#when i identify as a man one day and a women the next i may dress different or wear a binder depending on how i feel but i do not suddenty

[faggyangel]

what i love about aziraphale and crowley presenting as female is that they don't switch vessels to do it, there aren't other cis actresses on the side lines for the feminine presentations of these characters. when crowley presents as feminine he doesn't change his face, it's still crowley and it's still aziraphale. i just think it's nice to see gender fluidity represented in a way that doesn't require the person to become cis passing as the gender they present as in the moment

#as a genderfluid person its nice to see that crowley being played by a cismale actor doesn't have to change his entire to appearance #to appear more like a conventionally attractive cis passing woman like no crowley looks how crowley looks and presenting as a woman doesn't #require him to change that #she can still be a woman or a man or neither regardless of how he looks #idk thanks gaiman ig #good omens #gender fluidity represented in shape shifting creatures (for lack of a better term) is so frequently represented by that person changing #like physical shape and played by cis women/cis men and its nice to see a sort of representation that doesn't require that #when i identify as a man one day and a women the next i may dress different or wear a binder depending on how i feel but i do not suddenty #become a cis man or a cis woman i'm still me and i still look the way i look and that doesn't make my identity any less than what it is #does any of this make sense or am i screaming to a void of cis bitches

[sluttyten]

Eros & Psyche

Yesterday <- || -> Kinktober Masterlist

Day Eleven: Anonymous Sex w/ Taeyong

Word Count: 9,568

Summary: you don’t know his name, you never see his face. he’s a perfect hook-up, absolutely no strings attached when you meet up for just sex. but how long can the anonymity truly last, and is it a cure-all for catching feelings?

The first time was a drunken mistake.

A careless night out at a club in LA. It was dark except when the lights flashed in quick bursts, and he was wearing a mask. Not like a normal face mask, but a Jason mask from the Friday the 13th movies. It was mid-October, and this club was doing Fright Nights with a costume contest every Saturday night this month, so the mask wasn’t out of place.

At first when he approached you, you were creeped out, but you were tipsy and horny and sad, reeling from the end of two relationships, due to a cheating bastard and a betrayed friendship, so you were just looking for something, for anything to numb the pain. The club, the drinks, and this Jason-mask wearing guy were exactly what you needed.

You didn’t care who he was or what he looked like, all you knew was how it felt when you pulled him into a messy stall in the women’s restroom, hiked up the skirt of your already very short dress, and when he slid up behind you. You barely even spoke to each other, no more than was necessary, but what little he did speak came with an accent from somewhere you couldn’t identify.

By the time you woke the next morning, you barely remembered the encounter, only a vague memory of getting fucked in a filthy bathroom by Jason Voorhees. But you felt better, odd as it may sound.

The second time you were still a bit drunk, and it was still probably a mistake.

You were being mature about your ex-friend and ex-boyfriend having an affair, so you were running away from your problems, seeking a life where you weren’t tied down to the city where they were.

New York was as good a place as any, you figured, and a week after that lapse in judgement at the club in LA, you found yourself in another club in New York City.

This was another Halloween-themed night, though only about half of the patrons seemed to be wearing what could pass as costumes. Much like the last time, you weren’t wearing a costume, you were just dressed in something tight (“something that screams ’fuck me’” a friend you’d brought along on this adventure told you).

The costumes here ranged from lazy to frightening to Marie Antoinette (Sexy Version). There were sexy cops, sexy nurses, sexy anything you can imagine.

Your friend was swept away by a person of an indeterminate gender who was dressed in a floor-length lacy black gown and long black hair a la Morticia Addams, but with a nicely trimmed beard. And just like that you were left to seek your own fun. You were standing at the bar, watching the bartender make your drink when a man dressed in a fitted black button down and black jeans wearing a skull mask leans against the bar beside you.

“Are you following me?” He says, speaking loudly to be heard over the music.

It takes you a moment to realize that he’s speaking to you. But he’s looking directly at you, there’s no one on the other side of you, and you decide, if this is some kind of pick-up line, it’s not a very good one.

“Excuse me?” You laugh, accepting your drink from the bartender as he hands it over.

The skeleton man looks at you, cocking his head slightly to the side.

“Sorry if I’m wrong,” he says the words slowly, and you detect that he’s searching for the right words. “But you were in LA last week?”

You feel strongly tempted to tell this guy no, to lie about having ever been to LA, but then he leans takes a step back, giving you some space.

“I’m wrong, maybe.” He lingers. “I was, uh, Jason at a club last week in LA, I thought maybe you were the girl I met there.”

And just like that your memory is sparked. You get flickers of his breath against your neck, hands on your thighs, your breath rasping out of your lungs as he’d fucked you against the wall of the stall like a nightmare-fueled fantasy.

“Oh!” You cover your mouth. “Yeah, that was me. I— Are you following me?” You ask, putting on a teasing tone, but you’re also a little bit serious. It’s weird. You meet in a random club across the country last week, and this week he finds you in New York? A voice that sounds a lot like the voice of reason whispers in the back of your mind that he could be a stalker.

He laughs, and for the first time you realize that his skeleton mask ends beneath his cheekbones, the rest is just very detailed paint. “I’m here for work,” he tells you, leaning closer again so you can hear him over the music. “I travel a lot, but I’m trying to have fun too.”

Now you can hear the familiar tones to his voice, that accent that you still haven’t placed.

“Where are you from?” You ask, leaning in as well. You’re close enough that when the lights strobe, you can see his eyes through the holes in the mask. Gorgeous eyes, large and dark.

“Uh, Korea,” he says after a moment. And then, “Can I buy you a drink?”

You won’t turn down a free drink, although some of your friends cite that as a problem, but tonight you’re celebrating freedom rather than mourning jt as you had been last week, so you take the drink gladly. He orders two shots of something, and you each throw one back.

You don’t know this guy. He’s a stranger that you’ve fucked, just some guy who travels a lot from Korea. Jason the Skeleton Man.

Your voice of reason grows quieter with each shot, until you find yourself stumbling out of the club with this Skeleton Man. He’s equally as tipsy as you, if not more so. His hair is bleached to a perfect, silvery shade of white that gleams beneath the streetlights as he tugs you away from the club, both of you tripping over your feet.

You’re not really sure where you’re going. He’d taken you out to dance together, bodies pressed hot and sweaty together in the mass of all the other partiers, and at some point he’d touched his lips to your ear to ask you if you wanted him to fuck you again. His hands had been on your body for the better part of the last thirty minutes, his cock grinding against your ass.

The sound of that word from his lips—fuck—had sounded so tempting when paired with the drinks and his touch, so you’d said yes. What did you have to lose?

Your friend was nowhere to be seen, so you shot off a quick text, a shared location, and you’d let the Skeleton Man lead you out of the club. Reckless and potentially quite dangerous, you weren’t thinking with your head but with your pussy.

It was a hotel he brought you too, just several blocks away through the city. It took longer to walk those blocks than it should’ve, possibly because you kept stopping him to pull him against you, kissing him until the skull makeup around his lips was smudging into gray.

By the time you reached the hotel, his hand was tight in yours, and he led you quickly by a group of young women who lingered outside on the curb, giggling over their phones. He all but dragged you through the lobby, and the moment you were alone in the elevator, he pressed you against the wall.

You were a mess of giggles, fingers twisting in the front of his shirt as you kissed him. The edge of his mask dug into your cheek a little uncomfortably, but not enough that you really minded.

There wasn’t much of anything you cared about then. You were feeling the confidence and carelessness of someone who’s had several shots, of someone who just wants to get dicked down by a man who you know knows what he’s doing. All you cared about was getting your hands inside of his pants the moment that his hotel room door opened.

The door wasn’t even swinging shut before you had him back up against the wall beside the door, your hand diving down the front of his pants, your lips on his. He moaned against your kiss, nipping at your lip as you pulled back, chasing after you with his lips. He lets you jerk him off like that, hard and rough, a little dry, but he seems to like that.

His long fingers pulled at your dress, tugging the straps down over your shoulders, the top down over your breasts. Your skeleton man has you naked in seconds, walking you backwards into the room while your fingers work down the buttons of his shirt, exposing his chest, revealing a piece of a tattoo on his hip, but you don’t get much of a chance to get a better look at it.

When he spins you around and presses your chest up against the window of the hotel room, your whole body lights up like a storm, caught between the cool glass and the heat building inside you.

He fucks you just like that. Up against the window with the busy city street down below you, the world laid out in front of you. He cums first, spilling into a condom as he grinds into you, trying to make the most of your tight heat around him.

Your orgasm he gifts to you on a silver platter. He drops to his knees, and fills you with his fingers, soothing the throbbing need with his tongue on your clit. He moans and slurps loudly, so noisy, but you kind of love it. Especially when he pulls away from your pussy to moan something in Korean when you’d tugged on his bleached white hair.

