queer shit

Imagine being a black, gay drag queen in the 1800s after being born into enslavement AND having the style and cachè to throw soirées that the girls had to come to! That’s why I don’t want to hear this “we’re not our ancestors stuff.” You’re right!

From The Very Black Project Page- William Dorsey Swann was a gay liberation activist. Born into slavery in 1858, he was the first person in the United States to lead a queer resistance group and the first known person to self-identify as a “queen of drag”. Imagine the queenery of this icon.

He was a slave in Hancock, Maryland and was freed by Union soldiers after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. During the 1880s and 1890s, he organized a series of balls in Washington, D.C. He called himself the “queen of drag”. Most of the attendees his gatherings were men who were former slaves, and were gathering to dance in their satin and silk dresses. William was arrested in police raids numerous times,including in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888. In 1896, he was falsely convicted and sentenced to 10 months in jail for “keeping a disorderly house” (running a brothel). After his sentencing, he requested a pardon from President Grover Cleveland. This request was denied, but but he was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community’s right to gather.

He was known to have been close with Pierce Lafayette and Felix Hall, two men who had also both been slaves and who formed the first known male same-sex relationship between enslaved Americans.

When William stopped organizing and participating in drag events, his brother continued to make costumes for the drag community. Two of his brothers had also been active participants in his drag balls.

Imagine how intelligent and ambitious this man had to be to come up with drag balls in the 1800s! Imagine how many terrible concepts he had to unlearn by himself to be a confident gay black man who does drag in the 1800s! Imagine how courageous he had to be to fight for lgbt people as a former slave in America in the 1800s!

"The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions" by Larry Mitchell is just as needed today as it was in 1977. Thanks to @nightboatbooks for helping the book return to print.

*This review will be discussing terminology that has historically been/and in some cases continues to be used as slurs, proceed with caution if you think this will upset you. “The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions” was published in 1977 and remains a deeply needed and highly relevant book, both because of the ongoing criminalization of queer bodies, and because of the push from members…

Sideways Pike is back in The Scratch Daughters by @sapphomancer at @ErewhonBooks ! Things have gotten more complicated, but at least they've got their coven. Right?

Sideways Pike has lost her specter, her witchy soul. It was taken by Madeline, a fellow witch whose own specter was taken by a witchfinder of the Chantry family. Now it’s all Sideways can do to hunt her down and get it back alongside the Scapegracers and Mr. Scratch, the book devil inside her keeping her alive. Easy right? “The Scratch Daughters” is everything a sequel should be. It furthers the…

"The Scapegracers" by @sapphomancer and published by @ErewhonBooks is a feast for lovers of all things queer and witchy.

Magic and power are second nature to teenage girls and the ambiguity of both suits them immensely. “The Scapegracers” is the best exploration of high school dynamics and teenage girls that I’ve seen for a good long time. Part of it could have been that I grew up in the same town and went to the same high school as the author, and every so often I felt like I recognized something from that. Even…

It goes into detail about everything from different types of procedures, to preparations, to recovery, and to risks.

I've found it extremely helpful while I was looking over my options because they don't just vaguely warn you about potential complications; they explain them in depth with the goal of informing you rather than dissuading you.

I think one of the most important takeaways I found here is this section:

The phalloplasty has come a really long way since it was first preformed (almost 100 years ago, I believe!) and complications are a risk with any surgery. Phallo has higher complication rates, sure, but it also boasts a very high satisfaction rate--higher than that of people who have undergone cardiac surgery. And regardless of all of this, shaming people or calling transmasc surgeries "butchering" or "invasive" or "dangerous" is kind of awful actually.

(There's also a similar site for people considering metoidioplasty too!)

They’re NOT “perfectly good.” Not for those of us with bottom dysphoria. They’re parts that SHOULDN’T BE THERE. They’re parts that SHOULD BE DIFFERENT. And modern medicine can make that happen.

“Doesn’t even work” I can fuck both your parents with it one after another, shut the fuck up. You can piss with it. You can fuck with it. You can orgasm with it. What else do you want, a song and a dance?

“Doesn’t look like the real thing” if it’s like 2 months post-op maybe?? Babydoll there were SCADS of cis gay men biting their lower lips at my phalloplasty cock at the nude beach. One did an honest-to-god double take complete with jaw drop. And once I get my baculum (by which I mean erectile implant) in December, I’ll be able to put it in any damn position I please. Partner likes ‘em straight out? No problem! Partner likes an upward curve? Can do! Show me a cis man who can fucking do THAT.

