#prow talks

Girlfriend lives in fucking Kentucky and I'm in VA and yeah there's nothing either of us can do about that yet but it fucking sucks. But I know I can't just complain about that to her 24/7 bc, you know, all that would do is maybe make her feel bad too and what good would that do

Everyone's like get a cat you have a cat right? :) yes I do but a cat can't go to the movies with me or take a ride in the convertible or watch TV or eat take out with me or talk to me animatedly for hours about a special interest. A cat is not a fucking substitute for human interaction

I’ve just had a lot of Thoughts on t*rf nonsense and rhetoric ever since realizing I was trans (and most likely gay), me realizing I’m actually pan and that I only felt discomfort with anything other than ‘gay’ bc of fear of being misgendered and dysphoria, then my girlfriend realizing she was trans...

I see a lot of t*rfs acting like trans people are gonna force cis people (women, ofc, bc they couldn’t give a shit less what happens to men) to have sex with them and like...

i just wanna talk about what happened with me and my partner. I realized I was trans, I told my partner (she went by he/him pronouns at the time). She was shocked and, as she was undergoing a lot of stress at the time and the relationship was long distance, she was uncertain. She took some time to process it and ultimately said she would accept me, though she seemed apprehensive of me undergoing medical transitioning in the future. This kind of hurt, but I assumed she needed time - only to realize later she fundamentally misunderstood how things worked. We fought. We fought, because she had seemed onboard until she learned that other things might happen, aside from me getting a bigger clit and a somewhat more masc appearance.

But you know what?

We talked about it....

Shocker, huh?

We talked. We had an objective conversation, after emotions had calmed, about whether we still wanted this relationship. We did. So we talked more. She came to understand that being trans didn’t make me suddenly a new person, I was still me, and just wanted to experiment with gender presentation. SHE decided that SHE WANTED to continue the relationship with me, after I asked her objectively, if she did not want it to continue.

And you know what?

She realized that maybe her appreciation for feminine features, her envy for many women, may not be simple attraction. As I talked more about my dysphoric experience, she realized it sounded painfully familiar.

And when she was having these thoughts, we talked.

It started with her testing occasional feminine pronouns (the bigender label), before fully realizing she was binary transfem.

It.... it honestly saddens me, do... do people not think they can talk to their partners? If you feel you can’t talk to your partner about stuff like this... Then I’m sorry, but you might need to try working at trusting one another more, at being open to harder discussions.

Me and my girlfriend may have fought, but we never, EVER resulted to physical blows, name-calling, or anything else. We had some heated discussion over the topic at hand - more like a passionate debate than anything - but nobody was ever directly insulted. These harsher discussions lasted two days, with discussions after - while occasionally tense - never rising to anger again.

We love one another. I love her. I love her for HER... I certainly appreciate her body, but god, that’s not why I started hanging out with her? I don’t ever get to know someone specifically because they’re ‘hot.’ I thought she was funny. I thought she was captivating. I thought she was introspective, engaging, and fun. I still think she’s all of those things and so much more. She’s beautiful, in the way her personality melds with the comfortable, soft familiarity of her body, but I’m not there for just her body.

Changing how she looks will not make me love her less, it never has, and it never will. We had candid discussions, and realized she felt the same about me.

It.. it hurts so much to think there are people that think I am abusing her, or worse, that she’s abusing me, when they don’t know either of us - or our story - from Adam. It also makes me so angry that people would rather project their own insecurities and faulty looks on relationships onto perfect strangers, with such patronizing ideology, since they believe they just know so much better...

brain is like “hey!!! if we stay up ungodly late or if we wake up ungodly early, we unlock SECRET EXTRA HOURS IN THE DAY SOCIETY WAS HIDING FROM US!”

I'm 20, almost 21 now, and... We had to quit watching Dragon Ball.

Between the racist stereotypes, the sexism, the uncomfortable constant nudity of kid Goku, the constant sexualization of Bulma, the nonstop horniness with Master Roshi...

And look.

I get it.

The 80s was a wildly different time. It still wasn't right, but by media standards and among anime especially, this stuff would be pretty run of the mill.

But there's one character... One character I will never forget after rewatching so much of Dragon Ball.

His name is General Blue. He comes from the Red Ribbon Army part of Dragon Ball.

General Blue is based on Max Bielas, a Nazi known for keeping a "harem" of little Jewish boys he'd dress up like princes, their barracks designed like a dollhouse. You can also see by looking at him he's based on Aryan race theory. The entire Red Ribbon Army was somewhat referencing Nazis, but General Blue takes it to an entirely new level.

In the dub, he's introduced as a somewhat stereotypically queer coded character, but is otherwise fun and entertaining to watch. However... In the original version of the show, he's blatantly gay, and the stereotypes are so much worse. There's a scene where he meets a little boy and he obviously starts crushing on him, offering to take him to buy him pretty clothes... The boy is a child. In the dub, this was changed to make it look like the boy was General Blue's long lost brother, but the way the animation and set design is... You clearly still get an awfully romantic tension from the scene. There's another scene where in the Japanese version, Blue yells at Bulma when she flirts with him, saying he's gay, to which Bulma says she's a boy - and Blue essentially says something like "your breasts give you away as a woman."

But the kicker is... None of this was really revealed until like, 10 episodes after General Blue was introduced. I was attached to this character. But then he was revealed to be nothing more than a racist, homophobic, sexist, antisemitic, transphobic joke.

I realize he was written in the 80s. I realize that.

But I was so upset upon feeling completely misled to like his character, just to be slapped with how much of a walking insult he is, that... I can't even finish watching Dragon Ball. It was so heartbreaking to me to learn this character I thought was funny and entertaining literally just existed to mock me and people like me, not even to begin touching on the antisemitism of his origins. I feel lied to, especially, since the dub just tries to skirt over these issues.

The issue is, being a trans dude that’s afab, I get really worried about labels like bi and pan. I feel like it somehow opens me up to being labeled a lesbian or woman myself, meanwhile, calling myself gay does not allow room to be called a woman. I know that’s not true and transmisandry runs rampant, and the people who hate trans people will call me female regardless of what pronouns I call myself...

but man, gender dysphoria works fuckin hard. and it sucks, because I DO like feminine and female people sometimes. I do have a preference towards men, but still. I do enjoy a lot of femme people too. I just have an intense dislike of being viewed as feminine in any way.