Little cloud, home again

Being attracted to any kind of body is normal. Fat bodies. Trans bodies. Disabled bodies. All normal. Being extra attracted to a specific kind of body is normal too. Totally normal to have a type.

Not unlearning the societal stigma attached to those kinds of bodies, the people who inhabit those bodies, and the people who fuck them, to the point where you do any of the following:

Only want to date/fuck the person in secret.

Reduce the person to the feature that you desire and ignore the rest of who they are as a person.

Expect the person to be a walking porn fantasy instead of a real person with their own sexual preferences and boundaries.

Would no longer love the person if the stigmatized aspect of their body changed.

Consider yourself superior to the person, think the person should be 'grateful' that you love their body, etc.

See the person as a temporary adventure while planning to eventually settle down with someone whose body isn't stigmatized.

Is bad and harmful and you shouldn't be dating anyone until you've worked on your shit, because this makes you a very terrible partner. This doesn't mean you are a bad person with bad-fetishist-desires who can only desire people badly, it means you need to unlearn societal stigma so you can be a better partner to the people you desire.

We also often have headache-specific rescue meds like triptans restricted and rationed which, when we cannot access proper preventatives, puts especially those us of with chronic headaches at risk of overusing OTC painkillers like paracetamol or ibuprofen instead, or—depending on how bad the headaches are—folks might even resort to street drugs to numb the pain.

I think Ed has a lot of gender feelings he hasn't been free to explore safely. I think Mary does gender in a transgressive way and has been comfortable living that way for a long time. I think that Mary would make a younger Ed curious, and she would be a safer (if not safe) person for him to do gender play with than any of the other people in his life. I think when you're in that kind of gender space, sexual orientation gets fuzzy around the edges. I'm a nonbinary butch who isn't attracted to men, generally, but I've had sex with camp and femme men and it was a good gender experience for both of us. I see the potential for that in Ed/Mary Read.

I think Ed has a lot of gender feelings he hasn't been free to explore safely. I think Mary does gender in a transgressive way and has been comfortable living that way for a long time. I think that Mary would make a younger Ed curious, and she would be a safer (if not safe) person for him to do gender play with than any of the other people in his life. I think when you're in that kind of gender space, sexual orientation gets fuzzy around the edges. I'm a nonbinary butch who isn't attracted to men, generally, but I've had sex with camp and femme men and it was a good gender experience for both of us. I see the potential for that in Ed/Mary Read.

I have seen this statement from several people - not just one of the OPs of the most recent biphobic blow up (and I won't be addressing that saying Mary should have been nonbinary somehow invalidates Ed as bisexual, since bisexual means attraction to all sexes, not just two) - and, as a nonbinary person, I really wanted to address it.

Very strong disclaimer that: nonbinary looks a lot of different ways. My experience of nonbinary may not resonate with other nonbinary people. Maybe Mary Read WAS nonbinary for whatever definition of that would have been understood by an 18th century pirate. But why HAVE some people gotten it into their heads that OFMD is being disrespectful by not portraying her that way?

Read has an extensively sourced and researched wikipedia page which demonstrates how little we know about the historical figure of Mary Read (and it's a really interesting meta-article about how her supposed sexuality was constructed by later authors). It also notes that the likely inaccurate but first popular depiction of her has her dressing as a boy when she was young in order to receive money from a relative. Then she and Anne Bonny are both said to have dressed as men in order to sail aboard pirate ships. And that's… it. So why, exactly, should Read be portrayed as nonbinary? Even leaving aside the disputed accuracy of these sources, is it because she's said to have dressed as a boy from a young age, but then is also said to have saved herself from hanging by claiming she was pregnant? That's all I can think. And that seems like a gross misreading of what it is to be nonbinary - without even getting into a discussion of what gender identities and sexualities were like in the early 18th century Caribbean.

Butch is also a gender with a long history and a lot of contested argument. Butches are celebrated in many places, but they've also been criticised as bad representation, as giving lesbians a bad name, as abandoning the fight for women's rights by trying to emulate men. For all these reasons and more, it's really hard to find depictions of true butch characters in popular media.

there's no real evidence on whether ed could be attracted to women, not even the implicit kind there is with stede, it doesn't really undermine anything in his character arc. and i don't think the show would ever have any reason to address this even if it continued; they're largely uninterested in assigning modern identity categories to characters unless there's a reason for it to be relevant. so it's open space for headcanons.