BUT WAIT, THEY EXIST. Because phalloplasty and erectile implants and testicular implants are done for cis men, too. Do you think THEY’D rather have no dick instead?

You say don’t want phallo because it doesn’t give you a cis dick. I hear “I’d rather wallow in misery and self-pity because chasers and other transphobes have convinced me that I should not have my body altered from the parts they want to fuck.” I hear “I have been duped into parroting genital essentialist transphobic bullshit by cryptoconservatives.”

I love my dick. This is a $135,000 cock—I saw the bill. It’s QUALITY. And it fucking ERASED my dysphoria. Do I wish it worked like a cis man’s penis? Do I wish I had a foreskin? Of fucking course I do! But you know what I never fuckin’ find myself thinking after bringing myself off is “Gosh I sure wish my hand, pubes, genitals, and sheets were covered in rapidly-concealing jizz.” If it were possible to go back to my original configuration, there is no universe in which I would EVER consider doing that for a PICOSECOND.

The most common complication is a fistula. GUESS WHAT. THEY USUALLY HEAL UP ON THEIR OWN. MINE DID.

With a nebula-sized fuck-you to the transphobic cis gay who coined the term on LJ 20 years ago and discouraged the fuck out of me for ever getting bottom surgery, this “dick roll-up” is so much better than my OEM parts they’re not in the same fucking universe for comparison. They are on different levels of reality apart.

"He described them as, “at best…a tube of skin and meat hanging between their legs.” He testified that a constructed phallus cannot function sexually like a penis, is incapable of erection, and has no sensitivity. He stated that he had never seen a phalloplasty that looked like a real penis and that its appearance may worsen over time, so that it becomes “kind of flaccid and wrinkled up [like a] piece of—to me I think it looks like a dried up cucumber.”"

"During my research of hormones, legal hoops, and surgeries, I’d continuously come across comments and information on how phalloplasty for transmen left something to be desired. Descriptions such as “mangled flesh,” “frankendick,” and “they fall off” were frequent. Most of these comments came from fellow transmen."

"Because my exposure to phalloplasty procedures was limited, I could not have imagined how talented the plastic surgeon who performed my surgery would be, nor how realistic my penis would look, feel and function. I had heard many of the common remarks: Phalloplasty provides an insensate organ barely approximating a penis; or, If you’re going to get bottom surgery, it’s better to get a metoidioplasty, because at least you’ll have sensation and a natural erection, even if it is rather small."

There's also this:

"I remember hearing one man speaking about how in the first few years of his transition he felt like he had been convinced having a penis was unnecessary, because he met so many trans men who told him that “the penis does not make the man,” yet he ended up feeling otherwise. He eventually did come to feel that in order for him to live more fully as a man, he needed to have a penis, but he felt like the most opportune time had passed him by: he believed he was now too old, too broke and too sick. He was angry that so many of his trans-brothers had dissuaded him from seriously considering the procedure, considering the importance it would end up being for him. He questioned why these men had cared so much about the issue, why had they felt the need to criticize other trans men who opted for genital reconstruction. He wondered how they could be experts on a topic they had never experienced personally."

“How gay men used to speak - A short film in Polari”

“A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men”

“Polari: The code language gay men used to survive”

“Polari, a vibrant language born out of prejudice”

The Polari Bible

Had to do a write-up on monkeypox to combat the fucking HIV/AIDS era homophobia the media has decided to go with on their coverage of this outbreak. 

If you don’t want to read the article, here is the reason why most monkeypox cases currently confirmed happen to be in cisgender gay men, medically noted as MSM (cis men who have sex with cis men): 

Gay cisgender men are far more likely to seek early healthcare assistance for any new or suspicious skin blemishes– Like lesions. 

This is because during HIV/AIDS, the queer community realised A FULL DECADE before the formal clinical diagnostic criteria were formulated for AIDS that Kaposi’s sarcomas were often a visual physical sign that someone had HIV/AIDS. 

A lot of us older queer people have it burned into our brains that any suspicious skin damage or marks should be an immediate indication to go to a doctor, because it can mean someone may be seriously unwell. 

So, naturally, since gay cisgender men are generally the most likely to seek care for any suspicious skin lesions far earlier than other patient cohorts, of course you’re going to have a lot of cis gay men overrepresented in early detected cases of an illness which manifests with physical lesions. 