You can feel the coolness of the rings that decorate his fingers as he thrusts them knuckle-deep inside you, and feel the sharp and cool sting of the rings as he brings a hand up to your ass, squeezing massaging, pulling his hand back a little just to slap it back down as he sucks at your clit and crooks his fingers just right inside you to prod against that spot inside you that sets your world on fire.

He slurps up you wetness, the unavoidable gush of cum as you orgasm. You’re basically sitting on his face as he kneels behind you, and he lets you rock against his face, just licking you out as you chase the endless high.

Afterwards, when you just have to stumble away from him, pressing your cheek and hands and tits once more against the cool glass, you swear and pour out praises for his skills. You glance back over your shoulder at him just in time to see your very sexy skeleton man rock back on his heels and rise up onto his feet.

“Thank you,” he says as he wipes at his mouth and chin, smearing his makeup and even wiping it away in some places. “You’re really, really good too,” he tells you, and then he’s fumbling with his phone as he pulls it out of his pocket. You catch a glimpse of the time, quarter past two in the morning.

You should leave. Go back to the club or to the Airbnb you and your friend were renting for the weekend. You should definitely not stay here and sleepover tonight.

As much as you like sexy Skeleton Jason guy, you also really like the anonymity of this. You like not knowing what he looks like, not knowing his name, not knowing if fate is going to push you together again, maybe next time just passing in the street of some other city without you even knowing.

“I’d better go.” You peel yourself away from the window, skirting around him on your way back towards your abandoned dress on the floor. “But it was nice fucking you again.”

He laughs, and the sound makes you halfway turn around. “It was nice fucking you again, too,” he says. “Maybe we’ll get the chance again in the future?”

You’d like that.

“How long are you going to be in the city?” You ask, unable to help yourself.

“Ah,” he lifts a hand to rub the back of his head. The skeleton mask slips forward on his forehead a little bit. “Not too much longer. Back to Korea in two? Three days, maybe?”

That gives you at least another two days to chance running into him again.

You pull your dress back up, tugging the straps into place on your shoulders. “Maybe we’ll see each other again.”

“Maybe. But you might not know I’m me.” He grins as he says it. “You know, if you’re ever in Korea, in Seoul, let me know.”

“How?” You slip your feet back into your heels. “I don’t have your number or your name?” And you would kind of like to keep it that way. The anonymity is half of what makes this so hot.

“Give me your phone.” He holds his hand out, and you find yourself passing your phone over without a second thought. “This is my contact for, uh, kakaotalk. It’s an app we use instead of, like texting or, like, calling. If you’re in Seoul, use it.”

When he passes your phone back to you, you lock it without looking. “I will,” you promise. “But you have to promise that when I do, you’ll remember me. Okay?”

He smiles and nods, a slightly ominous sight with the skull mask. “I promise.”

You leave a few minutes later, and it’s only when you’re in the elevator, descending to the lobby, that you catch a glimpse of yourself in the reflection of the doors. Your mouth and cheeks and chin are smeared with dark gray makeup. You look like you’ve been making out with a piece of charcoal. You wipe at it until it comes off.

You hurry out through the lobby, back out onto the street as you pull up a map. To your surprise, your Airbnb is only two blocks back towards the club and then three blocks north, an easy enough walk, but it’s chilly and too late to be walking alone, so you order an Uber instead. It’s once you’re sitting in the backseat of the Uber, clearing out your open apps, that you see your contacts open.

He created a new contact, and the page is still open to it. There’s what you suppose must be his username on that kakaotalk app, and at the top of the screen, for his name, he put only two letters:

TY

and beside it, a small emoji of a rose.

Fate was a tricky bitch, presenting you with tricks and treats and twists of fate.

It was Halloween morning, a Monday of all days, when your boss approached you at work in the office. She was offering you a promotion.

In the weeks since discovering the affair between your boyfriend and your best friend, your life had felt quite messy and topsy-turvy, and basically every single day you woke up wishing for a fresh start. New York had been a fun break, but that was a couple weeks in the past now, and in the days since then you’d been approached by your ex-friend begging for forgiveness, seen them out together in public, and had to deal with the fallout in explaining to friends and acquaintances and family that you were no longer together with the cheating asshole.

So a fresh start, a promotion, that was exactly what you needed. And you accepted her offer only half an hour after she first presented it to you.

“The position will require you to uproot yourself,” your boss warned you. “You’re going to have to move wherever the company decides to place you. Are you sure you don’t need more time to think about this?”

No, you absolutely did not need more time. It was exactly what you needed.

Within days you were making preparations, by the end of the week your higher-ups in the company had contacted you to let you know they weren’t just moving you to another city, but another country.

When you received the email with the news, when you read your office location as Seoul, South Korea, you laughed out loud, dissolving into a fit of laughter that had you literally rolling off the bed onto your apartment floor. Your roommate had to come check on you.

Fate, the tricky bitch, she was up to something, you could feel it. It was only too convenient for your life that the mystery TY had fallen into your lap, given you some of the best random stranger sex you’d ever received, and your company was now moving you across the world to be perfectly positioned to be able to run into him again at your convenience.

It was closer to December when you were finally able to make the move. Your passport and work visa, your transfer of information within the company, and your housing in Seoul all had to be organized and confirmed, so by the time that you were finally stepping foot on the foreign soil to start your life anew, you were beyond ready for it.

Settling in took a bit longer than you might have liked, but your apartment was nice, just a fifteen minute walk from the office. There was another girl in the office who had actually transferred from your original office at home about two or three years before, so she was a big help in getting you settled, showing you around, helping you with the language as you found yourself immersed in a culture and language you’d only begun learning about a month ago.

When you finally had a moment to look at your recently downloaded kakaotalk app, you realized, although you had TY’s user ID, you had no way to identify yourself to him. Just as you didn’t really know his name, you’d never told him your name either. And what would you say to him anyway? Surprise! I just moved to Seoul! Now you’re the one that would sound like a stalker.

But then came a night after work, following an evening of after-work drinks with your coworkers, you were feeling confident enough to message him.

“I don’t know if you remember me, but you promised you would. I’m in Seoul for work now.” That was the basic gist of the message, but with several typos (your fingers felt a bit more drunk than you thought they should) and with a winky-face attached on the end.

You passed out before a response came, but in the morning when you woke with a hangover, you found a response waiting on your phone.

“I remember!”

It was a booty call like you’d never done before. Arranging it was difficult because he seemed to be quite busy here at the end of the year, but to be fair you found your schedule growing rather full as well. You kept trying to arrange times to meet, but it would interfere with something he had to do, even after normal work hours, he was always busy, and you were getting to the point where you wondered if he was just trying to get you to leave him alone.

But then he messages you to say, “I feel like it would be so much easier if we just met somewhere in the city, had sex, and went on our ways. I don’t have time for much of anything else, definitely not a relationship of any kind.” And then shortly after that, “and if we could keep it anonymous, that would be good too.”

You weren’t looking for a relationship either. Keeping it anonymous worked for you too. After the debacle with your ex-boyfriend, you still weren’t ready for a relationship because you didn’t think you could trust anyone enough. TY staying anonymous, as just basically a booty call, that made it so much easier, giving you no chance of developing feelings if he was little more than just a dick for you to use.

The first time in Seoul, you meet up during your lunch hour at a coffee shop. Or rather, behind the coffee shop. You can’t make out any of TY’s features as he approaches, and you turn to face the alley wall as he comes closer.

“We’ll be quick,” he tells you, coming up behind you as you pull down the waistband of your pants.

He’s wearing a hat and sunglasses and a mask, obscuring every part of his face. Not that you care. He fucks you fast against the alley wall, covering your mouth with one hand, the other on your clit, and as soon as you’ve both cum, you each pull you pants up and walk away.

The second time he sends you an address with specific instructions and a time. It’s a park, and you’re sitting on a patch bench with a scarf tied around your eyes.

You hear approaching footsteps, hear his voice as he says, “Open your mouth,” and you obey, letting TY fuck your mouth.

The thrill you get from not seeing his face, not knowing his name or his job, not having any idea what his favorite food or color or movie or hobby is, you love it. You love knowing nothing about him, the whole meaninglessness of your sex.

When you meet him in a public restroom, on your hands and knees on the floor so he can fuck you under the gap in the stalls. When you meet on a dark street or in a parking garage or on a back stairwell, anywhere neither of you can see clearly. You love it. You fuck and leave, only speaking when you first arrive.

He always speaks first, letting you know in some way that it’s him and not some random stranger that means you harm. He always fucks you from behind or blindfolds you in some way. He normally asks you to meet him late at night, while you normally ask for earlier in the day.

It’s all fun and sexy, thrilling and risky.

But after about a month of this, you get tired of just quickies. You want something more. You want the foreplay, the slow burn of taking each other apart, you want multiple orgasms, consecutive rounds. You want…. Well, not a relationship, but something a little more solid than what you’re doing now.

