shel's zone

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

In System Collapse, Tarik says “motherless” (as opposed to something like motherfucking) and the BE corporates say things like “lame-skulled” and while you could think those are just futuristic insults as a result of linguistic drift (which they could also be), I think they’re just literal translations. It becomes more noticeable when you see how religious terms are rendered: “oh high one! Oh deity!” Which is like…sure. They could literally be saying that. But imo it makes more sense if MB is translating something they’re saying in another language.*

I think the most notable case of this is when Thiago calls Amena “my daughter.” On first read I literally thought it was just a Preservation thing but then I realized it made a lot more sense to me (a 21st century American) if he was saying something like mija but MB was just literally translating it into its archive bc that’s how it processes language.

This is also the reason for Amena’s use of Second Mom and Third Mom. It sounds kind of clunky in English but Chinese does a similar thing which sounds perfectly natural in that language (e.g. da-ge, er-ge, san-ge for first/oldest brother, second (oldest) brother, and third (oldest) brother).

Anyway! It’s a fun little detail I really enjoy about MB. There are definitely way more examples but I didn’t have time to track them all down.

Honestly, Murderbot doesn't just "translate" language, I would say it tends to genericize terms, and this is part of a broader motif around Murderbot's relationship with language. Aside from in translation, Murderbot also just uses generic terms to control its story and express its viewpoint better- there's "oh deity" and "Starchy Foods!!!!" as obvious places where this had to be translated in some way from something, but notice how it doesn't get translated into anything in particular in Murderbot's presumed Standard Whatever Dialect lexicon. Why? Because while details about food and religion are of critical importance to human culture, they're not important to our rogue machine intelligence protag. (Amena's "fried vegetable crunchy things" are another classic example.) You see this in action throughout the series: it never describes an animal by specific name ("avians," "fauna"), it barely describes the weapons it gets into fights with ("energy weapon," "armor piercing projectile weapon"- notice it never calls anything a shotgun or grenade let alone specific gun nerd terms), and it especially never uses a brand name or even a genericized brand name to describe an item or product if the most generic term will do ("feed interface," "transient rest tube" but not any term resembling iPhone or capsule hotel). And of course, it never names the company that owned it, explicitly replacing the name even in Bharadwaj's dialogue when she asks about it. Obviously, choosing to avoid the use of corporate names allows it to take back a little control over its own language from the likes of its former owners. Meanwhile, it'll name the systems it interfaces with to a high degree of specificity or panache: "HubSystem," "AdaColSys, "Asshole Research Transport," "hotelEnvironmentAccessAndMobilitySystem (MobSys for short)", etc.

Cobblestones on a road. The centre stone is a dark rust colour with gold lettering that says "I used to be a mountain"

tumblr tags from user sherbertilluminated "i might be missing something but that looks very fine grained and thoroughly oxodized. so like. ferruginous mudstone. you used to be a floodplain maybe.

I didn't go through the bureaucratic process of changing my Norwegian personal ID number, which encodes gender in it, because having an odd number there made me feel bad.

I did it because for someone with my name and outward appearance, having "man" on my IDs reveals private medical information to everyone who sees the document, information that they aren't entitled to know, which they might act on in deeply undesirable ways.

Taking HRT also isn't something I'm doing to be affirmed, it's something I'm doing because the biological processes signaled by having high levels of estrogen and low levels of testosterone are both something I want, and something that helps my overall well-being and functioning in daily life. Material, real, physiological effects that are well understood, easy to look up, and not about some vague sense that putting estrogen in my bloodstream is a badge of validity handed out by the doctor.

Like at some point I just want to ask these people if they actually believe trans people exist or if they just feel obligated to humor the idea to be nice. Have they actually understood that there are people walking around today with the full effects of transition care already sorted? Have they comprehended that the surgeries exist beyond the occasional picture of someone who's still in recovery?

we met here on tumblr in 2012. and last year in 2025 all three of us met up in person and rummaged through @jadefyre's fridge and went out to cafes and went to a petting zoo together and watched anime on the couch and had a sleepover