL fanfics and to explain why. I would like to see if you agree or not. Don't hesitate to give me your opinions!

The person I can usually unpack my thoughts with is busy and I won't be able to move on if I don't express them clearly, so… there you go.

If my writings are disturbing or inappropriate, please let me know and why they are inappropriate (it's always better to understand :) and I will delete this post.

Anyway,

𝐈 𝐃𝐎𝐍'𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐊𝐄 𝐅𝐀𝐍𝐅𝐈𝐂𝐒 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐌𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐆!

(male pregnancy for those who don't know and don't want to search on Google)

The comments I'm going to make are based on the fanfics I've read so, given that I started around 14 and that I'm currently 22, it is around 8 years of reading. Yes, I've just gotten old… And I exclusively talk about fanfics BL about pre-existing universes (mangas, books, films).

My problem with these fanfics is that they are full of 𝐄𝐗𝐂𝐄𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐎𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐌𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐙𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 while the point of a 𝐁𝐋 is to be centered around a 𝐆𝐀𝐘 relationship.

This involves several factors

𝐈 - 𝐅𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐈𝐙𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 “𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐑”

1 - Physically already because the carrier is generally a fairly small, thin and fragile man (and always bottom obviously). Especially next to his partner who is regularly a tall, strong and respected man. And I have a thought for all the tags like Werewolves, A/B/O Dynamics or Omegaverse, where we end up with convoluted anatomical explanations to justify the pregnancy as well as why he has milk flow to feed the child to the breasts. I don't know if the last one is possible for trans men - I admit that I don't know at all how it works in terms of hormones during pregnancy and after - but I imagine that it must be psychologically complicated because of the dysphoria that it can cause. 2 – The couple dynamic also closely resembles that considered “expected” for society. The carrier therefore often has the status of a housekeeper who will above all be a support for his more professionally fulfilled partner. When he is not pregnant - and even during pregnancy except when the partner is going to cook pasta to show how talented and caring he is - he is in charge of meals, cleaning and caring for the other to listen to his day and give him attention. 3 - The family dynamic is that of a heteronormative family. The carrier is the one who is responsible for the children (feeding, washing, emotional care, education, etc.) with even longer parental leave than the non-carrier. Except that longer parental leave is granted to women since they are socially considered responsible for the well-being of the child. Plus the number of times I read about the child who ended up calling the one who was pregnant “Mom”! 4 - The carrier is also totally emasculated during pregnancy: he has the typical symptoms of a pregnant woman (vomiting, cravings, peak of hormones for smut) and that's EVERYTHING!

𝐈𝐈 - 𝐒𝐀𝐂𝐑𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐙𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐎𝐅 𝐌𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐃

1 - Sacralization of the status of the perfect family with a dad + a mom + a baby. And the baby must be genetically related to the parents to have one's hair color and the other's eye color. OBVIOUSLY! The child is thus considered more as an object than in tropes where the child is adopted or comes from the previous relationship of one of the two parents. The two latters focus more on building the parents' relationship with the child while the first is just: "Oh, look everyone! He has his daddy's eyes!". And a family does not have to have all three elements: a couple without children is a family, a single parent with a child is a family. Just a group of very close friends may be a family. 2 - Sacralization of pregnancy which is perhaps understandable since, let's be honest, the overwhelming majority of fanfictions are written by girls. The pregnancy highlighted is therefore a very feminine idealized vision of pregnancy with an aestheticization of it. We therefore end up with scenes where the “dad” caresses the “mom’s” swollen belly, supports her during morning sickness and helps her in her moments of doubt related to motherhood.

𝐈𝐈𝐈 - 𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐙𝐄𝐃 𝐌𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐆𝐘𝐍𝐘

1 - If girls appear in the story, they have only one role: the stupid, mean slut who dresses extremely skimpy or vulgarly in a pitiful effort to attract the attention of the "man". They are almost all derogatory clichés of feminine pettiness and superficiality who make a fool of themselves by miserably trying to steal the man who is far too faithful to the one carrying the child. The carrier then appears as a saint raised by his lover—not by himself obviously, he must remain modest—above these vulgar people. The only goal in the lives of these girls is to try to attract the attention of men. It is quite ironic when we remember that these stories are written by girls who indirectly, or not, project themeself into the role of the carrier.   2 - The only other role that appears less often but may be present is that of the older woman who already has a child and who judges ruthlessly through gossip and backstabbing.

Well, that's good for me, I was able to reach the end of my reasoning and put it into shape. I'll be able to stop ruminating about it!

Don't hesitate to give me your opinion in the comments or privately. I'm interested to know if you share my opinions. I admit that I have become quite closed and stubborn on this subject over time, so it might be interesting to talk about it if you disagree. Your opinion is understandable as long as it is justifiable and justified!

Thank you if you have read this far, you have all my gratitude!

𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐚 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝 𝐝𝐚𝐲!

#yaoi #mpreg #☁️

[anawkwardlady]

Hiiii, this is the anon from 2 weeks ago who said trans girl tohya would fix so many issues in umineko but couldn't talk about it because my wrist hurt turn out my wrist hurting was going to last a lot longer than expected, but it's better now :3, so :

There are a few issues that I have with umineko: 1)Ikuko and Tohya are not properly utilised - ikuko is a mouthpiece for the author and tohya's characterisation is hard to parse- the only reason I'm so attached to them as a duo is due to the fic 'Coracle' by Ncfan 2)The exploration of class a bit poor- sure we see how Kanon and Shannon suffer but in their happy alternate timeline, where Lion exists, the issue is not framed as one of class divide and wealth, but rather the family's lack fo acceptance of Sayo (which is also a problem but it wouldn't have fixed everything if they did accept her). TLDR Berkastel was right actually, the existence of the ushiromia family is inherently evil, as it is a microcosm of class oppression 3)there was an opportunity for an exploration of queer community, and finding acceptance outside of family had Tohya been made a trans girl due to Tohya being so separate from the family - I understand why that opportunity wasn't taken, Rhykishi is a cishet guy who probably didn't know much about queerness at the time of writing, and I'm glad that Ciconia is doing what umineko didn't, but I'm still mildly disappointed on that front 4) the wedding in episode 6- no I will not elaborate (lie)

I do have a couple more issues of course, but those aren't relevant rn, why? Because these three (four) problems I believe could be fixed with the inclusion of trans girl tohya How? Combine Ikuko and Tohya into one character (not in the sayo way, but in a 'sometimes you have to kill your darlings" writing advice way) and make this new character poor. Let me explain or rather, let me paint you a picture

You, Ange, sit in the living room of the author you have been looking for. It's small, you note, not a sprawling study filled with books like you imagined, and all the decor is rather cheap. The woman in front of you claims to be 30, but she looks older, you notice white roots at the top of her scalp, her hair looking hastily dyed black to hide said fact, and her skin beginning to wrinkle, her voice nasally and rough, perhaps she's a smoker? Despite all this, she guides you into the small room with grand movements- probably trying to come across as worldly, but there is an air of performativity to it, and rather than dignified she comes across as a bit dorky.

At one point say you've heard that the author was a man so you're you're surprised to have to have found her instead. She actually fidgets and tells you that a friend of hers is the one who handles the public side of this, she always wrote for the sake of it and had little care for the sudden surge of attention she has received recently.

Your lip curls at the phrasing "So you write about someone else's dead family 'for the sake of it'". The woman leans back in her chair, she repeats that she had never expected to gain the attention that she did, let alone for it to catch the eye from a member of the family itself, considering what an eyesore someone like her must be to someone of your status.

it should have come across as scornful, but rather she levels you with a knowing look. Instead of judgement you feel understood in a way you don't wish to be.

You divert your eyes.

Listen, what I want for this reimagined version of tohya to be a worst-case scenario. Without being picked up by a rich benefactor, post-incident Tohya would probably become homeless due to lacking any credentials and not even knowing their own name. That would most likely lead to their first few years of life as tohya to be rather rough, but it would have exposed them to other unwanted folk perhaps even leading them to discover the queer scene of the time Badabing bada-boom, tohya realises she's a girl

over the span of several years

and probably making it even more difficult than it already was

The only reason the Tohya Ange mets even has a modicum of financial stability is because of the community she found.

This all is important to me because of two reasons: 1) trans girl tohya shows that Sayo wasn't doomed 2) it showcases the consequences of separating oneself from an abusive family- primarily the financial consequences - I SAY THIS AS SOMEONE WHO HAS EXPERIENCE HELPING SOMEONE ESCAPE FINANCIAL ABUSE THAT SHIT SUCKS- IT WAS A YEAR LONG PAPERWORK NIGHTMARE TO GET THEM BENEFITS AND SOCIAL HOUSING- LIKE COME ON RYUKISHI YOU WERE A SOCIAL WORKER YOU COULD INCORPORATED IT INTO YOUR STORY, anyway 3) the woman that ange meets being post transition battler would not only tie into the themes of the story ("without love it can't be seen" ange can't recognise who tohya is without coming to terms with what that means) 4) (yeah these points just keep going) tohya would probably come across as a little less irresponsible than in canon. Unlike in canon were tohya only makes contact with ange decades later, this version of tohya does make an appearance once ange seeks her out (perhaps even the whole having a bunch of pen names with different clues leading to her even being intentionally placed for ange). But once she realises that ange does not recognise her and their first meeting not going all that well, tohya might decide that it's for the best - it would echo Sayo's story and in turn make it easier to emphasise with tohya's circumstances 5) also I just think it would just make certain scenes more fun? for me at least. Like I think ange respects ikuko in canon a bit too much. I imagine in this version ange would catch on that trans girl tohya is a dork and think that would lead to some that lead to some interesting banter- the sort of banter that leans uncomfortably close to sibling banter

That would mean that would also change ange's dynamic with featherine. I like to imagine ange being a bit more casual with featherine, perhaps even bullying her a bit for that dress (seriously what is up with that dress), and everyone else being weirded out that featherine doesn't just outright smite her for it

also, episode 6's wedding being battler and erika. Listen, I'm just mad that ryukishi just threw a rape metaphor and never elaborated- that stupid rape metaphor lives in my head and I think it's about time to charge it rent. Felix from Jokrono positied that that scene is there to reflect Ikoku's feeling on how a romance between her and tohya is doomed to never blossom, but personally I feel that's a stretch due to how Ikuko's feelings are never explored in the story and I don't think ryukishi was about to start doing so with the wedding scene as he never elaborated on it.

