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#also like the way i personally interact with my gender identity is pretty much exclusively through presentation atm
our-aroace-experience · 4 months
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Ever since I've been in ace spaces, I've kept seeing how many aspec people feel excluded from the lgbt community. I won't say I haven't felt this, because I have. But, I will say most of it is online. I know that for some, online interaction is the main form of community interaction, but really, I find that irl people are way more accepting/understanding than online. That's not to say I haven't had some weird/dismissive irl encounters with queer people, but I do find the internet amplifies the bad side of community alot.
I feel pretty lucky because I'd say I do have irl lgbt friends who support me and fully respect my identity! Granted, I live in the suburbs of a city so it's more progressive where I live and I'm super lucky in that aspect, but it still stands what I said in regards to interacting with other queer people. Also idk where to put this, but I'm also lucky that I'm more arospec than just full on aro, because I do find people are more ok with ace than they are with aro and that fucking sucks. Tho, again, there are people who aren't aro who do get it!
Honestly, I tend to find that anyone in the "plus" tends to be more welcoming. Or even Bi people! There's some strangly weird bi/ace solidarity. Hell, the first person I ever came out to identified as just bi at the time(they now also identify as enby but yah).
I found out I was queer because I met other lgbt people. And it was actually that friend that helped me feel part of the community! As of now I'm personally queer in many different messy ways (looks at romantic attraction and gender). But I first called myself lgbt because of my acesness, and I still feel like that's my main identity that connects me to the lgbt banner. I have alot of love for the queer community and I hate to see other aspec people feel left out. Especially since aceness and aroness are inherently not-het/queer.
So, yah it can suck sometimes, but you can find a space for yourself in the community!!! (if that's something you want of course)
i agree 100%. in general, i feel like the internet makes a lot of the “discourse” or exclusion seem a lot worse in the community than it really is. of course there are still a lot of problems in real life, but in my experience people in real life just don’t care as much as people online do. they don’t have the time to reread and analyse something that’s been said when it’s a face to face conversation, so most of the time people just move on. although there are definitely still rude/ ignorant people in real life.
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butch-garfield · 1 year
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OK so I'm asking because you've been reblogging about it pretty frequently lately and I can not seem to get a straightforward answer from anyone I've asked so far on this:
What is the meaningful difference between a lesbian who identifies as nonbinary because of the ways their sexuality and gender interact, and a nonbinary person who identifies as both bisexual and lesbian because of the ways their gender and sexuality interact?
Because as someone who IDs as a nonbinary lesbian myself, I really can't see a difference meaningful enough to assume bad faith over the identity.
Like, do you consider women who are attracted to you to not be lesbians because you don't identify as a woman, and therefore they are inherently attracted to at least two genders if they are attracted to you?
Can a nonbinary person really be a lesbian if they're attracted to other nonbinary people and the definition of lesbian is inherently tied to attraction to women?
Does bisexuality inherently include attraction to men, or just to multiple genders?
If bisexuality does inherently include attraction to men, how would one identify if they're not attracted to men, but are attracted to multiple other genders?
I'll stop the questions here but I could keep going for a while if I wanted, lol.
I don't think I'll be persuaded to change my mind, but I want to hear other people's opinions on this, especially since I've seen so many other nb lesbians treating the other label as some horrible badwrong identity that's a threat to us all and I just don't get it.
Sorry that it turned into so many questions, I just genuinely want other perspectives on this!
If you don't want to answer at all that's fine, too! I'll just consider it an "agree to disagree" situation.
To answer your questions in order:
1. Difference between nonbinary lesbians and bi-lesbians
Nonbinary is an umbrella gender label simply describing any genders that fall out of the societal binary of male/female, therefore a lesbian who feels as though their gender has been impacted and made something other than straightforward “woman” may choose to call themself nonbinary; meanwhile lesbian and bisexual are both sexuality labels with mutually exclusive definitions and therefore both identities cannot impact one’s experience of gender as they cannot apply to the same person
2/3. Does being attracted to nonbinary people are you bi? Can lesbians be attracted to nonbinary people?
Attraction to nonbinary people exists across all sexualities, as all sexual orientations include some nonbinary people due to nonbinary being an umbrella term for a wide range of experiences and not a strict third gender, therefore some people may choose to identify partially as a woman/man in some sense but still be nonbinary
4. Does bi mean “two” in the case of bisexuality?
Famously and historically, no! Bisexuality has always included all attractions genders, with the term both being influenced by a society with a largely binary view of gender until recently, but even now with the widely agreed upon definition being “attraction to both one’s own gender and other genders”, also the idea of “two genders but not all” has always felt like a strawman if we’re being honest, if you can find me another specific gender with as much codified societal recognition as the current binary genders, I will answer this question, but until then question how well you really understand anything about gender both as a personal identity and a social construct
And finally: people are not “badmouthing” bi-lesbians for no good reason, we are calling out lesbophobia (the insinuation that lesbians can be attracted to men), biphobia (the idea that bisexuals should “pick a side” and do not truly experience attraction to all genders), as well as a topic I have yet to mention but it’s of extreme importance: transmisogyny
Since this label has a history of being utilized by TERFS and other transphobes to imply that lesbians who dated trans women were not in fact real lesbians
So even if a person could magically fit some definition of a “bi-lesbian” why is that the term they’d choose for it? The one that belittles and disrespects trans lesbians and those who choose to love them? Why do so few people know or care about the history of the term and ideas they’re trying to invent? It’s not pointless discourse over nothing, it’s fighting harmful ideas that ultimately perpetuate bigotry against all of us.
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eoieopda · 1 year
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⇢ how tf do i pronounce your username?
oy-OPE-da. it’s the romanized version of 어이없다, which is one of my favorite korean words. listen to hoshi scream it here.
⇢ why do you have a problem with minors and ageless blogs?
i discussed this here. as of summer 2023, i am no longer blocking ageless blogs and am instead ignoring their interactions unless and until i have some reason to believe they're an adult. see here for some ways that i (and other creators) approach this.
⇢ can i request to be tagged for new stories or new parts?
i don't do fic-specific tags (with the exception of force quit) because it's a massive hassle. instead, i have permanent taglists which include fics/chapters + drabbles:
multi (for all of the groups listed below)
bts
seventeen
stray kids
ateez
⇢ can i tag you in xyz?
i track #eoieopda archive (and also #eoieopdaarchive because some people use that instead). i don't like to be tagged outright in fics if:
i didn't sign up for a taglist or otherwise consent to be tagged
i didn't beta it or have anything to do with its creation, and/or
we don't know/talk to each other (because i can't vouch for whatever it is you've tagged me in — or you, personally — and don't want to be explicitly linked to it).
⇢ when is xyz being posted/updated?
when i have the brain juice and time and i want to 😌
⇢ why is xyz on hiatus/discontinued?
likely because i, icarus, have flown too close to the sun. sometimes, the idea part of my brain moves faster than the follow-through part; and i need to take a silly little break before i’m able to pick up a story. sometimes, i lose interest entirely and will then remove something from my masterlist + make it very clear that a series is discontinued.
personal
⇢ your real name was leaked — can i call you that?
it doesn't bother me if people use my govt. name when they talk to/about me! my whole tagging system uses my nickname (jade) because my actual name wasn't supposed to get out, so that's (primarily) how i'm going to refer to myself on here.
⇢ you said you were adopted —can you tell me xyz about this entire process, what you know of your birth parents, what you remember about korea, etc.?
no thanks! i know very little about the whole thing because i was literally 18 months old. i've also had experiences on here where users' entire communication with me has been to ask/talk about these things, which is icky at best and fetishistic at worst (whether or not it's intentional).
⇢ i’m not korean — can i call you unnie/noona/hyung?
i don’t have a problem with this, and i actually find it pretty cute. keep in mind that my opinion here isn’t universal amongst koreans; and i did not grow up in my own culture, so koreans that did are entitled to feel differently.
⇢ can i come into your inbox and ask very invasive questions about your personal life and/or spew racist garbage and/or erase your identity and/or tokenize you?
thanks for checking — absolutely not! playing stupid games will win you stupid prizes (aka being blocked and/or reported).
⇢ i’m confused by your pronouns — which should i use?
my gender identity is essentially the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon at this point, so i use both she/her and they/them. and by that, i mean: pls don’t stick to one or the other (exclusively she, exclusively they) because i am not exclusively either.
i’m comfy with almost all “gendered” terms (sis, bro, dude, girlie, sir, ma’am, gworl, etc.) because i think gender is fake, lol. i do not vibe with “queen”, though, and i don’t know why. #kingjade
⇢ is it cool if i pop into your ask box with random thoughts, memes, tiktoks, non-k-pop stuff, etc.?
hell yeah, brother! let’s be friends.
⇢ you talk so much and it’s clogging up my dash — what do?
check my tag index here and filter shit to your heart's content!
requests (read the rules here before submitting)
⇢ who will you write for?
bts, seventeen, stray kids, and ateez.
i don't write for han jisung, kim seungmin, yang jeongin, or choi jongho as a personal preference. i adore them, but i don't see them in a romantic and/or sexual light.
⇢ are there any requests you won’t take?
i’m open to trying most kinks, dynamics, and AUs, depending on what's being requested of me (and the weather, what i ate for breakfast, the lunar phase, etc.) i'm down with poly!member x reader; and member x reader x member (etc.) dynamics, but i don't currently write strictly member x member.
hard passes:
non-con
anything involving minors
harry potter AUs
⇢ did you get my request? are you done yet?
pleeeeaaaaaaaaseeeee don’t. i did get your request. i’m a full-time attorney with fibromyalgia & ADHD and therefore cannot make any promises that my brain and/or body and/or schedule will allow me to finish things quickly.
i don’t complete every request i receive! sometimes, the requests are too similar to what i’ve done already, they don’t spark anything for me, etc. i reserve the right to pick and choose what i spend my time on.
rev. 12/9/23
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variablejabberwocky · 11 months
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Thanks for the info! I think my different opinion on enby might have something to do with translation. I'm not a native english speaker, and in my language, girl/boy is always used to indicate age. It's similar to formal/informal you if you're familiar with that? If you want to be rude/belittling to a 20 something, you call them girl/boy, if you want to show your pride or respect to a 10 year old you say man/woman. I thought it worked similarly in english, but apparently not! If theres not a strong age connotation, then I don't really understand what the enby thing is about
eh *makes a so-so motion* kind of and kind of not
its...dependent on context and if the person calling you that is a peer in some way or not
like a little kid calling an adult a girl/boy could be meant to be offensive or it could just be a way of normally referring to someone with gendered terms (think angry teenager vs curious little kid. the first is probaby meaning it offensively but the second probably isn't. but a teen could just as easily mean it as a way of signaling they see you as a peer like a 'cool' adult or older teen or something. and something similar with an angry little kid calling an adult on being more childish than they- the kid- are)
similarly an adult calling a kid a "young man/woman" could be a way of showing respect...but its also wrapped up in the ways some adults manipulate kids in shitty and abusive ways.
but generally if someone sees someone else as of a similar social status, like they respect them as as much of a person as they themselves are regardless of age or other factors, then terms like boy/girl have a lot less age/power connotations
and because social media is dripping with anonymity and false identities (as-in people pretending to be a celebrity when they aren't) the language that gets used is generally very informal. like the entirety of my writing where i use capitalization almost exclusively for emphasis and not proper grammar, or the way punctuation is nearly non-existant. that flies here because it suits the tone of internet interactions. and a lot of us aren't too much more formal than that in meatspace unless its like... an interview or at work or something.
so: depending on tone, context, and body language (when applicable) boy/girl is generally a common informal way of referring to people of the the two socially-recognized genders in english regardless of age. meanwhile man/woman tends to have connotations of formality, clinical dispassion, machismo and even bigotry depending on the context (not as much as male/female but sometimes pretty close).
but yeah, its good to know some of the issue might be a language barrier/miscommunication/incompatability. thats...a lot fucking better than what i was afraid it was.
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wooahaes · 2 years
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writing thoughts ig
i think whenever i write my fics, i usually do try to like... ask myself what kind of story i want to tell and what kind of like... reader/mc i would use to tell that story? i think most of the time i try to go gender-neutral with my mcs so that people can project onto them.
like... under the sun deals with identity, but more in a sense of the way that you define yourself based on past and present experiences. i dont see that as something i need to gender in the slightest. the period comfort vernon fic, acts of service, isnt gendered either--there’s just a warning that reader does have a uterus because.. it’s a period comfort fic. not everyone w periods is female. i could have done the same with one word at a time (dad!wonwoo fic) but i think i projected more onto that one with some thoughts and fears about being a mom one day.
like obviously all my birthday fics from this year are gendered because i wrote them specifically for my birthday. i didnt have to, but they were mainly for me and i just shared em for funsies.
the flowers fics were all gender-neutral bc idk i think everyone deserves to get flowers + i didnt really have a reason to gender them.
lonely hearts club was specifically me, a chubby woman, writing a fic that doesnt center on a chubby mc and her weight + me wanting to write a chubby woman being actively pined for and loved bc of who she is as a person. no weird caveats based on weight. both tiger strips + beach body are also chubby!fem!reader because the fat experience does differ depending on the way you present yourself.  people who are perceived as women tend to get a lot more shit when it comes to the idea of “making up” for being fat. people who get perceived as men will get shit, too, but its usually in a different vein. i won’t go too much into it, but there’s a reason why i gender my chubby!reader fics and it is primarily bc of that difference.
i think while i do prefer and try to write fics where the reader is inclusive, sometimes i want to write a story for people like me tbh? even if people don’t always read them (lhc has very low interaction on it, specifically--so does beach body, but tiger stripes has decent engagement compared to them), i still think its important to write fics for people like me ig? i like making people happy.
i also like proving you can write a fic catered more toward fat ppl without making the entire plot “i hate my body sooo much im so ugly and fat no one will ever like me because im not skinny :(” and having the love interest go “babe ur pretty” and have that fix all their issues. self esteem can absolutely be a topic of conversation because i was talking with some friends the other day about the way weight gets handled in media (mainly on the topic of weight loss) and fatphobia itself. we kinda talked about a (shitty, according to a lot of ppl) anime adaptation of something where one character gets called fat and proceeds to essentially starve himself + overexercise until hes skinny and then he gets to be happy and confident and “earn” a friend. or media where a characters weight is constantly made fun of the entire time, even if they lose it--it’s constantly used to degrade them or for cheap laughs.
i think the topic of self esteem could be fully approached in writing in general. its not an issue exclusive to fat people, sure, but i think people forget that hating yourself wont just go away because one person loves you--especially if it goes deep. it gets tiring to read chubby!reader fics when so many of them feature a reader who is also depressed and hates themself, especially when it’s just waved away when reader receives love. having supportive people in your life can help, sure, but it doesn’t just... cure it. that’s the shit that happens in badly written romance movies that are definitely written by people who don’t know what it’s like to legit hate yourself and/or the way you look. loving yourself is a hard journey for everyone.
anyway im getting rambley so ill shut up now sdkfhdsf just know i like writing inclusive fic but when i get exclusive its bc thats the way i want to tell a story? lonely hearts club wouldn’t have worked the same way imo had i imagined a skinny reader by default. it would have touched on self-love in a different way + reader’s fears about pursuing ww would have been rooted a little differently. UtS reader outright being a fem!reader would have shifted the dynamic a lot  and probably touched more on how it feels to basically feel being the sole female among a large group of men and also it probably would have looked even more similar to m*ze r*nner. reader wouldn’t have been treated any differently imo but “last 14 ppl on earth who care for one another” is still at the core of it, but it would have definitely maybe pulled away from skinship a bit more to begin with before they’d all kinda go “fuck it, everyone needs physical comfort sometimes, we’ll just stay mindful of whats crossing a line with u” or w/e
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soundsfaebutokay · 3 years
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youtube
So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.
