cory

And sometimes fanfiction is, ‘Watch me do a fucking KICK FLIP off this cool sentence!! Also here's some sex'

give that knife/sword fight survivor nerve damage. give the character who was shot in the gut a stoma. give that fire survivor lung damage and an oxygen cannula. give that leg injury survivor a cane. give that starvation survivor gastroparesis. give that spinal injury survivor a manual chair or powerchair.

I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.

Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.

The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.

I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.

-having a job

-not having a job

-applying for jobs

-the job market

They pretend that if there were no gender roles no one would transition and trans people would cease to exist.

What's more accurate is that "trans" as a category would become incoherent but people would still have preferences about their bodies and would benefit from modifying them in ways that our current world considers to be heavily gendered.

I disagree. People can be attached to gender in the abstract, not just physical expressions of it. The reason people get gender euphoria from wearing eg dresses is because dresses are associated with femininity culturally. If femininity was not a known concept, people wouldn’t feel that way about dresses.

To which I have to ask:

1- Why exactly would it be a problem if some people were not euphoric about wearing dresses? Why would this be more of a loss than, say, not being euphoric about spinning cloth all day? Not being euphoric about eating vegan sandwiches? Not being euphoric about putting on the vaseline that says FOR MEN on the cover?

There is no shortage of pointlessly gendered things that most people, trans or not, simply don't feel that strongly about and that's okay. They can still do those things if they want but don't need them.

Society does not actually need to gender stuff like this.

2- These binary roles and gendered associations tend to put gender nonconforming and non-binary trans people in the worst position. Not all trans women want to wear dresses or shrink themselves into these roles, which few people completely fit in the first place. This is punished.

Someone in the notes said that gender is more than a straitjacket, but I feel that's only potentially true if you're talking about gender as an identity in your mind rather than talking about the social system that currently exists in real life, which is coercive, hierarchical, and arbitrary.

3- Crucially, it's all made up constructs that have already changed a lot over time. As I said in the notes, "being a man" and "being a woman" already don't mean the same things they used to mean and (at least in some parts of the world) the roles that still exist are less strict than they used to be. This is a good thing that results in more freedom for everyone, not just cis women.