The next time you meet up after you come to that realization, you do something a little different.

You’re on a walking bridge through a park. It’s surprisingly not well-lit, but you can still see as TY approaches.

You can usually tell it’s him now just by seeing him approach, though his face is always hidden. You can tell by the way he walks, by his clothes with their certain style, by this fuzzy bucket hat that you think must be his favorite because he either wears that or a beanie pulled down below his eyebrows.

Tonight he’s wearing the bucket hat, the brim of it shading his eyes. He’s wearing a facemask too, black to match the rest of his outfit, and it covers his entire face from his jaw to just beneath his eyes. But you can see a little of his hair peeking out beneath the hat. Over the time you’ve known him his hair has cycled through a couple colors—bleached silvery white when you first met, bright red when you first saw him in Seoul, fading to pink over the last month, but tonight it’s a new color, a soft lavender color.

Your heart pounds in your chest at his approach. An odd feeling like nervous anticipation. The feeling trickles down into your belly, stirring up a fluttery feeling.

He comes to stand right behind you, his body curving against yours with a sense of familiarity, hands braced on either side of you, pinning you up against the rail.

“Can I admit something?” He asks.

You roll your ass back against him, humming your consent.

“I’ve been thinking about this all day,” he says. “Touching you. Feeling you against me, around me. It was so cold this morning when I woke up alone in my bed, and I jerked off before I had to work, thinking of you. You’re so soft and warm inside. And all day working, I, uh, there’s this woman, her perfume must be the same as yours.”

TY dips his head forward, and you can feel him nosing against your neck, his mask still in place. You sigh, leaning back against his chest, into the nest of his arms tightening around you.

“Every time she walked by me, I could smell you.” He grinds forward again, hard against your ass.

You reach back, a hand grasping at his hip, your head tipping back on his shoulder.

“Can I admit something?” You ask, your voice catching, gasping out when he slips a hand around your belly, fingertips tugging your shirt free of your waistband, exploring over your warm skin beneath. TY hums, his lips pressed against your throat through his mask. This close, all you can see of him is the rim of his fuzzy hat, a hint of his purple hair. You can smell his cologne and the underlying taint of sweat.

“What is it?” He asks, his voice rumbling against your back and your throat. His fingers brush higher under your top until he reaches your breasts.

“I wouldn’t mind keeping your bed warm. You fuck me well, but sometimes I want more.” You sigh, and your breath clouds in front of your face in the cool night air. “Not love. I’m not asking for that. I want more sex. For a longer time. Not just you behind me, making quick work of getting us both off.”

He freezes against you. His hand slips down away from your breasts. He lifts his head from your neck.

You’re not expecting it when he forcefully turns you around to face him.

“Why do you want that?” He asks, and although you can’t really see his eyes, you can feel his gaze burning against you.

“Why shouldn’t I want it?” You reply. “Weren’t you just telling me that you thought of me this morning, warming you up on a cold morning? Why can’t I want the same thing?”

He makes a semi-frustrated sound behind the mask. “I thought you liked meeting up like this? Keeping me a secret, not knowing who I am?” He’s right. You knew you shouldn’t have told him that, but he seemed to like it as much as you. “How could we keep it like this if I take you to my home?”

“We can go to mine.” The words are out of your mouth before you can stop them. “I’m sorry,” you apologize. “I just, I feel like the best time we’ve had was the hotel in New York. When we had privacy, the time to do more than just fuck like we’re strangers bumping against each other in the street.”

That draws a small laugh from him. “Is this how you usually bump into strangers?”

You reach out to push at his chest lightly. “You know what I mean.”

He grabs your hand as you pull back from your light hit to his chest. “I can still wear a mask, or you can be wearing a, uh, what’s it called?” He gestures to covering his face with something.

“A blindfold?” You ask.

He nods. “Yes. We can keep that part the same.”

You agree. TY agrees.

“But are we still doing this here tonight?” He asks, reaching back for your hips.

Of course you are. You’ve been thinking about this all day, just like he has. You let him get you back into the same position as before, his arms caging you in against the railing. You tug the long skirt up above your ass, TY drags your tights down underneath, and he fucks you against the rail, until your knees quiver and your skin is covered in goosebumps, until you’ve both cum.

TY pulls your tights back up with a playful pat to your ass, and then he lets your skirt fall again.

“I think we should still do this sometimes,” he tells you. “It’s fun.”

You have to agree. Having quickies in places you definitely shouldn’t is a good chunk of the fun in doing this, in addition to the anonymity.

That night as you get home, you think about how neither you or TY really knows anything real about each other. You know how to get each other off, but you don’t know each other’s names. You don’t know what he looks like. You don’t even know how old he is, you realize, but you can only assume that he’s somewhere around your age, possibly a few years older, maybe a couple younger. But even after about a month of doing this, he’s still a stranger.

You haven’t had the guts to tell anyone you know about him. None of your coworker friends here, none of your friends back home. Even the friend you’d been with in New York, you hadn’t told them about this. They just knew that you’d hooked up with a guy from the club that night, but not that it was still going on, or that it had happened before that night.

You know what people would tell you if they did know. That you need to know who he is. You need more than just a TY to know him by. He could be anyone. He could be a psychopath, a murderer. He could be a known criminal. Everyone would go to the dark side of things, you’re sure, imagining the worst out of this man.

But your gut instinct tells you that he’s nothing like that. You don’t know him, but you do know him. It’s a difficult thing to describe.

And you truly don’t think you want to know. You like the anonymity, the blank slate that he is. You can fantasize, imagine him as anyone in the world that you want to. You can pretend that he’s your ex (on your dark days of missing the man you spent so much time loving). You can pretend he’s a celebrity. He could be a CEO or a convenience store clerk. TY could be anyone.

It’s strange having him in your apartment. This is your space. It’s the least anonymous, the most vulnerable you’ve ever been with him.

He’s wearing a balaclava, the kind that only reveals his eyes and his mouth. It’s very reminiscent of your first two times with him; a little creepy, a little hot. TY just looks around your apartment for a moment, standing there in the doorway when you let him inside.

It’s not a lot. Just a very simple place, underdecorated since you’ve only lived here for a little over a month. The walls are bare, the kitchen is just a tiny corner. You have a sofa shoved up against one wall, a small TV, a cluttered coffee table that doubles as a desk, your twin-sized bed. A rack of clothes and a chest of drawers.

While he’s looking around, you look at him.

He looks comfortable, wearing a pair of shorts despite the chill, a long sleeve shirt beneath a long coat. He stands there inside your apartment, his socked toes wiggling on the floor, his shoes abandoned by the door. A small chunk of his lavender hair peeks through one of the eyeholes of the balaclava, but you like it. You like all of it, these tiny things that humanize him, that make him seem a little more real, less like a random man.

Not that it really matters, because this isn’t anything. It’s not anything real. This is just fucking, just using each other without any of the strings attached.

TY fucks you in your little bed. He spreads you across his lap and he plays with your pussy, teasing your clit, giving your bottom little smacks that grow progressively rougher until you’re dripping down his fingers and he fills you with his cock instead while you bounce yourself back into his lap. He pulls out and flips you onto your back, he fucks you in the missionary position, kissing you although the mouth opening in the balaclava is a bit insufficient for that, and you both end up spitting out little pieces of fuzz, laughing about it.

When he cums, TY pulls out, lowering himself down between your legs to eat you out. You clutch at your bedsheets, writhing against his face and moaning, grinding your pussy against his tongue.

And then it’s your turn. You get him on his back in your bed, and you start at his hips, lifting his shirt to kiss his abdomen, pushing it higher.

He moans, his hands covering yours in his shirt, pushing it back down before you can lift it even above his navel. But even with it lifted just that high, you see the tattoo on his hip, a cartoon of astroboy as you can see now.

He jerks his shirt back down. “No,” he tells you.

You back away. You’re not here to cross any boundaries. You can fuck him again with his shirt still on, you don’t care.

He does let you sit yourself in his lap, kissing him, touching his cock until he’s hard again in your hand. You ride him this time, your hands at his shoulders, his lips on your chest while he pulls you down into him by your hips.

You cum again while kissing him, moaning against TY’s lips, riding out your orgasm rolling and circling your hips, until he’s moaning too, biting down on your bottom lip as he fills the condom inside you.

That night isn’t the last night it happens. He comes over sometimes, either when you message or sometimes just when he wants you. Sometimes you wear a blindfold, sometimes he wears a balaclava, a costume mask, or the classic hat pulled low and a facemask. But it happens again and again, TY satisfying you in bed, only to leave immediately after. He never stays, not that you blame him. That keeps it as casual as it can be.

The only issue arises one early spring morning, about three and a half months into your new life in Seoul.