If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.
If you care about media representation, you might like this.
If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.
If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.
If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.
Transcript below the cut:
You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories
by Jay Edidin
I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.
I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.
This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.
So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.
But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.
Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.
See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.
Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.
Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."
So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.
Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.
Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.
In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.
I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.
Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.
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queer-questioning · 2 years
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Hi, so here's my introduction:
I'm in my late twenties, and only recently realized I was a lesbian and came out as such. Classic late bloomer story. I knew that I liked girls at a young age, but comphet had me assuming boys were the default option and I must like them too, after all, all my friends were boys. I spent so much time with them, I must've been into them, right?
Turns out no, of course, but I used to consider myself a male-preference bisexual with a strong ally presence, because I had only dated boys but wanted to be as much a part of the LGBTQ+ community as possible. My entry into physical real world sexuality ended up being pretty traumatic despite being consensual. I thought something was wrong with me personally, I went to therapy multiple times to try and fix my "sexual trauma" so that I could go back to having sex with my fiance. That part of my life is thankfully over.
So here comes some of the questioning. Gender identity has become a big public issue these days obviously, and I've always been a super strong supporter of trans rights. But recently this has become a weird topic for me because of a few experiences. First, when I started seeing genital exclusion discourse. I have no interest in interacting romantically or sexually with anyone with a penis, regardless of gender identity or presentation. My attraction is also directed toward secondary female sexual characteristics. Which means I'm not attracted to hormone transitioning trans men or pre-op trans women. I started seeing people saying that this was transphobic or fetishist, and I was confused and upset. My sexual attraction is based on sexual characteristics, and I don't understand why that is considered wrong. As a newly confessed lesbian this felt weirdly threatening, that just as I had said I never wanted to touch a penis ever again, I was suddenly being told that "girl dick" is different and that I shouldn't write it off.
Second, a kid I babysat as a teenager came out as trans and began to medically transition in their teens. Now they have shifted to identifying as gender non-conforming and have expressed some regret for trying to medically transition. They're a musician and singer but it changed their voice which they wish they had thought of before. They also now deal with some anxiety and mental exhaustion after spending their teens as part of a lobbying group for trans rights. I don't know the fu story there. But I bring this up because of my own gender confusion as a tween.
When I first started to realize I was attracted to women I was very confused and felt like only boys could like girls. Combined with the fact that I was also a "tomboy" and quite proud of it, I came to the conclusion on my own that I must be a boy. I had no idea what being transgender was, but I picked out a male name, and even started to pretend to be a boy online. I used that online persona to flirt with girls, while in real life I bought more and more boys clothes and kept my hair short. My parents have always been very progressive so they didn't mind this at all. Eventually I found out what being bisexual was, figured that had to be what I was and toned the masc presentation down a little. However, even now I sometimes like to look a little more masculine, and enjoy the way I look in a binder. I'm not trans, not even gender fluid, its not a part of my identity, its just the fun of different presentations. I can't help but think though, that if there had been more talk among queer youth online advocating non-gender conforming presentation as a sign of being trans that I likely would have thought that I was. I think I would've regretted it down the road if I had tried to medically transition.
Obviously these are not the experiences of all people that are trans and transition early, but I can't help but feel like medical transition is maybe bring allowed too quickly? Of course, I then hear that this is invalidating and a negative stance to take as well, even though that doesn't match with my own experience through gender identity and what could've happened.
Third, the kid I babysat is hardly the first trans person I've known. I've known and befriended a lot, even had roommates that were trans. But one friend recently began to transition around the same time I began to realize I was a lesbian. I thought it would be great to have this late bloomer solidarity with someone I already knew and trusted, but she began to change in unexpected ways. Her personality flipped almost completely, she began to present more feminine but almost a caricature of the most "basic girl" blueprint, abandoning everything that had made her her before. She gave in to a lot of her vices and less positive personality traits, and began making anything that happened to her somehow related to her transness. She also began being very openly crude and making misogynistic jokes (which I later found out from mutual male friends she had done before, but only around guys so I guess that was always there), and I was so confused by all of this. I have known many trans women before and they were just... women. Living their lives, being who they were, which happened to include being women. She however focused her entire existence suddenly around her transness and at the same time became a strange and almost grossly adolescent boy imagined version of a girl.
She made a whole new group of friends, consisting of other trans women that seemed to portray a similar sort of personality and humor. I saw what they all posted online and it all felt so... wrong... They were gross, reactionary, aggressive and weirdly overly publicly sexual. They would excitedly describe and hype up their own "lesbianism." Because of them I learned the term "the cotton ceiling". My former friend's wife ended up gently asking for a divorce, since her transition had made her have to take a long hard look at herself and realize that she was truly straight, and couldn't be in a romantic or sexual relationship with another woman. I thought this was a fair conclusion to come true, and just a sad turn of events for two people that love each other to realize eventually that they're incompatible. Sometimes that's life, what can you do? Well their new friends made her ex out to be the worst kind of person and she went along with it. It felt so cruel...
I've never felt the need to qualify my allyship before, not ever, it was point-blank no-question all-in support for all trans people. But now I'm internally asking questions I feel like I'm not allowed to ask and I don't want to do or think terf-type things, but I also don't see people giving real world examples or citing research, often on either side, for the things I'm worried about. I try to Google for information but so much of it seems biased one way or another and not all of of my questions can be answered with a study.
What if some young girls are feeling that since they don't match cisheteronormative standards of femininity and sexual orientation that the answer must be that they're trans, and what if encouraging that thought is leading to harmful outcomes?
What if some boys feel so removed from the expectations of toxic masculinity that they start to think they're not men at all by societies standards, and then are further encouraged by the open arms welcome of a community that will finally allow them emotional connections and acceptance?
What if some people that identify as transwomen are fetishizing femininity for their own gratification, but thinking they need to turn it into a lifestyle to validate it?
How do we address transwomen that still carry with them the vestiges of male privilege and attitude?
If any of those are true, then what do we do about it? Its not fair to deny transwomen access to shelters and safespaces, or to tell young trans men that they're just confused victims of patriarchy. I'm confused, I'm suddenly have to put what I thought were absolutes into shades of gray and I see my fellows insisting, sometimes aggressively, that its always black and white.
So please, ask me questions, send me sources and articles and studies, tell me your experiences. I want to know. I don't like the extremes on either side, and I want to find the boundaries of what's reasonable and fact driven and not just my own experiences, or a complete refutation of my own lived experiences.
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baya-ni · 3 years
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SHADOW’s Queer Coding
I first started exploring this idea of Sk8′s implicit queer rep (as in stuff other than explicit same sex intimacy) in this post.
I know we like to joke that Hiromi is the Token Straight of the protag gang, but I argue that he’s as much an example of queer rep as any of our main characters, albeit in a less conventional and fanservicey way.
So that’s what this post is gonna be, an analysis of Hiromi/SHADOW as a queer figure, how his character fits the Jekyll/Hyde archetype as a metaphor for queerness and The Closet, the similarities between SHADOW as a skatesona and early drag, and how his character represents a larger problem of exclusion within queer fandom spaces.
The 1886 Gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is the origin of the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde”. What I’m calling the Jekyll/Hyde archetype, refers to the same thing; it refers to duality, to a character who is “outwardly good but sometimes shockingly evil” (as described from the novella’s wiki page).
And the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic has also long been associated with Queerness. The antagonism between Jekyll and Hyde as two sides of the same person resonates with many people as similar to the experience being in the closet, and many many scholars have written about this queer reading of Jekyll and Hyde. Do a quick google search if you don’t believe me.
Hiromi experiences his own Jekyll/Hyde duality through his SHADOW persona, which seems to entirely contradict with Hiromi’s day to day personality.
Whilst Hiromi is sweet, romantic, and generally very cutesy, SHADOW is mean-spirited, sadistic, described as “the anti-hero of the S community.”  And though these two personalities seem entirely at odds, SHADOW doesn’t exist in a vacuum, he’s very much a part of Hiromi. In the show, this manifests as SHADOW’s sabotage moves being all flower themed, as Hiromi works in a flower shop, and how he’ll “step out” of character when playing babysitter to the kids.
Below is passage from an essay titled, “The Homoerotic Architectures of Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” which reminds me a lot of Hiromi’s character, such that I think his character arc can be read as an allegory for coming out and self acceptance.
The closet, here, is a space not only for secrecy and repression, but also for becoming; it is the space in which queer identities build themselves up from “disused pieces” and attempt to discover the strength needed for presentation to the world. The closet is both a space of profound fear and profound courage—of potentiality and actualization. (Prologue)
Unlike the kid/teen characters, the show’s adult characters all lead double lives. When they aren’t skating, they have day jobs. Kaoru is a calligrapher, Kojiro is a restaurant owner, Ainosuke is a politician/businessman (but tbh his job is just being some rich dude), and Hiromi works in a flower shop.
But of the adult protagonists (so not Ainosuke), Hiromi compartmentalizes the most.
Kojiro leaves his face totally exposed such that he can be recognized both on and off the skate scene. Kaoru at least covers his face, but his trademark pink hair and constant use of Carla doesn’t make it very hard to connect the dots between him and CHERRY. He’s also always with Kojiro in the evenings, so if you don’t recognize him as CHERRY when he’s on his own, you certainly will when you see him interacting with Kojiro/JOE.
Next to these two, Hiromi seems the more adamant at separating his Work from Play.
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Even when he’s been clearly found it, he still tries to deny that he and SHADOW are the same person. Miya even uses this to coerce Hiromi into helping him and the boys:
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I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the separation between Hiromi and SHADOW can be interpreted as a metaphor for being in The Closet. As SHADOW, he leads a secret life, one characterized by an tight-knit underground community with a vibrant night scene, where he behaves in ways typically frowned upon by larger society. He worries about being found out and judged by the people close to him.
But in Ep 4, the walls of his Closet begins to come down, or in this case is literally imposed upon by other members of his community, by its younger members, who don’t feel the same need to hide their passion for skateboarding or lead the same kind of double life.
We then see the line between Hiromi and SHADOW begin to blur.
He becomes less of an antagonist, and instead the audience sees him become a mentor and “mother hen” figure for the younger skaters. Later on in Ep 4, we see him casually interacting with the other protags in full SHADOW mode, not as an “anti-hero” but as a friend.  In Ep 6, he acts as a babysitter for the kids, and we see him totally comfortable appearing both in an out of his SHADOW persona throughout their vacation.
And I think that this gradual convergence of Hiromi and SHADOW will culminate in this tournament arc.
There’s something more personal that’s driving SHADOW to do well in this tournament. It’s not just for bragging rights or his pride as a skater, but the results of this tournament is going to have some kind of greater impact on Hiromi’s personal life. Personally, my theory is that Hiromi is using this tournament to prove to himself that he’s worthy enough to ask his manager out on a date.
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Hiromi is no longer compartmentalizing, his two lives are overlapping and influencing each other. Recall the essay quote I cited earlier:
The closet... is the space in which queer identities build themselves up from “disused pieces” and attempt to discover the strength needed for presentation to the world... of potentiality and actualization.
This is exactly the case for Hiromi. Through skating, he is piecing together the disparate parts of him such that he can present himself to the world as a more unified and confident being.
And the show presents the very skating community that Hiromi has been working so hard to keep separated from his personal life- Reki, Langa, Miya, Kaoru, and Kojiro- as the catalyst for that becoming.
That, my dear readers, is queer coding if I ever saw it.
But there’s probably gonna be people claiming something along the lines of “But SHADOW can’t be queer rep because he’s Straight!” And I assume that’s because he shows romantic interest in his female manager.
First of all, Bisexuality. Also Ace/aro-spec people. And second of all, SHADOW is Hiromi’s drag persona.
And before anyone can say anything about how Hiromi can’t do drag because he’s straight (assumption) and cis (also an assumption) uhhhh no, fuck you.
Drag didn’t start with RuPaul’s Drag Race, that’s just how it got mainstream. And it’s also how it got so gentrified and transphobic. You heard me. But anyway.
Drag is, and has always been, first and foremost about exaggerated, and oftentimes satirical, gender presentation and performance. It’s about playing with gender norms through artistic dress and theater, not so much to do with sexuality or gender identity.
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Literally, what’s the difference here?
SHADOW is a persona of exaggerated masculinity with a punk aesthetic. Regardless of his sexuality or gender identity, Hiromi’s gender performance as SHADOW is drag- that makes him queer representation, change my fucking mind.
Queerness is more than same-sex romance, and by extension, good queer representation is not limited to canonized gay ships. The very word Queer, in it’s ambiguity, is meant to encompass the richly unique experiences of everyone within the LGBTQ+ community.
In my opinion, Queer =/= Gay. I mean, they’re colloquially the same yes and even I use them interchangeably. But for the purpose of this post, they’re not the same, and that’s to argue that Hiromi/SHADOW’s lack of acknowledgement as queer rep illustrates a larger issue of exclusion within fandom.
I mean, this is something we all kinda been knew, but in the case of Sk8 specifically, there are a two main reasons why I think Hiromi is rarely acknowledged as queer rep.
1. He’s not shippable with another male character
Fandom favors mlm ships when it comes to what’s considered good queer rep. And the ultimate mark of good queer rep is explicit acts of romance or intimacy between two male characters. Unlike with any of the other characters in the show, we can’t point to Hiromi and automatically clock him as gay, especially because he expresses romantic interest in a woman.
So by default, he’s less popular, because “Ew Straight People” amirite /s.
