Remember to take breaks and cool down! You're not lazy, rude, or invalid for needing to disengage from stressors of any kind. Discourse is not easy.
Pinned Post (explanations on what you're working with here):
This Blog:
The ask box is open, and I'll happily have a civil discussion-- one free of ad hominem remarks, and where all involved parties are aware they may be disagreed with-- from all sides of any discourse, barring plurality discourse. I don't do anons anymore.
Tagged "#muted notifications," I occasionally have to mute notifications for various posts of mine. So, don't try getting my attention on anything I've given that tag.
OP:
I'm a disabled, perisex, bigender adult living in the USA. When referring to me, do so with (he/him) and (she/her) pronouns, and call me either OP or Sage.
One such disability of mine is albinism, and I'd love it if people were to ask me questions about the condition. I wish more people cared about albinism beyond the aesthetic, or would at the very least get the aesthetic right.
Due to anti-transgender aggression where I live, I'm birth-stealth to all but my closest friends offline. Still, I call myself transmasculine, and I someday hope to evolve to transfeminine as well-- a femininity that is achievable only after masculine transition, that doesn't give me dysphoria, that meshes in beautifully with my being. (These are my own feelings with my gender; I'm not labelling anyone else.)
Lastly, I'll never ever disclose here whether I'm "TMA" or "TME." I have many reasons, but my biggest one is that I love it when bioessentialists don't know whether to treat me like a fucked-up "female" or "male." I hate the sex binary, and I hate TERFs.
Some of OP's Views (Warning: LONG):
Pro-Landback. Indigenous people have right to the land of their ancestors. Landback isn't about forcing non-indigenous people off the land to get the land back, or making non-Indigenous people second-class citizens.
One's religious beliefs (or lack thereof) should not affect the people who don't share those beliefs.
Pro-self diagnosis. Healthcare systems tend to be shit; tons of people go undiagnosed or misdiagnosed for very real struggles, and they still deserve resources.
Pro-choice. People should be allowed to do with their own bodies what they want, especially if it's to protect themselves and their livelihoods. This also includes that genital-altering operations should not be forced upon people, such as with many intersex infants having their genitals surgically altered (read: not gender-affirming surgeries that people consent to have done to themselves.)
Sex traits are naturally varied and malleable, and binaries in both sex and gender alike should be abolished.
White people (in the USA at least) can be resented and treated indecently, but they are not oppressed for being White. There is no such thing as "reverse racism."
Men (in the USA at least) can benefit from the patriarchy only if they participate in it. The patriarchy affects people of different genders differently, but everybody is hurt by it in some way or another.
Benevolent sexism exists and is harmful. Nobody is helped by the idea of "pink jobs" and "divine femininity." Capabilities are not inherent to one's gender.
Being oppressed and acknowledging that will never inherently mean you blame other oppressed people for it.
Trans people can and do experience unique struggles that cisgender people of the gender they identify as doesn't usually experience, by virtue of being trans. We need to stop referencing cisgender people as gender standards.
Transfeminine people don't have AMAB privilege / male privilege, transmascs don't have "AFAB / female privilege" (those are not real), and non-binary people do not have privilege from their ASAB. Additionally, one's ASAB refers to an event, and is not accurate to describing one's body or mind ("gendered brains" aren't real.)
Pro-MOGAILIOM, radinclus.
Anti-radqueer, pro-alternatives, pro-recovery.
Pro-paraphilia, however, people attracted to beings who cannot consent shouldn't hold contact stance besides anti-contact. "Cannot consent" includes bodily minors, who do not have the life experience and privilege to readily protect themselves from the risks that intimacy with bodily adults carry.
Youthlib, but bodily minors being unable to safely consent to sex with bodily adults is not something they need "liberating" from.
Transracial belongs to people adopted into families of a differing race, and only to those people.
You can identify as homosexual but have experience with others of a different gender. You can also identify as multisexual (bisexual, pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual) but have experience with others of only one gender.
You can be both sexually active and asexual. Asexuality and aromanticism revolve around attraction, not action.
Kink should be done with all participants aware of risks and consenting. RACK (Risk Aware Consensual Kink) is better than SSC (Safe, Sane, Consensual).
Not all coping mechanisms are healthy and productive, and not all facets of the human mind are beneficial-- however, neither is repression.
If I must don a shipcourse label, then I'm neutralship, through a mix of views cemented in both antiship and proship conversations.
