Read the essay on Neocities before going into the reading list.

"Sexing the Body", Anne Fausto-Sterling

"The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1", Anne Fausto-Sterling

"Gender Trouble", Judith Butler

"Bodies That Matter", Judith Butler

"The Straight Mind & Other Essays", Monique Wittig

"The New Woman", Emma Heaney

"Feminism Against Cisness", various, edited by Emma Heaney

"Is a Cervix Cis? My Year in the Stirrups", Emma Heaney

"The Arcana of Reproduction", Leopoldina Fortunati

"Women on the Market", Luce Irigaray

"Understanding Transmisogyny", Talia Bhatt

"Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity", C. Riley Snorton

"The Invention of Women", Oyeronke Oyewumi

"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book", Hortense J. Spillers

"A Short History of Trans Misogyny", Jules Gill-Peterson

"Deixis and the Queer/Trans Struggle", Nsámbu Za Suékama

"Racial-Class Paternalism and the Trojan Horse of Anti-transmasculinity", Nsámbu Za Suékama

"Transgender Marxism", various, edited by Juliana Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke

"Sleights of Reason", Mary Beth Mader

👁️🍄🪸‬ ‪@bloomfilters.plus‬ August 10, 2025 instead of treating queerness & transness as a minority it probably better helps to understand that it is basically the protagonist force of the still-ongoing long 21st century version of the sexual revolution.

people treat legal gay rights as a concession and not the prologue to the future of humankind. think bigger!

taking heterosexuality and cisness as a default norm inherent to human beings rather than institutions imposed upon embodiment and sexuality is still kind of a '20th century hangover' of the left, one of many that needs to be tossed out with sharper analysis & practice.

i see so many cultural psychosexual crises over the possibility of straight men having gay sex or whatever and it is just so stupid we have to put up with this. my god. they're already doing it they just gotta hide it anyway. read jane ward!

👁️🍄🪸 ‪@bloomfilters.plus‬ June 18, 2025

Quote:

very often you'll see reactionaries like openly state on the net that they can't wait for [trans women] to be undergrounded again from public life so they can get back to just getting off to our bodies as 20 diff porn categories & physically+sexually abusing us in the semi privacy of "male spaces".

(April 11-12, 2026) 👁️🍄🪸 ‪@bloomfilters.plus‬ when people argue about animanga characters potentially being trans or not and start pointing to stuff like mentions of legal records or infographics i feel like the people involved are just straight up unaware that currently you still need bottom surgery for legal sex change in japan & literally last year only a lower court in sapporo ruled it unconstitutional? "[character] lives as a woman, but is actually male" takes a much different context here lol.

when, in con cafe, tao in ch 6 mentions that she sometimes boymodes "because of the family register", she informs the reader of two key pieces of information: she wants to dress more fem but can't because of her assigned sex on the koseki, and she hasn't had bottom surgery yet.

folks please remember that legal gender change without surgery is an extremely recent thing and mostly restricted to anglo america, latin america, and parts of europe.

i guess i wanted to bring this up b/c people were fighting over kirara but it matters less than you think. by this argument a lot of trans women are technically femboys or whatever lmao.

reminds me of when people are like "this character's canonical pronouns are X" the character's pronouns in languages that commonly use third person pronouns are always a translation decision.

hunter schafer? femboy [her passport forcibly listed M after the trump admin changes].

kalina2hu.bsky.social ‪@kalina2hu.bsky.social‬ whispers this is the malicious intent of kirara femboy discourse. People genuinely actually believe that you existentially are not and cannot be a trans woman if you haven't already been recognized by the law in specifically Anglo America and Europe as one and they're even still mad that the surgical requirement got waived.

Angyo ‪@angyo.bsky.social‬ [character in thing] kills me for this. She comes up to [other character] at the end and asks to get a body like her game avatar that seems like a girl. I feel like that's really explicit esp given how much importance GRS has in japan, but it's rarely acknowledged since she doesn't say "I'm a girl." Just asks for GRS.

[Ed note: I will provide the character name + source material context under the cut.]

👁️🍄🪸 ‪@bloomfilters.plus‬ the effect of trans discourses over here has had a funny result in that, in discussions of fiction, people further entrench cisness to be universal - that is to say, a character can literally desire transition but still be cis b/c "cis people can have/do X" - but a character is simply never trans unless they either turn to the camera and say the exact or the author has to confirm it. this cisnormativity, which tends to treat characters as real people and sex as an impossible paradox, has had a chilling effect on queer people being able to recognize trans readings outside of headcanons.

i'm not even talking about a specific medium or regional context here. i think people should confront cisnormativity and try to uncover the textuality of how gender operates on the level of subjectivity and "what would keep people cis and not a little trans". especially b/c trans experiences can be so complex. i wonder if people would read "boymoder" as a cis guy ?!

in the brief moment the "maybe denji isn't a guy" reading was popular it felt like a lot of people didn't understand that this came from two things: his disdain for other men and boys and his strong aversion to the typical route of (what people would call) socialization into being a Man.

the funny thing about part 2 is that this was always unstable (fighting with himself) and this eventually changed, and he fully eventually bought into the socialization (as the Protagonism of Chainsaw Man), culminating in the final words he said as CSM. but w/o this context of not treating gender (cisness) as simply arbitrary & fixed, seeing "boy" as the androgynous position (denji was a mother figure to nayuta!) and "interrogating the path that turns a boy into a man" one gets an interesting reading!