2. He’s not attractive
This is really interesting, because like JOE, Hiromi is a beefcake.
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But fans don’t thirst over him the same way they do over JOE. Granted, the show really plays up JOE’s muscles in a very strip-teasey way that literally encourages viewers to find him attractive. By contrast, Hiromi is pretty much covered head to toe and he paints his face in theatrical makeup- the point is to look scary, not attractive.
In essence, even though Hiromi engages in “queer behavior” through his SHADOW persona, his queerness isn’t palatable.
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But I also think there’s some pretty insidious undercurrents of fetishization going on here, of both Asian people AND gay men. Which is... a whole other thing I really don’t have the capacity to unpack completely.
But basically, Hiromi doesn’t fit into any of the popular BL archetypes so he’s less likely to recognized as Queer. Relatedly, he’s also less often subjected to a fetishistic gaze as other characters. I mean...
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So again, fans just don’t find him as appealing. Attractive characters are always more popular than ugly ones.
And I’m sure there are a lot of people who just don’t care for Hiromi’s personality, that’s fine, he does act like an asshole sometimes. But this post is meant to illustrate that queer rep takes multiple forms, and unfortunately I think a lot of media just tends to fall back on stereotypical portrayals of queer people for the sake of broader appeal. And by consequence, the fandom’s idea of what constitutes queer rep narrows to same-sex romance, usually between two cis gay men.
With the release of Ep 9, I know a lot of people queer people are going to find representation in the Kojiro’s whole “unrequited love” thing. But personally, I feel more represented by Hiromi, his journey of self-acceptance and subversive relationship with gender- that’s what resonates with me as a trans person.
And I think it’s important to see that kind of less palatable type of queer representation more acknowledged in fandom, and in Sk8′s fandom especially, because I know the demographics of this fandom lean heavily queer.
But that’s all for now, lemme know what you guys think :)
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aro-comics · 3 years
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Fashion Analysis (Part 2: Outside of Amatonormativity Alone)
[Note: This post is a part of a series analyzing self-expression, fashion, aromanticism, and how they interact with other parts of identity. For full context please read the whole thing!]
Outside of Amatonormativity Alone: Sexism, Homophobia (and/or Transphobia), Racism, Ableism, and Other Factors That can Impact Self Expression 
My comic was originally meant to be a light hearted joke. I’d always been told I’d want to dress up one day, be pretty and feminine once I fell in love with a boy (BLEGH). I was so certain that I would never do that, and now … here we are. I put lots of effort into my appearance, present feminine, all in the hopes I’ll impress a very special someone - a potential employer at a networking event. I think there’s a certain irony to all of this, and I do find it funny that I managed to both be wrong and completely subvert amatonormative stereotypes! 
But having the chance to think about the whole situation, I realize now that my changes in presentation reflect far more. The pressure I felt to dress differently are still influenced by fundamental forms of discrimination in society, and I would be remiss to not address these inherent factors that were tied with my experiences alongside my aromanticism. So in this section, I will briefly cover some of these factors and summarize how they can influence people’s self expression as a whole, before discussing my own experiences and how these factors all intersect. 
Sexism
The pressure on women In This Society to uphold arbitrary norms is ever present and often harmful, and while I wish I had the time to discuss the impacts of every influence the patriarchy has on personal expression, to even try to cover a fraction of it would be impractical at best for this essay. Instead, since the original comic focuses on professionalism and presentation, this is what I will talk about here. 
Beauty standards are a specific manifestation of sexism that have a deep impact on how people perceive women. It’s a complicated subject that’s also tied with factors like capitalism, white supremacy, classism, and more, but to summarize the main sentiment: Women are expected to be beautiful. Or at least, conform to the expectations of “feminine” “beauty” as ascribed by the culture at large. 
They also tend to be considered exclusively as this idea that "women need to be beautiful to secure their romantic prospects, which subsequently determines their worth as human beings. The problematic implications of this sentiment have been called out time and time again (and rightfully so), however there is an often overlooked second problematic element to beauty standards, as stated in the quote below: 
“Beauty standards are the individual qualifications women are expected to meet in order to embody the “feminine beauty ideal” and thus, succeed personally and professionally” 
- Jessica DeFino. (Source 1) 
… To succeed personally, and professionally. 
The “Ugly Duckling Transformation” by Mina Le (Source 2) is a great video essay that covers the topic of conforming to beauty standards through the common “glow up” trope present in many (female focused) films from the early 2000s. 
“In most of these movies, the [main character] is a nice person, but is bullied or ignored because of her looks.”
Mina Le, (timestamp 4:02-4:06)
Generally, by whatever plot device necessary, the ugly duckling will adopt a new “improved” presentation that includes makeup, a new haircut, and a new wardrobe. While it is not inherently problematic for a woman to be shown changing to embrace more feminine traits, there are a few problems with how the outcomes of these transformations are always depicted and what they imply. For starters, this transformation is shown to be the key that grants the protagonist her wishes and gives her confidence and better treatment by her peers. What this is essentially saying is that women are also expected to follow beauty standards to be treated well in general, not only in a romantic context, and deviation from these norms leads to the consequences of being ostracized. 
The other problematic element of how these transformations are portrayed are the fact that generally the ONLY kind of change that is depicted in popular media is one in the more feminine direction. Shanspeare, another video essayist on YouTube, investigates this phenomenon in more detail in “the tomboy figure, gender expression, and the media that portrays them” (Source 4). In this video, Shaniya explains that “tomboy” characters are only ever portrayed as children - which doesn’t make any sense at face value, considering that there ARE plenty of masculine adult women in real life. But through the course of the video (and I would highly recommend giving it a watch! It is very good), it becomes evident that the “maturity” aspect of coming of age movies inherently tie the idea of growth with “learning” to become more feminine. Because of the prevalence of these storylines (as few mainstream plots will celebrate a woman becoming more masculine and embracing gender nonconformity) it becomes clear that femininity is fundamentally associated with maturity. It also implies that masculinity in women is not only not preferred, it is unacceptable to be considered mature. Both of these sentiments are ones that should be questioned, too. 
Overall, I think it is clear that these physical presentation expectations, even if not as restrictive as historical dress codes for women have been, are still inherently sexist (not to mention harmful by also influencing people to have poor self image and subsequent mental health disorders). Nobody should have to dress in conformity with gender norms to be considered “acceptable”, not only desirable, which leads us to the second part of this section. 
Homophobia (and/or Transphobia)
So what happens when women don’t adhere to social expectations of femininity? (Or in general, someone chooses to present in a way that challenges the gender binary and their AGAB, but for the sake of simplicity I will discuss it from my particular lens as a cis woman who is pansexual). 
There are a lot of nuances, of course, to whether it’s right that straying from femininity as a woman (or someone assumed to be a woman) will automatically get read a certain way by society. But like it or not, right or not, if you look butch many people WILL see you as either gay, (or trans-masculine, which either way is not a cishet woman). This is tied to the fact that masculinity is something historically associated with being WLW (something we will discuss later). 
This association of breaking gender norms in methods of dress with being perceived as a member of the LGBTQ+ community has an influence on how people may choose to express themselves, because LGBTQ+ discrimination is very real, and it can be very dangerous in many parts of the world. 
I think it’s very easy to write off claims in particular that women are pressured into dressing femininely when it is safer to do so in your area; but I really want to remind everyone that not everyone has the luxury of presenting in a gender non-conforming way. This pressure to conform does exist in many parts of the world, and can be lethal when challenged.
And even if you’re not in an extremely anti-LGBTQ+ environment/places that are considered “progressive” (like Canada), there are still numerous microagressions/non-lethal forms of discrimination that are just as widespread. According to Statistics Canada in 2019: 
Close to half (47%) of students at Canadian postsecondary institutions witnessed or experienced discrimination on the basis of gender, gender identity or sexual orientation (including actual or perceived gender, gender identity or sexual orientation).
(Source 3)
Fundamentally this additional pressure that exists when one chooses to deviate from gender norms is one that can not be ignored in the conversation when it comes to how people may choose to express themselves visually, and I believe the impacts that this factor has and how it interacts with the other factors discussed should be considered. 
Neurodivergence (In general): 
In general, beauty standards/expectations for how a “mature” adult should dress can often include clothing that creates sensory issues for many autistic people. A thread on the National Austistic Forum (Source 6) contains a discussion where different austistic people describe their struggles with formal dress codes and the discomfort of being forced to wear stiff/restrictive clothing, especially when these dress codes have no practical purpose for the work they perform. If you’re interested in learning more on this subject, the Autisticats also has a thread on how school dress codes specifically can be harmful to Autistic people (Source 7). 
In addition to potentially dressing differently (which as we have already covered can be a point of contention in one’s perception and reception by society as a whole), neurodivergence is another layer of identity that tends to be infantilized. Eden from the Autsticats has detailed their experiences with this in source 5. 
Both of these factors can provide a degree of influence on how people choose to express themselves and/or how they may be perceived by society, and are important facets of a diverse and thoughtful exploration of the ways self-expression can be impacted by identity. 
Also, while on this topic, I just want to take a chance to highlight the fact that we should question what is considered “appropriate”, especially “professionally appropriate”, because the “traditional” definitions of these have historically been used to discriminate against minorities. Much of what gets defined as “unprofessional” or otherwise “inappropriate” has racist implications - as an example, there is a history of black hairstyles being subjected to discriminatory regulation. Other sources I have provided at the end of this document (8 and 9) list examples of these instances.  
Racism (being Chinese, specifically in this case): 
For this section, I won’t be going into much depth at all, because I actually have a more detailed comic on this subject lined up. 
So basically, if you were not aware, East Asian (EA) people tend to be infantilized and viewed as more childish (Source 10). In particular, unless an EA woman is super outgoing and promiscuous (the “Asian Bad Girl” stereotype, see Source 10), IN MY OPINION AND EXPERIENCE it’s easy to be type casted as the other end of the spectrum: the quiet, boring nerd. On top of this too, I’ve had experiences with talking to other EA/SEA people - where they themselves would repeatedly tell me that “Asians are just less mature”,  something about it being a “cultural thing” (Yeah … I don’t know either. Maybe it’s internalized racism?). 
Either way, being so easily perceived as immature (considering everything discussed so far) is also tied to conformity to beauty standards and other factors such as sexism and homophobia, which I believe makes for a complex intersection of identity. 
[Note from Author: For Part 3, click here!]
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inkmyname · 3 years
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The Ember Island Players: performing toxic masculinity and narrative complicity in propagating misogyny
Initially I wasn’t going to respond to concerns about Katara’s racist/misogynistic portrayal in the Ember Island Players with anything more than snarky tags, but apparently I can’t keep my mouth shut, so I’m posting my response as a standalone meta about how the writers’ insistence on creating drama for drama’s sake leads them to--in lieu of actual character development--fall back on lazy narrative shortcuts whereby a performance of toxic masculinity against a gendered heternormative background is used to create tension in a romantic relationship, presumably with the goal of keeping the audience invested.
The Ember Island Players is problematic for a lot of reasons, not least of which is the pervasive tone-deaf misogyny, including racialized misogyny, directed at Katara. There’s a lot of meta on this, so I’d like to focus on something different: Aang’s relationship with gender and romantic attachments.
Aang seems so uncharacteristically chagrined the whole episode: “I’m not a woman!” Based on his previous characterization up to this point:
The Fortuneteller. This is the same Aang who makes a necklace for Katara when she loses her mother’s. Observe how he responds to Sokka’s jibe about jewelry-making, which can be seen as a feminine pursuit: Sokka: Great, Aang. Maybe instead of saving the world, you can go into the jewelry-making business. Aang: I don’t see why I can’t do both. Femininity isn’t presented as being mutually exclusive with narrative pursuits like saving the world which have traditionally centered male protagonists (especially if we take the entire canon of anything every written in any genre that’s not specifically, say, something like shoujo or jounen which are directed and young girls and women, the narrative focus on male personalities is overwhelming).
The Warriors of Kyoshi. Oh, and this is the same Aang that dressed up in full Kyoshi gear, kabuki makeup and all, without complaint. Why would he? After all, she was him in a past life. (There’s a whole meta here about gender-critical analysis of kabuki productions where male actors typically assumed female roles and how Avatar both takes inspiration from this real-life kernel and subverts it in Rise of Kyoshi where Kyoshi’s signature look is not only an homage to her parental heritage but also a reimagining of who can inhabit what roles. Her legacy, though imperfect, is also notably feminist, taking face paint worn typically by men IRL and expanding it into war paint for women warriors.) (There’s also great headcanon-adjacent meta here about gender non-conformity and non-binary identities in Avatar. Avatar was not overtly explicit about its feminist or gender-progressive mindset outside of episodes like The Warriors of Kyoshi or The Waterbending Master, but it was still way ahead of its time. If anyone was to be presented or headcanoned in such a way, it would be the Avatar who’s lived a thousand lives, inhabiting a thousand skins and a thousand identities, including gender identities. There’s also cool crossover meta here about the Legend of Korra depicting a female Avatar in Korra with masculine tendencies and visible muscle vs Aang as a male Avatar with a gentler pacifistic spirit and gender nonconforming tendencies.)
The Cave of Two Lovers. Aang wears a freaking flower crown and is generally wholesome and adorable, even leading up to the “let’s kiss lest we die” scene with Katara. He’s not pushy or overly concerned with appearing masculine and it is in fact Katara who suggests the kiss and Aang makes a fool of himself. From the transcript: Katara [Shyly, blushing.] Well, what if we … kissed? Aang [Very surprised.] Us … kissing‌? Katara See? It was a crazy idea. Aang [Dreamily.] Us … kissing … Katara [Fake-jokingly.] Us kissing. What was I thinking? Can you imagine that‌? Aang [Fake-jokingly.] Yeah. [Awkwardly laughs.] I definitely wouldn’t want to kiss you! [Beat.] Katara [Insulted.] Oh, well! I didn’t realize it was such a horrible option. [Angrily.] Sorry I suggested it! Aang [Realizing his mistake.] No, no, I mean … if there was a choice between kissing you and dying … Katara [Disgusted.] Ugh! Aang [Desperately.] What? I’m saying is I would rather kiss you than die - that’s a compliment. Katara [Enraged.] Well, I’m not sure which I’d rather do! [Slams the torch into his hand and storms away.] Aang [Miserably.] What is wrong with me … Aang, sweetie, this is not what you say to a girl you want to kiss, but generally, this is Wholesome™ and narratively, this is Good™. Eventually, they do kiss and that’s perfectly acceptable because there’s a whole conversation beforehand with humorous romantic framing. There’s consent and communication and initiative by the female protagonist. So solid A on the sensitive writing.