Anti-harrassment. Engaging in discourse is not harassment until the arguments "break containment," such as with ad hominem attacks. I hate echo-chambers.
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they've been arguing about malgendering on twitter so here's the truth from me, the arbiter of truth (jk but ive been talking about malgendering long before it became a popular buzzword and heres my understanding of it)
malgendering is a form of transphobia wherein a transphobic person uses their victim's correct gender to harass or demean them. it is meant to be the inverse of misgendering, where a transphobe uses the victim's incorrect gender to harass or demean them.
misgendering towards trans women can be as simple as "youre a man." but malgendering is more insidious, like someone saying "you really are a girl" when she makes a mistake in order to insult her intelligence. the phrase "you really are a girl" is positive when removed from the context of the trans woman making a mistake and the transphobe's sarcastic tone that implies shes stupid in an misogynistic way.
if a trans man does something like standing up for himself against an unfair situation or asks for better accommodations/treatment, and a transphobe wants to use that to imply he is selfish and entitled, they might say "trans men really are men" which again, is a true statement on its own. but in the context of the situation, its clear the transphobe is using the stereotypical worst qualities of men to insult and undermine someone's very identity.
malgendering can be any severity of harm, just like misgendering. my mom slipping up in the first months of my transition and accidentally calling me "she", and a bigot shouting "YOURE A WOMAN YOULL NEVER BE A MAN" at me are both examples of misgendering, but one is much worse than the other and its the same with malgendering. being told "trans men are the men of the trans community" as an insult is annoying and rude but not a big deal. however, right now ICE is torturing trans men in concentration camps by forcing them to do pointless and grueling labor. and when they become exhausted, theyre told "I thought you were a man. if youre really a man this should be easy for you" these are both examples of malgendering. one is a microaggression, the other is literal torture.
malgendering happens equally to both trans men and trans women, its not something that is unique to anyone because it is a form of transphobia. the strategy is that if a transphobe tries to make a trans persons life as their true gender so miserable and unsafe, detransitioning seems like the safer and happier option. its psychological torment, moreso than the plain and obvious insult of intentional misgendering. so dont let it happen, call it out when you see it and dont be fooled by transphobes trying to erase the context and be like "what!! what i said was true!"
Humans are a keystone species, not inherently parasitic or evil or destructive, for most of our history we had a very unique & beautiful &beneficial role in the ecosystem of this planet, we acted an ecological knowledge reservoir, learning, preserving & accumulating knowledge, & using that deep knowledge of the land to form very beneficial & mutual relationships with the land, many experts think that the average hunter gatherer actually had more knowledge accumulated than the average person in modern civilization
We used this knowledge to form a deeply symbiotic/mutual beneficiary relationship with other life forms, for example spreading their seeds of the best flowers to attract/help bees to create the healthiest, tastiest honey we would later eat, this would also attract many other beneficial pollinators & make flower & pollinator populations more vibrant & healthy, we would clear out competitive plants in order for edible, medicinal & other helpful plants to grow faster, healthier & more often, we would hunt herbivores that killed all these plants, we would spread the seeds of anti-parasitic plants to prevent parasites from attacking the plants, we even mastered controlled fires which helped clear dead wood & barriers that restricted growth in forests, we acted as “allies” to much of the life in the world, our deep knowledge, memory & constant learning gave us a unique, mutually beneficial & highly beneficial role in all ecosystems, which is why we spread to every continent
When giant ground sloths went extinct humans stepped in to preserve the avocado among other things that relied on the giant to survive, a mutualistic relationship between avocados & humans replaced the one between ground sloths & avocados
For the vast majority of human history, we have been a beneficial part of the ecosystem, this modern consumer society, is just a long term result of the natural mechanisms that limited the bullies & egotistical among us from getting too powerful & influential in hunter gatherer societies just not being effective at challenging bullies in many agricultural communities, while some agricultural communities invented new mechanisms to be challenge bullies & power-seeking people, many did not & eventually this led to kingdoms & empires, which led to colonialism, which led to capitalism, which eventually led to the industrial revolution & modern extractivist & consumer societies & the hell these societies are inflicting upon the planet
i wish we were able to talk about women's rights without someone mentioning how much they do or don't want to have sex with them. i don't care if you're a lesbian Stop finding worth in women purely from their perceived attractiveness
"I think women should not be expected to shave for societal respect / to avoid discrimination" "yeah🤤 i love bush" ok well that's not what we're talking about is it.