In my version of the narrative the wedding scene, it could signify tohya's guilt for her inability to be beatrice's groom, to be her prince. ("I mean in canon one of the chester sister's says that battler is more of a bride than a groom, come on ryukishi it was right there!!!) being wedded to erika could signify the fear of staying a man, and the wedding between battler and Beatrice signifies embracing trans lesbianism baby!

Ok I am simplifying it a bit- I honestly don't know what to do with the wedding even in this context, at least not without changing it rather drastically, but I need to get it out there or else this thing is going to stay in my brain. There's nothing wrong with having a rape metaphor in the wedding scene btw especially with a story that focuses on sexual violence like umineko I just wish it effected battler's or tohya's character you know?

And on a final note, tohya in this version wears a short white jean jacket with rolled sleeves with a knee-long black dress and short black hair cut just above the shoulders (aka just a better version of Ikuko's outfit from canon), and once ange and tohya meet again decades later once ange too has become an author, the colours of her outfit have inverted since her hair has gone fully white by then. i would send you a pic of the outfit but I can't find any pictures that match on google so I'd need to draw it- which I might do later

Okay so lets take it from the top lol 1) I usually don't focus much on these characters so I don't have a strong opinion on that, but maybe its in itself a proof of what you're saying here lol. 2) For the class part I don't exactly agree, I think the fact that the servants despite being here for so long are being targeted and distrusted needlessly + sayo being a victim of child labor and being forbidden to be too close to Jessica WHILE going to school with her, being a parallel of her having a normal childhood does say something about the class element. I get where you're going tho and yes, it could have been more developed on that part. 3) Well, but I'd rather something like this on the queerness part than if it tried to bit more than they could chew (and then become really clumsy in the message). I think it treats the subject with enough compassion and respect, thats all I wait for tbh. But I'm also not the right person to elaborate on the trans identity part. (and idk anything about Ciconia but glad its elaborating in the subject).

With all of that said, I do think your idea of Tohya being trans is smart and interesting, combining to characters in one and changing a bit the dynamics with Ange, and its true it would balance things out with Sayo, it holds water and all. The financial part I think was more to make everything easier (having time, opportunities and so on without putting more hours of explaining how its possible). (also that design sounds really cool!)

For the wedding scene and the rape metaphor : in some ways I feel like it was a good adding and in some ways i do not. I understand how it can feel out of place and I agree with you with the lack of following on all of that. I think its being taken as a "what happens in a game stays in the game" but... yeah. I personally just saw it as an illustration of how to feels to force a narrative and a truth without consideration, as a continuity of what happened in EP5 with the character assassination of Natsuhi (which btw, did give me that kind of ick too even if its not the same thing or situation). But for why Tohya made that specific choice I couldn't say for sure. With that said, I can't deny how impactful and chilling that scene was, it think it was extremely well done, but its too bad it was so consequence free :/ (i actually heard other criticism on that scene but more in comparison with how rape was treated in ep7 it was really good I wish I could find it again anyway).

#answered #umineko spoilers #tw rape

[silenthillmutual]

get to know more about me tag thingie

tagged by @muppetings thank you<3

Relationship status: in a relationship, polyam! Favorite color: aquamarine something I want right now: an entire damn team to help me with bloodborne bosses (guy who is bad at combat playing a combat game) song stuck in my head: another postcard by bnl Three favorite foods: tortellini, dumplings, cheesecake Last song I listened to: heavy in your arms by florence + the machine is the last one i remember tbh Last thing I googled: orphan of kos weaknesses Dream trip: staying in like. a flat in ireland for a while. i'd like to do some touristy things but i want to be able to like. live normally y'know. If you had the chance to safely become a cyborg via body upgrades, would you: in a perfect world the answer would be yes i would love that but considering shit like capitalism man. i would just want to homebrew my own body. ain't that what being trans is like anyhow?

idk who all to tag so if we're mutuals imagine i am tagging you in this. tell me about yourselves<3

#icarus.txt

[kamil-a]

GOWLANTHROPOLOGY, or “Winning At Gender”

DISCLAIMERS BEFORE WE START- 

-i am not finished his route yet. this isnt a roundup of the character/route, this is mid-route impressions only. 

-theres a lot of other things i could wander off to talking about but im trying really hard to limit my scope to one thing, for time and effort and brain capability and coherence’s sake.

first of all i want to establish something that anyone who even briefly interacts with this game probably knows very well. Im going to try to keep this to canon facts as much as possible without interpretation:

Alice is constantly comparing herself to the "perfect" (her word!) women that are her mother and sister.

both of these women are dead.

while she isnt able to access the knowledge that Lorina is dead, currently, she does openly talk with nightmare about how grief affects the way you talk about a person- only the good parts remain in your sight, theyre not there to offer their opinion anymore, etc.

okay, we're letting “my opinions” back in the room now!

so we see that, within the worldview of hnkna, the perfect woman is a dead woman. the “perfect” status that alice wants to achieve is impossible for her so long as she is alive because the perfect woman comes to exist at all by being eulogized.

“okay but kam we know this. where are you going with it. where are you gowling with it, even.”

lets get this down to a thesis statement. I tried really hard to make the text here blue, in honor of umineko, but it was destroying my other blockquotes etc that i put for ease of reading, so please just imagine that the bold text is blue (like in the umineko manga, i guess):

gowland badly wants to "win at being man" the same way alice badly wants to "win at being girl". however, while winning at girl is, within the worldview of this work, impossible, winning at man IS POSSIBLE within the worldview of the work and in fact we see other characters do it all the time.

as a product that needs to sell copies, winning at man HAS to be possible because this is a dating sim with a target audience of not just straight women but straight women who want a particular set of tropes to be in play. i’m not saying this as a value judgement just an observation- this game was made to appeal to a particular audience!

So as the route goes on, gowland keeps asking alice to affirm him on two things- first, if she can become "aware of him as a man". second, if she can "be wary around him" the way she can be "wary" of other men she knows.

brief interlude- until the game says it outright i am going to assume that the WRITERS think he is cis. EDIT: he is, in fact, cis, as ive been informed. but for a character who 

1. (im not sure yet if he actively did this in game or if it was a writing decision that just goes unquestioned, but it IS changed) changed his role name from something female-gendered (duchess) to male-gendered (marquis), and 

b. has a girls' first name he explicitly hates being called by ( because of the pun it makes with his last name, but still), 

i headcanon that he is a trans man. and i think that this adds some more really interesting layers.

okay. back to masculinity. 

lilich: gowland your GENDER lilich: babe does this horsie make me look masc lilich: i get the PLEASE GENDER AFFIRM ME BY DATING ME thing but you gotta do that when youre like, 16, and not a whole adult,

Alice repeatedly says that as she gets to know him he becomes someone he can “relax” around, someone who makes her feel peaceful and who she can talk to or not talk to about deep stuff as she wishes without pressure. and this makes him really depressed! and it’s something she tries to placate him about over the course of the route (YES babe the horsie DOES make you look masc, etc) 

GOWLAND: “... Even this doesn’t make you wary of me?”

GOWLAND: “So even if I do this, you’re not aware of me...”

ALICE: (thinking) He hangs his head and I hurry to reassure him. When Gowland gets depressed, I somehow get incredibly flustered.

even when he suddenly kisses her, she says it made her feel "startled", but it didn’t make him seem like a dangerous or threatening presence to her. Shouldn’t this be good? Shouldn’t it be desireable if your crush feels relaxed in your presence, responds without fear to you kissing them? But...

GOWLAND: “As a man... For you to be so relaxed with me in this situation is difficult, so...”

this goes in circles until they get into a real fight about this where he says in return some things that make alice feel truly bad and he has to apologize for saying!

 (That she’s a cold person, that he thinks she must’ve been a player back home- MUCH to unpack here but this is the gowland essay and we mustn’t wander too far or we’ll be here forever.)

but it becomes an issue in the first place because, as he keeps saying, over and over, this isnt the kind of thing "a man" wants to hear. I’m going to quote some fellow scholars (friends who watched me stream), now. 

lilich: like i think there are ways to do it that would be really interesting to me lilich: but by the nature of this game its treated as like lilich: very normal and right that a man would feel this way lilich: which is not really great to me lilich: BUT ALSO SOME OF IT IS VERY FUNNY

lilich: my issue is not that hes trying to win at man or that he comes off as aggressive especially since he explicitly fails at being aggressive...my issue is that the wider narrative is like, yeah this is totally normal

skitazzu: I guess he wants to make her nervous like in the "I like you way" but it comes off aggressive skitazzu: and creepy

But now we have to ask, WHY is this masculinity within this setting? Why is this, specifically, what a perfect man is?

for easiness’ sake, i’m going to quote/paraphrase myself from yesterday-

the culture of man in this park is different from what he’s trying to be. the culture of man in this park is a HYUU HYUU guy*. we have seen this for ourselves with our very own eyes and ears, that a man in this culture, this territory, this country, is a HYUU HYUU guy.

He might be masculine when compared to the men where he lives, but not when compared to other roleholders.

*we see a scene with the local faceless guys and girls and theyre all full of pep and energy and have 24/7 customer service voices just as a local accent even when not at work and this guy goes HYUUUU HYUUUUUU and its a really hysterical bit of voice acting

for example, his behavior brought up a connection for a friend-scholar:

skitazzu: YOU KNOW WHAT skitazzu: IT GIVES ME skitazzu: TRYING TO BE LIKE ACE skitazzu: BUT he can never be ace

So this “wariness/awareness” he’s trying to reach is a standard not of being a man in the Amusement Park Territory. He wants to be a man in the style of (to look at the game level) roleholder men or (to look at the wider view) dating sim love interest men.