Butch is, from what I understand, just a way of describing masculinity done in a queer way- typically a somewhat over-the-top performance of masculinity, often as an act of reclamation or a way to reframe masculinity as something queer.

There's no prerquisite for calling yourself "butch", and no particular identity required. The word has been used to describe gay (and otherwise queer) men for decades, right alongside lesbians and other queer women. If it makes sense for you to use it, use it!

The origin of 'butch' is contested. Some people think it comes from 'butcher' or from 'bulldagger,' but neither of those sources are actually very well-attested at all. The best-attested source for butch is from Polari, a queer cant (often called a 'gay men's cant' but it is important to remember that at the time it was used, the concept of transfemininity and transmasculinity was not well understood AND a lot of other "lower class" or "rough" people used Polari too) that was used broadly in those groups until at least the 1970s in the UK. There is in fact an episode of Doctor Who where a traveling performer addresses The Doctor in Polari, mistaking him for another performer!

Polari contains words from Italian, Romani, London slang, Yiddish, rhyming backslang, thieves' cant, theater cant and later on added in some 60s drug culture slang.

A few other words which passed from Polari into 'queer words' are 'trade' to refer to sex work, bona for face, naff to mean bad or dull (this word passed to general British English from Polari), and zhush up (to dress something up, as used often by JVN on Queer Eye). In its first recorded use in 1902, 'butch' meant 'tough youth.'

Butch has been used by every stripe of queerness since its known inception in at least the 1950s. You can see it being used in Paris is Burning and POSE to refer to a performance of queer maleness ("The category is: Butch Queen Business," "Butch Queen Military," etc.) as a contrast to a performance of queer femininity which at the time referred to transfemininity but also referred to drag ("Femme Queen" is the contrasting term -- in the series these categories were often walked by trans women characters but Pray Tell, a Black GNC (but cis, as far as the series has words to define that) gay man, also walked a Femme Queen category at least once during the series). I refer to POSE in this as an excellent source since several people from the ballroom scene going back to the 1980s and earlier were involved in the production and it is easily found and watched online, so it makes a good resource.

Butch and femme have a rich history within lesbian subculture, but a lot of the very strict definitions of butch and femme come from specifically white lesbian subculture, where the worst sin during the midcentury queer era was to be 'kiki,' or 'neither butch OR femme.' We see butch and femme as relationship roles and identifications rising and falling with popularity, and there have been a lot of arguments over what the words mean and whether the terms simply replicate heterosexual relationship patterns within queer relationships, and I'm sure there will be many opinions on that for a long time to come.

It's important to remember, too, that we will encounter lots of contradictory information before, say, the mid-nineties to 2000s, and while we will see less of that today, the myth of the 'universal queer community with just one face and just one meaning' shatteres utterly when we slide back to pre-internet -- or pre widespread internet -- days. Queer communities were extremely regional.

What is clear, however, and extremely well-supported by queer history across the US, is that butch and femme are not and never were "lesbian exclusive terms." They were terms available to a wide variety of gender expressions and identities, sexuality expressions and identities, and they were terms with corollaries and alternate terms which are available only to specific subgroups (for example: stud and aggressive are Black terms, and white queers should not) or refinements which refer to specific subgroups of the wider butch and femme identities, like stone butch (butches who do not want to receive genital stimulation), hard femme (a fat-positive, QTPOC political identity which is gender-inclusive). I've heard "tomboy" is sometimes used by Asian queer folx as an aesthetic and gender identity instead of butch.

Butch is my (non-binary) gender identity; for me, it refers to a certain gentleperson sort of identity which exists as a queer performance and identity of masculinity. It is to manhood as salsa is to bolognese sauce: it contains some of the same ingredients, sure, but the way it is prepared, and the end result of the preparation, the way it is consumed and who will want to consume it are all different. Butch for me is suspenders and cuffed jeans and boots, spoiling my femme darlings, holding doors and pulling out chairs, shaving my face rather than plucking stray hairs even before I went on T, carrying a clean handkerchief and knowing how to diagnose what's wrong with a gas lawnmower and a car engine, but it's a performance of those things which has nothing to do with anyone but me, and it also comes with a side dish of knowing this is my butchness, and doesn't need to be anyone else's. It also -- for me -- contains room for me to carry the "mom" role for my daughter, and to acknowledge -- again, for me -- my upbringing where the world thought I was a woman, and the impact and effect it has on me that I am still commonly presumed to be a woman because of my non-binary presentation, and therefore has room for me to deal with the misogyny that I experience daily in all aspects of my life despite and in some cases because I am viewed as a GNC woman.