i hate how many posts about trans women deserving respect always devolve into "I love girldick" or "trans rights but I don't want to date a trans person" because that's entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. you should not respond to feminism with "YESSS I loveeee you because I see you as nothing but a sex object" you people sound like other men I get stuck talking with that end up saying "free the nipple so I can see boobies in public" and thinking they're feminists. why can't we just respect women regardless of your attraction to them or not. why does it need to be brought up in every conversation regarding their rights
Begging people to stop referencing the radical feminist theory of "sexed socialization" ("male socialization" vs "female socialization"), and fighting for it under a new definition, when they really just mean "socially-imposed gender" ("socialized as a girl", "socialized as a boy.")
What you mean has already been given terms and theory.
You just have to listen to intersex people and not talk over them.
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"Fiction isn't real, you can hurt fictional people without being a bad person" and "what you write says something about what you believe" and "what media portrays as good/normal/desireable vs bad/rare/undesireable has an influence on its readers" CAN AND SHOULD COEXIST!
It's fairly uncontroversial around here to say that representation in fiction is a good thing, and that showing queer/disabled/female/nonwhite characters as normal elements of society has the potential to advance the acceptance of those groups in real life.
That is fiction having an effect in the real world.
Yet to say that authors can write harmful things is met with absolute denial around the same parts here. "It's just fiction", "let people have fun", "it's not real", etc.
But those aren't mutually exclusive?
Everyone talks about how Rowling's portrayal of goblins as hook-nosed, treacherous, communist money hoarders is antisemitic and reproduces antisemitic tropes, but nobody talks about how many common fiction tropes reproduce misogyny, homophobia, etc.
Often it's not the decisions the author consciously makes that are at issue – we all agree that rape is, uh, very bad actually and you shouldn't do it! – but the subconscious ones.
"You can write about your blorbo being raped and nobody gets hurt, your readers read it voluntarily and your blorbo isn't real" is a true and valid statement.
"It's possible to write irresponsibly or write harmful things" is as well.
Among many other reasons, the prevalent "you can write anything you want at all and any criticism whatsoever amounts to censorship, because authors can never write anything harmful" mindset is one reason I refuse to describe myself as "proship", even though most of those "anti" kids would put me in that box.
Fan fiction can perpetuate biphobia. I've read fics that attempted to be trans ally fics and fucked it up so spectacularly, they circled back to using tons of transphobic tropes. Fics that trivialised eating disorders, fics with inaccurate and stigmatising/misleading descriptions of PTSD. Don't even let me get into the misogyny that so many slash tropes are drenched in. We could talk about condoms vs barebacking in slashfic, the disproportionate overrepresentation of twinks vs bears, fic-typical dick sizes and how far removed from reality that is; ask what expectations that conveys to people who read it as teenagers.
Or, to circle back to OP's point with a much more banal example: the oft-cited difference between American and Japanese omegaverse fics, with American-written omegas struggling to pay for heat suppressants and Japanese-written ones getting them free from their health insurance.
And it's not that I'm saying everyone has a responsibility to only produce educational, inspiring media that opens with a safety PSA. Far from it; I know I don't.
But I want people to understand that what they believe, especially subconsciously, informs what they write. What is widely believed is widely written, absorbed by readers, and reproduced by them.
In how many slash fics does the canonically straight character turn out to be gay, rather than bi, and his relationship with his canon girlfriend is erased or rewritten to have meant nothing?
In how many slash fics is a canon straight pairing broken up so the guys can get together, rathern than going for polyamory?
And how many of those break them up by making the girlfriend a nasty bitch who's terrible to her boyfriend?
How does that compare to societal attitudes with regards to bisexuality, polyamory, and women?
I want everyone to be able to write whatever they want. Anything. AO3 doesn't censor anything and I believe firmly that that's a good thing. But I resent the idea that writing, and fan fiction in particular, exists in a vacuum free from consequences. What you think shapes what you write shapes what your readers think – most likely not your single individual fic, but the sum of everything a person reads, and your fic is one small part of that.
.
.
Below the cut is an example. Warning for rape, panic attacks etc., self-harm mentioned, etc.
A good while ago, I read a fic that genuinely left me speechless. A couple notice their best friend is depressed, so they strongarm him (I can't describe it any other way) into letting them "take care of him" and basically adopt him into their home. And at one point, they have a threesome.