(i think looking at how vivaldi fits in as a love interest and roleholder woman who is treated differently by the game but still given moments of romantic aggression could be VERY interesting, but again, not the point of this essay. MOVING ON!)

august 12, 2022 edit - it’s been weighing on me for some time now that i quoted something that is Extremely Not About Silly Little Videogames for my silly little videogame essay. regardless of the association in my brain it seemed inappropriate to me and i’m deleting it.)

okay, now i’m going to quote a friend-scholar again. this blew my brain RIGHT open. i have nothing to add it says it all for itself.

EccentricIsopod: i think his angle is interesting within the context of this wonderland, where violence is so ubiquitous, physical power is kind of irrelevant, so winning at man leaves, interpersonal power or fear i guess, which as we've been saying, is a weird angle

and other love interests DO have alice being “wary”. other routes she could take DO include that element of romantic/sexual aggression, fear, jealousy (as a normal and expected emotion born of Being A Man With A Crush) and feeling of ownership to her, etc. 

And because this is the desired trope, they embody it so it can be in the story.

So I think I’ll leave it here for now- In this worldview, you CAN “win at man”, and many men (men-y, hahhaaha) do.

Thanks for reading all this!

commentary on the gowland post:

thanks to friend-scholar @venhediss for this information!

re: the "you aren't aware of me as a man" thing, i always read this as "man" having the built-in suggestion of "potential sexual partner" because of how naturalized the role of sexuality is to a man vis a vis a woman. you see this same phrase in other japanese media; i guess the english equivalent is, you know, friendzoning or "like a brother to me". that's what gowland is upset about, i would think, is that alice's lack of wariness around him shows that she doesn't consider him as a potential sexual partner (he's "like a friend" or, in this case, more likely "like a father", but not like a (sexually interested and interesting) man). if she did, she would be more conscious of the fact that he could potentially be perceiving her sexually, and she would be more cautious and more on guard.

it is obviously shitty and patriarchal and it's rooted in an understanding that women are wary about/guard their bodies against men who they perceive as potential sexual partners, because a potential sexual partner is also a sexual threat.

the HYU HYU guys and the other goofy faceless are probably goofy, from a meta standpoint, to keep them from ever reaching that level of being recognized as potential partners - they're desexualized and perhaps, consequentially, demasculinized, because those two things are intertwined.

like i have a reason for thinking this, i've seen this like. i think the phrase is "otoko to shite ishiki wo suru" or something similar.

like i literally just googled 男として意識 and the first page is "how to make the girl you like be conscious of you as a man: 9 methods"

So essentially i want to clear up that a lot of this is based on me reading it literally as a man (gender) , and not realizing the expression it actually means. But i hope there were still things here worth reading and good thoughts for you to digest!

#hnkna #thoughtful honking

[dwestfieldblog]

OPEN LETTER FROM THE PRISON ISLAND

Have you accepted Eris into your pineal gland? Can you remember the first planet? A sense of humour is vital. Literally. On with the show…

So, I’m back ‘home’. Here in England, failing to stay sane as the country genuinely falls apart. Boys not allowed to wear shorts to school in 31-degree heat but they can wear skirts in Norfolk. The rights of trans men to ‘chest feed’…do men give birth and lactate? A ‘Period Dignity Officer’ appointed in Scotland to mansplain all about menstruation to teenage girls…and presumably boys too. Parents demanding the dick in Dick Turpin is changed to Richard in York. Non binary aliens helping kiddies to read rather than a male teddy bear. And the ever-wonderful Mermaid organisation giving chest bindings to young females against parents’ wishes to flatten breasts most are yet to even have.

Men’s toilets to get tampon machines in Bristol. For cocaine haemorrhages? Drag queens doing story time pantomime dame schtick for 3 to 11 year olds, encouraging them to ‘get fabulous’. A female lecturer was sacked from a college for daring to suggest that ‘Drag is a grotesque caricature of femininity… started off as a liberating form of entertainment for gay men ostracised for being effeminate’. Which it was. The Brighton Institute for Modern Music (lol) replied that ‘BIMM fully supports and defends freedom of speech, academic freedom….’ No, you don’t.

A genuine shame the only folk ranting in public about this endlessly increasing mentally ill virtue signaling woke excrement waste of time and upended version of biological fact…are right wing bigots. Far too much hogwash Newspeak has been coming from the Left, no wonder the Tories were able to abuse power for so long. The steady shift against evidence based teaching will turn truths inside out until the masses believe only in a new type of very virtual reality, dumbed down all the way and proud about it. Speaking of which…

A temporary goodbye and good riddance to Boris Johnson…the ‘oven ready’ turkey and his chumocracy of swine, a symptom of just how lost this country has become in the last 12 years of his arrogant parties’ aristocratic rule. Wonderful the Queen waited until the guilty scumbag who lied to her face was finally gone to take her own leave. The very thought of him trying to look sincere in sorrow and leading the nation through this endlessly funereal time…a vast deal of which he is directly to blame. The populist opportunist seems likely to attempt a return as his Cincinnatus quip showed. And as for his ‘Mission largely accomplished, for now’….Yes, if his plan was to rip Britain apart from her closest allies, make us the poor man of Europe  (‘the status of an emerging market economy’ said the Financial Times) allow thousands to die by his own policies, ensure his mates got the most bonuses, contracts and honours , pressure the NHS to collapse brick by brick and treat it all as if were an Etonian prank…A special deep circle of Hell is reserved for leaders who betray their own countries for their own gain. Or so I pray by candlelight.

Britain has the worst rate of inflation in the G7…Utility companies have bosses receiving colossal bonuses above and far beyond decency while the average household will be paying over three times what they were this time last year. Heat or eat. Freeze and eat trash. And all services are providing less and less actual functioning service. Can’t pay? WON’T pay…It would be nice to imagine a revolution here which did not involve rabid morons. Righteous middle-class fools supergluing themselves to motorways or those financed by Moscow and Beijing to stir the poo. But unlikely. The new laws against protest, set up under the Covid Times and extra surveillance will nip that in the bud. The Mass Psychology of Fascism by W Reich should be mandatory reading in schools…when I am World President, it will be.

Government lawyers are now banned from telling from telling ministers that their polices are unlawful. Apparently, this calling to account is slowing down the bright, illegal and twisted ideas that genius politicians have. How to hold a government to account if is not allowed to explain the law to it in terms they understand? Let alone the Boris et al idea or removing all accountability and ethics advisors. How very decent a fair play English style. Not at all like a step by goose step into a totalitarian state without noticing... Meanwhile outside…

NASA finds a way to create oxygen on Mars. China finds evidence of floods there. DNA experts decode the blueprint of life, almost twenty years of re checking the supposed junk DNA and recalibrating their ideas. Unwinding the coils to explore the origins of Man will be a beautiful thing for all the fundamentalists who continually have to amend their ideas to fit the expanded horizon or else go crazy//crazier…This year’s massive droughts, floods, extreme weather rising…could just be a historical blip, a decades long hiccup for mother Earth or a serious glitch in this blue green spaceship’s computer caused by the monkey brains. The world will realign by wiping us out. Or perhaps Mad Vlad the slaphead will do it…

Russian schools now under heavy propaganda to prepare the next generation for serious nationalistic impulses to defend their glorious Mother. Apparently, life is not worth living unless you are prepared to die for your country…Just ask the hilariously insane state gimp Vladimir Solovyov on his prime time tv show, the lovely guy who repeatedly calls for Britain to be annihilated by nuclear missiles. Apart from the fallout blowing in the wind and the drop off in customers for China’s shite, it seems a possibility. Not sure if the world would truly give a damn if this island vanished overnight. Putin has promised his hypersonic penis replacement Satan II will be ready by Christmas. But Shorty must be getting desperate in ordering the foulage based Wagner group to offer cash and freedom to convicts to murder civilians. Something seems likely to give soon to appease the shame… the use of tactical nuclear missiles on Kyiv to assassinate one man or an overthrow of the bald dwarf by Zyuganov et al. One scumbag to be replaced by another warmonger. There must be quite a few rich generals who would love to declare martial law.

(That paragraph was written before the mobilisation of the crippled and the masses pressganged to fight, the disgusting referendum at gunpoint and the gas pipe line sabotages)

No country ever seems to understand that once you have been ‘great ‘and then diminished, you never rise again. When an empire falls due to greed and inhuman ideology, it stays broken. ‘In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule’. FN. There is always the slim optimistic chance of evolving a country through wisdom rather than brute force, intelligence over violence, better education at every level, common sense and critical thinking, philosophy, empathy, work and play…Hmmm. Verrry likely eh? But still possible. This is what happens when I have no alcohol for seven days and nights…A utopia of clarity…

Meanwhile Hungarian bug eyed bullfrog Orban addressing CPAC ‘A Christian politician cannot be racist’. Yes, IF they ARE actually a Christian Viktor. Countries where European and non-Europeans mingle are ‘no longer nations’. ‘We Hungarians know how to defeat the enemies of freedom…’ Love how all these corrupt leaders are always able to convince followers by projecting their own identity as a description of enemy outsiders. When the biggest threat to their country is themselves. And his government are now worried that ‘pink education’ means that so many females are studying and receiving higher education that they will be less likely to choose or find a spouse who can match their standards of attainment. ‘The over representation of women in universities’ is causing a fall in birth rates as, shockingly, many females do not want to waste their qualified career times cleaning up baby mess. Got to love the right wing eh? So they are encouraging women to be less intelligent or else they won’t marry…get back in the kitchen bitch. What a charmingly Christian government. Can just imagine Orban and Bolsanaro paying a Dominatrix to beat them while their tiny private parts are tied up in a little cage. Speaking of which yet again…

Trump, Tucker Carlson, Bannon, Alex jones. America…well another noble and Christian decision, now enshrined in law, to disallow the right of women to make their own decisions with regard to their own bodies. The abortion desert is spreading across all Republican states. I think it is maybe possible that ‘a’ Creator exists but until this can be PROVED and peer tested by constant review that a supposedly all forgiving and mercifully compassionate master of all that is, actually has something as mundane as an opinion on how many ‘mewling cabbages’ (copyright Bill Hicks) are born, then the dumbass supreme court and the fake ‘Christians’ should shut their dammed mouths. You can quote the Bible until you are red in the face (and a lot of you insecure sadists do) but this has no meaning other than in your own reality, go twist in your own insanity and mind your own business.