General Air Nomad culture. We don’t get a lot of Air Nomad culture in the show (and what little we do get what presented in such a misguided way, especially the whole commitment to forgiveness/pacifism which was handled in such an amateur black-and-white way from a writing perspective in season 3). But I digress. I really, really don’t think that Air Nomads who were so concerned with the spiritual side of bending and general existence had stringent notions of gender and romantic relationships–at the very least, they had very different notions of these issues compared to, say, the Northern Water Tribe. Canonically, even though AN philosophy emphasized detachment, Air Nomads practiced free love. Same-gender romance was freely accepted unlike in the homophobic Earth Kingdom (which even Kyoshi, a bisexual woman, wasn’t able to change) and the militant Fire Nation (Sozin outlawed homosexuality after declaring world war, essentially). And though the temples were gender-segregated, it seems that the burden of raising children fell to the entire community instead of just the women. Both male and female Air Nomads are revered. In the case of the former, Guru Laghima who unlocked the power of flight through achieving complete detachment from the material world. And in the case of the latter, Avatar Yangchen, who has statues everywhere because she came to be revered as a deity not just among Air Nomads but in the physical world in general. Nowhere in Air Nomad philosophy is the concept of gender, romance, love, sexuality, relationships etc. etc. tainted with jealousy and possessiveness (especially towards women) or rigid binary heternormativity.
So this was Aang for the better part of the first half of the series. Not overly concerned with gender roles. Pretty much fumbling his way through his first crush like a lovesick puppy and it’s all very wholesome. Supposedly a classic product of Air Nomad upbringing.
Meanwhile, Aang in EIP:
Checks out Katara’s butt as she’s sitting down.
Gets mad at being portrayed by a woman.
Accuses Katara of being the racialized misogynistic version of herself depicted on stage ([sarcastically]“Yeah, that’s not you at all.”).
Nods in agreement when the misogynistic stage production of Katara presents her as the “Avatar’s girl.”
Unable to differentiate between fiction and reality and puts the onus on Katara to do the emotional labor to justify something she never said (”Katara, did you really mean what you said in there? On stage, when you said I was just like a … brother to you, and you didn’t have feelings for me.”)
Assumes they would just… fall into a relationship… just because he forcibly kissed her at the invasion and again pressures Katara to do the emotional labor to justify why their relationship is not how he wants it (“But it’s true, isn’t it? We kissed at the Invasion, and I thought we were gonna be together. But we’re not.” / “Aang, I don’t know.” / “Why don’t you know?”)
Forces a non-consensual kiss on her even though “I just said I was confused!”
So, there’s so many things wrong with this, most of which are a laundry list of behaviors typical of toxic masculinity:
Ogling
Outdated misogynistic humor (what’s wrong with being a woman?)
Verbal abuse
Offloading emotional labor
Gaslighting
Pressuring a potential romantic partner
Lack of direct communication about romantic desires
Lack of sensitivity
Lack of active listening
Lack of emotional intelligence and empathy
Lack of consent and sexual assault
I could go on and on.
My question is Where and when did he learn these toxic behaviors? What happened to the wholesome boy making necklaces, wearing flower crowns, and generally being adorable in a kid with a first crush kind of way when it comes to romance?
Now, you can argue that EIP players Aang has been through a lot, including being shot by lightning and actually dying, and after the failed invasion, he’s stressed out with the weight of the world on his shoulders and maybe not expressing himself or his desires in the best way and taking out all of his frustrations on Katara.
Except… that is all just conjecture because the actual writing of the show doesn’t put in the hard work and make those connections. Instead, they fall back on misogynistic tropes and toxic heternormative romance tropes and a forced love triangle subtext and they just, to put it politely, fuck it up, two and a half seasons’ worth of work, gone, in the space of one episode. And even if it weren’t conjecture, it would still be wrong of Aang to act the way he did.
Let’s list Aang and Katara’s interaction in relation to each other in season 3:
The Headband. “Don’t worry about them. It’s just you and me right now,” Aang says as he pulls Katara into a dance. I have qualms about the writing of this episode: the creators wasted a golden opportunity to flesh out the Air Nomad genocide because they were too busy playing footloose in a cave, they wrote Katara–the same Katara would said fuck you to Pakku, freed enslaved earthbenders from a Fire Navy prison, and became a spirit goddess ecoterrorist to help a village in an enemy nation–as uncharacteristically shy just so Aang could sweep in and pull her into a dance. But like fine, whatever. It’s cute and really well-chreographed and there’s actually appropriate romantic framing here for once and at the end of the dance, look at Katara’s face–she’s happy! Positive Kataang interaction, and I don’t actually mind it. 7/10.
The Day of Black Sun Pt.1. He forces a kiss on her on the mouth, taking her completely by surprise. A chaste kiss on the cheek and a wistful pining last look and “Be safe” might have been acceptable, but given Katara’s shocked and uncomfortable body language, the kiss on the mouth was not. Worse yet, the show just… forgets… to follow up on it for several episodes and when it’s brought up again, it’s used as a sledgehammer to punish Katara for not magically being with Aang. 0/10.
The Painted Lady. Let’s look at the transcript: Katara [Using a disguised voice.] Well, hello Avatar. I wish I could talk, but I am very busy. Aang Yeah, me too. I hate that. [Looks at Katara’s face from behind the veil.] You know, you’re really pretty, for a spirit. I don’t meet too many spirits, but the ones I do meet, not very attractive. [Looks at Katara suspiciously. Tries to look under the hat.] Katara [Giggles nervously.] Thank you, but- Aang You seem familiar too. Katara A lot of people say that. Aang [Suspicious.] No, you really seem familiar. Katara Look, I really should get going. [Covers her face and runs, but Aang uses his airbending and blasts her hat up into the air, exposing her.] Aang Katara? Katara [Guiltily.] Hi, Aang. Aang [Shocked.] You’re the Painted Lady? [Pointing at Katara.] But how?Katara I wasn’t her at first, I was just trying to help the village. [Takes her hat off.] But since everyone thought that’s who I was anyway, I guess I just kinda became her. [Drops her hat on the ground.] Aang So you’ve been sneaking out at night? Wait, is Appa even sick?Katara He might be sick of the purple berries I’ve been feeding him, but other than that he’s fine! Aang I can’t believe you lied to everyone, so you could help these people. Katara I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have … Aang [Happily.] No, I think it’s great! You’re like a secret hero! Katara Well, if you wanna help, there’s one more thing I have to do. Aang gives her a curious look. Cut to the Fire Nation factory. Aang and Katara run along the river’s edge toward it. Aang looks at the polluted water. Aang You wanna destroy this factory? Katara Yes. Sokka was just kidding, but he was right. Getting rid of this factory is the only way to help these people permanently. He helps her blow up the Fire Nation smelting plant! Yes, he does call her pretty, but more importantly, this is one of the few times he acknowledges her faults (lying, deception, putting the mission at risk to help the enemy nation etc.) and still thinks she’s so fucking cool. He calls her a secret hero! There’s a lot of admiration and support here from Aang. He’s raising up Katara (instead of putting her down as in EIP) not because he sees her as a potential love interest but because he admires her and her compassion! This is great. Solid wholesome Kataang interaction. 10/10. But all good things must come to an end…
The Southern Raiders. I’m not going to spend too much time on this because there’s a million pieces of meta on this episode. He’s completely out of line asking Katara to be forgive her mother’s killer, the source of her greatest trauma as a victim of targeted ethnic cleansing. Given that he’s a victim of ethnic genocide himself, although he personally wasn’t there for it/didn’t actually witness it unlike Katara, he should have understood. He does say “You need to face this man,” which is good and supportive and he should have stopped there, because he continues on to say, “But when you do, please don’t choose revenge. Let your anger out, and then let it go. Forgive him.” Stop. Stop stop stop. No one should tell a traumatized victim of ethnic cleansing how to deal with their trauma. By the end of the episode, Katara doesn’t kill him–but she crafts a third path as the conclusion to her hero’s journey and it is not the path of forgiveness that Aang preaches. Ironically, it is Zuko, who also confronts Ozai, the source of his greatest trauma, who never tells Katara what to do but follows her lead instead: even though he redirects lightning at Ozai and could have killed him, he doesn’t go through with it. He understands Katara and he understands that she needs to this. Kataang interaction rating: 0/10.
So that’s where we are with Aang and Katara in Ember Island Players. Some positive interactions that are appropriately romantically framed and some that are just wholesome and good… but all ruined by forced kissing and moralizing about Katara’s trauma instead of offering understanding. So that still doesn’t answer when Aang would have learned all of the toxic masculine/heternormative behaviors he displayed in The Ember Islands Players.
The only answer, I’m forced to conclude, is bad fucking writing, where the creators were not only tone-deaf in portraying Katara in a racist/misogynistic way or, you know, in writing solely for the male gaze because fuck half the audience, I guess, but they just wanted to create drama for drama’s sake. They completely disrespected their female lead and I would argue they disrespected Aang’s character too in making him a stereotypical self-insert Gary Stu who displays toxic masculine behavior without consequences because that’s what’s expected of a toxic heternormative romantic plot device.
And worse yet, they never follow up on this, just like with the kiss at the Invasion. In the last five minutes of the finale, Katara looks up at him with admiration for saving the world and then kisses him. This is not only a missed opportunity for character development for Aang, but also a big fuck you to the female audience because the message is clear: the guy gets the girl as a trophy for saving the world, and fuck input from the female half of the partnership because that’s just not important and is not worthy of screentime. But I guess screentime dedicated to displaying toxic masculine/heternormative behaviors without ever condemning such behavior as a follow-up is just fine! :)))
If the EIP was supposed to make an argument for Kataang, then it failed. but more important:
By the show’s own high standards, The Ember Island Players is a failed episode, full of bad writing and worse characterization. For a show that was so ahead of its time, this episode is a narrative black mark, a failure of progressive representation and a disservice to its main characters.
There’s some wholesome Sukka and Zuko/Toph interaction, but even that doesn’t manage to save this episode, especially given there’s no resolution to the central conflict: the relationship between Aang and Katara. The entire unnecessarily OOC and forced Kataang drama drags it down.
We know Aang is capable of lifting up Katara and being supportive of her, as he was in episodes prior. We could have had honest, supportive, and open dialogue between Aang and Katara that actually followed up on the Invasion kiss, with Aang clearly expressing what he wants, Katara expressing that maybe she didn’t want that right now, and Aang completely respecting that and them hugging at the end because their friendship/connection is much more profound than pre-teen romance. This is an instance where Aang could have chosen to center Katara’s feelings, for once, instead of his own out of selfless love. If this happened, I would have been okay with a Kataang ending. But that isn’t what we got, obviously.
Part of what appealed to me about Aang as a male protagonist in media aimed at young audiences is that he–at least initially–did not start out as a toxic self-insert Gary Stu lifted from every problematic heternormative romance film ever. In fact, given his playful trickster archetype, general kindness/gentleness, and his stance against violence (a typically masculine trait), he both subverted expectations of and expanded the boundaries of what a male protagonist in children’s media can look like. Unfortunately, the creators don’t go all the way with Aang. In fact, they took a step back with his portrayal in The Ember Island Players, where the creators not only rely on misogynistic tropes to create drama but also make him complicit in propagating said misogyny. And that’s just a damn shame because we could have had a wholesome Kataang storyline and a sensitive male protagonist who cares not about your outdated gender roles and respects his partner’s autonomy!
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arianaderalte · 3 years
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my employee keeps getting deadnamed by a coworker
A reader writes:
I have managed “John,” a transgender man, for about two years. John does not keep his transgender status a secret, but he also doesn’t go out of his way to tell people, so some people know and some don’t. “Lizzy” recently transferred to a department that works closely with ours. She previously did not know that John was trans, but now that she’s interacting with him much more often, she’s found out. At first, she didn’t seem to have an issue with it, but then she discovered some articles he’d published while still going by “Sally,” and now she insists on calling him Sally. She claims that she has no problem with trans people, but that she feels it’s important to call John by the name he was given at birth “out of respect for his mother” (John’s mother does not work for our company, and to the best of my knowledge, she and Lizzy have never met).
John and I have both asked her to stop, but she refuses. On John’s request, I have also gone to her manager, but Lizzy has a very domineering personality and her manager avoids confrontation, so I don’t think he’s said anything to her. Not only is Lizzy’s insistence on deadnaming John offensive, it is confusing, because many people don’t understand who she’s talking about when she mentions Sally. I’ve tried casually correcting her in the moment, as if I thought she was making a mistake, and John has outright refused to answer to the name Sally, but she keeps saying that it’s disrespectful to his mother to use a name she didn’t choose for him. John complained to HR, but they said that because she is not explicitly harassing him for being trans, they can’t do anything. (For the record, our state did not consider being LGBT a protected class, though from what I understand, the Supreme Court ruling should have changed that.)
John has now started exclusively calling Lizzy “Elizabeth”; there is another Elizabeth in the office, and if there’s any confusion over which Elizabeth he’s talking about, John uses Lizzy’s maiden name, rather than her married name. Lizzy HATES this and has complained to him, me, and half the office, but he says that it’s out of respect for her mother. Honestly, I think this is hilarious (and kind of want to start doing it too), but I feel that as a manager, I shouldn’t encourage John to deliberately antagonize Lizzy, even though she started it (and definitely shouldn’t join in). However, it does seem extremely unfair to tell John that not only does he have to put up with Lizzy using his deadname, he has to use her preferred name. Do I have to tell John to knock it off? Is there anything more I should do about Lizzy?
Lizzy is horrible, and your HR sucks too.
It’s ludicrous for your HR department to say that Lizzy isn’t harassing John for being trans, when clearly she is. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the ways in which trans people get harassed knows exactly what this is.
You’re right about the recent Supreme Court ruling that discrimination based on gender identity is illegal. (But even aside from that, what’s up with your company refusing to intervene when an employee is refusing to call another employee by his proper name? It sounds like there’s an agenda there.)
How high up have you gone in HR? If you can go higher, do — because it’s possible someone will overrule whoever there told you that. Point out the recent court ruling, and point out that the company is opening itself to legal liability by refusing to protect John from Lizzy’s harassment.
You should also go back to Lizzy’s manager and push the issue again. You said he prefers to avoid confrontation, and often the best approach with people like that is to make not acting the more unpleasant option for them. So be pushy, be loud, and keep following up — “Have you talked to Lizzy yet?” … “This is still a problem, when will you be talking to Lizzy?” … “What Lizzy is doing is unacceptable. Can you call her in right now and we’ll both speak to her?” … etc. Keep up the pressure until he does his job. You owe that to John.