But I feel fine with making my own post about the subject, and that subject is:

The Origin of Pan(sexual)

At least, the origin in so far as I lived it. Obviously the term spread for a variety of reasons in a variety of places. This post is a personal testimony of one experience with this political movement, but I think it’s one people need to hear.

Imagine, if you will, The End of the Nineties. I know many of you weren’t there for that (hell, I barely was, I was like apparently eleven at the time of most of this stuff, but I was also being dubiously raised by a rotating assortment of Very Queer People so there’s that at least). 

So any, imagine the era roughly from 1999-2003.

We’ll give you riots until you give us rights was still a rallying call of our people, but the desperate fervour of the AIDS epidemic was beginning to dial down to a more manageable level. New treatments existed, the government wasn’t as out for our blood as before, and the fact of the matter was so many of us were dead and scarred by all that death, burnt out from all that anger. To a certain degree, there was a deep exhaustion in our communities.

Decades of attempted genocide will do that to you.

As well, the systems we had relied on for introducing new queer youth to queer culture has begun to fall apart because there’s just not enough queer elders who are both alive and able to take that task on. Not everywhere, not like there had once been.

Pamphlets and manifestos had always been critical outreach, but now they became some of the only things available, especially in rural and suburban areas where there weren’t large enough populations of queer people to self sustain, or where organizing in a large way was effectively a death sentence in itself. 

Queer groups had always been localized and closed, but now populations were patchy enough that state and national networking through mailing lists were rising to prominence out of necessity.

And with this, there was increased exposure to each other’s different definitions of queer. 

One of the terms that, it turned out, was the least uniformly established was bisexual. There were basically two ways “bi” was used in those days. In some circles, it meant “neither gay nor straight.” If it was analyzed at all, it was generally decided to be a catchall term for anyone else who showed up, a very broad umbrella. For the most part, it just meant “whoever I like.”

And in many other places “bi” meant two. 

It meant men and women. It meant “real” men and women, that is to say, cis ones. 

But the 90s had also given prominence to this previously undefined group of gender nonconforming people who had previously just sort of shrugged when asked their gender. There was a new word on the block, and that word was genderqueer.

The 90s had also given prominence to transsexual/transgender people and began to impress upon the populace that trans women weren’t Super Ultra Gays, but were in fact their own group of people with unique experiences. (Trans men, I am sure you have heard by now, were basically invisible at this point in time: either they were classed as hard butch, or they were stealth and had no association with queerness).

It’s worth noting that the 90s also gave prominence to the inclusion of intersex people, but that’s a subject I’m less well versed in (unfortunately). I never met another intersex person- to my knowledge- during that formative period of my life, and if I did I wouldn’t have known or understood what it meant anyway.

So, as the nineties drew to a close and all these previously indeterminate groups started becoming more well known and more recognized and more seen at all, there was inevitable conflict. 

There were bi people who had never even heard of transness and who were revolted by it in the way cis people always are. There were bi people who had never heard of genderqueerness and insisted that genderqueers were really men/women based on their sex organs. 

There were also bi people who learned, to their alarm, that according to these complete strangers halfway across the country their own identity literally excluded themselves. Or their partners. Or just people they had never even met but still recognized the inherent humanity of.

And worse, that definition of Real Men and Real Women was getting more and more well known as networking continued to expand. 

It was easy for cis gay and lesbian people to understand and include in queer literature that was even then dominated by gay voices, but more importantly, it was easy for Straight people to understand and pass around in their own dangerous and damning ways. 

Especially in places where queer community was patchy and inconsistent, often with gaps where people were dead or had fled, the national scale information was the best thing many of us had.

That meant “bi means 2″ became the dominant interpretation pretty quickly.

So, there were basically two responses to that.

The first was to reclaim and redefine bisexual.

That movement is the one, I think, that has been the most consistent. 

It has also had varying levels of success, given that every year or so we have another rousing round of “well actually, bi means 2 or more.” But by 2016, most people seem to either naturally understand that bi includes trans people, or are open to learning that fact quite quickly.

The second response to the corruption of bi was to break ties with a word that was rapidly being used as a way to seriously hurt people, and make something new. Something that would be self defined rather than reclaimed from medical studies, and that would be clearer and more transparent even in its basic design.

That was basically how pansexual rose to prominence. (Some people say pansexual as a term existed even into the 80s, but I have seen no evidence or firsthand accounts of it before the 90s. Certainly if it did exist in the 80s, then this political context is why it became a Big Deal rather than staying a niche concept).