As for possible future president, Mike Pompous has recently said that that no extenuating circumstances be allowed for an abortion, including impregnation by rape or incest, both of which are very popular in Republican states. ‘Every one of these is a child’. Yes, junior, yor daddy is a rapist but he’s a gud Christian man. My brother is the father of my child…lovely. Great to know Pompeo has vowed to fight on against anything which seems ungodly ‘until the Rapture’. (That would be the end of the world, when all believers will be lifted together into the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.) These creeps are actually looking forward to the Apocalypse because it means they get to meet the invisible sky wizard. Raise thy children to be Pagans and honour the mystic.

‘Nationwide abortion ban means you must wait until your child is at least seven years old before they can be terminated in a school massacre by a disaffected 18-year-old loner legally carrying three semi-automatic weapons’. Private Eye.

The Justice said he believes ‘the constitution means something and that meaning does not change’. Aha, so the part of about ‘a wall of separation between church and state’ is open to the opposite interpretation. Love it when right wingers start looking upon the Founding Fathers as libertarian Socialists and change the basic tenets to fit their nonsense. ‘Congress shall make NO laws’…but it is fine when judges appointed by their side can do it. There is always a get out of jail free clause for the corrupt of heart.

Top secret intelligence documents in Florida…Trump of COURSE using the ever gullible Christians and Q Onan to spread the word about the utterly unfair raid on his mansion by the Eff Bee Eye. If you want to convince folk about a conspiracy, always get those who already believe in conspiracies on side first. Then let them spread the cancer. I continue to sense via very remote viewing, that Q was either set upby troll farms in the East to sow discord, or by some wannabe pranksters who might very well be regretting their test to see just how much utter garbage the American masses will swallow. The devil runs a slave ring of porno kids through a pizza shop and the elite clientele all worship the horned one. Sure he does, sure they do. It is horrific what bollocks morons are willing and anxious to believe. Affirm their most paranoid ideas and swear to protect them and the bleating ones will just trot along meekly to the stained and stinking slaughterhouse.

Headline; ‘Russia and China ‘exploit technology for own ends’. Really? Did not know that. A digital silk road indeed. And the West would never dream of doing that eh? If China wants to rule the world, it had damn well better put the reins on their wayward brat Putin or they will lose millions of above ground customers soon. Another recent headline ‘China undermining internet as a force for good, warns spy chief’. Hmm. Fill in the blanks with your own ideas.

Watch out for Blake Lemoine and those like him, AI is a dangerous pretend friend to have, even more so than traditional ideas of God and the actions of believers.  Handing over power to a sentient machine just because it can imitate empathy to any sucker is a grim future mistake.

Foreigners in Israel who fall in love with a Palestinian must inform the military authority within 90 days or be expelled. Yes really. Should they also have to wear a big yellow ‘P’ on their clothes? Enough already…

‘The universe consists essentially of information/implicate order. Out of this enfolded (archetypal) information, temporary ‘realities’ unfold spatiotemporally, but which ‘realities’ we encounter/perceive, depends on our state of consciousness. Normal consciousness, or the Black Iron Prison, consists of a type of delusion in which one conditioned ‘reality’-tunnel appears to us as the only possible ‘reality’. The terror of seeming insanity or the confrontation with Death jar us out of that one ‘reality’-tunnel and opens us to multiple universes. Or we can make the quantum leap escape the Black Iron Prison- simply by contemplating the right kind of deeply meaningful nonsense long enough. RAW/PKD

I remembered the first planet. Happy Halloween if we get there…gather the correspondences from 777 and perform a ritual or 23. Blessed be the witches and magicians. Sensual epiphanies needed…Do something or Be Nothing. Love more.

[0pexigon0]

Camilo Madrigal x deaf!male reader

A/n: Female reader dni! Non-binary readers can interact as long as they are okay with the use of he/him pronouns, trans ftm can read

Featuring: Bruno

• Camilo loves meeting new people and finds it easy to befriend citizens

•Until [Name] had rolled around

•[Name] was either born deaf or deaf from an incident

• It was late in the afternoon when Camilo had gone to a new bakery in town to pick up an order of bread, [Name] came into his sight.

•A new face! A new friend!

•With bread in between his hip and his arm, he trudged over to [Name], saying the biggest and loudest “Hello”

•Though, he just continued to what seemed like examine a flower, very hard

•That confused Camilo, he was sure the other man would hear him, “Excuse me? Hello?”

•He smiled at the flower and turned his back, his smile growing even farther when he caught sight of many more variations of the flowers in a shop

•This damn near broke Camilo’s heart

•That night, Camilo was silent at dinner, playing with his food in deep thought

•The only one to really notice was Bruno, despite being back for only three months he was deemed very perceptive

•”Camilo, is there something wrong?” Camilo only looked up to his tío, “Umm, today.. I was ignored…”

•The entire family went silent, not from surprise but from confusion, “Well, did you make that person mad?”

•”No tío!” He clutched his fork, “I just… I’ve never met him before, I said hello, super duper loud too! But… he didn’t even spare a glance, he was looking at a flower, saw more at the flower shop and ran off!”

•Bruno softly smiled, “I see what’s going on…”

•”You do? So.. is he mad at me?”

•”You cant be mad at a stranger you cant hear…”

•”Can’t hear…?” Then it clicked, “He’s deaf…” Delores looked down at her food, sympathetically, she couldn’t imagine what it would be like not being able to hear

•”I’ve never met a deaf person before.. How do we communicate?”

•”SSL” Abuela took a bite, gracefully, from her food, “Spanish Sign Language”

•”I don’t understand…”

•”He speaks with his hands, hopefully. Bruno, since you know so much about his situation, do you mind?”

•”Oh.. Um, no problem!”

•The next day, Bruno and Camilo took a trip to the library to learn a bit of SSL

•What they didn’t expect was to see Camilo’s mariposa (butterfly), reading on a wooden chair, it seemed he was still on the first page

•The librarian whispered under her breath, “He’s been here for three hours and still on the first page…”

•The familia glanced at each other, “I-I’ll wait outside…” Camilo nodded

•”He’s deaf, get his attention by waving a hand in his face” Bruno gave his last piece of advice before leaving the library

•Camilo rubbed the back of his hand with his thumb, approaching the deaf boy and waving a hand in front of his face

•The boy seemed to recognize the gesture and smiled at Camilo, waving

•Not even ten minutes later, Camilo and the deaf boy were out of the library, Camilo greeted his tío and introduced his new friend

•”Hola, tío! This is [Name]!” [Name] couldn’t hear the conversation one bit but stayed smiling and waved, “We are gonna go hit the park and teach him to read!”

•Bruno said nothing as Camilo and the deaf boy parted from him

Date finished: 12/22/21 A little Christmas present

I might as well join in on the hype despite the movie not even being released where I live

Status: edited, I apologize for any missed mistakes

#gay mlm #mlm #camilo madrigal #encanto #bruno madrigal

[thecraftybear]

I'm having thoughts Hasimir Fenring, the Emperor's trusted assassin.

Paul is mentioned to be unable to see him in his visions, and draws the conclusion that Fenring is somehow a key character of his story, a person of great potential, but squandered in service to his master. Nearly an equal to Paul, an almost-Kwisatz Haderach whose inability to be a father (hideously worded as "genetical eunuch") made him a "dead end" and turned him bitter.

tl;dr: Count Fenring's "genetical eunuch" status is a bullshit term to cover the fact that he's a trans man in a strongly binary, conservative and genealogy-obsessed society.

"Huh? Wtf are you on, Bear?"

Consider. This is a world where women reaching for direct secular power are despised and pushed back, and where the only acceptable leadership path for a woman is becoming one of the Bene Gesserit, forced into advisory and support roles at powerful men's side, but also entangled in their order's millenia-long plans and often paying for their privilege by bearing and matching their children according to the Reverend Mothers' scenarios. It's also a world where men generally only trust other men, and the binary is so culturally entrenched that you are allowed to only be one or the other, at least if you're anyone significant. Paul Atreides receiving both mentat and Bene Gesserit training is subversive not just because it blends two opposing philosophies, but also two gender roles - which is normally not allowed, save for Kwisatz Haderach potentials.

Now imagine that an opposite of Paul is born in this world: a carefully planned child, one of the possible outcomes of the Kwisatz Haderach equation, with all the perfectly designed qualities... except a double X chromosome. The Bene Gesserit are of course ready for such eventualities, and consider the child merely a perfect future mother for their end product. But here's the second snag: as soon as the child becomes aware of the gap between accepted genders, and the expectations that come with it, they start pushing back. They don't want to be Bene Gesserit. They don't want to be a woman. They feel as male as possible when raised by women in this strongly gendered, rigid environment. And being a scion of a significant House, an impatiently awaited progeny to perhaps a more tolerant father, the child finally succeeds in being recognized as a boy.

Being already inducted into Bene Gesserit training, and having male status now, the newly-named countling Hasimir manages to achieve a lot - preliminary mentat programming, combat training worthy of a future lord, the works. He is in nearly every aspect like Paul, except... he can no longer take part in the Bene Gesserit genetic program. Instead, he is trapped between the order's manipulations - which allow him to take the woman he loves as his wife, for the price of having no say in whose child he will raise as his heir - and his loyalty towards the Emperor (I'm sure there would be a whole story here, considering Shaddam's misogyny, paranoia and general assholery - maybe he was a better person in his youth, although it's doubtful).

In the end, Hasimir takes Paul's side instead of killing him for Shaddam - is it because of a feeling of kinship with Paul? The boy managed to fulfill the potential Hasimir couldn't fully develop because of the laws and taboos of his society. He seems to have a chance where Fenring was given none. At this point, Hasimir's life of bearing the limits and expectations thrust upon him comes to a pivotal point where he must make a choice. He can either bear the indignity and accept these limits one last time, or follow the expectations and kill the only person in the room he can somewhat relate to despite so many differences - the boy he should've been.