You also said you’ve been casually correcting Lizzy when you hear her deadnaming John, as if she’s just making an innocent mistake. Stop giving her that cover. Call it out more honestly: “Lizzy, you’ve been told repeatedly to stop calling John that. Why are you continuing to do it?” If she trots out her ridiculous line about respecting John’s mother, then say, “John’s name is not up to you. You are being disrespectful and embarrassing yourself, and you need to stop.”
As for John calling Lizzy “Elizabeth” and using her maiden name (out of respect for her mother!) … well, it’s pretty brilliant. If your company says it’s okay with what Lizzy is doing, then surely this is the logical conclusion. It would be tremendously unfair for you to tell John he has to stop, while Lizzy gets to continue harassing him. Let Lizzy experience some very deserved consequences of her actions.
But that’s not enough, amusing as John’s handling of it is. You need to keep pushing — with HR, with Lizzy’s manager, with anyone else with appropriate authority here — because you can’t let an employee be repeatedly harassed on your watch.
The update, a month later:
Hearing from Alison and all of the commenters made me realize that I needed to talk to John about what he wanted to do. I apologized to him for not being proactive enough with this problem and for underestimating just how offensive Lizzy’s actions were, reiterated that I was on his side, told him that I was setting up a meeting with Lizzy and her manager for later that day, and asked what he wanted to do and what he wanted me to do. He admitted that although he was joking about it, he was actually really upset by Lizzy constantly dead naming him, so in addition to needing her to stop, he would rather not work with her anymore, or at least work with her as little as possible. I also told him that I was willing to make a big stink about both Lizzy’s actions and HR’s inaction to my boss (Lizzy’s grandboss) and the higher ups in HR, but that I wanted to make sure he was comfortable with being explicitly identified as being transgender and experiencing transphobic harassment. He said he was worried about escalating the issue himself, because he didn’t want to come off as pushy or overly sensitive, but that he did want me to do it.
I took Alison’s advice with Lizzy’s boss and just checked his and Lizzy’s Outlook calendars to find a time when they were both free and set up a meeting, figuring that his dislike of confrontation meant that he would go along with it. I said that Lizzy’s offensive behavior towards John had gone on way too long and that she needed to immediately stop calling him any name other than John. She tried to say that she had no problem with transgender people (I had not mentioned anything about him being trans, only that she had to call him by his name) and that it was a matter of respect for his mother, but I interrupted her and said that John’s mother and her feelings were irrelevant and that she was being deeply disrespectful to John, who is actually her coworker and thus actually needed her respect. I also said that it didn’t matter how she felt about trans people or if she didn’t intend to be transphobic, purposely calling John by his dead name was a transphobic action and it needed to stop, and that until I could trust her to treat him with respect, she was not to attend any of our team meetings and any workflow that would normally pass between her and John would go through me first and I would pass on the information. Her boss spoke for the first time then and said that that sounded like it might make us miss deadlines on some of our tighter turnarounds, which I agreed was true, but that given that Lizzy refused to use John’s name, I felt I had an ethical duty to prevent her from speaking to him at all, not to mention that allowing her to continue harassing him would open us up to litigation. I tried to say this all as matter-of-factly as possible, so it would be clear that I didn’t care how Lizzy actually felt about mothers or trans people, and that I wasn’t asking for suggestions on what should be done.
After that meeting, I emailed my team and explained that due to Lizzy’s outrageous and offensive behavior, I was changing our procedures so that she and John would no longer have direct contact, and that they should expect some delays in communication between her and our team. I also apologized for having allowed her to behave in such a blatantly transphobic fashion for close to a month, which should never have been tolerated at all, and explained that I had told her that she had to stop immediately, so if she referred to John as Sally again, they should let me know, either by forwarding me an email if it was in writing or by documenting the incident if it were over the phone or video chat, and should also feel free to tell her that she was being offensive and needed to stop.
This is when things get satisfying! My boss was included on the email to my team, and he called me about half an hour later asking about it. I hadn’t told him much about the Lizzy situation, because he has very little patience for people complaining about their interpersonal conflicts to their boss, and while this is a lot more significant than an interpersonal conflict, I thought he wouldn’t want to hear about it anyway, especially since he doesn’t have much contact with my team in normal times and has had even less while we’ve been virtual. Once I explained what had been happening, he said that was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard and set up a meeting for the two of us with the head of HR for the next day (I asked John if he wanted to come and he said he’d rather not and he trusted me to take care of it). The head of HR agreed that this was outrageous and that HR should never have tolerated it. A week later, Lizzy got fired. Then the HR rep who had said this wasn’t explicitly transphobic got fired about about a week and a half later, Lizzy’s boss had to go through some pretty extensive management training and there’s talk that he may transfer into a position without any direct reports, the entire HR department did training on LGBT issues and what is now required of them because of Bostock v Clayton County, the entire company got an anonymous survey asking if we had ever been harassed or felt that we were the victim of discrimination in the workplace, and the head of HR personally apologized to John for the first HR rep’s mishandling of the case and encouraged him to come to her if he ever felt harassed based on his gender identity.
I also sent John the link to my original letter, and he told me to thank everyone for all your supportive comments. And of course I want to thank you all as well, for giving me the confidence to escalate this situation the way I should have from the beginning. It’s seeming more and more like Lizzy, her boss, and the first HR rep were problems, but that the company as a whole really is the good place to work that I’d always thought it was.
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flipflap-flipflap · 3 years
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[Alright take-two on this damn post.  First one got eaten by post editor right as I was ready to post.  You see how long this is?  Save to drafts, kids.]
I’m here to shove a manga on you: Ookami Shounen Wa Kyou Mo Uso O Kasaneru (The Boy Who Cried Wolf Also Told a Lie Today).  It’s a gender bending romance.  Despite how awful that probably sounds, it’s actually really fucking good and I do not say that lightly. 
(No spoilers, this is all in the first chapter)  A high school boy insecure about his intimidating face, Itsuki, has fallen for a shy loner girl, Tokujira, who does not seem specifically phased by his naturally scary face.  So he takes a risk and confesses, but she turns him down brutally.  Itsuki goes to his sister to lament his insecurities about his face, which he (more or less correctly) attributes as why he can’t make connections.  To give him a new perspective on his appearance, his sister (trans btw) gives him a makeover while he’s sleeping and then kicks him to the curb of her salon - fully crossdressed.  On his way home, Itsuki (♀) ends up bumping into Tokujira, and she mistakes him for a boyish girl.  Under this misunderstanding, she asks "her” for a favor...
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She has androphobia, and she has it bad.  So much so she can’t even look at men without snapping violently or becoming physically ill.  And Itsuki (♀) is just boyish enough to trigger her, but not enough to lock her down.  So she asks for “her” help, to see if she can desensitize herself to her phobia. Itsuki’s in a bind for a couple obvious reasons, not the least being the guilt of deceiving Tokujira. But nonetheless, he genuinely wants to help her.  So, he decides to continue crossdressing, diving into a lie that he soon finds he has no easy exit from.
I really recommend this manga.  I cannot say that enough times.  It is phenomenal, shattering tropes left and right in fun and interesting ways.  Do yourself a favor and give this manga a try.
Personal feelings and meta analysis below the cut.  It’s, uh, ungodly long, and will get very spoilery.  But I will flag spoilers.  And there will be pretty pictures?
(Also, no, I did not go into this planning to compare a manga about crossdressing to the abolitionist writings of Frederick Douglass, but reality deserves to be a bit absurd sometimes.)
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Before you think I’m getting spoilery, with the intro I gave or anything I don’t mark as spoilers, I’m really not.  Everything outside of spoilers is right on the package at the start.  It sounds like I’m spoiling late-game stuff, right?  That’s something that was really fantastic to me: this manga doesn’t spoon feed you.  There’s no arcs of pure silent angst, even at the lowest point in the story. These kids are smart, they think and intuit on the spot, and they share what they’re feeling with each other like good friends do.  Like that next panel down there with Itsuki introspecting about his confidence level while crossdressing?  That’s from the first chapter!  These kids are smart.  And god damn that is so nice to see.
There was a lot I liked about this manga, but at the top is how compelling the protagonist and his internal conflict are.  Right from the first chapter he’s already wracked with guilt about what he’s about to do: deceive this girl by pretending to be a safe space.  But Tokujira told Itsuki (♀) she hopes to one day be able to fall in love, and Itsuki wants to ensure she can have that - even if it’s not him that gets to confess to her.  He’s fully aware of exactly how fucked up what he’s doing is, and is appropriately beating himself up over it in a really realistic way.  But although the guilt never fades, it slowly gains company in happiness. He enjoys this new, fragile life he has constructed around the two precious new friends he's made as a girl.
It was probably easy to gloss over in the synopsis, but arguably the biggest part of Itsuki (♂)’s conflict is his complex about his face.  He looks dangerous, and because of that he is afraid to even lift his head or smile in front of others.  But as Itsuki (♀), he smiles and laughs without fear.  It becomes immediately clear to him on the first day that he's a more confident person while crossdressing.  Happier in a way he can't be as a man.
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Botan is easily my favorite character in the series.  She’s introduced early on, as Tokujira’s first and only friend before Itsuki (♀).  At the start she’s a dangerous third wheel, a serious threat to Itsuki’s ability to keep up his lie.  And though the situation is (thankfully) defused rather quickly, she becomes a massive source of internal conflict for Itsuki. Nonetheless, she becomes a dear friend for both Itsuki ♂ and ♀. She’s just so...*chef’s kiss*
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^This face is the repository of all my love and affection.
Mark my words, this is the first and I assume last time I will ever say this: love triangle good. You know it’s inevitable in a romance genre piece, but this manga approaches the trope in a new and compelling way. [Spoiler] Needless to say, it’s between Itsuki, Tokujira, and Botan.  But...there’s two Itsukis involved, ♂ and ♀, and in the center of it all is this lie. His lie stops being about him: it's about not hurting these two girls he cares so much about. [/Spoiler]
On a more personal note, I saw so much of myself in Itsuki’s older sister, Ibuki.  She runs a salon, catering especially to crossdressers and transwomen.  She’s a self-described “Youthling”, an alien from the planet Youth, obsessed with observing the exciting and turbulent lives of the youths of earth.  For more or less for the same reasons most of us do: transpeople don’t tend to get the youths we want, if we allow ourselves to experience youth at all. So it’s nice to be able to enjoy it vicariously, through this younger generation that is able to more fearlessly pursue the lives we couldn't. 
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^Incidentally, one of my favorite interactions in the manga.
Despite getting Itsuki into this crossdressing mess, she’s someone he can always return to and confide in, and get good, helpful advice from.  Her whole philosophy is to give young people agency to explore their identities and find themselves, and though she tells Itsuki the road he's taking is dangerous as soon as she learns what he's doing, she'll always support him however she can.
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That, I feel, is what separates her from other, more creepy/pedophilic enabler types, like Sawako from K-On! or Lucoa from Dragon Maid. It’s a refreshingly honest and respectful portrayal of a quirky adult just trying to be a good older sister.
The last thing I want to say, and I’m not going to even mark this as a spoiler because of course it’s going to happen and if you can’t predict that then you’re not my problem, is that Itsuki of course eventually has to drop his lie.  All I’ll say about it is that it is probably going to live in my head for years. Everything about it, the lead up, the execution, the fallout, and the recovery, are all so masterfully crafted for maximum emotional impact.
That’s all I want to say exclusively about my personal feelings.  On to analysis.  There will be a lot more contextual spoilers here that, even without reading the parts I’ve specially blocked off will probably leak through.  Read at your own risk, but I would recommend revisiting after you have finished the manga.
One thing I really want to talk about is language.  That’s right, I’m going to compare a crossdressing manga to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the autobiography of a freed slave turned abolitionist. Douglass talks about a concept that has remained imprinted on my mind ever since I first read it: how and why slaves struggled to comprehend the concept of freedom.  This wasn’t anything to do with fear or “racial inferiority” like pro-slavers would argue, but rather with a lack of vocabulary.  They have all of these feelings and things they know to be true, but lack the words to make meaningful sense of them.  For Douglass specifically, his life completely changed when he learned the word “abolition.”  It was like a floodgate burst, as he was suddenly able to put meaning to feeling, create context from chaos.
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And that’s right, we see that happen in a big way, with Tokujira.  This should be an obvious development, but as it happens late in the manga I will mark it [Spoiler].  As Tokujira and Itsuki (♀) practice things like talking, eye contact, holding hands, etc., Tokujira naturally starts to fall for Itsuki (♀).  But she doesn’t understand that.  An important part of her character is that, growing up, she focused on expanding her vocabulary as much as humanly possible in the hopes of being able to better articulate herself.  So words are very important to her.  It’s not until she sees a work of lesbian fiction on display that she finally realizes that’s the word she’s looking for.  The floodgate bursts, and all of her emotions suddenly make sense.  She realizes she loves Itsuki (♀). [/Spoiler]
And I think that is a vital and underexplored concept when discussing LGBT youth, especially in countries where even knowledge of these concepts is taboo.  The reason so many LGBT youth struggle with their identities, especially trans youth, is because we do not have the vocabulary to conceptualize our feelings.  I am always excited to see this concept play out, especially in this context.  It’s such an important thing that needs to be addressed more broadly.
Moving on, I want to talk about historical context of the genre as it relates to what the author did here.  Notably, I want to talk about a specific trope rampant in Japanese queer fiction, specifically early lesbian fiction: the idea that queerdom is a meaningless, youthful phase that children will naturally and inevitably grow out of.  It’s problematic for obvious reasons.
[HELLA HELLA SPOILERS]  My kneejerk reaction to the ending of this manga was that the author fell into this trope.  In the end, Itsuki comes to the conclusion that he does not need to crossdress.  So again, kneejerk.  But...it really wasn’t like that.  He never had any dysphoria; crossdressing was always just a necessity of his circumstance.  Nonetheless he learned to analyze and value his experience crossdressing as a woman, and because of that grew as a man.  And as part of his journey to understand his identity we, through him, see why some people crossdress.  Along with his example, we see why his sister, a bona fide post-op transsexual, has made it a permanent change to her life.  Likewise, we see Miyama, who crossdresses purely for the gender euphoria, but has no (stated) interest in going all the way.  These are all presented as valid and meaningful. [/Spoiler]
Crossdressing, and gender nonconformity in general, is portrayed not as some one-dimensional fetish like cultural taboo would depict it to be, but rather a meaningful exercise for exploring and critically analyzing your own identity.  For some, yes, it’s a phase, but an importantly transformative one when done right.  While for others, it is a gateway to a new way of experiencing and enjoying life.  Or, it’s fun just for the pragmatic reasons...
