Beedrops

best case: they dont think about transfems & our struggles at all, and think it isnt that serious to omit us.

worst case: they dont think transfems belong in women's/queer/trans spaces and would rather want us dead than included

“Freedom always has a price.”

why are we unironically treating the word “blackwashing” as if it’s a real term now??? and using it to tell other poc they’re ‘blackwashing’ the character by making them darker or a realistic skin tone.. omg i seriously don’t have the energy for it. i don’t.

"You know, Quasimodo predicted all this"

One of the funniest among many funny scenes in The Sopranos.

I always love the og zoot suits made by black americans in Harlem, I really like looking at the changes from these clothes from the 30s to some of the more exaggerated renditions from the 40s. It's also so interesting to look at how fast the subculture spread, and especially in the american west integrated with mexican diaspora and pachuco culture to the point that that's what a lot of usamericans associate them with.

⬆️ long wallet chains and pork pie hats were classic accessories for mexican diaspora zoot suiters. Zoot suits/their components were also really popular with women and were a way to symbolize independence and a choice to move away from strict gender roles on top of the existing countercultural message ⬇️

Anyways it's kind of impossible to talk about zoot suits without mentioning the racism and violence that followed them. On top of a zoot suit making someone a target for individual racial violence, the national reaction of white america to zoot suit culture was part of the beginning of clothing and presentation being read explicitly as signals by police and justice systems, and the broad association of youth of color with gang violence through this specific excuse. Gang culture and how it's percieved in the western US and especially California is very influenced by this era. The most famous events from the zoot suit era are the collective zoot suit riots and the media characterization of all mexican american, filipino american, and black american youth as violent anti-american baby gangsters. Which, even if that was broadly true I mean. I'll take the opportunity to be flippant hell yeah??

As a side note, while making more new zoot suits during war rationing was pretty sick, most people weren't buying from the black market tailor shops and just wore what they already owned because the style had been popular for years already. People bought clothes less often to begin with back then. I think that misconception comes from the reasoning white americans gave to go beat up people of color with baseball bats in the street; i.e. it was racial and xenophobic violence to begin with and the nature of the suits themselves has been mushed around a lot to serve different narratives.

More zoot suits! ⬇️

Some reasons why they might not, and these examples are all from real people:

Some nonbinary people are fully agender, and don't like or identify with the terms transfem or transmasc because these terms imply they have a gender somewhere on the M-F spectrum, which they do not.

Some nonbinary people have a distinct gender (I,e. They are not agender) but it isn't on the M-F axis (e.g. aporagender, although not everyone for whom this scenario is true identifies with that term)

Some nonbinary people may privately identify as transfem or transmasc, but do not want to reveal which they are, and do not wish to reveal their assigned birth gender, so they publicly do not identify with these terms because they think it's none of your business.

Some nonbinary people's experience of transness involves crossing gender roles "both ways"; for example someone might pursue HRT but then engage in other presentation choices or even medical treatments that push people's perception of them back towards their assigned birth sex. So these people might identify as being both transfem and transmasc in different aspects of their life. Or they may find these labels flawed because they are oversimplified so they want to avoid using them entirely.

Some nonbinary people are genderfluid so they may feel transmasc or transfem some of the time, but not all of the time, and because of this, they may feel uncomfortable labeling themselves with one of those terms on a more permanent basis.

Some nonbinary people are intersex and their experience of transness does not start fully from a binary reference sex, and thus they are not fully comfortable with the terms transfem or transmasc, even if their gender identity would technically satisfy it with respect to their binary sex assigned at birth. They see the terms as misleading, overgeneralizing, and/or erasing key aspects of their intersex experience.

All of these sorts of nonbinary people are valid.

There might be other people I haven't even imagined. These are just ideas I have heard people express.