trinket ghoul

Draculaura, ghoul, you already established in like the second episode that you and you alone could understand the Cyclops girl, Twyla even explained why, why are you surprised again??

I don’t love doing drama but I’m extremely disappointed with Demily Pyro. I don’t know how best to convey that any sort of gender supremacy is bad and transphobic. It’s alright that masculinity isn’t for you, but treating it as lesser, demonizing it, conflating it 1:1 with misogyny is not okay. This is why I will never take anyone who treats forcefem as a morally upright or even necessary praxis and not as a gender affirming (or detrans I guess I’m not your dad) kink among consenting parties (It’s called consensual non consent for a reason) seriously.

When I was 13 I didn’t take meticulous stock of the social realities of patriarchy and systemic misogyny we live in and go “This feels bad, I bet on the other side they have it better. Being a girl is for losers. I hate femininity and women.” I went, “Yeah, I think wearing a suit at my band recital would be cool……. Since kindergarten I’ve loved short hair on the boys in my class…. Maybe I could convince my parents to let me cut mine….. I don’t like being called Emily, and all the boys in my family have R names. Maybe I’ll go by Rem! I wear horizontally striped shirts and flannel because they make me feel like a boy, and Birkenstocks because my dad wears them. I think Percy Jackson is the coolest person ever and want to be just like him… I love Nico di Angelo and Marshal Lee and Karkat Vantas and Dave Strider….. but like, in a gay way?????”

What part of any of that was me doing a misogyny? What part of that was an internalized hatred for my childhood or femininity vs an inherent deeply held appreciation for masculinity? I still love and appreciate my childhood, and to this fucking day my favorite colors are pink and yellow, I love princesses and fairytales and rainbows and fairies. (Just glance at my FFXIVsona, or trollsona, or practically anywhere in past 13 years of this blog and you will know this all to be true.)

But I’m still a guy? I’m not binary but that doesn’t make me any less of a man. What happened to me was not me betraying the sisterhood or deciding I’d like to experience less misogyny please. My body betrayed me. One day puberty knocked me on the ground and gave me a bunch of unpleasant, painful, ill fitting for me personally aspects to my body, and alongside it the came the social expectations to grow up and become A Woman ™.

I know this can probably be hard to internalize for trans women who find femininity and womanhood to be genuinely liberating, but I know you know it can fucking suck. I know you experience misogyny. I know how impossible it is to be hairless enough, to be skinny but not a rail, plump but not fat, to cover up but not be a prude, wear enough makeup that you look alive but not so much that you look fake. I know because I also experienced that shit! The vast majority of that bad stuff I experienced after I realized I was trans, because teenager and early adulthood is when that stuff was pushed on me in a major way. It was not a motivating factor for my transmasculinity, but it certainly didn’t feel nice growing up being told you have to fit into this rigid box If You Ever Want To Be Taken Seriously As A Woman when I WASN’T EVER A WOMAN.

I understand you feel the exact same way about masculinity and manhood. God fucking knows trans men understand how much hegemonic men and masculinity suck. We still deal with misogynistic men, and people don't ever let us forget masculinity is hell. We understand it’s those patriarchal hegemonic ideals that are impossible to attain even if you’re Whitey CissyMcPrivilege face without violently suppressing others that are the issue, and that masculinity doesn’t have to include that. Violence, power, and control are not the be all end all of manhood. I’m not saying that all trans men are pure angelic thirdgenderfolk that aren’t Actual Real Men because cis men bad, trans men good, or that there are no ragingly misogynistic trans men who try their fucking hardest prove their manhood by climbing that patriarchal ladder by pushing everyone else down around them. If anything, I know that 1) Queer, nonbinary, and cis men alike are all perfectly capable of unpacking and deconstructing their hegemonic manhood if they care enough to try, and that 2) Queer trans guys are one of the main groups those misogynist assholes throw under the bus on their way up.

I know that masculinity has a bad reputation, and for a good reason, but I chose to move forward and make it my own. I understand it wasn’t for you. But why turn around and make it other people’s problem? Why shame men who are comfortable with themselves? Why take the “acceptable” parts of masculinity and say they’re completely fine and should be celebrated when a butch woman does them, and gross yucky disgusting when a man does?