You’re rolling out of bed, feeling the sweet ache in your muscles of having been fucked well the night before, when your foot bumps against something. It’s his, that’s something you realize immediately. A necklace he always wears, but it must’ve fallen off last night when you were clinging to his neck as he bent you backwards off the bed, laughing against your neck as you moaned and cried and laughed that he was gonna break your bed.

For safekeeping, you put the necklace on, liking the way it falls against your chest. It’s a thin gold chain with a charm shaped like a dog’s head. It’s precious, and you can’t help wondering if TY has a dog, or what this necklace means that he wears it so much.

You think nothing else of it as you get ready for work, nor as your day begins at work. It’s not until one of your coworkers approaches you to ask you a question, as you lean forward to look at a document she’s showing you that you even remember you’re wearing the necklace. It swings forward from the front of your blouse, the gold charm catching the light.

“Oh?” The other woman says, looking at it. “I didn’t know you’re an NCTzen, unnie!” She smiles brightly.

To be frank, you don’t know why that is. “What are you talking about?”

She laughs. “Your necklace. My best friend is Yongie biased, and she’s got a necklace just like this.”

Now, in the months you’ve been living in Seoul, learning the culture and the language, you’ve picked up a few things about K-pop music, the groups, the idols. It would be impossible not to when you see the handsome and beautiful faces of idols watching you from ads all over the city. So you understand when she talks about a bias she’s talking about her friend’s favorite member of a group, but you don’t know which group, and you don’t truly understand the relevance at the moment.

TY probably just bought this necklace from the same brand as your coworker’s friend, which apparently has something to do with an idol named Yongie or Yonghee or maybe even Younghee, you’re still not the best at differentiating similar sounding syllables.

Again, you forget about the necklace and your coworker’s reaction until later that afternoon as you’re leaving work for the day. You stop in a cafe on your walk home, just wanting a quick drink, maybe one of the pretty cakes in the display case. But while you’re in there, there’s a couple teen girls sitting at a table, giggling over their phones. While you stand in line, you pick up enough from their excited conversation to know that they’re talking about a male idol updating on Instagram.

Reminded of the necklace, you pull out your phone to search first all the iterations of Yongie/Yonghee/Younghee that you can think of. You get a few results, but nothing that really helps solve your mystery. But when you search that along with NCTzen, you find a result.

You look at the first picture that comes up, grabbed from a news article posted online earlier today about an upcoming album release for NCT, a boy group. There’s a pretty handsome man standing on-stage in the middle of performing, his heavily made up eyes sparkle, and you get the appeal. When you look at him your belly does a silly swoop that you only ever feel when you have a crush.

You swipe backwards, returning to the search results, and you type in ‘dog necklace’ alongside the name and what is apparently the fandom name. This yields more results. A close up picture of a neck and chest, a necklace almost if not exactly identical to the one around your neck.

You click on the image, and when the article it’s been pulled from loads, you see second photo beside the first. A small tattoo that matches the charm on the necklace. Curious, you scroll further down in the article, wondering if it’ll mention the brand name of this necklace anywhere. But as you scroll down past a chunk of text you don’t want to read, you see another picture of a tattoo, this one of a bunny. And then another, a whale. You scroll past a few more, and then you see one that makes you go still.

You don’t even hear the barista call out you name the first two times. You’re too busy staring at your phone in confusion and slight shock at the sight of a tattoo of astroboy.

Everything about it from the color to the placement to the exact shape of it is too familiar to be a coincidence. Over the last several weeks of getting TY in your bed, various stages of undress, though he usually wears his shirt, you’ve gotten a couple glimpses of the tattoo at his hip. And it looks the same as the one in this picture.

The barista calls your name one more time, and you finally hear him, thanking him and apologizing as you take your to-go order from him.

You leave the cafe with your mind reeling, trying to find a way to quickly translate this article. Maybe it’s just talking about tattoos all done by a certain artist, although they don’t all seem to be done in the same style. Maybe it’s something, you don’t know what, but something that means anything other than that you’ve been anonymously fucking an idol.

You can’t find a translation of the article, so you search instead. You get back to your apartment, plop yourself on the sofa, and start searching.

You learn several things very quickly.

NCT has a member, the leader of the group actually, named Lee Taeyong. He has a few nicknames, one of which is TY. He has a necklace with a little golden dog head charm that one of the members had custom-made for him after Taeyong’s dog Ruby passed away. He has a tattoo of the dog. He has several tattoos, including Astroboy on his hip. Also he recently dyed his hair lavender for the upcoming album release. The fans love it, as do you. Though at the present moment, you feel a little bit like ripping your own hair out.

What the fuck?

How did you just accidentally discover the identity of TY? Your mysterious, anonymous lover had clearly been so careful to avoid this exact thing. He did his best to hide his tattoos, he hid his face. He didn’t even let you see his hair color normally, you only caught it in glimpses. But everything makes sense now. Why he’d been so easy to convince to keep this anonymous. Why he’d been so busy some days at such odd hours. It made sense too why he’d been in LA and New York.

Everything just clicks into place, and you wonder if maybe you should’ve been able to figure this out a long time ago.

Going along with the theme of you forgetting things all day, you’d forgotten that the night before you’d agreed to TY—Taeyong, your mind helpfully reminds you—coming over this evening. You forgot too that you’d given him the code to your door when last week you wanted him to surprise you with the balaclava on, roleplay a little robber and helpless victim.

So when you hear the sudden beeping of the door code being entered, your heart leaps into panicked overdrive.

You drop your phone, somehow kick it as well, and it goes flying all the way across the floor. Skidding and spinning, it comes to a stop right at the feet of your unmasked masked lover.

He closes the door, looking down at your phone. Specifically, looking down at his own face staring back up at him.

When he doesn’t look up for a long stretch of seconds that expand into a minute threatening two minutes, you clear your throat.

“Are you an idol?”

It almost sounds silly to ask aloud. What if you’re wrong? You’re going to look ridiculous.

But there’s all the evidence too. You can’t be wrong.

“Is there any point in me telling you no?” He asks.

He stoops down at last, picking up your phone before he stands back up. He doesn’t move any closer than just inside the door. He only tosses your phone over to you, looking right at you.

“How did you find out?” His voice is low, a mix of sad and disappointed, disgruntled and concerned.

“You left this here,” you say, already reaching up to unclasp the necklace. “I put it on just so I wouldn’t lose it again before I could give it back to you. One of my coworkers, she saw it, and she said her friend is a fan of, um, I guess a fan of yours. I was just curious what she was talking about, I didn’t think she meant you. Well, my version of you, anyway. But I looked it up, I saw a search result that showed your tattoos. The one on your hip.”

TY— Taeyong sighs.

You watch as he lifts a hand, reaching for the beanie he’s wearing today. Faded purple locks appear as he tosses the beanie over onto the small table beside your door. He runs his fingers through his hair a little, and then he moves his hand down to his facemask.

When he pulls it off, sending it over to join his beanie, you look at your mystery man’s face for the first time after these several months.

He avoids eye contact as you look at him, as you drink in his handsome face, his familiar eyes, the lips you’ve kissed so many times.

“Taeyong,” you murmur his name.

His gaze snaps up to yours. There’s heat in his eyes.

“Do you hate me for figuring it out?” You ask.

“Do you hate me for not telling you?” He fidgets, shaking the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands, then he folds his arms over his chest. “Is this gonna be over now? Now that you know, that takes all the fun out of it for you, doesn’t it?”

As if you were only fucking him for the fun of not knowing who he was. You scoff. “Are you fucking serious? I like you, asshole. You’re great in bed, you’re good to me. I know we don’t really know each other. That was the whole premise of this, but I like you. I don’t know who Taeyong is, but I have an idea of who TY is, and I like that guy. So I’m sure if I merge the two of you together, I’ll still like you. I’ll still want to have sex with you. As long as your stage persona isn’t bad in bed, I don’t see a problem.”

That draws a laugh from him at last.

“And now,” you say, “I also get to look at your pretty face. You’ve had the pleasure all along of seeing mine, so now it’s my turn.” You stand up from the sofa, approaching him.

He doesn’t balk, doesn’t look like he wants you to stop. In fact he settles, sinking into a comfortable standing pose, shifting so when you come to stand in front of him, the pair of you fit together.

“Also, now I can do this,” you cup Taeyong’s sharp jaw with your hand as you say, “without getting fuzz from that mask in the way.”

You kiss him, pressing your mouth to his. Taeyong opens up, meeting your kiss eagerly, hungrily. He’s wrapping himself around you—an arm around your waist, one curling behind your shoulder as his hand lifts to the back of your head to angle your lips against his.

It’s nice having that fucking balaclava out of the way. Beside the fuzzy bits that snuck into your mouth during kisses, the material of it often rubbed your cheeks, itchy and uncomfortable at times. Now it’s just Taeyong’s warm, smooth cheeks.

You want to touch him everywhere. Your fingers leave his jaw, tickling against his earrings before you press your fingers through his purple hair. He smiles when you pull a bit at it, biting your bottom lip in response.