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I honestly cannot recommend this manga enough.  Tragically, I cannot imagine it ever getting an official english translation, so you’ll have to settle for a  scanlation like the one I linked in the title up top (and here, again).  It’s a really good translation, though the site is predictably sketchy.  Warning for lots of NSFW ads.
Read it, and then come talk to me about it!!!  There is basically zero fan community and I need to fangirl with someone!
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werevulvi · 3 years
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This is a very long, ranty post that's only lightly edited. It's about me deciding to basically leave radfem, so I wanted to be thorough about explaining how and why. And this is mainly because my blog ended up existing in a radblr bubble, deemed as hostile by other ideologies/groups of people, and I need to break out of that bubble, because I feel trapped in it. I'm not sure how, as I may have to start over with a new blog entirely, but I'd hope to avoid that if at all possible (my blog is my baby.) So I'm thinking that making this kinda post is a good start in trying to change how my blog vibes and what kinda blogs I can interact with in a non-debate kinda sense. Basically, damage control.
A while ago, I made some post about how I wanted to move away from the worst rudefem stuff of radfem, for the sake of my mental health. Well, I've now hit a point of wanting to take further steps away from radfem, pretty much altogether. The main reason for this is that there's still too much focus on ragging on trans women, and trans people in general. It's suffocating me, because I'm not all that detrans and I'm not anti-male. I miss connecting with other trans people, and I miss being part of that community. Truth is I've become really fucking hateful towards my own kind and I've been in denial of it. This has been carving a hole in my heart that my radfem views have carved even deeper, and it has led me to become a quite lost soul.
Do I hate trans women? No, but I clearly act as if I do, and I don't feel comfortable with my own actions and thoughts towards/about them anymore. Are some of them cumbrains fetishising my oppression (misogyny) and/or predators? Yes, undoubtedly. But I am not a collectivist and I can't view all trans women like that. Nor does it sit right with me to treat them all as potential predators. I care about trans women in general, ultimately because I am trans too and their struggles reflect my own. I cannot shit on them without shitting on myself. But it's not just about me. I feel empathy for them, and I want to extend kindness and care towards them. I cannot with any goodness in my heart view them as men. Males, yes, but not men. More on that diffentiation later in this post.
I do not want to politisise their gender identities as women, because I don't want my own gender politisised, regardless if that is man, woman, or otherwise. (More on that later too.) I don't want to trap them in the category of "man" because I do not want to be trapped in the category of "woman" as if our transitions and gender incongruence meant nothing at all. Do our transitions change bio sex? No, and I'm not arguing that. I'm saying transition changes SOMETHING and that that something matters. And in a lot of contexts, it even matters more than bio sex.
But isn't that just an emotional argument, like boohoo, my/their feefees? YES, it's an emotional argument. But you know what: I believe that feelings matter, about as equally much as facts and logic matters. An argument being emotional does not make it necessarily useless or invalid. Grave robbery and necrophilia is illegal due to purely emotional arguments. Perhaps think about if that's useless.
I care about trans women's feelings and comfort, not just their rights, and I care about men's feelings and comfort too, because I do not think individual males' oppression being patriarchy's fault even remotely means that "men cause their own problems" because one male suffering at the hands of other men (patriarchy) is NOT his own fault. And him reaching out to women for help when other men fail him AGAIN shouldn't be hard to understand. Of course it's optional to help him or not then, but I feel like it is truly heartless not to, unless he is some kinda raging misogynist. I see that kinda vibe a lot in radfem circles and it honestly churns my stomach. That kinda man-hating is to me absolutely repugnant. You do you, but I will not support it.
Why do I care about males? Because they're human. They're the same species as me, and I care about them as one human to another. Because I don't believe there's any difference between males and females beyond the physical biology stuff. Socialisation varies from person to person. I've always been a person of principles, so I can't sit around and say I only care about fellow females and all females, because no one choses to be born female - and then in the same breath hate males for essentially having been born male, which they also did not choose. If I had been born male, I'd probably hate radfem, and that says something. It's very fucking lopsided, and barely even to my favour.
And I've been asking myself that a lot lately: Is radfem even to my (a bio female's) favour - or is it only the the favour of some kinda statistic average of a general female who doesn't even exist? I dunno, but it's an important question to ask.
This is getting ranty already, but hey I'm trying.
Trans women and males aside, radfem often has a kinda negative view of trans men (and any variety of dysphoric females) that I've always felt iffy about, but first thought I had been mistaken about. It seemed for a long while that radfem is totally supportive of transmascs/dysphoric females, but..... upon closer look, it appears a little bit rotten, sorry to say. Because lately I've come to realise maybe I was kinda right from the start that radfem really is not as supportive of transmascs/dysphoric females as it claims to be. This is probably not intentionally unsupportive, I'm aware, but some of the things that really stand out to me like sore thumbs:
1.) The idea that if gender abolishion happened, no one would be dysphoric or wish to transition medically, is frankly incredibly unfounded. Do you have ANY evidence for that dysphoria is ENTIRELY social, because I've yet to see any reliable study on this. As far as I'm concerned this is just a theory based on essentially the exclusion method that all the biology-based theories are incomplete. So this strong assertion that a genderless society would have no trans people (with sex dysphoria only) gives me this unsettling vibe that radfem is not at all supportive of transition, but would prooobably prefer it if no one was trans - even in a world where gender is abolished and transitioned females are masculine women who just like looking like males, and transitioned males are feminine men who just like looking like females, and I dunno dysphoric nonbinary people would just be men and women who transition in a variety of atypical ways.
Which was always what I envisioned. That no one would be FORCED to be feminine or masculine or anything, because of their sex - NOT that trans people would be forced or expected to accept their physical sex characteristics. Because I don't know about you, but I've personally never based my sex dysphoria on that it's too hard to live as a masculine woman, and I've met tons of other trans people who feel the same way about that. It's a myth about dysphoric trans people, and I think perpetuating it does more harm than good.
Feminism, gender abolishion, etc, probably can't cure anyone's sex dysphoria. And even just striving towards that is a little iffy. How about leave it up to the dysphorics if we wanna be cured? Because I bet most radfems would not wanna enforce a cure for autism if that became a thing, or strive towards curing the world of autism. So why do it with sex/gender dysphoria? Point is I'm just noticing these uncomfortable, kinda hidden anti-trans sentiments behind the gender abolishion idea. I'm FOR gender abolishion, but only if transition would still be available in such a future. But I'm sensing that's not what radfem is actually about, and I've been properly fucking fooled. If so... fuck you for that.
2.) Some of you operate on the false assumption that trans people never pass as the opposite sex. This level of intellectual dishonesty is skewing radfem certain arguments really badly, and makes them appear poorly thought-out at best, and impossible to implement in real life at worst.
3.) The idea that sex segregated spaces can be upheld in a world where some people pass as the opposite sex, is frankly ludicrous to me, if you think of how it would actually pan out in practice. If women's spaces became only ever available for bio women, and males spaces only available for bio men, I'd be banned from both, due to my own transition. (And why the flying fuck would I promote that? I'm not insane.) Because there is no way I can prove that my sex is female, most people do not even believe that my sex is female when I tell them, and I already get tossed out from women's spaces due to that I just look like a man.
People's failure to believe I'm THAT passable irl, is about as frustrating as people's failure to believe I'm actually female, and both those people's arguments on where I "should" go is entirely useless garbage. This doesn't only affect me, but a lot of trans people out there in the world. And then I'm probably more accommodating to this kinda drama, than what most trans people would even be willing to pretend to put up with. I am your faithful lapdog, yet I still get my teeth kicked in for being annoying. To which I have to ask myself: is this kinda martyrdom really worth it? Other trans people often see me as self-hating for being a radfem, and I'm sadly starting to see why.
And to then claim I could just use gender neutral spaces is frankly robbing me of MY female rights. To treat me as a threat to other women is very uncalled for, and yes... misogynistic. And to assume that male-passing females would be welcome in women's spaces in such a world is frankly laughable. Masculine women who have not even touched a vial of testosterone in their lives already have trouble being allowed in women only spaces that have harder rules on "no trans women allowed." This is anti-trans in a way which I cannot support.
If I am to be barred from women's spaces (which I am) because I look like a man, then I WILL use men's spaces. Because I refuse to be dehumanised and stuffed into a "trans toilet/locker room" for other people's convenience. The majority's comfort does NOT get to override my personal comfort. Especially considering men (in general) are not actually uncomfortable with my presense in their spaces, because I look like I belong there. So there is not even any damn argument to be made against me using male only space. This is not because of me wanting some kinda validation for how much of a "man" I "identify" as or whatever. This is about me not wanting to be dehumanised for my medical condition or for how I choose to treat it. Because yes, barring me from both men's and women's spaces does feel a lot like considering me sub-human, because my physical body is frightening, unsettling, gross, or otherwise inconvenient for "normal" men and women to be subjected to. Fuck that noise. I am just as much human and I deserve the same level of basic respect, and that should not be asking for too much. I will not sink below that bar. That's like telling a disabled person that they "have to" use the disabled space because their amputation (or whatever is their ailment) freaks people out, even if they're capable of using the regular men's/women's space despite their condition. So, I'd say barring trans people from both men's and women's spaces is actually rather ableist.
So how do I think that issue should be solved then? Honestly I do not have a solution. So I'd say skip the sex segregation of stuff like bathrooms and locker rooms completely (but keep it for stuff like sports and rape relief shelters) and let trans people themselves figure out which space suits them best, and only intervene in cases when they make a really poor judgement. The only other option would be allowing ALL females in women's spaces (yes, including fully passing trans men) and vice versa all males into men's spaces, but I'm extremely worried about how exactly passing trans people would be expected to go about proving they're going to the right spaces. So I'd say don't do shit until we have found a better (actually better) solution.
Because I can't sit here and say that trans women should never use the women's locker rooms, while I go showering butt naked in the men's locker room. That would be a very hypocritical double standard. Yes, I think passable and/or post-op trans women can and should be allowed to use women only spaces. Based on that I think passable and/or post-op trans men can and should be allowed to use men only spaces, but I do not think that is a perfect or ideal solution.
3.) There's just in general a lot of negativity towards medical transition and how trans people look; our desires, hopes, goals and our dysphoria. This feeds my self-hatred like fuck. Yeah I'd consider myself a rather strong person in general, but I'm not made of concrete, and I think radfem and gender critical thought has broken me down a lot, which took me a while to notice. I don't even know if the real reason I'm calling myself a woman nowadays is because my dream of being a man in ANY sorta sense (be it fantasy or reality) has become completely crushed. Yet I'm unable to truly be okay with being a woman.
Yes, I truly love my pussy, I'm fine with my reproductive ability (producing ova, chance at pregnancy) and in general I like that I started off on a female ground. I love that I have small hands and feet, and a relatively small frame. I really like my height, that I'm not very tall, but do tower most other females. So there's a lot I like about being bio female, and it's mostly things I can't change about my physique anyway. As for my curves, I seem to sometimes like it and sometimes not. I'm also okay with having cellulites and stretch marks. But what I'm NOT fine with about being female is being driven by estrogen, my body's natural gravitation and persistense towards re-feminising itself as soon as I went off of testosterone, having breasts, having less muscle mass than males, having a higher voice, having little to no body/facial hair, etc. I am not fine with being recognised as a woman, or having most female secondary sex characteristics, or lacking male secondary sex characteristics.
This does make me feel like although I'm actually fine with simply being bio female, I'm only fine with it on the condition that I get to look/sound/appear as close to male as medically possible. And does that make me a man in the bio male sorta sense? No, obviously not, but I'm starting to ask myself: Why the FUCK does it matter so goddamn much?! I am sick and tired of being a political pawn no matter where I go. I just wanna live my life.
And radfem discourse (as well as TRA discourse) is so goddamn far from real life it's honestly pathetic and destructive. Most people really don't give a fuck if I'm male or female, or if I have a dick or pussy. It's only really relevant for my doctors and my sex partners. But outside of those very specific contexts, I do like being open about my bio sex, because it just makes it easier to be open about my life, and I feel like that's a good reason to be open about it. However, being open about it solely because some people on the internet think people's bio sex is absolutely crucial info (outside of the context of sex/dating and docs) does not feel good.
I shouldn't feel pressured to be so open about myself, just to not feel guilty for how I choose to treat my dysphoria. I should not have to feel this guilty.
I think my opinions on gender are actually unhealthy for me. I understand more and more that people's opinions on gender are largely just based on their own personal experiences with whatever trans people they've stumbled across. There is no objective facts on what gender is and what it is not. If it's an internal identity or just social roles and clothing. If it's somewhat biological or entirely socially constructed. I feel like I've been arguing bullshit semantics that don't even hold water. I'm not saying that bio sex is changable or a spectrum or completely unimportant, or anything like that. When I say gender I don't mean biological sex.
I'm not saying that I'm not biogically female. I'm saying that just because I'm a female, doesn't mean I cannot also be a man - under, not another, but just slightly looser definition of man which is still connected to physical maleness - in contexts where it simply does not, and should not, matter if I do not fit someone else's definition of what a man or woman is. Because maybe semantics are killing discourse more than it's killing real life issues like human rights. Just saying.
But I dunno what I want with my gender or my label. But I think my realisation that I need to scrap my views and values in regards to gender altogether, and rebuild them from scratch... might actually quite likely change my sense of my gendered self (again.) Because you know what? My gender identity seems very highly influenced by my opinions of gender as a whole, and not just by my dysphoria. If I go by just my dysphoria, I think I would consider myself a trans man, which is why I guess I never truly stopped considering that... but my opinions on gender as a whole (women's rights, female liberation, gender abolishion, trans stuff, bio sex, etc) intervene and conflict with that, and makes me wanna be both a woman and a trans man at the same time, which I can't. So I end up being pulled in two opposing directions.
It's just that up until recently my opinions on gender used to matter more to me than tending to my dysphoria. And now I've come to a point where I don't think I wanna have that sorta prioritisation anymore, because it's having real bad effect on my mental health.
And I need to get very real with myself and ask myself if this really is the life I want. Upon knowing that I'm not actually comfortable with my own opinions, and their affects on my mental health is not actually worth advocating for female liberation, which I already know by now. Then my next step is to take a step back and try to consume less media from any and all sides of the discourse, and listen to my intuition again. Hear myself out. This might take a while, and in the meantime I'm just gonna have to say that my stance on feminism, trans stuff, women's rights, etc, is "under construction."