The next morning, the guy freaks out a little about having slept with his best friends. And here's where it gets complicated.
It was very clear the author intended that scene as "cute little 'oh shit' moment, followed by extreme fluff and cuteness".
It was, to me, equally clear that was not what it was.
Because the guy's reaction? Textbook post-rape trauma reaction. I know how that looks; I've dealt with too many of my friends going through it. What the author was describing in a surprising amount of detail was a panic attack, dissociation, etc. It was almost eerily similar to people I've seen.
And that would all be fine, if not for the fact the author seemed to think it was a cute morning after scene.
What does it say about the author and their life that their apparently genuine idea of a cute morning after scene is a massive dose of sexual trauma and they don't realise it?
I shudder to think about what they might suffer or have suffered in their own relationships, but worse, I fear for the readers, who almost all of them left ecstatic comments about how cute the fic was. I hope by the time they get into relationships, they've learned that having a dissociative episode, feeling numb, self-harming, and having a panic attack after sex is usally not a good thing.
One day we will come to a societal understanding that "treat a child like a child, not like an adult" basically only really means "do not try to extract things from them" — whether it's sex or labor or emotional support or any other thing an adult may try to extract from a child — not "surveil the shit out of them and give them zero choices and never treat them like people ever" but I fear today is not that day, either among most of the world or among this site's so-called youthlib community
Kadji Amin joins Jules to talk the category nonbinary, the asymmetry of trans masculinity and trans femininity, and a shared love of f*gottr
I just found this and it's really bad
Wtf is this seriously.
Not only is this just an absolute circle jerk, but they view enben (in 2021 mind you) As a political statement, as something like oooh we're just shaking things up, we're so silly goofy.
Hey how about ask us?
This is the lady who goes to further her reactionary hatred of non binary people with her "transgender liberalism" article.
At least in 2021 they both treated us like some strange tropical bird they were studying. Now it's pure blame and hatred.
This is the kind of "scholars" that make me want to be more loudly mogai. Because the self is the point, you don't need anyone's external evaluation in order to be. I don't live my gender in relation to other people, it's not an act, it's just a static piece of info about me.
Also, "if everyone treated me like I was okay, I'd not transition" is a very strange argument to bring out. I don't think we should treat trans people harshly in hopes it'll push them to transition. That's fucked up.
Okay yeah I read this article and it sucks ass. Also this reblog got longer than anticipated to under a cut it goes.
They keep talking about nonbinary people in the abstract, and going like "ohh if only we could understand what nonbinary femmes think their identity means! Are they trying to figure out the boundary between being a gay man and being a trans woman??? What are their intentions???? If only we could know!" like. Jules. You know you are allowed to talk to nonbinary people right? And listen to their words? You don't have to speculate on them from your ivory transsexual tower, helpless to understand their strange and foreign minds.
Not to mention how they continually treat "nonbinary" as, seemingly, equivalent to non-transitioning, and draw a sharp distinction between "transsexuals" and "nonbinary people." They talk in this frustrating, masturbatory way about their many Intellectual Transsexual Questions for nonbinary people and just projecting all their exorsexist bullshit onto nonbinary people, and acting like its impossible for them to just ask a nonbinary person?
this whole paragraph:
Whenever I would think of genderqueer (the term in vogue in my twenties) and nonbinary as positions, I would imagine them as truly heroic. As naming people who are able to exist in a space where others don’t see who you know yourself to be, but you just don’t care. Your sense of yourself is so strong you don’t need to change your body to get other people to see you in a certain way; you just know that other people are wrong and that you’re right and that’s okay. And I thought I could never be strong enough to do that. In my life I had associated it with the most unbearable dysphoria, the most unbearable gap between how I was seeing myself and how other people were seeing me, especially once I had taken on the pronouns he/him but was trying to transition without testosterone.
So, I thought of nonbinary as this heroic position for a long time and then, more recently, I’ve begun to have doubts and think, well, maybe that’s not how it feels.
LISTEN, KADJI. I DO NOT WANT TO BE YOUR NONBINARY HERO. I DO NOT WANT TO BE SEEN AS TRULY HEROIC.
They seem just. Obsessed, with this image of nonbinary people as "brave" for being visibly androgynous?