“Can you take your clothes off,” you ask, murmuring the question against his lips, unwilling to give up kissing him just yet. “I really want to see you without your shirt on.”

He moans deep in his throat, the sound half a laugh. “Didn’t you see those pictures online in your research?”

You break the kiss, pouting a little at him. Taeyong only smiles wider, leaning back in to nudge his nose against yours. “I wanna see it in person,” you whine.

He doesn’t disappoint you.

It’s still early evening, the sky outside not quite dark yet. The sun is setting over the city, and the last rays of sunlight burnish the clouds, fiery bronze against the dusky blue of the settling night sky.

That same rich orange light glows against Taeyong’s skin as he finally peels his shirt over his head. The shirt falls, a dozen tattoos revealed, and you want to taste all of them on your tongue.

You want to kiss his stomach and his hips, want to leave your mark on him, touch his nipples without the barrier of his shirt because you’ve known his nipples are sensitive when you’d touched them over the shirt while you sucked his cock.

His pants go next, and there he stands in front of you in only his underwear, bulge straining the front of the fabric.

Taeyong moans in delight when you press yourself against him once more. You kiss him again, unable to stay away for long, and your hands slide his underwear down over his hips, leaving him fully naked for the first time with you.

You’re wet already, just from kissing him, but when he slides his hand between your thighs, skimming his fingers up your bare thigh to beneath the skirt you wore to work today, you can feel yourself instantly growing wetter. His fingers rise up, meeting your slit through your panties, rubbing his finger there teasingly until you’re moaning into the kiss, reaching for his wrist to hold onto.

Taeyong pulls his hand away, bringing both up to your blouse, drawing it out from where it was tucked into the skirt. His fingers fumble with the bottom buttons, trying to work his way up, but now that he’s touched you, you’re feeling impatient.

“Just tear it. Rip it,” you tell him. “I’ll just buy a new one.”

He grips both sides of your shirt, pressing his lips harshly against yours as he gives a hard tug. You hear the fabric rip, hear the buttons pop, a few bouncing across the floor, rolling under furniture. Not that you care. You shake the remnants of your blouse off your shoulders, Taeyong’s lips scatter hot kisses along your jaw, your hands sink to his erection, the hot weight of it pressing against the front of your skirt, against your thigh.

He murmurs something you can’t quite catch in Korean. His cheek skimming along your jaw, lips ghosting a sensitive spot high on your throat.

“Hmm?” You hum inquisitively, but you don’t listen for his answer, now when Taeyong’s fingers curl in your skirt, pulling it down just as roughly as he’d just torn your blouse. You step out of the skirt, pressing yourself forward against him, stroking your hands upward on his cock in a way that makes Taeyong’s ears turn pink, a needy sound escaping his throat.

“Wait,” he sighs, his tongue tracing a section of your jaw before his lips take over again. “Turn around for me.”

You do just that. Circling around so your back is to him. His fingers tuck in the band of your panties, disposing of them only slightly more gently than he’d done your skirt.

“Pretty,” he tells you, lowering his mouth to your shoulder and neck, he steps around beside you, his chest against your right arm while he scatters kisses over the top of your shoulder, up your throat. “So pretty for me.”

He trails a finger down your spine, from the base of your neck all the way to the base of your tailbone, right above your ass.

“Taeyong,” you moan softly, a shiver pulled from you. You swear you can feel your pussy dripping, leaking down your thigh. “I need you.“

“Say it again,” he says, his voice a hum against your shoulder.

“I need you,” you repeat first, and then, “Taeyong.”

His hand comes down against your ass, a good, solid smack that brings a loud moan from your lips. You’re definitely dripping, you can feel how sticky you are between your thighs, and to your utter delight, Taeyong slips his fingers down from your plump ass, down lower until his fingers tease against your pussy.

Taeyong stuffs you with two of his fingers right away, your wetness squishing between his fingers, the sound audible in your apartment as he fucks you on his fingers, his lips busy leaving a mark on your shoulders in the same spot as a tattoo that he has. He scissors his fingers inside you, curling them, and still you grow wetter, resting back against his chest as your legs shake.

And when Taeyong slides his other hand down in front of you, stimulating your clit from the front, you can’t contain your whimpers and cries any longer.

You buck your hips, riding his fingers, desperate cries of pleasure tie in with his name pouring from your tongue as if you’re so familiar with it.

His fingers glisten with your juice, slick and sticky as he pulls his fingers away from your needy, clenching entrance. Instead you watch over your shoulder as he wraps those fingers around his cock, jerking himself off. You twist around, his face taken between both hands, you crush your lips against his.

Taeyong moans, reaching for your thigh with his free hand, lifting it to his hip.

You use protection, you always do, and right now as he’s about to fuck you right here in the middle of the apartment, you realize there are no condoms within reach, but you really don’t want to move. Not as Taeyong ruts his cock against your inner thigh. Not as he glides through your wetness.

“Fuck it. Just this once,” you think. You’re on birth control, you just normally prefer using two methods.

You wrap your arms around Taeyong as he does you, your leg high on his hip as he sinks right inside you.

It’s different right now. Somehow.

Maybe it’s because you can see his face clearly. You can look in his eyes unhindered as he moans at the soft warmth of you wrapped around him. Maybe it’s that there’s an all new open layer of vulnerability here between you two, one that seems like it’s changing everything while keeping things the same, just better.

You’re not claiming Taeyong. Not telling him that he has to be anything to you. This can all still be a secret. He can still just be your hook-up, your fuckbuddy. No strings necessary.

But you can’t deny that you’ve got that fluttery feeling in your belly. The crush feeling. An attraction based in something deeper than just physical appearance.

When Taeyong pulls your other thigh up to his hip on the other side, seating his cock deep inside you while holding you up, you think that you don’t care what changes as long as you still get this.

Taeyong moves, surprising you with his strength as he carries you back over to the sofa. He lowers you down into the edge of the sofa, kneeling down as well so he never has to pull out, and you just pull his mouth against yours, wanting to kiss him breathless.

He pulls your hips right to the edge of the sofa, making needy sounds as he kisses you back, as he starts thrusting into you. Taeyong hips snap forward again and again, both of you gasping against each other’s mouths. It’s frenzied and desperate, the way you move against and with each other in those moments.

“Baby,” Taeyong moans. “Baby, I wanna wake up with you. God, you’re so warm, I want to stay here.” He pressed in deep, grinding against you as if he can possibly get any deeper.

“Stay, Taeyong,” you sigh, dragging your nails over his back. “You can cum. Then stay.”

You’re not sure if he means it. He’s never stayed before, never waited long enough after cumming for it to even be an accidental possibility. But tonight things are different. Tonight Taeyong presses up into you, pushing off the floor, tipping you back deeper into the sofa, pushing your legs towards your chest, his lips against yours, and he groans deep in his throat as he cums inside you.

And he stays. His hips planted against yours, rocking in tiny motions, grinding in little circles that rub right against your clit and that spot inside you, and this time your orgasm is like snapping a wire. Your body goes taut in the initial wave, head thrown back, his name cascading from your lips as your nails rake down his back.

You swear he cums a little more from the pain of your nails digging into skin, but you’re a little too far gone to be certain.

Taeyong doesn’t pull out of you, he just rests his cheek against your shoulder, trying to catch his breath from the intensity of it. He asks carefully, “Did you mean it? Me staying tonight?”

You’re still buzzing with the white heat of your orgasm, your pussy still throbbing around his cock going soft inside you. Yeah you were serious. You don’t want him going anywhere. “As long as you meant it,” you reply, turning your face to the side, burying your nose in his hair. “My bed is yours for the night. Though I don’t see either of us moving any time soon.”

Taeyong chuckles in agreement. Then there’s a momentary pause. “So, this is as good a time as any,” Taeyong pants, shifting his sweaty cheek on your shoulder, lifting his head, and asking, “But what’s your name?”

You laugh, the sound bubbling out of you before you can help it. All of this, and you’ve forgotten that you’ve never told him your name. You lean in, tucking your laughter against Taeyong’s shoulder for a moment before you lift your head. You relinquish the last little bit of anonymity as you whisper your name against his lips.

a/n: I apologize for any typos/major grammar errors, I didn’t really edit this before posting it, but I will go back and check it over soon!! Thank you for reading!!

#taeyong smut #nct smut #nct 127 smut #taeyong #nct #nct 127 #kinktober #kinktober 2022 #nct kinktober #i promise it's better than i made the summary sound

[cantheykillmacbeth]

Could Marinette Dupain-Cheng from Miraculous Ladybug kill Macbeth?

Her mother Sabine is a woman, and though her birth is never mentioned it presumably happened. There’s just the gender clause. Marinette is a girl.

There’s a huge theme of masks, and as the protagonist Marinette uses endless alternate identities. Most of her disguises are clearly feminine, but there’s an exception.

