Nabokovian Lesbian

If you're new to my blog, my name is Autumn. She/her, trans lesbian. This blog used to be for mediocre poetry and there is a chance it eventually will be again. But for now, I mainly post about:

Christianity: I am an Episcopalian (formerly Roman Catholic) who firmly believes that God is all-loving, God is queer-affirming, and "Christian" nationalism is evil.

Shakespeare: my favorites (in no particular order) are Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Antony And Cleopatra, and King Lear.

Occasionally I might post about my own writing. Currently I'm working on a dark fantasy novel that has to do with vampires and corrupt religious crusades.

Now, I don't really want to make a DNI list so much as a "take note" list:

Conservative Christians: You are welcome to engage constructively with my posts, but as it pertains to the beliefs mentioned above, they are not debatable. I won't entertain you on those notes.

Non-Christians (on my religious posts obv): You are also welcome to engage constructively, if you feel compelled to do that for whatever reason. What's not welcome is blatant disrespect for my beliefs. Especially as a queer person, I consider myself pretty open to hearing out people's grievances with Christians, but if you're only here to be rude, sarcastic, or aggressive, I'll just block you and move on.

Like, when trying to figure out the vibe of a given Christian online space, I always check the rules and they’re very open to interpretation. “We value scripture” okay? Doesn’t everyone? “No twisting God’s word” is innocuous on the surface but can quickly become a red flag as soon as anyone mentions the “clobber verses” (see: the Bible’s controversial history of mistranslations).

And especially if a space doesn’t have an explicit rule against hate speech, or homophobia, or even has a rule against homophobia but not transphobia, I immediately assume it’s a bigoted space. Because even with rules against homophobia, they get to decide what they mean by “homophobia.” Which pretty much means anything short of “gay people deserve to die” could fly in some of those spaces as long as you pretend to “love the sinner and hate the sin.”

And, I reiterate, trans Christians are even more uncomfortable in these spaces than cis gay Christians. And that’s saying something because cis gay Christians are already treated with basically no respect at all.

I kid you not, I was briefly in a Christian discord server with a rule against homophobia (but not transphobia) that was way more strict about people posting gym selfies (in the gym chat) than people blatantly breaking the hate speech rule. The meme chat in that server was full of racism and antisemitism. The general chat would shout down anyone daring to be openly queer (even queer Catholics who practice the church’s rule about gay chastity, i.e. lifelong celibacy). But sure, tempting each other to “lust” by showing gym progress is way more of an issue (this deeply weird and unhealthy view of sex and the human body among young Christians deserves its own post).

I will constantly assert that religious people are conformists while recycling the same five insults and half-baked arguments that have been beaten into the ground by online chuds since 2009. I somehow don’t feel any amount of cringe towards myself when using the phrase “sky daddy” because it’s le epic own.

I’m rightfully upset about the rise of Christian nationalism and fascism in the United States and my means of fighting back against that is to harass random Christians on the internet. Even ones that are very outspokenly opposed to Christian nationalism. And yes, at times, this requires me to ACTIVELY seek out these Christians posts I supposedly don’t want to see.

Because I already decided when I was 13 that I’m inherently more intelligent and more educated than all religious people, I don’t see anything wrong with using labels like “fiction” or “fairy tales” to disparage religious texts. This totally makes the Bible sound silly instead of making myself sound uneducated and ignorant about literary definitions.

Despite it being many books by many authors in many literary genres, I think saying “it’s in the Bible” is sufficient context to just quote random stuff. But it’s totally different when I do it than when the Westboro Baptist Church does the same thing to justify wishing death on gay people. Now that I mention WBC, because they’re technically Christian, I can lump ALL Christians under the same category as them, from any of the thousands of denominations there are. Including the Christians who are openly gay themselves.