[J]: [...] But this is the problem because we don’t have an operative, positive account of what’s at stake in nonbinary trans femininity, so it gets filtered through these really superficial lenses. Like, “well, they get treated like shit all the time, but they’re really resolute, plus it’s empowering to have facial hair and wear lipstick,” and I’m like, yes, okay, but tell me more! I want to know.
Kadji: Maybe my major question is why there isn’t more of a discourse about all of this? Even an intra-community discourse where questioning people could go online and hear “this is what it means to identify with this as opposed to that, this is what you do.” I don’t know if I should read that as a refusal or—
Jules: Or just the impossibility of speaking outside a discourse of gender? Which in some ways, nonbinary is trying to do in a really sophisticated way, but which remains very hard. How can you simultaneously dissent from a system but still maintain its central presumption, which is that gender is a fundamentally important facet of the self? That seems like a really complex tangle that, technically, is not unique to being nonbinary. Even cis women have this problem to some extent, but there’s something really interesting in the nonbinary case that is not being unleashed.
How can we understand the phenomenologies attached to different trans identities of this moment and what their claims are on the relationship between the self and the social? It seems like the contemporary taxonomy of gender identity and expression suggests that every identity position is valid so long as it is articulated and can therefore be respected, and in that sense it becomes devoid of content. How do you give an account of yourself in this situation?
This just feels like "I don't get nonbinary people" soaked in fifty-three layers of academic language, all to avoid confronting the fact that nonbinary people are nonbinary in the same way a trans woman is a trans woman. They just cannot help but insist that nonbinary people are "heroic" and "trying to [speak outside the discourse of gender] in a really sophisticated way," like they are truly only able to conceptualize nonbinary identity as a political move and act helpless about their ability to talk to a nonbinary person and take what they say seriously without secretly re-interpreting it as whatever bullshit they want (such as "nonbinary people think they are soooooo much better than us binary people!" looking at you, Jules.)
More exorsexism:
But one of the things you and I have been trying to understand is what’s the historical trajectory here to nonbinary. For a long time, the line between a faggot—a really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queen—and a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture. That you might go all the way, that it might be horrifying and abjecting, or it might be something like the total freedom of feminization or castration, or even bottomhood (to which I laugh, as a femme top). It’s this sort of construct of the gay imaginary. But it also leads to this question: since there’s so little space for nonbinary trans femmes today and there’s a lot of pressure on them to put out something legible, they have to use this taxonomy of “oh, I’m not a man or woman, but I’m definitely not a man”—and then what? I’m always searching for the positive account that comes after “here is what I’m not,” and I’d like to see more cultural space granted to that. If you’re a nobinary trans femme that has a largely aesthetic component to your transition—say, makeup, clothes, and pronouns—what is it that differentiates you positively from the faggot as a gay boy or feminine person who is not a man?
I want to underline that there has been precious little oxygen accorded to that, so this is not a criticism of any of these people. Not enough has been granted to them to affirm their desires. And since there is so much pressure in our contemporary taxonomy to separate gender from sexuality, it seems to make the situation even more impossible.
I am just. so confused by her confusion here? Once again, Jules, JUST TALK TO NONBINARY FEMMES ABOUT THIS??????? Why in the WORLD are you having this conversation with a binary trans man. What purpose does this serve except jerking each other off on how much nonbinary people confuse you and seem to have no phenomenological basis for their existence.
[Kadji]: So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection. But as time has gone by, I’ve started to wonder if maybe that’s not what they’re doing, and it’s still unclear to me because of the lack of a space for that kind of discourse, or a refusal to explain themselves in that kind of way. I’m quite surprised, given the amount of space that was devoted in the late 1990s to early 2000s to figuring out the butch/trans man proximity, that there’s still a vacuum for that kind of discourse on the other side. How do you know if you’re a gay man or a trans woman? How do you know if you’re a trans woman or a nonbinary femme? This contributes to my lack of understanding of what a phenomenological position for nonbinary femme might be.
Again, I don’t know if that’s what any nonbinary femmes are trying to do, but if that is what some are trying to do, I’m not sure it’s working. As in, I’m not sure that enough people know how to read or respond accordingly to a trans femininity that isn’t either gay effeminacy or trans womanhood.