In Trouble Fête, Marinette becomes Marino to sneak into a no-girls-allowed party. Marino self identifies as a boy.

She improves the disguise in Gabriel Agreste, using it to sneak into a party with plenty of women but nobody from her social class.

It’s played for comedy, but she does claim to be a boy and never contradicts it. She doesn’t show any discomfort with the disguise or with being taken for a man.

Is Marino a man from woman born, or could Marinette kill Macbeth?

I would say that, under these circumstances, Marinette could kill Macbeth under the Gender Clause normally, but could not when in the Marino disguise. It's a similar situation to genderfluid characters, where they may identify as a man one day and then not the next, so their ability to kill Macbeth fluctuates as their gender does.

Thank you for your submission!

#asks #gender clause #miraculous ladybug #marinette dupain cheng

[coochiequeens]

Oh Canada. A nurse who treats women and babies could lose her job because of her activities outside of work after two people, who weren’t even her patients, complained.

For more than two years, Canadian nurse Amy Hamm has been going through an ordeal that can only be described as Kafkaesque.

In November of 2020, Hamm had been informed by the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) that she was under investigation for her “off-duty conduct.”

Two members of the public – neither of whom were Hamm’s patients – had complained, essentially, that she was a “transphobe.”

Despite Hamm’s flawless track record and her history working with transgender patients over the course of her decade-long career, the BCCNM took the random complaints seriously. Six months later, Hamm was sent a document over 300-pages in length detailing dubious “evidence” of her transphobia in the form of her published articles and posts on social media.

Hamm is an advocate for women’s single-sex spaces, and has been involved in the Canadian iteration of the debate around gender ideology – the idea that one’s self-declared “gender identity” is more important than their biological sex. BCCNM took the position that Hamm’s personal views made her unfit to be a nurse.

Hamm’s lawyers described her views to the BCCNM as follows:

“Men are not women. Humans are a dimorphic species. Women and men are biologically different from one another. Women and girls have sex-based rights as a result of those differences. Those rights are under threat. This is the truth. It has always been the truth. Speaking the truth should not be a punishable offense.”

Hamm has written and spoken publicly about gender ideology in addition to organizing large events where this topic can be debated and differing perspectives can be heard. While she had been doing this for almost 7 years, what eventually triggered the two complaints against Hamm was her involvement in erecting a billboard in Vancouver that simply said “I [heart] JK Rowling.”

The billboard didn’t last long, and was vandalized repeatedly in its short time being up on Hastings Street.

For this, she was put at risk of losing her nursing license and her livelihood on the charge that she has made discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people while identifying herself as a nurse.

Initially, her disciplinary hearing, which is taking place over video, was scheduled for May 30 through June 3, 2022. However, it quickly ballooned to an expected seven days and was rescheduled for September 21-23 and October 24-27, 2022.

After the first seven days, four more days were subsequently added the week of January 10. The fourth day in January was canceled when it became obvious that the hearing was nowhere near completion, and it was decided that another eight days would be added.

Those dates have not yet been scheduled, but one wonders if even the added days will be sufficient to conclude what has so far been a demonstration of the ideological capture of the BCCNM.

It all kicked off on day one when BCCNM legal counsel Michael Seaborn (who displays he/him pronouns next to his name, like the rest of the BCCNM legal team) declared that insisting there are only two sexes denies the very existence of transgender people.

The BCCNM contends that, as a regulated professional, Hamm is not allowed to make such basic, factually accurate statements.

The next day, the BCCNM called on its first expert witness, Dr. Elizabeth Saewyc, who is the Director of the University of British Columbia School of Nursing and a member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which recently decided that a man who castrates himself as part of a sexual fetish is a gender identity.

One of the highlights of Saewyc’s testimony was when she had great trouble (or, at least, pretended to have great trouble) understanding that lesbians are females attracted to other females. In fact, she opined that it might be transphobic for a lesbian to openly state her exclusive interest in other females.

The next witness for the BCCNM was Dr. Greta Bauer, a Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario. Bauer is also a member of WPATH.

Bauer continued to present ludicrous ideas about sex and gender identity as if they were universally accepted and unquestioned.

She spoke confidently about toddlers having gender identities and people changing sex over the course of their life. At the same time, she was unable to define terms like “gender,” “sex,” “women,” and “female.”

At one point, Lisa Bildy, legal counsel for Hamm, put to Bauer a definition of “female,” coined by biologist Heather Heying, that accounts for all possible caveats: “Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs.”

Bauer could not agree with this definition. When Bildy pressed further, legal counsel for BCCNM Barbara Findley objected, claiming that the definition of “female” was outside of the scope of Bauer’s expertise.

Like Saewyc, Bauer did not agree that lesbians are females who are exclusively attracted to other females. She said that lesbians should examine why they are not attracted to men who identify as women and likened sexual orientation to sexual racial preferences.

Bauer also dismissed concerns about the potential harms of placing trans-identified male prisoners, many of them sex offenders, into women’s prisons. She hand-waved away the suggestion that this situation may create an unacceptable level of risk by saying that “cisgender” women assault each other in prison as well.

On the topic of gender-affirming medical procedures for minors, Bauer stated that it would be transphobic to question any of the extreme and experimental interventions that are being performed.

When Bildy suggested that one of the side effects of hormonal interventions for young trans-identified females is early menopause and corresponding symptoms like hot flashes, Bauer remarked that some adolescents might be “excited about that.”

Bildy closed her cross-examination by pulling up a photo of the infamous Oakville, Ontario high school shop teacher. 

She then asked Bauer if the man wearing the enormous prosthetic breasts is a woman.

“If she identifies as a woman, then her gender identity is a woman,” Bauer responded.

“With full access to female spaces?” Bildy pressed.

“As per the law,” Bauer said.

Hamm is, essentially, in trouble for holding the opposite position.

After Bauer’s cross-examination was complete, it should have been time for Hamm’s witnesses to give their testimony. However, counsel for BCCNM has spent a good portion of the 10 days of proceedings trying to get her impeccably qualified witnesses dismissed.

Legal counsel for Hamm intends to call Dr. Miriam Grossman, Dr. Kathleen Stock, Dr. Linda Blade, and Heather Mason. All have extensive knowledge of the gender ideology debate and experience in different areas pertaining to it.

Dr. Grossman is a practicing psychiatrist who works with trans-identified patients and has been raising concerns about gender ideology since 2006.

Dr. Stock is a philosopher, a writer, and the author of Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism.

Dr. Blade is the president of Athletics Alberta and co-author, along with journalist Barbara Kay, of Unsporting: How Trans Activism and Science Denial are Destroying Sport.

Mason is an advocate for women in prison and a former federal prisoner who knows more than anyone what is happening to the marginalized women who are bearing the brunt of Canada’s disastrous policies regarding the placement of trans-identified male prisoners.

BCCNM counsel has argued that none of these witnesses’ experience, expertise, and opinions are relevant to Hamm’s case, despite the fact that they clearly demonstrate the existence of an ongoing debate of great public interest.

On day 10 of the hearing, Karen Bastow, legal counsel for Hamm, reiterated that what is taking place is not a negligence case but a free speech case. She stressed that Hamm��s speech is protected by her charter right of freedom of expression.

Opposing counsel Findlay made it clear that the BCCNM cares nothing for Hamm’s charter rights by launching into a description of how Canadian institutions have been completely captured by gender identity ideology as if this is a positive and desirable state of affairs.

“A transgender youth in Canada, or an adult for that matter, may discover their identity as transgender and, when they do, they find it in the context of a medical and a legal system and an educational system that recognizes and understands, accepts, and assists with their identity as transgender people. The schools teach it, the doctors practice it, the nurses care with it.”

She concluded, “there is no debate here. Here, the debate is settled.”

Except the debate is not settled in Canada: it has not even begun. The BCCNM is trying to prevent it from even starting by silencing Hamm and not allowing her witnesses a chance to testify.

What is happening to Hamm should not happen in a free and sane society. It is an example of the totalitarian nature of gender ideology and its “no debate” mantra come to manifest.

Amy Eileen Hamm is a dedicated nurse who has never faced any workplace discipline. She is a mother of two young children. And she is now facing the loss of her job for stating basic facts that most people agree with. This should concern everyone.

Our society should be applauding the kind of people who can stand up to social pressure and against atrocities like the sterilization of children and the destruction of women’s boundaries. Instead, it has cowed to a regressive orthodoxy that is burning heretics at the stake.

No, the debate is not settled. Amy Eileen Hamm’s hearing is only its beginning.

By Eva Kurilova Eva is a guest essayist for Reduxx. A regular contributor at Gender Dissent, Eva is passionate about promoting lesbian activism and protecting women's sex-based rights. You can find her traversing the Rocky Mountains of Alberta, Canada with her partner and their husky, Freya.