Anyway I have nothing but respect for Count Hasimir Fenring, a soft-spoken man of loyalty and integrity in a galaxy of chest-thumping, disloyal and scheming bastards.

#dune #literary interpretations #i realize i'm treading a fine line here as a cis man myself #but i haven't come across this interpretation yet and it just makes sense to me #even if herbert lacked the awareness to think of something like that #headcanons are a tricky thing

[ilikedetectives]

Thanks for saying it. As a trans woman I was side-eyeing that hashtag the moment I read the “movement explained” post last year saying this:

That wording (from the most prominent voice!) directly implies that there’s an acceptable criteria for womanhood and women outside those criteria don’t count. This kind of thinking always ends up targeting gnc cis women too because they’re not the “right” women, no surprise it happened here. (Apparently a gay cis man is more worth defending to them than gnc and sapphic women too?)

Plus a quick google search would easily tell them Kassandra and Eivor were envisioned as “masculine” as they are now even before the male options were designed? Official ACV concept art for Eivor’s character design even states lady Eivor was designed first and that male Eivor was based off of HER. But sure they’re “shells” based on men 🙄

Looks like they’ve chosen to “highlight, appreciate and support” the fact that queer, gnc women aren’t real women because these women are simply men’s “shells” for being masculine and queer.

Oh I’m so glad that you see this and stay tf away. Aren’t these the same breed that were sooooo outraged after reading and citing that Forbes article by Jason Schreier last year, “OMG Kassandra and Aya/Amunet originally were supposed to be the protagonist, I’m so oUTraGEd and feel rOBbeD that Ubisoft took this from us”? You’d think with all the devs that they are good friends with, they should know by now that Kassandra and f!Eivor were designed first in mind, then the male counterparts were added AFTER being forced by higher-ups and marketing. The Montreal writers keep having to reassure people that everything about Eivor is intentional and they have always intended that Eivor is a female. The first name alone, Eivor, is a female name. I think the devs already know they’d have to deal with idiots, so they added Varinsdottir in her last name (dottir means “daughter”), but I think the devs still underestimate their level of stupidity. They sure are attentive to plot details when it involves their brotherhood though, but women? *wheeze* They love AC2 sfm but it didn’t take them until last year to realize how dirty Aya/Amunet treated. Nobody paused when Origins was announced to say, but Amunet statue? Pleaseeee *wheeze* For them to go around saying that Kass and f!Eivor are just “shells” based on men and now, practically calling the devs lazy because making them masculine to save time/effort in development time really shows their true colors. If a woman isn’t slim-af-and-only-attracted-to-cishet men, then they’re not women. gnc, queer, trans women? I don’t need to take a guess to see what they view these women as. These fake feminists don’t find it disrespectful that Kass and f!Eivor are pushed aside for the male shells to take the spotlight, but they find Kass and f!Eivor being masculine and queer disrespectful. Someone please turn on “Send in the Clowns'' for me, I prefer the Judi Dench version.

You know what I find hypocritical about these fake feminist breeds? When they call for more female assassins content, they never once invalidate their beloved male protags, “We’re not here to cancel m!Eivor/Alexios/Bayek/Jacob/Arno, we just want more of f!Eivor/Kassandra/Amunet/Evie/Elise/Aveline”, but now that they have more backers, they immediately turn around and dismiss the only two AAA female protags as women because they’re “too masculine, like men.” That’s right! f!Eivor walking like a man and both Kass and f!Eivor wear male armors and are attracted to women automatically dismiss their existence as gnc, queer women. Being a masculine, queer woman somehow exempt them both from sexism because these two are just “men’s shells”? What kinda Isu drugs are they on? Now I wish f!Eivor had a true buff Viking body in her vanilla state (I know there’s muscles mod by amisthiosintraining and I, but still), because what else are these fake feminists gonna trash her on? f!Eivor is a shell for m!Eivor? *wheeze* What could’ve been said was, “I want a female-protag-only game because then the devs can focus all their time and effort on her story, for her” or “Ubisoft should give the devs more time, resources, and creative freedom to give players more historical context of the struggles the female protags have to deal with, compared to male protags”. For example: a side quest with Aspasia as she deals with how sexist people (surprise, women can be sexist too) were towards her as perhaps the most educated, influential woman in Athens at the time. Or how Kassandra had to fight her way to be allowed to compete in the Olympics. That’s all that’s needed to be said. There’s nothing wrong with asking/wanting a feminine female protag who is gender-conforming, but it says a lot about their true view of women when they drag gnc and queer women down to parade their idea of a superior woman.

But what did these fake feminists choose to “highlight, appreciate and support” instead? Oh that’s right, disregarding both Kassandra and f!Eivor as inferior women, because them fakers don’t deemed masculinity and queerness as the aUThenTIc female experience they want to play as. You know what’s worse? Pitting these female characters together to rate how “feminine” each of them are to deem which ones are more “real” as a woman. Can you imagine them doing that to the male protags? Knowing full well that the devs’ hands were tied when it comes to creative freedom when making Kassandra and f!Eivor, but still go around and shit on the devs for being “lazy”, while dismissing Kassandra f!Eivor experience as women because of their gnc and queerness. What kinda Beta Sigma (BS) is this? Oh I think I know the answer: reinforcing their ideas of what they find acceptable for their version of a woman. Honestly, it’s not the first time gnc, queer women are shit on in AC, remember that cursed DLC from Odyssey? Yea. I expect nothing more from Ubisoft-certified fans. Watch, if we somehow get a female-lead AAA game next installment and she happens to be queer, gnc, and godforbid to their fEMinISt standards, she happens to be trans as well, these fakers would most likely scream, “We support women. We want the REAL woman experience”. But if she happens to conform into their fEMinISt standards, you’ll get to hear how she’s their most favorite protag since Ezio cuz she’s a “real woman”. Again, nothing wrong with gender-conforming, feminine women, but using them as THE superior example, this fuckery/fakery reeks.

One last general tip from Doctor Who, “Goodness is not goodness that seeks advantage. Good is good in the final hour, in the deepest pit, without hope, without witness, without reward.” Look closely and you’ll see what those advantages and rewards are. 

p/s: Didn’t Ubisoft CEO just appoint his family member(s) to be in charge, while there were also discussion on how the new directors are no better than the sexist, racist ones that were fired/let-go? Sounds to me like it’s business as usual again. Or us Vietnamese have a saying, “It’s easier for rivers and mountains to change than human’s nature to even budge” (giang sơn dễ đổi, bản tính khó dời). I find it so ironic that “gaslight gatekeep girlboss” is trending on my dash.

#I'm no Pythia but I saw this light years away #handsomejaclyn #f!Eivor #Eivor #Kassandra #ac valhalla #ac odyssey #aya #amunet #evie frye #elise #ac origins #ac syndicate #aveline #ac liberation #ac unity #Cisterhood #misogynistic feminists

[theculturedmarxist]

In the third decade of the 21st century, the Social Register still exists, there are still debutante balls, polo and lacrosse are still patrician sports, and old money families still summer at Newport. But these are fossil relics of an older class system. The rising ruling class in America is found in every major city in every region. Membership in it depends on having the right diplomas—and the right beliefs. 

To observers of the American class system in the 21st century, the common conflation of social class with income is a source of amusement as well as frustration. Depending on how you slice and dice the population, you can come up with as many income classes as you like—four classes with 25%, or the 99% against the 1%, or the 99.99% against the 0.01%. In the United States, as in most advanced societies, class tends to be a compound of income, wealth, education, ethnicity, religion, and race, in various proportions. There has never been a society in which the ruling class consisted merely of a basket of random rich people.

Progressives who equate class with money naturally fall into the mistake of thinking you can reduce class differences by sending lower-income people cash—in the form of a universal basic income, for example. Meanwhile, populists on the right tend to imagine that the United States was much more egalitarian, within the white majority itself, than it really was, whether in the 1950s or the 1850s.

Both sides miss the real story of the evolution of the American class system in the last half century toward the consolidation of a national ruling class—a development which is unprecedented in U.S. history. That’s because, from the American Revolution until the late 20th century, the American elite was divided among regional oligarchies. It is only in the last generation that these regional patriciates have been absorbed into a single, increasingly homogeneous national oligarchy, with the same accent, manners, values, and educational backgrounds from Boston to Austin and San Francisco to New York and Atlanta. This is a truly epochal development.

In living memory, every major city in the United States had its own old money families with their own clubs and their own rituals and their own social and economic networks. Often the money was not very old, going back to a real estate killing or a mining fortune or an oil strike a generation or two before. Even so, the heirs and heiresses set themselves up as a local aristocracy. Like other aristocracies, these urban patricians renewed their bloodlines and bank accounts by admitting new money, once the parvenus had served probation and assimilated the values of the local patriciate.

These regional urban patriciates were similar demographically, at a time when the racial caste system that divided whites from nonwhites was accompanied by an ethnic caste system among whites. Within the white population, Anglo American Protestants, preferably Episcopalian or Presbyterian, were at the top, followed by Anglo Americans belonging to more vulgar denominations like the Methodists and Baptists. German and Scandinavian Americans could be honorary Anglo Americans. But Irish American Catholics, Jews, and Italian and Polish Americans occupied a lower rung. Mexican Americans occupied an ambiguous position. In some areas they were discriminated against as Blacks were, in others they were treated as the equivalent of low-status whites. Black Americans and Asian Americans were excluded.

The Anglo American Protestant patricians in every region and state shared a common Anglo American and Trans-Atlantic culture—but not a common national culture. Instead, they had regional cultures separately based on a common British and European heritage. This is so peculiar that it needs to be explained.

Let us begin with what they shared: Trans-Atlantic culture. From the earliest days of the republic, the wealthy elites of even the most remote and Godforsaken parts of the South and West could afford to vacation in Europe. They would bring back the latest French and British fashions to rural Mississippi or Wyoming. Before the self-consciously regional Prairie Style of Frank Lloyd Wright, there was never any indigenous American architecture, just wave after wave of faddish European styles: Palladianism, Greek Revival, Gothic, Romanesque. The relics of these transient Europhile fads litter the United States in the form of courthouses and other old public buildings from coast to coast.