Again, maybe it’s because I’m too nonbinary, but I don’t reject my own femininity. I'm just not a woman, despite what my body and society says. If you are a woman, I’m genuinely so fucking happy for you. Just because it wasn’t for me doesn’t mean I don’t understand there are people out there with different experiences and identities than me. I would never shame trans women for choosing womanhood. I would never shame any women for participating in femininity. I would never blame them for my own personal distance from womanhood, or for the bad experiences I’ve had with misogyny. I know it's not and has never been their fault.

You know whose fault it was? European colonial settlers who codified western gender roles in order to hold racial, cultural, and economic hegemony over native peoples. They made up womanhood to include delicate white ladies of the house and exclude slaves and people of color. They made up manhood to only include white landowners and their strapping sons who traveled to every continent to conquer territory, excluding the native people they stole it from. Gender continues to act in this manner, not only as a hierarchy of power across genders, but within them. I don’t want this baggage to be the lasting legacy of gender. It doesn’t have to be. We made that shit up, and we have the power to change it. (*read more) When I say "it's made up," I don't mean "it doesn't matter or have material effects on the world," or "you can’t fit 101% into one of those boxes if you so choose," but that the boxes are constructed. Traits and behaviors we all have a propensity for as humans were sorted into "masculine" or "feminine", and they shift over time and culture. We all have the capacity to do both, even if society enforces / discourages them to conform or you personally cultivate / avoid them for affirming reasons. You can not define gender based on traits.

This is why there's no one concrete enough definition of "What is a Woman," for bigots, because the only correct answer is, "Whatever the person you're asking says women are to them." "What is a Man," (but a miserable pile of secrets I've been way too open in this post) I don't fucking know. Whatever the hell I am. One's own relationship to gender will always be fundamentally based on personal vibes. Isn’t that wonderful? Don’t you want to live in a world where we have the power of self determination like that? I was under the impression this was the goal for transness as a political project - to be able to choose who we are, change our bodies to fit that, and be respected by others for that decision.

I didn't vibe with masculinity because of any one ideal or trait or bigotry, least of all because I wanted an excuse to be misogynistic. I like men. I've known good men. I want to be like those people I look up to. I didn't become a man to step over, or silence, or protect, or defend people. I'm a huge fucking pushover, but that doesn't have anything to do with my gender. Asking men for specifics of why masculinity appeals to them, why they consider themselves masculine, will never be enough. "I like providing for and protecting people," "I like reaching up on tall shelves and opening pickle jars," "I like short hair and working out with the bros," “I want a penis, a strong jaw, a flat chest,” is met with, "Oh, so women can't provide for or protect people? They can't be strong or tall? Women have short hair or work out? Women can’t have penises or strong jaws or flat chests?" Nobody worth listening to says that women can’t be or have these things. This question is a false premise because gendered traits will never be mutually exclusive. Something that is masc affirming to one person will be fem affirming to another. Asking men why they can't just be butch women is asking them to change their entire relationship to gender, which makes up a key factor in one’s personhood. And idk about you, but I'm not one to change my entire sense of self to please other people. If I was I'd be cis.

Speaking of - the implicit assumption that someone could just simply chose to not be who they are inside is frankly laughable as a trans person. “Ewww why would you want to be a man why can’t you just be normal and a woman,” from a transmasc perspective isn’t at all different than a transphobe saying, “Ewww why would you want to be trans why can’t you just be normal and cis.” This rhetoric implies you want transgender men to detransition and go back in the closet, and transmasc eggs to never break out of their shell and spread their wings. This sentiment is exactly why transmasc people are ashamed of themselves, why they're afraid to come out, to transition, why they're afraid of being too binary. Because at every turn they are told that their true selves are too masculine. Too scary. Too brash. Too loud. Taking up too much space. When they are literally just being people and living their lives, constructing their sense of self like anyone else.

Shaming people for the identities they can’t control, just like cis society shames us for the bodies we can't control, is never fucking cool! The moment someone asks “why can’t ‘X person or group’ just be normal” - instead of being curious, of reaching out and asking, engaging in good faith with the intent to learn about someone different than you - you’ve completely lost me.

So - how does a man look into a mirror and say “Yeah, this is awesome. I love looking like this. I love leaving this impression on others.” Quite simply, actually! Like this 💕

Sparkle on, my friends. It’s Wednesday. Don’t forget to be yourselves, in whatever form that takes! 🧚✨💖🦋🌈🐈☁️💐

...Do you mind? They're in the middle of something...

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.