And as for my goddamn gender label... I'm half okay with pretty much anything right now. Transmasc, woman, ftm, trans man, dysphoric female, masculine/gnc/male-passing woman, etc, is all fine. It's not really about how other people label me anyway. How I label myself is the only thing that truly matters to me in that regard. That it's with self-respect, love and care... and not for political reasons.
I think that's just the thing. That I need to stop doing shit I'm not comfortable with just for political reasons.
With that said, I also wanna briefly touch upon other aspects of radfem that I find myself either no longer agreeing with, or just no longer caring about.
The sex work industry: I know it's bad. But I no longer care and I still might wanna become a sex worker one day. At least I wanna try it. Because no I don't want for sex to be personal, private or hidden. I feel like that's just not how I wanna express my sexuality. And sex is the ONLY of my passions I can in any way imagine turning into a job. Because it's the only one of my passions I never get tired of, and also never truly get obsessed with either. Sorry if the sex industry hurt you personally, but I kinda fail to see how that's my problem, or my responsibility, or how it would seal my fate. I don't wanna live my life after other people's problems, and I cannot learn from other people's mistakes (for those who chose it but still got burned.)
Watching porn, engaging in bdsm, etc: After having tried for a couple of years to heal my broken sexuality and to enjoy vanilla sex, I'm frankly giving up. Some say I'd have to go celibate and work really hard on my trauma for it to have effect, which... honestly I'd rather eat a bullet than do that. I saw a sexologist once last summer and oooooh BOY did that go badly! She basically told me I'm just kinky and need to work on accepting myself. That hurt a lot, and made me give up extra hard on psychiatry again (like it was the last drop again) but it made me realise that there just isn't any help for me out there. And that I'm also not willing to do anything drastic to change it on my own.
That what I want is to have a sex life that I enjoy. So... I'll go back to what simply works for me: bdsm sex. That's not entirely without some reluctance and hesitation, and I do plan on going about it in safer ways than I previously did. Like for example only doing it with people I trust and know well, use safety words, etc, as a bare minimum. I'm learning everything I can about safer bdsm practices, well before actually diving into it. But thing is that I like such extreme "kinks" that it's never gonna be entirely safe, and.... I guess I can't be fucked to care anymore, and I'm tired of even just hearing about the preachings of how bad hardcore bdsm is. Like yeah, I know it's bad, now shut up now and leave me the fuck alone to live/ruin my own damn life.
And as for porn: I never quite quit it, just reduced it by a lot. Again, not denying the harms about it, just not caring enough to change my habits.
Conclusions and wrapping it up: Basically, I've always been a Trauma Queen and I just wanna be myself again. I don't think my former views (more egalitarian/equality based rather than female liberation, and neither individualist nor collectivist) were bad or wrong, but rather that how I implemented them into my life and disregarded danger which was bad. Bio sex matters, but I think gender matters too, and the world is what it is. I have to accept that if I'm gonna have the slightest chance of living a happy life. I can't force myself to live according to feminist ideals for the sake of women in general, when those ideals smother my flame.
I cannot claim that either of the things radfem stand against are all inherently bad. I cannot claim that transitioning shouldn't be a thing, even in a perfect world, because I wanna bring my testosterone with me everywhere I go. I cannot claim that there's any "one road fits all" to happiness for all people, or all women. I cannot be a hypocrite who only values female lives when male lives are at core equally valuable. That has nothing to do with pandering to men. All it means is that I want a world where men and women can live in peace together, and if that's not possible, then at least I wanna live my own life in peace with myself, making whichever decisions I see fit for myself, and surround myself with both men and women who are respectful and decent people. I do not want to try to force my life to fit an ultimately flawed ideology. And all ideologies are flawed.
I'm flawed. We all are, and that is okay. Yes, I wanna strive towards happiness and some health and safety, but not ultimate health or 100% secure safety. Health and safety should not come at the expense of fun and happiness, if at all possible. Because I still need some amount of danger to find enjoyment in things, and I think having fun and getting bitter lessons is more important, than being healthy and safe. I've always thought that. It might just even be a core value of mine, and it does conflict with radfem values. What matters to me in life is in conflict with radfem values. I need to learn moderation and to balance fun with health, happiness with safety, and transitioning with reality. But what I do not need is to wingclip myself because of what matters to other people.
Radfem has taught me a lot of good stuff, it has made me aware of a lot of shit I didn't wanna know, but now it's time to move on and leave it behind me.
Please note that I do not mean to demonise radfem as inherently bad, fearmongering, transphobic, etc. It still has a lot of good points that I agree with. And I may still likely reblog and interact with radfem posts that I do feel are good and/or interesting. I just don't wanna lock myself to radfem as an ideology anymore. I do not think radfem is the ultimate truth, and I do not think there even is ANY ultimate truth to such things as gender.
I'm saying that I declare myself no longer a radical feminist because I am no longer dedicated to the cause as a whole. Not that it's suddenly all bad.
I wanna spread my wings and just be my problematic, true self... this sex-crazed, kinky tranny who deep down loves being a transitioned female, but also don't want for any female to suffer oppression simply because of how they were born, but also sees trans women as "women enough", values male lives and their opinions, etc! Whatever else I might think and feel which I haven't figured out yet. Instead of a forcing myself to become a perfect pawn for completely sex-based feminism.
I may adopt some of my old TRA views back, as well as some of my old libfem views. I will not limit myself to only one school of thought, ANY one school of thought. Please remember that if you're thinking I'm gonna go back to be a TRA libfem entirely, because that is NOT the case. What I'm breaking out of is the tribalism and extremism of radfem: the radical part of feminism. Because ultimately, that radical part of feminism, what I've been describing (perhaps poorly) throughout this post, is what's become suffocating for me.
I need to find myself again, beyond EVERY ideology that's telling me how I should think, feel and live my life. I've had enough of that shit. I need to think and feel freely, and live my life for myself.
Thank you all for your patience with me.
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5 Ways That Bi Erasure Hurts More Than Just Bisexual People
December 2, 2014 by Milo Todd
This year, Bisexual Awareness Day/Celebrate Bisexuality Day was on September 23rd.
That same day, the National LGBTQ Task Force thought it’d be a good idea to post an article entitled “Bye Bye Bi, Hello Queer,” in which leadership programs director Evangeline Weiss said “she is ready ‘to say bye bye to the word bisexuality.’
She said it does not describe her sexual orientation, and she encouraged readers to cease using the word as well as she felt it reinforced a binary concept of gender.
Let me drive that home a little more. The National LGBTQ Task Force not only thought it would be a good idea to publish an article insulting, misrepresenting, and forsaking the bisexual letter in their own name, but did so on Celebrate Bisexuality Day.
Rude.
And a fantastic example of the constant, ongoing erasure bisexual people have to deal with. This one just happened to be incredibly blatant.
What happened as a result of that article? People got pissed.
People got so pissed that the Task Force not only removed the article from their website, but posted in its place this non-apology (it keeps being referred to as an apology, but I’m not so easily pleased): “Having listened to a wide array of feedback on the timing and content, we recognize that this blog offended people. For this we sincerely apologize. It has been removed.”
In other words, “Sorry you got pissed off. Hopefully you’ll shut up if we take it down.” Which, as far as I can tell, isn’t much of an apology for a blatant disregard of an entire community of people.
Misunderstanding of the bisexual community has been the crux of biphobia’s history and the ongoing battle to erase bisexuality from the LGBTQIA+ community.
It’s a scary time to be bi, especially when your lesbian, gay, pansexual, and queer siblings and allies are calling for your blood simply because they’ve fallen victim to the mainstream agenda without realizing it. (Say what?! Jump to #5.)
It’s time for a change.
It’s time for all of us to properly understand one another and to — hope of hopes — become allies for our incredibly similar endeavors. To help initiate that friendship, I ask you, dear reader, to go through the following three steps.
Step 1: Look below. If I’ve played my cards right, virtually every reader should find at least one category with which they identify.
Step 2: Approach your designated section(s) with an open mind, an unprejudiced heart, and a desire to further enhance your own community/ies. It’s difficult for people to learn new things and see different views if they automatically approach them with resistance, which is often the case with bisexual topics.
Step 3: See how bi erasure hurts you as a person and, while you’re at it, likely hurts the people you care about. Because it really is happening.
So here are five ways in which bi erasure is hurting people of layered identities.
1. Female-Identified People and Feminists
Bisexuality is one of the only non-monosexual* identities currently recognized in the English-speaking world. If bisexuality is kept underground, it suppresses our limited, precious resources for open discussion about non-monosexuality. This hurts female-identified people and feminists regardless of their sexual orientation.
To this day, female-identified people can’t get a fair shake. Pay is unequal, birth control access is limited, and objectification is a daily thing. Non-monosexual women in particular are often not taken seriously because they’re seen as sluts, greedy, or unable to make up their minds.
Also, the general fetishizing of women is particularly intensified in the bisexual realm by (straight-identified) men, turning the very act of women’s sexual freedom, empowerment, and self-expression into nothing more than something for male gazes. (This is most often seen through the relentless prompts for female-female-male threesomes and masculine catcalls in bars when two femme-appearing women make out.)
By participating in or casually allowing bi erasure to happen, we’re ignoring the specific plights and abuses of bisexual women, thereby contributing to the ongoing problem of female inequality, objectification, and silence.
As feminists, we can’t pick and choose which women to fight for. The complexities of womanhood — and all of its cultural suppressions — are an all-or-none deal.
*Note: Non-monosexuality usually refers to someone who is interested in more than one sex or gender. (In other words, somebody who isn’t gay, lesbian, or straight.) Another way to say “non-monosexuality” would be “polysexuality” to help keep it from sounding negative.
2. Male-Identified People and Male Liberationists*
Just like with female-identified people and feminists, bi erasure hurts male-identified people and male liberationists regardless of their sexual orientation.
Allow me to make this pretty basic: Men continue to be fed the message that being gay is bad. Being gay means you’re not really a man, which means you lose your dude membership and the bulk of your male privilege. And since gayness equals the slightest shred of attraction to or intimacy with another male, all manners of bromance must be squashed.
In short, many guys live in a state of silent terror in this regard.
Bi men are afraid of being banished from the world of lady-loving, gay men are worried about losing all of their connections to hetero land, and nothing is worse for a straight man than being called a fag.
Constant monitoring, constant filtering, constant stress: Is this really the kind of world we guys want to keep living in?
By being able to talk about bisexuality — remember: one of our only non-monosexual identities — male-identified people can begin to break free from the masculine ideal.
Bi talk helps bridge the gap between being a man (straight) and not being a man (gay) and realizing, hey, having some manner of attraction to or intimate interaction with another guy is totally okay, masculinity unscathed.
Gay men can begin to regain their identities as men, bi men can finally start coming out, and “fag” will lose its strength as an insult from one straight man to another.
*Note: Male liberationists are more or less seen as allies to feminists and vice versa. Both will argue that patriarchy is bad, but while feminists talk of how it’s bad for females, male liberationists talk of how it’s bad for males. Examples include the inability to romantically or sexually love another male, the emasculation of men of color, and the physical, verbal, and mental abuse that comes from society’s expectations to be stereotypically masculine.
3. People Who Identify as Trans Sexual, Trans Gender, Genderfluid, Genderqueer, or Gender Non-Conforming
This one’s pretty easy. Some people on the trans spectrum identify as bisexual. But then they’re told they can’t or that it’s an insult to their trans siblings because bisexuality is believed to be trans-exclusive.
The problem with bi erasure is it adds to the ongoing problem of cis people — LGQ or not — telling trans people what to think. Cis people have a bad habit of thinking they need to speak for people on the trans spectrum even when trans people are quite capable of speaking for themselves. This is even more frustrating when it comes from a community supposedly meant to support them.
Despite the personhood for which they’re continuing to fight, trans people can receive backlash from the lesbian, gay, and queer communities as their identities and bodies are turned into political battlegrounds.
Sometimes, they’re used without consent by some cis individuals so that points can be made for non-trans-specific agendas, and sometimes they’re ironically used in the attempts for cis identities to help better the trans worlds.
For instance, automatically dismissing bisexuality as trans-exclusive and guilting any person on the trans spectrum that wants to identity as bisexual, if I may make so fine a point.
As blogger Aud Traher writes, “If you want to support trans people like me, don’t erase me or speak over me or cause me harm out of self-righteous biphobia. Look into yourself and deal with that internalized biphobia and then help others get over theirs. Don’t advocate for the destruction of a community in the name of ‘saving’ it. And, especially, don’t do it in my name.”
4. People Who Identify as Gay, Lesbian, or — Yes — Straight
Quite simply, it makes gays and lesbians (and straight people) look bad, too.
Bisexual people get a bad rap for apparently upholding the gender binary by saying they love only (cis) men or (cis) women, but isn’t that pretty much exactly what gays, lesbians, and straight people are saying when they identify as gay, lesbian, or straight? That they’ll only love either (cis) men or (cis) women?
But where’s their rampant backlash from the rest of the community for upholding the gender binary? I’m just sayin’.
Even when these groups extend their definitions to include trans people and people on the gender non-conforming spectrum, it’s often still as long as those trans people exhibit some manner of gender representation that falls into the lover’s category of desire.
Now, I’m honestly not trying to rag on gays, lesbians, or even straight people. They have as much right to identify how they want as anybody else. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling primarily attracted to only, say, cis or trans men if your brain simply tells you that you only like guys. That’s fine. Go ahead and do that. I’m not saying you can’t.
What I am saying is you can’t be spewing bi hate or letting bi erasure slide because 1) it’s incredibly one-sided and unfair, and 2) in the end, it’s making you look bad, too.
What do you think will happen if bi erasure is a success? You’ll be next, dears.
*cue Jaws theme*
5. People Who Identify as Queer, Pansexual, or Another Fellow Non-Monosexual
In late October, Lizzy the Lezzy — who I quite enjoy, by the way — shared a photo on her Facebook timeline explaining sexuality in terms of guests at a BBQ.
This would be all well and good if it didn’t include a glaring misconception about bisexual people, especially when compared to pansexuals. While bisexual people were defined as getting both hot dogs and hamburgers, pansexuals were defined as getting hot dogs, hamburgers, “and a salad.” Oops. What year is this again?
I’m going to make something very plain to you, dear reader: Bisexual people don’t just love (cis) men or (cis) women. That’s not how the ballpark definition goes. The “bi” in “bisexual” does not indicate a binary. Well, okay, it does indicate a binary, but probably not the one you think.
Instead of “bi” meaning a love for only cis men or cis women or otherwise putting men and women at two opposite ends of a spectrum, “bi” means a love for identities bisexual people identify with themselves and identities that they don’t.
Or, as the popular Robyn Ochs definition goes: “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”
Look at that very closely. That’s still a binary. That’s still “bi.” And there isn’t a thing wrong with it, no exclusion to be seen.