WHO GIVES A FUCK IF PEOPLE KNOW HOW TO RESPOND TO US. for a lot of nonbinary people its live illegibly but openly or be in the closet forever and want to kill yourself because there is no space for you. I hate to pull the "we have dysphoria" card, but like, WE DO HAVE DYSPHORIA TOO, YOU KNOW? for a lot of nonbinary femmes there is no fucking "project" other than living a life that makes you feel real despite never being given any social reality. They go on to talk about how butches apparently have more cultural legibility, but I do not understand why the "faggot" or femboy or drag queen is not seen as a nonbinary femme equivalent? There is plenty of hostility from cis woman butches towards nonbinary and transmasculine butches. I guess the point is that all of those rely upon the assumption of attraction to men.... but so does butch, and there are gay transmascs who still identify as butch, butch4butch (which for some was a way of being a gay trans men when the option did not seem available) has always been treated negatively, and once again. Why is nonbinary identity being judged around people can get what we are by looking at us?
& then there's the same old bullshit about how transmascs have always had more cultural space and "reasons to transition" (what?), alongside a quote in which she says "and who the fuck in this world is allowed to desire to be a woman?" tell me you know nothing about how misogyny works. People raised as women are expected to desire to be a woman, obligated to do so. I do not know why the fuck people cannot get it in their heads that yes, womanhood is treated as a lesser state of existence, but for those who are expected to fulfill the role of daughtermotherwife, that lesser state is what they are meant to be happy with. They also claim there is "so much more cultural space for mascs, including nonbinary, and there’s so much more history (for butches and non-binary mascs)." Which. Fucking. Where.
ultimately, i think this final part of this interview hits more clearly on what issue they are taking with nonbinary people:
[Kadji] This is a hypothesis, but I do think today’s taxonomies seem more confusing than ever—though perhaps that doesn’t feel true to people who are coming into their genders today. But I believe that they are more confusing than they are helpful to actual queer and trans people. [...]
And so, I imagine that today, when there is a huge proliferation of options and the options often overlap or are synonymous without substantial phenomenological accounts to differentiate them, and the pressure to come into a true self has never been greater than it used to be—it seems just flabbergasting and impossible.
What I’ve realized is that I believe that the matter of gender is practical and relational. It’s not about who you are inside, it’s more about how you would feel most comfortable in the world. It’s not Who are you? but How do you want to live?
Had that been the discourse when I was coming up, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t have to figure out who I am on the inside, I just have to figure out how I want to live.
look, i'm a pragmatist and a phenomonologist, i also see gender as being to some degree inherently practical and relational. but as a nonbinary person, i do not have the luxury of living the way that makes me feel fucking comfortable. my feelings of being nonbinary are not abstract, they materially impact me. nonbinary identity is about survival, to me, point blank period. survival comes first, survival is where the term nonbinary/genderqueer/whatever terms we use emerges because it emerges from us no longer being able to live without giving voice to our sense of otherness.
demanding nonbinary provide a phenomenological account that satisfies binary "transsexuals" who define their transsexuality opposed to nonbinary people, using the language of "gender is practical and relational, not who you are inside," maybe i'm being dramatic here when i say this, but its a threat to nonbinary survival. patriarchy makes us illegible and then we are punished i mean critiqued i mean "we're just asking questions!!" for not being legible. because we practice, in Jules' words, "nonbinary idealism" and are all rich white people who are just doing this to be heroic and make ourselves look more #woke than binary transsexuals.
anyways, shoutout to one of the people in the comments who said:
you two talk as though non-binary femmes (heroically, but also for fun) put on some makeup and change their pronouns and thereby become illegible. for my part, i have always felt illegible (how is that for a phenomenology of non-binary gender).
most of the answers to your questions here are in your own the text if you begin from the assumption that non-binary people have a genuine experience of their gender as neither men nor women.
^ literally exactly the point. Jules and Kadji are exorsexist and fundamentally do not seem to grasp the idea that nonbinary people feel nonbinary and that feeling nonbinary has a real impact on your life regardless of whether you want it to or not. They literally cannot, or refuse to, see nonbinary gender as functioning the same as their genders, and so treat nonbinary people like a peculiar species of not-quite-trans with mysterious motivations, and not just like normal fucking trans people.
All in all, as a nonbinary transsexual, everything JGP says about nonbinary people makes me feel like I am going fucking crazy.