And, that’s part of why, today, pansexual remains its own unique identity.

Even though at this point bisexual has mostly been cleansed of the horrible debacle that was binarism-and-transphobia-in-the-90s, pansexuality literally is a separate political group from bisexuality. The identity fractured off and became its own unique culture and label.

The old claim that “bi is transphobic” is nonsense today, but that claim came from a very real historical problem. 

The pansexual identity spread as a way to try to combat that problem- and there are people on this very website who will attest to the fact that in the 90s and 00s knowing someone was pan rather than bi was fairly similar to seeing someone wearing a “trans ally” pin today: it marked the potential for a safer relationship.

Whether pansexuality is still “necessary” today, when bisexual is more often accepted as meaning 2+, is irrelevant.

And that would be things like the whole holier-than-thou attitude that gained prevalence over the years (the whole “hearts not parts” thing), the fact that a worrying number of people used it basically as a “softer” version of “trans chaser”, and the fact that some people used it not just to mean inclusion of nonbinary identities but also to lump binary trans people as a third gender.

Bisexuality was never transpobic, any more than homosexuality was. Gay and lesbian biphobics didn’t care; accusations of transphobia were just an effective way to punish someone they already didn’t like, and it let them show great allyship to the trans movement.

Some bisexuals fled to pansexuality; some redefined themselves (more or less) willingly.

My impression at the time was that the fighting over “bi means transphobic” was widely a bogus excuse to shit on bisexuals and drive them out of the gay community while pretending it wasn’t biphobia.

At minimum, it was suspicious as FUCK that it was bisexuals, and ONLY bisexuals who got (and still get) interrogated about their willingness to have sex/relationships with trans women (let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that trans men were ever really part of this discussion, and they’re still an afterthought if mentioned at all. The discussion centers on willingness to have sex/relationship with trans women.).

Like @januarylightbringer I ended up distancing myself from the LG"B"TQ community because it seemed actively hostile to people like me, while still demanding benefits from bi folks.

And like @earthboundricocet, I saw “pansexual” essentially mean trans-chaser.

I also had the impression that some of the push for both-gender attracted people to date trans people was based on wanting to push off the “not really either gender” trans people off on the both-gender attracted people and kill two birds with one stone to the gay and lesbian communities that were ambivalent about bisexuals and trans people.

it also completely ignores the fact that the majority of trans people id as bi which is just another proof it doesn’t stem from a genuine care about trans people or from the trans community itself

also in my experience, a lot of people who could id as bi instead call themselves pan or queer or reject any lables because no one takes bisexuality seriously and it’s easier to be seen as “actually lgbt” and a part of the community instead of some horny confused not to be trusted asshole who’s gonna go back to hetero-/homosexuality in the end

They meant well (maybe…), but definitely had a privileged, holier than thou attitude, and their ignorance, biphobia, and transphobia all played a part in the early movement and still exists in some quarters. For instance, the ignorant “bi means two” rhetoric, the way they sometimes other trans people by marking them out as inherently different (“I’m attracted to all genders - male, female, and trans!”), and so on.

We ring in October with Some Strange Disturbances, the queer Victorian spooktacular of my dreams, written by @AmyCringeneck from @HeadlessPress

Queer Victorian horror. Three words and you instantly have my attention. Furthermore, the graphic novel format is a perfect structor for “monster of the week” style storytelling, which is more or less what we have with “Some Strange Disturbances.” In volume one, “The Rat King of Bedlam” they battle a rat king (the creature, not just a particularly regal rat) and in volume two “The Lunchroom Under…

He and his first wife divorced after… well she said it better than I ever could.

“I excused a lot of his failings and whims because I loved him. But one day he did something to me that I couldn’t forgive. I was singing that evening at the cabaret. I left him home and he told me: “I invited a few friends; we’ll dine while we wait for you.” And it just so happened I had received a new dress from Paris. That evening, after work, I arrived home and what do I see? All these gentlemen dressed as women. And Conrad had put on my Paris dress. At this point, I divorced!”

And as  Anita Loos put it

Veidt fervently opposed the Nazi regime and later donated a major portion of his personal fortune to Britain to assist in the war effort. Soon after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, by March 1933, Joseph Goebbels was purging the film industry of anti-Nazi sympathizers and Jews, and so in April 1933, a week after Veidt’s marriage to Ilona Prager, a Jewish woman, the couple emigrated to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them.