👁️🍄🪸 ‪@bloomfilters.bsky.social‬ August 21, 2025

this sort of irony that occurs where the "anime femboy" archetype is a legibility lens on youth transfemininity filtered by heterosexual consumption (the -boy as much as in tomboy; subsumption to feminization), but feminine men are in fact prolific they're just in like, shoujosei, yaoi, danmei, etc.

i think the "gap" here sort of speaks to the way, as well, that feminine men, often queer, get treated by straight men in general. the guys who very valiantly attack a youth transfeminine narrative reading also are in fact utterly uninterested in stories of feminine men.

the other part of the "gap" here is what "boy" means. boy is the gender of ambiguity under patriarchy - it's the collection of the man-to-be, the failed-man, the androgyne, the disguised woman, the girl-fag. boy's subordination to man is how you'd see queer men and racialized men be called 'boys'.

it is in fact not a coincidence that cultural touchstones for how nonbinary genders become legible to wider heterosexual society often revolve around 'boyish-ness'. under this state of affairs, the girl, the woman, and the man are far too 'gendered'.

anyways, so is this saying you can't let a character be called a femboy? actually, i dont really care, you can do whatever you want. the broader point is that the representations and positions for how these characters operate can often be polysemous and additive, and the opposition to trans readings - even those that can supplement narrative - doesn't often come from a place of actually caring about the kinds of populations these characters reflect rather than a strategy of defending particular modes of consumption.

lots of boys, feminine or not, learn they might have more in common with women and girls than they think.

[Ed note: By this bloomfilters means to think about the fact that some transmascs prefer "boy," others "men", others still "both" or "neither," and how all of this intersects with "boy" as the locus of more gender ambiguity than "man" in our culture and language.]

~

here's a demonstration: ask transmasculine lesbians vs trans men whether the term "boy" or "man" or "both" feels more or less comfortable to them.

i'm contextualizing transmasculinity here b/c of the particular way transmasculinity constitutes a 'wide position' and how anti-transmasculinity operates to try to reduce trans men to "boys" and transmasculine boys (not-girls) to "girls" (transitive), but because at the same time because naming gender is also the structure of the assertion of communicating desire and embodiment in a culture of sexuality, it sometimes becomes contextual and complicated too!

(also "or neither" is implicit but for this demonstration we are looking at the relative rather than the absolute.)

here's a second demonstration: Yaoi.

~

[Also a couple of essays that came up in the threads.]

https://newsocialist.org.uk/an-anatomy-of-the-soy-boy/ (tumblr doesn't like to embed this for some reason)

‪👁️🍄🪸‬ ‪@bloomfilters.plus‬ January 1, 2026

the more you believe sex is inherent + immutable (whether biologically i.e. "male"/"female" or temporally i.e. "amab"/"afab") rather than a relation someone is weighed against (you are judged by how you adhere or subvert Sex, i.e. things are Sexed) the more incorrect the theory & politics get.

Sexing the body is just one main Process of the patriarchal system of Gender, specifically its dynamics of the "social mode 'Heterosexuality'" oriented around family, kinship, property, labour division, & the restraining of desire into gender, always tied 2 Race & Class and thus political economy.

~

👁️🍄🪸 ‪@bloomfilters.bsky.social‬ August 20, 2025

you all got to understand that the extreme denial ppl have of trans readings or narratives unless it is said directly to the audience comes from an environment where lots of cis and trans ppl alike do not actually believe transness is an ontological mode of living and simply a cisfailure state.

how many times have you heard "in an ideal world transness wouldnt exist [but cisness would, implicitly or explicitly]"? or all the arguments about transness, pro or against, that treat it simply as a particularly exceptional minority.

a lot of people ask why a project of a map of transfeminine consciousness is important to some trans women and part of it is because if this did not act as a collective work of knowledge production then there would only be fragmentation and isolation and an inability to know your body.

[Excerpts from The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward.]

Two decades before the emergence of what we now call queer theory, lesbian feminists argued for a vision of sexuality as a site of choice and political resistance. A far cry from today’s “born this way” approach to sexual orientation, which has been most widely embraced by gay men, lesbian feminists claimed their love of women as a cultivated political stance, an act of opposition to heteropatriarchy.

~

Some years ago, I was chatting about parenting with a lesbian couple with a child close in age to my own. We arrived at the topic of children’s sexuality, and one of the lesbian moms made a comment I have heard before, a comment that lesbian and gay people are perhaps more likely to share openly than lefty straight parents: “If I am to be totally honest, I would prefer, for our child’s sake, that he isn’t gay. We don’t want him to have to deal with the challenges that come with being gay.” Despite the stark reality of homophobic bullying, this logic didn’t ring true to me, and I was struck by how normalized it had become to say something about queerness (“No one would choose to be gay” or “I don’t want my child to be gay like me”) that most people I know would be quite unlikely to say about almost any other form of difference subject to violence and oppression. I then asked these lesbian moms, “Do you really feel that way? Do you feel like your own life has been so terrible that you wish your parents could have saved you from it? Do you feel that being straight would have been better for you?” These women both smiled, looked at each other, laughed, and said, “No. I see your point.”

~

👁️🍄🪸 ‪@bloomfilters.bsky.social‬ August 21, 2025

the vast majority of transfeminine "representation" in culture is a "men writing women" scenario (even in cases where the writers arent men!) until like extremely recently.

this is also true of ethnographic accounts of transfemininity. i think part of how transmisogyny operates as a misogyny is that the idea that subjective interiority to the trans woman is assumed absent, so she is primarily made symbolic.

the revolution of the 19th century novel was how (mostly cis) women of various bgs used this form to advance interiority and subjectivity. thus, writing and storytelling - literacy historically denied to all women, and still is - has had an exploratory place in feminist consciousness under modernity.