It feels like Jules doesn't even talk to trans women who aren't strongly tied to cis gay culture that much, so a lot of this reads as "but how do non-binary transfems fit into cis gay culture?" Like, "For a long time, the line between a faggot—a really effeminate gay person, a queen, or even a drag queen—and a trans femme was blurry and there is a lot of cultural anxiety about that slide in Western culture." And then Kadji saying: "So, I thought, okay, gay male culture has done its best to kill the possibility of faggotry, but here are nonbinary femmes bravely trying to resuscitate it as a living possibility rather than a site of abjection."
And, like, speaking for myself (as an agender trans woman), I just don't occupy a space in cis gay culture. So yeah they're going to have trouble fitting me in there. IDK this feels like high school when peers called me a faggot and thought I must be a cis gay boy because I was obviously queer and that was the only kind of queer they could think of. But I'm ace and I'm not a man and I'm not into feminine gender expression. I am definitely not a gay man being extra faggy about it. My relationship to the culture of gay men is that of an outsider with a history of people incorrectly thinking I'm one of y'all.
And in terms of internal identity vs. relational identity, my internal identity is "agender" and my relational identity is "trans woman". Reading through those bits from their conversation, I think I'm not even on their radar enough that it's occurred to them to interrogate my positionality or whatever. I'm not "brave" or trying to make a statement or primarily interested in the aesthetics or anything like that. In society I hope people read me as a woman who isn't into feminine gender expression, because that's a reasonably comfortable and reasonably socially accepted thing to be. I don't put the non-binary aspects of my identity front-and-center in my interactions with people because I don't want the hassle.
Anyways yeah they should both talk to more transfems. Sure, there are trans women and other transfems who are strongly associated with the culture of cis gay men. But if that's kind of the entire landscape they can imagine for transfemininity they gotta get out of their bubble every now and then.
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It is misgendering to shoo multigender people away from spaces made for people of at least one of their genders. For instance: kicking multigender men out of MLM spaces, or kicking multigender women out of WLW spaces.
How you perceive them beyond how they identify is entirely in your ballpark, and isn't something they should have to carry the burden of, irregardless of if they present more like how you'd expect somebody of just one of their genders to present.
They also shouldn't have to carry the burden of not knowing which one gender of theirs somebody is going to laser-focus on, and worrying how that's subsequently going to determine how they're treated.
It really annoys me when people say that trans men have privilege over trans women because “men of minority groups always have privilege over women of the same minority group”. Like okay but that’s cis people. That’s cis men. It’s entirely different for trans people??? Name me one privilege or benefit that trans men get over trans women that doesn’t require the trans man to be stealth.
It pains me to inform you all that we have found @transfaguette He unfortunately has passed on. Thank you to everybody who aided us, reposted, and had conversations with us to help find him. I wish I had better news to share.
He’s at rest now.
Please take care of yourselves and each other. You are loved, you are cared for, you are so much more important than you could ever realize.
I never met him, but there's something that aches deep down knowing that one of our community is gone. I hope there's something beyond all this for us, so people like him can know real peace.
Just, look, if you're transmasc, nonbinary, transfem, anything; I don't want to lose you, I want you to know happiness here with us. Please, please if you even think of something like this, reach out; to me, to anybody. You are loved. I don't have to already know you to know I love you.
if you think saying "trans men who have gynecological body parts require healthcare for those parts and thus are affected by medical misogyny" is equal to saying "all trans men are actually women" then sweetheart you might be a bioessentialist
Of course the only transfems you hear about are perisex binary trans women. How else would society keep peddling the narrative of "men become women to get into women's spaces and assault the vulnerable?"
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People talking about the lack of variety in nonbinary rep by saying that most nonbinary rep is "woman lite or AFAB" like they're trying to be allies to people AMAB while being microaggressive in all directions. They don't even realize they're implying they don't think nonbinary people AMAB can achieve "womanly" looks/etc. They're equating (subjective) femininity with womanhood. They're implying that cases where the character's AGAB was unspecified was still somehow about being AFAB. They're implying all actual women only have a certain look. They're rebinarizing nonbinary folk, categorizing us according to what we were assigned at birth, and then saying they want the rep to look less binary? They're leaving no room for intersex nuance. Or how the actual issues with some rep trends are more to do with centering of skinny folk with minimal body hair—people's shallow acceptance, with aversion to when genderqueers don't seem more "feminine" or "woman-passing". Nonbinary characters, especially ones made by nonbinary writers/designers, shouldn't be called "[perisex cis] woman lite" as often as they are.