#Canada #Amy Hamm is speaking the truth #British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) #I Heart JK Rowling #Michael Seaborn has pronouns in his bio #Dr Elizabeth Saewyc doesn’t understand how lesbians are same sex attracted #World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) #Dr. Greta Bauer Can’t define women or female #If she loses her job that is one less nurse to treat actual women and their babies

[ask-professor-fig]

Musings of an old man (VI)

I was teaching a class… simple as that. 

It was a regular Tuesday afternoon, I had my first-year students and we were discussing the First Fundamental Law of Magic. A rather simple concept, when you think about it. The more one tampers with the elementary magical laws, the greater and more formidable the consequences would be. A simple enough concept, yet so many dark wizards in the world tried their hand at breaking it on a daily basis.

The class itself was rather small as well, only about a dozen young minds interested in the course. I was seated on the head table, reading from the textbook when my attention was drawn away by a knock at the door.

To her credit, Professor Weasley kept her expression completely neutral. If anything, she had a soft smile on her face. It confused me, especially when she dismissed my class, claiming she needed my assistance. We stayed in my class till the students left, then she ushered me into my own office. After the fact I would be grateful for the privacy but in the moment I was extremely confused. 

Matilda pulled a stool next to my desk chair and motioned for me to sit. I hesitated for a moment before joining her. She placed her hand gently in mine, tears welling in the corners of her eyes.

“I’m so sorry, Eleazar…” It was strange to hear such a quiet voice from such a strong woman, it didn’t seem to fit. I sat there trying to put the pieces together, it still didn’t make sense. What was she apologizing for? 

“They found her this morning. They used her notes to identify her. She was alone… in a campsite to the south of Poidsear Coast near some ruins.” The more she spoke the less I listened. She couldn’t possibly be speaking of Miriam… my Miriam. 

Miriam had just sent me an owl the day before, telling me about the ruins in Poidsear Coast, how excited she was to search them, how this could be another break in her research. Miriam couldn’t possibly be…

I stood from my chair, practically knocking it over with the force. The room was spinning around me and closing in all at once. I could no longer hear Matilda as she tried to console me, there was no helping at the moment. I may have accidentally pushed her, I cannot remember anymore, on my way out of my office. The journey seems a blur but I do remember rushing to my chambers as quickly as I could. 

I had to write to her, I had to prove them wrong. 

Several other professors attempted to assist me on my journey, I vaguely remember seeing Dinah and Abraham as I left the Astronomy Tower, but thankfully none of them tried to physically stop me. I shudder to think what would have happened had they tried. 

I stumbled to the South Wing, through the doors of the Faculty Tower and nearly barreled into Aesop. He had been heading towards the door with Officer Ruth Singer.

“Ah, there you are, Eleazar.” He hardly used my first name… it was an informality saved for the rarest of occasions. Which meant… if Singer was here… and he was using my name… 

Matilda caught up to me, placing a gentle hand on my shoulder. My breathing became rapid, my heartrate was unsteady, my eyes unfocused, my hands shook. She shifted herself to wrap an arm around my shoulders to support me, thankfully so because any longer on my own and I would have probably collapsed.

“Why don’t we head inside, yes? We can… discuss this.” Matilda nodded to Aesop, who led the four of us to my chambers, the deputy headmistress gently depositing me into an armchair in front of the fireplace. I sat in silence for a few minutes before Aesop sat down next to me. 

“Would you give us a moment?” He asked the two women, who both nodded and stepped out. I stared at the empty fireplace, not giving a damn if it was ever lit again. What would be the point? Would I even care to feel the warmth again?

“You won’t want to hear it from anyone else because I can assure you that there aren’t many other individuals in this building that have experienced this kind of loss besides you and Mudiwa, not that I am aware of at least.” He began, I could feel his eyes fixed on me as he spoke. 

“But after I lost my partner, something changed. I lost a part of myself. She was the closest thing I could have ever imagined myself having to a spouse, so I can imagine the pain you are feeling… and I am going to tell you one of the oddest yet most comforting things I have ever heard when it first happened.” I managed to face him, a knowing look covering his features.

“In another time, in a happier place, you’ll meet again.” It would be an unfortunately long time before I remembered to thank Aesop for these words. However, he thankfully understood that it would take time for me to reach out.

He left soon after, and I assumed he took Matilda and Officer Singer with him, none of them returning that evening, and I was left in the silence of my chambers. It took a while to gather the will to move, and when I did I noticed a letter on a side table. I lifted myself from the chair and made my way to it, gently picking up the parchment with shaking fingers. 

Eleazar,

You were right about the Bowtruckles. I owe you a Knut.

Miriam

I used the wall behind me to slide to the floor, pulling my knees to my chest as I placed the parchment back on the table. 

I couldn’t get it wet with my tears… It was the last letter she had sent to me.

#ask professor fig #professor fig #eleazar fig #miriam fig #hogwarts legacy #musings of an old man

[slowjamastan]

hi, I like you and what you post but may I ask what your view is with trans folks? I genuinely just want to know, tbh it doesn’t matter to me your views but I am just curious because you don’t seem particularly judgy but a little more traditional

oh yeah fair question. i hope u dont mind if i expand on my life a bit, bcz my views make more sense w context i think. tldr at the end

so i identified as dif flavors of nonbinary/trans/queer for nearly a decade of my life. ive been on tumblr since 2010, i called myself "trans" since age 14. ages 18~20ish i went to art school. it was a Peak Woke environment if you will and i fit right in. i dropped out when i realized the artists life wasnt for me. I had no idea what to do next with my life, so i did a lot of serious introspection and among many things, made the conscious decision to consider points of view on trans people from places other than tumblr (there is a lot wrong with me), like, i found out that people who didn’t “get” the trans thing aren’t universally stupid and considered their concerns. crazy ik. later i conclude baby steps style "hey i think 'nonbinary' as an identity might make no sense, like at all" and officially moved my worldview away from "identify as whatever you want forever uwu" 

my opinion on nonbinary genderqueer etc people is that it was made up online in the early 00s at best. “but other cultures have third genders—“ yeah you mean like when gay men aren’t considered real men? or when theres no male children in a family and a girl has to take on that role? nonbinary folx are either children or immature adults who can barely function in society. thats not a moral failing btw but it is hard to watch

from this point forward, assume im talking about binary trans people.

i dont believe gendered pronouns are a decision you get to make, theyre when someone looks at you and diagnoses your appearance as one of two things, and trans or not you dont get to decide how other people see you. trying is an easy way to drive yourself insane and get 500 plastic surgeries and do nothing but obsess over your appearance for your short time on earth. this isnt controversial right? we've all seen trashy reality stars with fucked up faces and botched boob jobs right? trans ppl look like that to me. again, not a moral failing, but def a red flag considering, for instance, the price tag and self centeredness transitioning implies. but anyway it feels ridiculous to handle random men in skirts or women with green hair with kiddie gloves in public yk so i just gender em as i see em. i dont give them any space in my brain bcz why should i. sorry if u dont pass and are going to angry tweet ab this interaction, its not my problem

i started identifying with truscum types (because i was never doing the trans thing “for fun” ive been uncomfortable in my body and had complicated feelings on being seen as female for most of my life), and committed to being a trans man full time age 21~22. started therapy soon after while weighing the risks of T on my health and safety and what exactly i wanted from it, even tho i WOULD be kicked out if i medically transitioned and i had no safety net nor any close friends to help me, so i kept putting it off. i was saving as much money as i could from my pt job (while going to community college for my ged) but mentally getting worse and worse. so i got a prescription for ssris.

in a few months, zoloft not only helped my overall mental state but also alleviated the fixation on my body parts being somehow wrong (or maybe it was all the same thing?). it took away my ability to mentally spiral about gender for hours at a time. i dont know if thats a normal effect, or i got placeboed out of wanting to transition somehow. but i experienced the hypothetical scenario "what if you woke up one day and didnt want to be trans anymore" after 10 years of trans identity and organizing my life around transition as a goal.

it was awful but mostly a huge relief. the dysphoria (or dysmorphia or whatever it was) had felt innate and had been with me my whole life and it was just gone, age 23ish. i felt genuinely neutral about myself and my body, and didnt feel like other peoples image of me being “wrong” would make me kms. could have had something to do with my brain maturing also. (as an aside: it felt like 1/3 of my brain had been dedicated to the gender musing pathways and then stopped all at once. my head genuinely hurt. it was a bizarre physical sensation, like a lobe removal, and it took a good year for that to go away)

ive since gone on and off then quit my meds for good, and the mental spiral patterns came back, but its not strictly about my body anymore. its an overthinking pattern that can latch on to anything. (my friend with ocd described a similar cycle she gets caught in. i dont have full blown ocd but i can relate)

i realize my experience isnt universal ofc. gender dysphoria could be a result of a lot of things, but i dont think its an innate hardwired thought pattern. my take is its a result of trauma / autism / mental issues / bi/homosexuality in whatever combination. this is a personal opinion subject to change given evidence, naturally.