In contrast, local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics).

In short, for two centuries there was a double competition among regional American oligarchies. On the one hand, the local notables, particularly those from the newly settled regions, had to prove they were not backward bumpkins, but were just as up-to-date with regard to European fashions as the patricians in New York and Boston and Philadelphia. On the other hand, some of them dreamed that the city they ran, whether it was Atlanta or Milwaukee, would become the Athens or Renaissance Florence of North America, and favored local writers, poets, and artists, as long as their work was in fashionable styles and did not inspire seditious thoughts among the local masses. The subnational blocs of New Englanders, Southerners, and Midwesterners fought to control the federal government in order to promote their regional economic interests.

The status of Harvard and Yale as prestigious national rather than regional universities is relatively recent. A few generations ago, it was assumed that the sons of the local gentry (this was before coeducation began in the 1960s and 1970s) would remain in the area and rise to high office in local and state business, politics, and philanthropy—goals that were best served if they attended a local elite college and joined the right fraternity, rather than being educated in some other part of the country. College was about upper-class socialization, not learning, which is why parochial patricians favored regional colleges and universities. If your family was in the local social register, that was much more important than whether you went to an Ivy League college or a local college or no college at all.

American patricians of earlier generations would have been surprised that rich people, many of them celebrities, would scheme and bribe university officers to get their children into a few top universities. Scheming to get into the right local “society” club—now that would have made sense.

Upper-class women were the chief enforcers of local “society.” Anybody who thinks that women are somehow naturally more generous and egalitarian than men has never encountered a doyenne of high society. Mrs. Astor’s 400 families in New York had their counterparts throughout the United States, from the Mainline elite in Philadelphia to the Highland Park set in Dallas.

As in the novels of Jane Austen, the daughters of the local ruling class had to be married to a young man from a good family, if the dynasty was not to fall into disgrace. Until recently (and to this day, in some circles) a young woman’s debut in society was, if anything, more important than marriage itself, since the debutante ball helped to define her eligibility for a high-status marriage.

When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?

The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family.

The Western frontier was not entirely a myth, to be sure. My great-great-grandfather proposed marriage to my great-great-grandmother by handing her a letter from horseback before riding north on a cattle drive from Texas to Kansas, and a distant uncle was murdered by outlaws on the road outside of Austin in the 1880s. But the Wild West or boomtown era everywhere was brief. The first white settlers in a region may have been trappers or small farmers or ranchers or outlaws or pirates, but once Native Americans had been removed to reservations and the railroad was in place, the area was rapidly gentrified. The rich moved in, bought up the good land, built mansions and the local opera house in the current European style and drove the frontiersmen and their families out.

White poverty in the United States today is concentrated in greater Appalachia, because the Scots Irish settlers, often illiterate squatters, were priced out of other areas and ended up in the hills of Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Texas Hill Country. As soon as the affluent discover the scenic views in those areas, they will be forced to move once more, just as old-stock families are already being priced out of the Texas Hill Country by rich refugees from California, bringing with them their cultural heritage of trophy wineries and boutiques, New Age spirituality and organic cuisines.

Because there was no single national American elite, there was never a single Western frontier. New Englanders moved west in a band to the south of the Great Lakes, and then moved eastward and inland from ports on the Pacific Coast. While the Scots Irish followed the hills, the Southern planter class acquired cotton-friendly soil from Virginia along the Gulf of Mexico to central Texas, where the coastal plain collides with the southernmost part of the Great Plains. As the historians David Hackett Fischer and Wilbur Zelinsky have pointed out, these parallel bands of east-to-west settlement brought separate Anglo American cultures, reflected in everything from codes of honor to town layouts (town planners in greater New England laid out village greens with churches and schools, while Southern towns tended to be centered on the courthouse).

In short, a historical narrative which describes a fall from the yeoman democracy of an imagined American past to the plutocracy and technocracy of today is fundamentally wrong. While American society was not formally aristocratic it was hierarchical and class-ridden from the beginning—not to mention racist and ethnically biased. What’s new today is that these highly exclusive local urban patriciates are in the process of being absorbed into the first truly national ruling class in American history—which is a good thing in some ways, and a bad thing in others.

Compared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias. As recently as the 1970s, an acquaintance of mine who worked for a major Northeastern bank had to disguise the fact of his Irish ancestry from the bank’s WASP partners. No longer. Elite banks and businesses are desperate to prove their commitment to diversity. At the moment Wall Street and Silicon Valley are disproportionately white and Asian American, but this reflects the relatively low socioeconomic status of many Black and Hispanic Americans, a status shared by the Scots Irish white poor in greater Appalachia (who are left out of “diversity and inclusion” efforts because of their “white privilege”). Immigrants from Africa and South America (as opposed to Mexico and Central America) tend to be from professional class backgrounds and to be better educated and more affluent than white Americans on average—which explains why Harvard uses rich African immigrants to meet its informal Black quota, although the purpose of affirmative action was supposed to be to help the American descendants of slaves (ADOS). According to Pew, the richest groups in the United States by religion are Episcopalian, Jewish, and Hindu (wealthy “seculars” may be disproportionately East Asian American, though the data on this point is not clear).

Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.

Dialect. You may have been at the top of your class in Harvard business school, but if you pronounce thirty-third “toidy-toid” or have a Southern drawl, you might consider speech therapy.

Religion. You may have edited the Yale Law Review, but if you tell interviewers that you recently accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, or fondle a rosary during the interview, don’t expect a job at a prestige firm.

Values. This is the trickiest test, because the ruling class is constantly changing its shibboleths—in order to distinguish true members of the inner circle from vulgar impostors who are trying to break into the elite. A decade ago, as a member of the American overclass you could get away with saying, along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I strongly support civil unions for gay men and lesbians.” In 2020 you are expected to say, “I strongly support trans rights.” You will flunk the interview if you start going on about civil unions.

More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.

Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.

Mrs. Astor would approve.

#ivy league #history #american history #oligarchy #aristocracy #american culture #bourgeois culture #bourgeoisie #class society #class struggle #class system #overclass #russiagate #virtue signaling #woke culture #wokeness #petite bourgeois #harvard #yale

[gothwarlocks]

17. How were you introduced to the fandom? 25. What type of ship would you fly? and 30. Do you have any headcanons (was thinking of how you've talked about the underground scene in SW but this can be about anything)?

thank you Raven!! 🖤🥰

Placing under a cut bc I ended up rambling a lot! It’s a long post.

17. How were you introduced to the fandom?

I didn’t actively participate in any true Star Wars fandom for a while, actually. When SWTOR launched in 2011 I was about 16 and hadn’t had great interactions with SW fans since the majority I bumped into were gatekeepy cishet men, and being a closeted gay trans kid... lol, you get it. I mostly just chatted with irl friends about stuff I was excited about. And also, the fandom wasn’t really established too well on here yet, so there’s that. I would peek around tumblr occasionally but short of a couple people chatting about it or posting fanart there wasn’t a sense of community yet (at least, from what I saw).

In 2010 though, idk If anyone will know about this at all but if you ever heard of Clone Wars Adventures I was very very present there haha. I interacted with mostly other teens or the occasional chill adult that was there for some reason (this was a very...kid-oriented online game). I was hounded a lot by other players bc I would always be top 5 on the leaderboards for a couple of the silly little minigames :) it was really fun, actually! I would log on and since you can see peoples’ online/offline status, I would get messages within minutes from players wanting to challenge me to a 1v1 of some sort lol. There was also instanced housing, and there was more free reign on building stuff, so people got really creative. I myself built a functioning cantina/music venue on the roof of my Coruscant apartment (which should not have been reach-able lol) that was sometimes used for group chilling.

If anyone ever is interested, look up some videos. The things players would build and boundary-break to do is very cool lol. Once SWTOR launched though, players that had formed friend groups or guilds just migrated there. It was interesting to see!

25. What type of ship would you fly?

HMMM there are so many ships around in the EU lol. Almost too hard to narrow it down... When I was a kid I was obsessed with A-wings, X-wings, and Naboo starfighters. From SWTOR, I think my favorite ship is either the Phantom, for it’s sleek and elegent design, or the smuggler’s freighter, for it’s cozy and communal atmosphere.

30. Do you have any headcanons?

Oh yeah!! Like you mentioned I do love thinking about subcultures in the galaxy and expanding on that, but here’s a few for SWTOR and EU(?) that I enjoy:

(Sorry in advance for how many run-on sentences there are and if anything just sounds harebrained lol. CW for talk of transition, I suppose!)

Dathomirian Zabraks in the Old Republic Era... I just accept that their witchy culture(s) have existed for millennia, but were just very isolationist and did their best to remain undetected from the rest of the galaxy--different groups could have had other policies though. The group portrayed in CW could be maybe the last group to survive, or something like that (since in Jedi Order it’s presented like that, right?). Anywho, as a matriarchal culture that unfortunately enslaves Zabrak men, I think they would have a unique take on gender. I think trans women/trans feminine people would be wholly embraced and exalted as having “ascended” out of the male lower caste for discovering who they really are, and trans men/trans masculine people would be, well, not so cherished(?) having--and I say this as a trans man--“lowered” or “belittled” themselves. The witches can change/enhance body shape through magic, as seen with Maul and Savage. So I imagine they would help trans people that want to physically transition to help fit them into the social roles they were always meant to have, and beyond that there isn’t much to blink at. I headcanon Lorn still has the skin pigmentation of a Datho witch (and he retains some of their powers), but his tattoos are given to him by fellow Zabrak men and his horns and other body characteristics are given to him through witch rituals. And as for non-binary Dathomirian people, I would hope they just have the choice to belong to either the witch clans or Zabrak tribes. I’d love to hear a non-binary person’s take on this, to be honest 👀

Rattataki should have little to no sexual dimorphism, and they could stand to look more...alien. (Plus, they desperately need lore-building.) I just think of all the species they could have done this for out of the game, this one could have been it.

I also just absorb and adopt a lot of HC’s I see going around for all sorts of stuff, here’s a few of my fav that aren’t my own:

Twi’leks having headgear designed for trans or gnc twi’leks to help them express themselves. Also lekku accessories in general are very cute and fun to think about.

