This is exactly why the whole "Queer characters can only be played by queer actors" argument, or the queerbaiting celebrities argument is not only unhelpful, it is actively harmful. You are not entitled to other peoples identity. You are forcing people to come out in order to protect their careers, when they may not have wanted to share that with the world. Real people can not queerbait. Real people can not be bad representations of themselves. Do not conflate how you treat fictional characters with how you are allowed to treat real people. We can not keep having the same conversation. Forcing people to come out or else face social consequences is Bad. Always. Everytime.

In this case, Kit is literally a teenager who has been facing overwhelming amounts of online abuse for not being open about his personal identity.

Im seeing it with other queer media too. With nicholas galitzin and taylor zakhar perez in the red white & royal blue movie, people demanding that they should have been recast with "actual queer actors" despite the fact that we do not know if they are or are not queer. We can never know until they tell us that they are, which they have not.

Im also seeing it with young royals. With the new season coming out later today, the speculation on omar and edvins sexuality and relationship is incredibly harmful and toxic. They are real people, please treat them like people instead of fictional characters you can write rambling, speculating paragraphs about.

I'll say it one more time.

You are not entitled to other people's identities.

So excited to present the cover i drew for the @bookcoupleszine featuring feysand, kanej, patrochilles, and jurdan!! 💕✨

Check out preorders for more #bookish couple art and writing!! ❤️

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”

The Adventure Zone, when Taako kissed Kravitz. I was beyond thrilled. Hades the game, when Zagreus told Thanatos he had feelings for him, I got butterflies.

Our Flag Means Death, all of it. The glances, the faces of realization, everything. The kiss, the kisses. It turns out I love romantic stories, I adore people falling in love, finding happiness in a world that might not always encourage it. I learned that I hated heteronormativity as a plot device, two people with no chemistry kiss because they have to, rather than characters who find themselves caught in love, without worrying if they should, but rather if they could.