When compared with the general concepts of pansexuals and queers, our orientations suddenly sound pretty darn similar: We love everyone.
Bisexual people get a bad rap for apparently being transphobic. While we’ve already seen a little bit in #3 as to why we aren’t, I want to further drive the point home here. A large portion of the transphobic accusations toward us come from the queer and pansexual communities, which in turn seem to derive from some serious misinformation and misdirection by the mainstream.
For the record, queers and pansexuals are cool. I like them. But the fact of the matter is that the misconception of the “bi” in “bisexual” as meaning an attraction to only (cis) men or (cis) women — and therefore upholding the gender binary — was created and imposed upon bisexual people by the mainstream. You know, the people that want the gender binary to stick around.
And some queers and pansexuals ate the propaganda they were fed? That’s terrifying. It starts to show just how large and sneaky the mainstream’s gender binary monster truly is.
By defining and erasing bisexuality on the grounds that it upholds the gender binary, pansexuals and queers are not only reinforcing the binary they so sorely wish to dismantle, but they are losing important focus on where the problem actually resides: the mainstream’s insistence to force the gender binary on non-mainstream groups such as bisexual people.
Further, holding bisexual people responsible for the abuse they’ve suffered is simply wrong. All that’s doing is blaming the victim. But, by recognizing and respecting bisexual people as they truly are, bisexual people can not only help dismantle the gender binary and put a new definition on the concept of the spectrum, but finally be allowed to team up with pansexuals and queers to crush mainstream abuse on non-mainstream identities.
Doesn’t that sound nice? I think it sounds nice.
TL;DR
Dear non-bisexual identities, please stop shooting yourselves in the foot and then wondering why you’re missing toes.
We’re here for the same reasons you are: for the right to love whoever we want and for the right for others to do the same.
So let’s finally be friends. We’re never going to get anything done if we keep spending our time putting each other down.
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transrightsjimin · 4 years
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I'm asking as a confused trans and gay person regarding some of your recent posts saying aphobia doesn't exist, etc. Do you consider asexual people to be inherently LGBT even if they are cisgender and straight (heteroromantic)? I don't want to discriminate at all, I'm just confused because I see people fighting on here all the time about whether aces are part of the LGBT community or not. Do you have some insight for me as an ace nonbinary person? Thanks in advance!
no it’s fine lol dw!
i’m not sure how to explain this w/o being too extensive in what i say bc i’ve talked about this before but more in private conversations (and maybe some rants in tumblr posts) nd i tend to ramble abt it.
first of all i do not actually like the common conception that there is one way to define LGBT or the idea that everyone should fall within that category term or not, for example because the English language is colonial and rigid and does not reflect on experiences of all cultures, bc being gay or trans are not distinctly different experiences everywhere while they would be divided into different categories. so whereas i was more insistent on saying ‘you must be gay / bi / lesbian / trans to be LGBT / suffer from homophobia or transphobia’ i’ve come to realize now that this argument is rather exclusive of many gender diverse identities that do not correspond to all experiences or cultures. so i will stay away from using that argument.
however, i am speaking from my experience with online LGBT and asexual communities and have seen how the latter has tried to force itself into the other. i think a large issue with the asexual and aromantic communities is that they are partially based upon the creation of AVEN, an online forum founded by a homophobic and antisemitic man, and partially (though related to the former) by just blatantly made up statistics and history. not once have i seen a good argument or research or even personal accounts that illustrate very well why aphobia is a thing. i am asexual myself but do not want to take the lack of discrimination i faced for it as proof. there have been accounts of ‘aphobic’ discrimination that are either 1. much more a general concern with the OP facing misogyny and girls being sexualized, 2. someone making a remark based on a misconception of OP’s experiences or 3. misappropriation of terms and applying them to asexuality, e.g. ‘corrective rape’ was coined to refer to (African) lesbians who were assaulted under the presumption that it would turn them straight. asexuals have appropriated this term years ago to claim asexual people face rape on a large scale because perpetrators try to force them into liking sex. some people don’t even know the original meaning of the term because of this. i’m also not a big fan of this new interpretation of the term anyway, because legit sexual attraction is not the main reasons people commit rape; it is to seek power. this kind of mindset of asexual people being inherently vulnerable to sexual violence due to lack of feeling sexual attraction is seriously harmful; in the crime show Law and Order SVU, a suspect was let off because some main character said the suspect was asexual and this couldn’t have done it. people can be and sometimes are raped by an asexual person, because it is about taking advantage of someone and not attraction. the sole fact that so many authors of overly fetishistic fanfiction are asexual should prove this much, but instead the lack of attraction is used to distance oneself from the harm one can still cause.
and yes, asexual people can face discrimination, especially if you’re a girl you’re expected to be sexually submissive, which is pretty horrifying on its own. but this is not the same as targeted discrimination on a mass scale or institutional whatsoever. we are not thaught as we grow old that asexuals are disgusting, are a joke, or need to be violently murdered. my biggest issue with the asexual and aromantic community that we (as i have removed myself from it years ago) keep telling it that anecdontal accounts of being mildly discriminated is nowhere near the same as risking being kicked out of your house, being violently attacked due to the way you appear or having a partner of the same gender, being systematically discriminated by all sorts of institutions in society and being thaught that what you are is bad from an early age on. and then the counterargument is that LGBT is more recognized but asexual and aromantic isn’t, so ‘ace / aro’ people deserve to be included because they are underrepresented in media. but that is not the case at all. the speed at which asexuality has suddenly been incorporated and included into LGBT spaces, also offline, has been ridiculously fast. nowadays when you see a bunch of LGBT flags you see the asexual one being included a lot, sometimes in 3 different versions, while the lesbian flag is nowhere to be seen. lesbians are consistently excluded from their supposedly own community and they are not included in LGBT due to a need to change underrepresentation or lack of awareness, but because they face their own version of homophobia. the most mind-boggling thing about cis / cishet asexual and aromantic people being told that they are not oppressed, is that the response is not relief (’oh i’m glad i don’t face systematic oppression for this thing’) but anger (’how dare you not let us into your group!’). LGBT is seen as a fun party that is unnecessarily mean to anyone it gatekeeps, as if it is not actually necessary to keep out cishet people who benefit from their privilege and can use that against the rest in the group if they join.
my largest issue with the asexual community however, and i’ve touched upon this a bit before in the post, is that it victimizes itself, to such a degree where it puts itself oppositional to ‘allosexuals’. the whole idea that people who experience sexual attraction to another person are inherently privileged over abd hold power over asexual people is just not true (and the same goes for this rethoric for aromantic people). this idea is so wrong and the whole concept of the ‘allosexual’ as oppressor collapses once you consider that people who are attracted to the same gender are actually in danger and oppressed for their very attraction. not only are those who experience attraction (that isnt platonic) to other people portrayed as oppressors, but also as perverted freaks. once i decided to stop associating myself with acearo people and instead interact with LGBT people with other experiences, i realized just how much stigmatizing abd frankly, homophobic and transphobic bullshit i’ve adopted within the spaces i used to be in and that i still see gather a lot of traction (now their harmful points are also used on twitter and IRL in the public domain). the community has a huge issue where it teaches you to be puzzled and grossed out by people who want to date / kiss / have sex with other people, and this results in GSAs that now include asexuals to prohibit kissing your partner per request of asexual / aromantic members, asexual people showing up at pride with ‘can we just hug?’ signs, the common serophobic jokes (’at least we dont get hiv!!’ blergh), and for me it led to a great discomfort with kissing and sex imagery and it wasn’t until i left the community that this was in fact subtle homophobia because so much content on here is lgbt themed and to combine that with the increasing aversion to romance or sex without critically looking at that is... very toxic to say the least.
so where it’s standing right now, i don’t think including asexual or aromatic people in LGBT spaces on the basis of those identities is a good idea. one community advocates for the acceptance of sex, whereas the other is stigmatizing it and painting off those who are in fact oppressed for their transness or homosexuality, as the oppressors. it clashes and it doesn’t work. the ‘ace / aro’ community (quote unquote bc i see ‘ace’ being used a lot to imply superiority over ‘allosexuals’ like, theyre being the ace at something) has too many issues, which it is largely based on, to figure out. it can be a community on its own and i do not think you need to join LGBT to have a valid identity that has something to do with sexuality or gender and deals with a form of stigma.
it woukd be a rant, i warned you lol
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rivetgoth · 4 years
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OC #3 - Giovanni Marcello
Pinterest board 🔮 Tag on OC blog
Sorry for the long delay in these, uh, if y’all have been watching my posts I got sick and had to fight a bunch of hurdles in the super inundated pandemic medical world to even get my medicine and things have just kind of been exhausting, but LUCKILY I think (KNOCK ON WOOD) I’m on the tail end of it now and recovering.
SO here’s Giovanni. He’s a really special OC to me, he’s one of the protagonists of my novel. He means a lot and I’ve spent a LOT of time with him. I realized a while back that if I ever did one of those memes where you combine all of your favorite characters into an OC, Giovanni would be it. He’s really fun and I care a lot about him. I can’t wait to finish my novel and force people to really get to know him.
Giovanni is in his early-mid thirties and he’s gay. He’s the second youngest child and the youngest son in the Marcello family. The Marcellos own this huge corporation in the Fresno megalopolis that sells drugged, often heavily addictive candies to the public. They basically have the monopoly on the pharmaceutical industry even though they didn’t even initially claim any medicinal value, but as Himmel Medicine took over the entire hospital industry and started inflating medicine prices, Marcello Candies became the public’s go-to for over the counter drugs and self-medicating. Giovanni is the product of his father’s second wife, with whom he has one fully biological sister, Vittoria. She’s the other protagonist of my novel.
Giovanni was born to Vittorio and Camila Marcello. During the early years, Vittorio was very much not around, busy running the Marcello Candy Company and letting Camila worry about their infant son. After some time it became clear that there was something “wrong” with Giovanni - this universe probably doesn’t really have a reliable DSM, but it would be something along the lines of autism or ADHD. He was just taking a lot longer with things like talking than most would at his age, stuff like that. Vittorio was furious and suggested that they put him through intensive therapy to sort this out, but Camila reassured him that she would see to it personally that Giovanni was looked after, and he was, until he was about about seven, when she gave birth to his younger sister, Vittoria, and died of complications shortly after.
Now that his mother was gone and Vittorio was left to parent alone, he went through with his initial plan and set Giovanni up with a strict tutor and therapist who was supposed to train Giovanni to comply properly with Vittorio’s expectations for him. Obviously, this didn’t really do much except horribly effect Giovanni’s sense of self and destroy any sort of confidence or certainty in his identity that he may have had otherwise. And, between the therapist, his father, and his older brother Antonio, already a teenager, who often babysat him and was merciless and cruel to him all being men, he also came to really fear men and have a very intense aversion to masculinity in general, which would fuck with him more and more as he grew older and began to develop attraction exclusively to men. By the time he was in his teenage years he was a complete mess with horrid self esteem issues and constant insecurity. Vittorio insisted on him staying inside as often as possible, not wanting him to be seen by the public and ruin the family’s name, and the one person who tried to reach out to him, his half brother Dante, killed himself not long after.
What probably saved Giovanni’s life was becoming invested in makeup. Trapped in trauma and internalized homophobia he didn’t comprehend that his attraction to women was not any sort of romantic or sexual attraction but a sort of draw towards femininity, in part to cope with aforementioned trauma and in part to grapple with his own complex feelings about gender and sexuality he was dealing with. Through makeup he could get in touch with a more effeminate side, a space more comfortable than masculinity, and he could begin to view his own face as a canvas for art instead of something ugly and imperfect. He began to experiment with makeup and get increasingly good at it, and it gave him something to be passionate about for the first time in his life.
Vittorio, having given up on even wanting Giovanni to be a “functional member of society,” decided it would do less damage to his company’s name if he just kept him pacified, allowing him access to as much of the company’s drugged candy as he desired and giving him odd jobs around the company to give him busy and out of the public’s eye. In his free time he would take care of pet birds (which he adored), get drugged out on candies, and have sex with various women from the company - Something he didn’t even really enjoy except on a physical level and usually just left him feeling guilty and bad about himself and unable to understand what was wrong with him, refusing to even consider or address his attraction to men out of fear. Free time was also spent making his little sister’s life hell - He has a lot of complex feelings towards her, mostly jealousy and anger, feeling like she ruined his life by being born.
As the Marcello Candy Company grows more powerful, questions about the Marcello children would become more and more frequent, and Giovanni would eventually become a source of shame that his father could no longer handle. He (as well as Vittoria, his little sister) would get kicked out of the house and thrown out onto the streets, unofficially disowned with only a small monthly “allowance” to satiate them. At the time that this happens, Giovanni is thirty-four. The vast majority of my novel takes place around these events so I want to keep things from here kinda vague, but I will say that he ends up on the outskirts of Fresno and comes to stay with Angel Steel and Hollywood California in a little house that they’re using to hide out in. Angel becomes one of Giovanni’s primary love interests, although he also has some “interaction” with an assassin named Leatherette too (I’ll do his bio soon… maybe it’s the next one? Hmm). He eventually comes to live out by the beach as a fortune teller, but I don’t want to share too much, though I don’t mind spoiling that he doesn’t straight up die in my book LOL.
Giovanni can be very childish and immature. He overcompensates for his insecurities by being very haughty and bratty. He likes to take petty little shots at his sister but he gets very easily offended when she retaliates. He likes to imagine that he’s something of a romantic. He loves makeup, glitter, and the colors purple and gold. He likes fancy clothing, scarves, flowers, and dangling earrings that he can tap and swing around and rub between his fingers when he gets anxious. One of his bigger struggles is conceptualizing things around him as real and existing with their own thoughts and feelings rather than being stuck inward and only focusing on himself, which only leads down a path that hurts others and makes him incredibly self-destructive as well since he hates himself. One way this manifests is through his pet birds; despite how much he adores them he struggles to take care of them and frequently kills them via neglect, which makes him feel really bad too. You can dwell on foreshadowing here if you’d like, or wait to read my novel and learn more about what happens. :)
Giovanni doesn’t have very good social skills and he gets pretty flustered and nervous easily, but like I said before, he usually copes by acting out which only makes things worse for everyone, including himself. He’s pretty good at embarrassing himself. He eats way too much candy and is almost always high or drunk because he doesn’t really want to think too hard about stuff. He loves art, especially paint and makeup. I think Giovanni feels very bad about things very often but has worked extremely hard to mask it as well as possible by simply rejecting anything that makes him feel at all guilty or uncomfortable, so he has a very fractured sense of self.
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