Cathar behaving a little bit feline... In cute ways :)

Togruta with sharp teeth and montrals that can grow into all sorts of forms!

Sith Purebloods having black sclera and pointed ears is a pipe dream of mine but it’s cool if they don’t given their integration with Humans.

#long post #ty again!!! I got to word-vomit for a bit lol

[a-queer-seminarian]

we are taught to interpret Esau’s trading of his birthright for a bowl of stew as impulsiveness, even (in Christian language) as a ‘weakness of the flesh.’ He chooses instant gratification over the farther off but far more valuable thing, and thus proves himself unworthy of his firstborn status and all it entails -- Abraham’s wealth and social power, but also Abraham’s relationship with God.

i don’t believe that.

Esau gave in to Jacob’s demand because he knew that Jacob would never have the means to compel Esau to make good on his word.

Jacob was physically weaker. Jacob was set to inherit the tiniest fragment of the wealth and resources that Esau would inherit. how on earth would Jacob ever wrest the birthright and the blessing he was owed from Esau?

Esau’s ‘crime’ here is less impulsiveness, and more a trust in the status quo. his world of patriarchy and primogeniture promised him his inheritance, whether he was a good man or bad, an honest man or a liar. he could tell his younger brother whatever Jacob wanted to hear, but down the road he could trust that their father would bestow the blessing on Esau anyway.

his reliance on the status quo is what allows Esau to hand over his birthright so easily -- because he knows that merely saying it’s Jacob’s now does not make it so.

Esau’s great failing is that he assumes that his culture’s will is God’s will.

the problem for Esau is that God does not play by human rules.

____________

in the Book of Genesis and throughout the rest of scripture, we see God working within the bounds of cultural assumptions and norms, rolling with the binary systems that human societies construct -- right up to the point where Xe doesn’t.

In The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Jewish scholar Joy Ladin focuses on the elements of gender inherent to the system of primogeniture that places the firstborn Esau over the secondborn Jacob in every way. To her, biblical maleness comes in different “flavors” -- the roles expected of a firstborn son are different from those assigned to non-firstborn sons. She says,

“Jacob and Esau are both male and are born almost simultaneously, but they are assigned at birth to very different gender roles. Because Esau emerges from the womb first, he is considered the firstborn, heir not only to Isaac’s worldly possessions but also to the relationship with God that Isaac inherited from his father, Abraham. Though Jacob is born holding onto his brother’s heel, he is considered the second-born, expected to accept the authority of his older brother, who, after their father’s death, will be the head of the family. Like the gender binary, this law of inheritance, called ‘primogeniture,’ creates a lifelong, life-determining binary division between males who are and those who aren’t firstborn sons. And like the gender binary, primogeniture turns biology, in this case birth order, into destiny. The way male children are raised, the roles they are assigned, and the futures toward which they are steered are determined by whether they are or aren’t firstborn sons.” (p. 36)

Esau has grown up understanding that his inheritance is his destiny. It’s what he’s been born for, what he’s been raised for, what he is entitled to. Why would he believe that he would ever have to make good on his silly promise to Jacob to hand over that destiny? It’s set in stone, inviolable.

at least it is in the eyes of men. but not to God.

“If God were committed to the gender binary idea that people are unchangeably defined by the gender roles we are assigned at birth, then either Esau would have been destined to inherit Isaac’s relationship with God, or Jacob would have been born first. But as God reveals to Rebekah before the twins are born, God intends for the younger brother to usurp the elder, prenatally linking God’s blessing to trans experience. (Ladin, pp. 37-38)

in the ancient past and in the present day, countless roles get assigned to us as soon as -- or even before -- we exist the womb. biology is presumed destiny in so many ways: our gender, our race, the class and geopolitical location and family into which we are born, supposedly map out what our personalities will be, how our lives will go. and certainly these things do shape us, both by nature and nurture -- generational traumas come packed into our very cells, while our environment and how others treat us based on our assigned roles impact how we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

but even so, even so, biology is not destiny. especially not if God has any say in the matter.

for God is the great binary breaker, no respecter of persons or prejudices, unbeholden to the status quo. indeed, God almost seems to delight in upending our assumptions about who is blessed. secondborn sons and eunuchs, women and disabled persons, impoverished persons and disenfranchised peoples -- these are the ones whom God selects, again and again, to be recipients and agents of divine blessing. “blessed are the poor;” “the last shall be first.”

Esau assumes that biology, his status assigned based on birth order, is destiny. he does not fear his younger brother, who is rendered powerless by their culture to claim what he is promised in a moment of hunger. and probably this is safer for Jacob -- because when Esau does finally realize, too late, that Jacob is a real threat, Esau becomes murderously angry.

when Isaac is duped into giving Jacob his blessing after all, Jacob cannot stick around to claim the wealth and status that comes with it -- he must flee, or die under Esau’s hand.

i wonder if some of the violence we see in our time, and across every time and place, stems from the same kind of rage and fear that Esau experiences:

the rage of the ones who are raised to believe the world belongs to them, that they are entitled to certain blessings and privileges, only for the truth to pounce on them unexpectedly -- the shocking truth that biology is not destiny, that they are not inherently superior, that what they thought would be theirs without question might could be snatched from them after all.

the divine right to rule. manifest destiny. the ‘white man’s burden.’

white men who assume they are entitled to white women, so that the mere thought of a Black man winning a woman’s heart is enough to incite them to brutality.

white women who understand that the police are their personal body guards, to call down upon the bodies of Black adults and even Black children on a whim -- and are indignant in the rare circumstance that they are told otherwise.

men and white people who expect the best jobs and properties to go to them, so that anyone else advancing over them seems an appalling injustice.

cis women who perceive trans women as “invading their spaces;” cishet couples who think LGBTQ/queer couples ruin “the sanctity of marriage;” persons who are accustomed to being accommodated without even realizing it sneering at “safe spaces” and trigger warnings....

and on and on.

Esau had every reason to assume that his biology determined his destiny -- that he could make an impulsive promise, make a big mistake, and everything would still turn out in his favor. he was born into a world that told him so every day -- even that God sanctioned these human assumptions and systems. But God does not.

“God’s disruptions of gender in these stories make it clear that even the gender roles that matter most to human beings are not sacred to God. ...God in the Torah uses gender, but is not bound by it. On the one hand, God depends on gender to transmit the covenant across time and space, so that even after hundreds of generations, Jews will still see themselves as children of Abraham. On the other hand, God disrupts gender as a way of making God’s power and presence known. ...In these stories, faithfulness to gender has little to do with faithfulness to God. In fact, God counts on the fact that people are not bound by gender roles. The covenant with Abraham is founded on Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob’s embrace of trans experience: their willingness to live outside the gender roles they were born to and become the kinds of people they are not supposed to be.” (Ladin, pp. 57-58)

Faithfulness to human constructs has little to do with faithfulness to God. God blesses us when we can imagine beyond the narrative we are assigned -- as Jacob does in this story where he demands a birthright the world does not intend for him....and as Esau eventually does.

In Genesis 33, Esau catches up to Jacob after decades apart -- and Jacob expects violence. He sends gifts of livestock to Esau and conceals his most cherished family at the back of his huge household. But to his bewilderment, Esau is no longer murderously angry at having “lost” what he grew up assuming he was entitled to -- he rushes to his brother, throws his arms around Jacob’s neck, and weeps.

Esau was raised believing that he would own everything, and his brother nothing -- that Jacob would be one of many members of Esau’s household, subservient to him. But now, he does not even feel entitled to the livestock that Jacob offers him: “I already have plenty, my brother. Keep what’s yours.”

Jacob is relieved by this unexpected reconciliation, exclaiming to Esau that “Seeing your face is like seeing God’s face, since you’ve accepted me so warmly!” He never expected Esau to accept what Jacob has known all along -- that biology is not destiny; that neither of them are bound to human constructs like birthright; that they can live a different way than the way prescribed to them, one in which both of them thrive.

___________

now, this story is by no means perfect. Jacob was able to imagine bigger for himself, to escape the destiny assigned to him -- but he does not imagine big enough. he does not use his new station to liberate others.

he becomes a patriarch -- assimilates into patriarchy and the power to own other human beings, to rule over every member of his household, rather than challenging the whole system that once oppressed him. i am reminded of trans persons, persons of color, women, who once they manage to acquire power for themselves never use it to help their fellow marginalized persons up. they land positions of power and use that power to oppress others as they were once oppressed, rather than using it to try to forge a new, better system for all.

Jacob the second-born becomes Jacob the patriarch. his household will be fraught with all the woes that come with this system that stifles all within it. his wives will hate each other and battle each other for what little power they can grasp. his sons will do the same, subjecting the younger Joseph to violence when, like Jacob, this little sibling dares to dream of being something greater than what his society assigns him.

what if Jacob could have imagined bigger? what if he had used his one fragment of shining clarity about how patriarchy and primogeniture stifled his true self to empower others, not only himself?

what if we could imagine bigger? what new and beautiful world could we build?

#bible study #joy ladin #jacob and esau #genesis 25 #what do you think? #sermon notes #just some half baked musings so far so i'd love feedback #summer 2020 #log #grace internship #primogeniture #essays

[dmsden]

What Is Wanting and What Is Owed

Hullo, Gentle Readers. Since I’ve been given the rare gift of a 5th Monday this month, I get a freestyle article. And, although I don’t often like to get on a soapbox, I’m going to do so a little. If you don’t want to hear me pontificate, you may want to skip this article and come back on Thursday.

During its recent D&D “Live” event, a few products were announced. Rime of the Frostmaiden was announced as the new adventure. While I’m personally meh about the whole Drizzt/Icewind Dale storyline, books, etc, I recognize that they’re an incredibly popular property, and I’m looking forward to seeing new monster stat blocks and so on. In proximity to this announcement came three other announcements, all of which I thought of as very positive, but which, to my surprise, brought a ton of venom from other D&D players.

Beadle & Grimm’s announced a Platinum Edition of the mod. No surprise there.

WotC announced Heroes’ Feast, the official D&D cookbook, from the same team that did the beautiful Art & Arcana book.