Goebbels had imposed a “racial questionnaire” in which everyone employed in the German film industry had to declare their “race” to continue to work. When Veidt was filling in the questionnaire, he answered the question about what his Rasse (race) was by writing that he was a Jude (Jew). Veidt was not Jewish, but his wife was Jewish, and Veidt would not renounce the woman he loved. Additionally, Veidt, who was opposed to antisemitism, wanted to show solidarity with the German Jewish community, who were in the process of being stripped of their rights as German citizens in the spring of 1933. As one of Germany’s most prominent actors, Veidt had been informed that if he were prepared to divorce his wife and declare his support for the new regime, he could continue to act in Germany. Several other leading actors who had been opposed to the Nazis before 1933 switched allegiances. In answering the questionnaire by stating he was a Jew, Veidt rendered himself unemployable in Germany, but stated this sacrifice was worth it as there was nothing in the world that would compel him to break with his wife.Upon hearing about what Veidt had done, Goebbels remarked that he would never act in Germany again.

As noted above, he was also bisexual, a friend once stating: “He was very much in love with a beautiful girl whom I trained. I’ll say frankly that Conrad also loved men, once in a while.“

“Gay Panic” is the name of the defense strategy that still was a legal defense in many states up until a couple years ago for the murder of a gay person. Where you can claim that you killed someone because you panicked that being near or hit on by a gay person for fear of being seen as gay too.

When invoked legally, the gay panic defense is used as a form of ‘justifiable homicide’ whereby a real or perceived sexual advance on the part of the victim is seen as enough ‘provocation’ for murder to be somewhat justifiable (usually because it’s seen as causing ‘temporary insanity’ in the murderer). It is/was invoked to avoid receiving a murder sentence, and its primary focus is on reframing the murderer as the ‘real’ victim who ‘just overreacted’. 

In the US context, the Matthew Shepard case is one reasonably famous hate crime that lawyers for the defense attempted to legitimate by invoking Shepard’s supposed ‘sexual aggressiveness’. 

To quote this article: “During a police confession, McKinney said he began to attack Shepard because the student had put his hand on his leg during the car ride...Yet in another statement to police, he said Shepard simply looked like he was about to grope McKinney...At trial, McKinney's lawyers argued that Shepard had made their client fly into a rage by touching his leg.”

In Australia, the gay panic defense became national law, at least in terms of setting precedent, via the High Court of Australia when I was 14. The case involved a man who beat his friend to death, later telling police: "Yeah, I killed him, but he did worse to me. He tried to root (note: have sex) with me."

 While some cases no doubt do involve men who fear being perceived as gay, or even men who have/had sex with men and then fear being outed, that’s not what the defense involves. In fact, men’s ‘justifiable’ fear of being seen as ‘gay’ is leveraged more often in the trans panic defense (as in the murder of Islan Nettles in 2015- see Cynthia Lee’s article ‘The Trans Panic Defense Revisited).

i get this ask a lot and like. it’s a lil frustrating bc the whole reason ppl starting pushing everyone to put pronouns in their bio was so trans ppl weren’t outed or othered for having their pronouns listed.

but now it’s used as a dog whistle to lyk who’s “woke” and who isn’t (even tho plenty of the ppl w their pronouns in their bio are still bigoted in many ways). so now everyone is assumed to be cis and pressured into putting their pronouns in every social media they have, thus once again othering trans ppl and forcing them to out themselves

im not cis. im not entirely sure which pronouns i prefer or will use. ppl going “you should list your pronouns” either outs me or forces me to pick pronouns that may feel misgendering just to appease a largely cis crowd.

and it’s like. how do you know they’re cis!!!! yes, i get that transphobes hate the pronoun thing and always have dumbass responses but you can’t assume that everyone who doesn’t immediately divulge specific pronouns or isn’t comfortable sharing them is a cisgender transphobe. i know most ppl assume im a cis woman even tho im nonbinary and it’s disheartening how many ppl would label me transphobic(?) for saying i don’t have a preference on pronouns atm.

another tiktok was showing a clip of a group of people being asked their pronouns and they all said “literally anything it doesn’t matter to us” and all the comments were “why was the group of women so aggressive abt it :/ just say she/her” and one of the people from the clip had to comment and say “hey, we’re all questioning our gender rn so we don’t have an answer pls don’t assume we’re cis women” and they shouldn’t have to fucking do that just bc y’all decided you were entitled to out people!!