And finally, WotC made an announcement, which I will not go over again here, about how they wanted to show more sensitivity when presenting cultures based on real world cultures. You can read this in full at https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/diversity-and-dnd

I was pleased with all these announcements, but I was shocked (I guess I shouldn’t be any more?) about the level of venom I saw online about all three of them.

The B&G announcements was met with comments like, “$500? For that, the adventure had better run itself for me!” “Does it actually cast the spells?” and so on. For full disclosure, I have bought everyone of the Beadle & Grimm’s products. I ordered Waterdeep: Dragon Heist with a lot of trepidation, because $500.00 is a decent chunk of change for me. After receiving it and being blown away by what it contained, I knew we’d be buying other products as they came down the line.

The fact is that I am the target audience for B&G products: I’m a huge D&D fan, as is my husband, and we have a decent amount of disposable income to spend on our major hobbies, which includes TTRPGs. If you’re not in that target audience, then of course you’re not going to buy it, but I don’t see the value in tearing down others who make that decision. I guess, if anything, it’s likely motivated by jealousy. That’s a pretty natural human emotion, but it would be nice to see the honest reaction behind it.

The reactions to the cookbook seem to range from “I won’t waste my money on this” to “Well, they’re gonna lose money on this one” all the way to “Why is WotC wasting time with all-fluff products like this? They should be working on XXXX, because I’ve been waiting years for it.” I can understand not wanting to spend money on something you don’t want or need; that’s sensible. I’m personally charmed by the idea of an official cookbook, because I love to cook, so I’ll be grabbing this. I was actually pondering a fantasy-based cookbook project myself, but now I’ll wait to see what this looks like and if it scratches the itch I have for such a product.

So is WotC wasting talent on this? No, they’re not. The people who are writing this are the same freelance team that worked on Art & Arcana, so no WotC authors were dragged away from valuable work for this. Also, this isn’t one of WotC’s normal books that they release in a year. We’ll still be getting all the fluff and crunch this year that we normally would, but those of us who like the idea of a cookbook will get one.

Oh, and as far as losing money goes, I’d like to tell you about a book called Leaves from the Inn of the Last Home. When the Dragonlance novels and modules came out, they were incredibly popular. They were so popular that the demand for more material about that world prompted TSR to publish Leaves. It was all fluff and no crunch. You got everything from astronomy notes to sheet music to...oh, gosh...recipes. And it was a massive seller. It sold so well that they ended up making two sequels to it. So I think WotC will be okay with this one. And if not, they just won’t do another project like this down the line.

I think what bothers me about this one is really the sense of entitlement. Way too many posts seemed to boil down to, “This isn’t what I want; I want XXXX. WotC owes it to me.” Like, really, no they don’t. Every time WotC has a product announcement, I cross my fingers for Spelljammer, because I have an irrational love of its silliness and the imagination that went into it. But it would NEVER occur to me to think that WotC somehow owes me Spelljammer. WotC is a company, and the core principle of every company is to make money. I’m sure that, if WotC eventually thinks Spelljammer will make it money, that it’ll happen, but they know that Forgotten Realms is their bread and butter, so I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve been going on for a long time, but the last one is the one that cuts me deepest to the quick, so I can’t ignore it. It’ll probably come as no surprise to anyone that, as a very liberal/progessive gay man, I was disgusted to see so many comments condemning WotC for bowing to political correctness or for doing this “just to make money”.

As far as making money goes, I have already said, that’s what a company wants to do. I think you’d have to be blind not to see the surging tide of people in the U.S. and across the world who are sick and tired of inequality. The fight for equal treatment for people of color, for women in general, for gay people, for trans people...it’s still raging. For every victory, like the Supreme Court case that said workplaces couldn’t fire people for being of LGBTQ+ status, there’s a crushing setback, like President Trump’s executive order to allow hospitals to discriminate against trans people. But things seem to be shifting again, and people are more and more stepping up to declare their dedication to the fight. So yes, if I were running a company, I would be taking notice, and I would be taking actions in this direction.

What I do not and will not understand are people who are somehow going to claim to be upset that WotC is going to take steps to try to not offend people in the future. It bothers me that people can’t say, “Well, I’m not personally offended, but I’m not black/Romani/gay/Asian/Native American/whatever. I think it’s great that WotC is trying to make sure D&D is more inclusive for everyone.” I don’t understand how anyone can play a game like D&D...a game that literally makes you walk in someone else’s shoes...and yet have so little ability to do it in your actual life. D&D literally shows you how different people with different abilities have to work together to help each other achieve a goal, and it’s sad to see that some who play it have so little regard for people who are different from themselves.

If you’ve stuck through this article this far, I wish I could offer you some great wisdom at the end. I guess I’ll just caution you to spend a moment thinking about what you’re going to say online before you say it. Once your words are out there, they’re very hard to take back, and that can have consequences. I try my best to make most of my interactions online with people positive ones. Even when I don’t agree with people, I try to be positive, and to educate them as to my side of the argument, rather than just blasting them with “No, you’re wrong for thinking that.” I thought long and hard before writing this article, and I thought long and hard before publishing it. I may lose readers over it, and, if so, that would be a shame, but I would rather be honest about who I am and what I believe.

So be kind to one another. To borrow a quote from Critical Role, “Don’t forget to love each other.” Roll those 20s. And we’ll be back on Thursday with a fun question about running a campaign that begins before Session Zero. Whaaaaat? You heard me. See you then!

[rotationalsymmetry]

The mistakes people make when trying to understand trans people. (Not gonna say cis people, it can take trans people a while to figure this stuff out too.) Not necessarily in this exact order. CW: Discussion of transphobic and transmisogynistic concepts, genitals mentions.

Your gender is determined by your body (genitals/chromosomes/whatever) and is immutable (and also intersex people don’t exist but that’s a whole ‘nother topic.) Anyone who says otherwise is wrong or delusional.

OK, maybe there’s some trans people, but only men and women, and they’re not really men/women until they’ve “fully transitioned” (back to your genitals determining your gender.)

And it’s a very, very, very rare thing and only shows up one way: having a consistent sense of being the other binary gender from a young age, being intensely miserable living as the assigned gender, ending up straight, ending up gender conforming, etc.

Also they’re not really men and women, they’re some sort of in between freak of nature. (Referring to a trans woman as “they”, etc.)

OK, maybe trans people’s genitals aren’t anyone else’s business. But they at least have to look like their gender, otherwise how is anyone supposed to take them seriously? (Also: why do trans people get so angry all the time? It’s a mystery.)

OK, trans men are men and trans women are women. But...that means they’re exactly the same as cis men and women in every meaningful way. (Including, at the absurd extremes, things like who needs pap smears etc. At marginally less absurd extremes, figuring trans men don’t have anything meaningful to say about patriarchy based on lived experience, because apparently gender identity means everybody retroactively knew what your real gender was your whole life.)

Trans men’s experiences and trans women’s experiences have to be mirror images of each other. In particular: if a trans women wants to start using women’s restrooms and not men’s as soon as she starts dressing like a woman, and a trans man wants to keep using women’s bathrooms while he’s transitioning, one of them has to be wrong.

Non-binary people don’t really exist, you can humor them but they’re basically just people of their assigned gender playing around.

Non-binary people exist, but only if they look androgynous.

Non-binary people exist, and are (all) a third in-between or genderless category.

Non-binary people can all be simplified down to “basically men” or “basically women”. (”Woman-aligned” etc.)

All non-binary people can give you an extremely precise explanation of their gender identity, it’s never “well I think I’m not this and I’m pretty sure I’m not that and some days I feel this and other days I feel...”

Trans people can be divided into two categories: real trans people, and “transtrenders” who are just pretending to be trans. Because that’s a normal thing to do.

Real trans status has to be earned through suffering

(Binary) trans people can’t be interested in the same sex

Trans people can’t be gender non-conforming

Trans people have to medically transition or at least want to; medical transition is the only form of transition; if you’re not 100% sure you want to medically transition then doing more easily reversed things like experimenting with hair or clothes or asking people to use different gendered terms for you, is pointless.

Everybody has exactly one gender. Or at most one.

Genders other than “male” and “female” are made up (in a way that “male” and “female” are not)

If I personally can’t imagine being transgender, then it must not be real.

Being non-binary means you have to actively want to destroy the gender binary/identifying as non-binary is inherently a political statement.

More people identifying as trans is bad for gay people, gays/lesbians and trans people have conflicting interests, being trans is more acceptable to the general public than being gay and trans people are mostly actually gay people who get pushed into identifying as trans for greater social acceptance.

Puberty blockers are totally the same thing as HRT and allowing minors access to appropriate medical treatment is pushing an agenda on to them. Doing nothing is neutral and can’t possibly cause harm.

Detransitioning or shifting from a binary trans to a non-binary identity is betraying the cause/is evidence the person made a mistake by transitioning regardless of how they see it/is evidence that there should be more barriers to medical transition.

You have to get your identity right the first time: asking people to use different pronouns for you and then changing to new ones or back to your original pronouns, means you’re not taking this seriously.

In general, asking people to use different pronouns for you should be one of the last steps in the process, after more expensive and less reversible measures like hormone therapy, not one of the earliest.

Unless you’re 100% sure you’re trans, you’re definitely cis.

Real trans people never second guess themselves.

Welp, that’s 18 28 items which is a bunch more than I expected to get to. I’m just kind of playing around with ideas in my head here. Happy to have anyone add on.

(This is meant for trans people mostly, so please don’t be hostile on this thread. If you’re confused and want to know more I'd recommend that questions show up in my ask box off anon so if you accidentally say something hurtful/offensive, I can reply privately. Like, I’m not going to be hurt and I’m not going to judge if it seems to be coming from a place of not knowing rather than overt hostility, and I’d rather you ask than just be confused. Having said that, I’m terrible at actually responding to asks, so you might do better with someone else or seeing what you can come up with from internet searches.)

#transgender #trans #transphobia #cissexism #misconceptions about being trans #transmisogyny #that word that I always forget about nonbinary genders #lgbtq+ #nonbinary