anyway. after the dysphoria evaporated, i moved on quick. my ideas about gender were still all over the place. i tried to be more feminine for a while to "match" how i "felt inside". i forced it, didnt enjoy it, but it was fine i guess. i was still insecure about my gender presentation. i still do have body issues, but who doesnt. i wear a mix of clothing styles these days and often get theythemed on vibes alone. im beating the tradwife allegations i promise

this is the point in the average detrans 20-somethings life where she will call herself a TERF semi-ironically and be a shithead online, which is what i did for a while. you pick up new perspectives that feel freeing and suddenly youre above all that gender drama bullshit, like finally you get to look down on the people suffering and laugh because theyre too dumb to "get it." its cathartic after a decade of feeling insane and suddenly feeling capable of living without inherent suffering. i reached gender nirvana and im better than you :3

then you wake up from that and go wait, that was fucking stupid lol. truly terminally online behavior, but i dont have regrets really. the most evil terfily thing i did, if ur wondering, was co-run a blog that reblogged selfies posted in public tumblr mlm tags. i dont think we even added commentary, but we got soooo much hatemail lmaooo. rip straightgirlarchive 🙏

even at peak terf phase i had irl trans friends by the way, and male friends for that matter.

i think the best way i could describe my feelings on trans people now is like meeting someone with a face tattoo, who also treats that tat like a religious experience. they can feel like this represents to the world who they are and are very serious about the symbolism of this tattoo, and thats fine. its trendy in many circles to have face tats rn (wont be for long) but theyre built different, they always needed this face tattoo to be themselves. bro u just dont understand the inner journey like u wouldnt GET it.... and then they complain about not being employable or single or how their loved ones are struggling to get used to their new look...you see what im saying. you get it

i dont hate people like this. i dont think trans people are subhuman or anything. but i am so so SO glad im not one of yall anymore u are ANNOYINGGGGG. I WAS ANNOYING!!!!! in hindsight i sucked so much and was insufferable to be around if u werent on My Level Of Gender Understanding which was based on nothing but social media infographics, >10,000 hours of blind introspection, and Vibes

my god if i could go the rest of my life not having to hear or think about trans stuff ever again i would. ive done my time. ive gotten my trauma. i dont wanna deal with this anymore but it is inescapable online and irl.

and of course, as a lesbian, i personally dislike what T does to womens bodies, not even getting into the top surgery epidemic.... plus theres now biological men taking over or shutting down every lesbian space. i gotta say, existing as a gay woman has never been more suicide inducing than current year /lh

but the human condition generates all types and genuinely if youre an adult and are determined to transition or microdose T or whatever, its your choice. we live in a society. im not gonna berate an alcoholic for drinking or a fat person for overeating either. hating yourself isnt a crime and i can say i find transing cringe but thats subjective and no one asked me. im just chillin, truly, and we can be friends even if i disagree with your life choices. like. its on par with being friends with someone with 200k in college debt to me. you made a dumbass decision imo but maybe to you its worth it, and what are either of us gonna do about it now? im not arguing shit brother, live ur life. manage those consequences best u can. i love u

in conclusion i wasnt born destined to be trans, im a gender nonconforming lesbian with mental problems related to gender and social roles because of the lesbian thing. this is a normal experience that i overthought into body dysmorphia and identity delusions because of the culture around me... im definitely not a radical feminist. maybe call me gender crit but i dont care. i dont identify with any labels that strongly. labels are the mind killer.

TLDR: 

-nonbinary isn’t a real thing outside of hyperonline exclusively-politically-left subcultures, which i personally find annoying since ive left it behind in the process of maturing. to each his own but im allowed to roll my eyes and not play along with larping teenagers and it doesn’t make me evil

-there are no major female / male brain differences. there are no gendered souls. gender dysphoria shouldn’t be treated with transition, because extreme body modification is a mental illness problem in every case. i can’t stop anyone with my opinions obviously but if i could talk to my younger self, id say wait until you’re 25 for the brain development, and in the meantime try less invasive/understudied treatments to improve quality of life.

final disclaimer: i am in my 20s. my views on life and social issues will continue to evolve as long as i live, but the cringe i feel when seeing visibly trans people will never truly go away due to personal traumas. and my trans exes, probably. im super over the queer scene, im a normie gay now. blessings peace love and light

#thanks 4 your patience i had a busy day yesterday. i wrote like 2 versions of this bc i wanted to get my feelings across #its still all over the place but i think it came out better than last time i tried to articulate my feelings on the trans population #mail #post #i deleted a lot of tangents. i like talking ab myself. maybe i just need to write a biography

[intersex-questions]

as an afab trans intersex person, i usually find myself greatly relating to transfems more than any transmasc i know (like having intense dysmorphia/dysphoria over not being perceived as feminine for traits i have, feeling like i have to feminise myself more than cis women to be considered feminine, having people think im a guy due to my features and/or voice, ect) but i always worry that since i am in fact afab its weird or inappropriate or even disrespectful to relate at all to their experiences, even when i fairly commonly get mistaken as transfem (happened even yesterday the day im writing this)

so is it weird to that i relate to transfems more due to my masculising intersex traits? is it bad that i do?

(also… i may send another ask about this but is there any feasible way for someone who seem to have gone through mostly female puberty to medically feminise, in the way transfems usually do? when i find myself relating i usually wish i could also do that)

Thank you so much for sharing these feelings. You are absolutely not alone in how you feel. Many intersex people, and even perisex people, feel the way you do.

This answer is going to have an inclusionist perspective. Exclusionists of both the queer (especially trans) community and intersex community might have a different perspective than I do. I believe myself to be correct, but acknowledge that others will not. I am biased.

First, gender dysphoria among intersex people is incredibly common. Dysphoria is a feeling and experience not limited to gender dysphoria, but it also does often manifest as gender dysphoria in intersex people, including cisgender intersex people or intersex people whose gender aligns closely with what they were assigned at birth. I experience gender dysphoria over my body's gender it was assigned at birth, even though I don't present as that gender and don't wish to.

Second, there absolutely are intersex people who were assigned female at birth (AFAB) and label as transfem. This is a thing in the community. I know many, many intersex people who were AFAB and label as intersex. I know FTM intersex people who were AFAB and also identify as transfem or MTF. I know cis intersex women who were AFAB and label as transfem or MTF. You absolutely are not alone in this.

Third, it isn't disrespectful at all to relate to transfems/MTFs. It is almost never disrespectful to relate to the experience of another group. Many people find solidarity and similarities with other groups. Butch lesbians/sapphics and trans men often find solidarity and share many, many experiences. (For example, my stepdad was a butch lesbian in a lesbian marriage with another lesbian, before he transitioned and is now a trans man in a straight marriage with my mother.) And, that leads me into my next thing.

Fourth, you can just identify as transfem or MTF. Labels are complicated, messy, and mean different things to many people. What being trans to one person means can be totally different than what being trans to another person means. Personal labels, like ones for queer identities, have variation in meaning and usage. They cannot be strictly defined and regulated, although many people (exclusionists, gatekeepers) will try to do so and argue that it might ruin the sanctity of the label or muddle the communication of the language. Labels aren't used as exclusively personal or ascribed to people. It is fair to say that someone fits the definition of transgender, or was historically transgender, going off of the commonly accepted definition of it, but it is also fair for an individual who fits the definition of transgender to not feel as though that label fits them. Labels and terms can be used in many different ways. It is impossible to narrow them down to one definition and keep it that way. Language constantly changes. I know that many queer terms that I was taught by queer people have different meanings that what I found among queer people my age in a different region and online.

There are butch lesbians/sapphics who also identify as trans men/FTM (and vice versa). And this is okay! It's allowed! You cannot truly dictate labels and personal identities of others. Someone's personal identity is something that only an individual can ever truly know and understand. There are exclusionists, like I said, who will argue or push against this, but I think that those people are wrong and need to be ignored.

I'm going to go into discussing various labels/communities. This isn't to say, "you are these things", but to say "these are people who share similar experiences with you."

Genderqueer, genderfucked/genderfuckery are both gender-related labels that encompass so many things. There are genderqueer and genderfucked people who are cisgender. Many genderqueer and genderfucked people may label as transfem and transmasc, transfem as a person who was AFAB and transmasc as a person who was AMAB, FTMTF, or MTFTM. I know many bigender and intersex people who label as transfem and transmasc or things like that.

Transfemmasc/transfemasc/transmascfem is a label people use to mean they are both transfem and transmasc. This is very common in bigender and intersex people. And that's the thing. You can just...do that. You can label however you want. If you want to label as transfem, you just...can.

If you're not comfortable with such an inclusionist view on just labelling however you want, there is still common precedent for intersex people who were AFAB to label as transfem because they do have a transfem experience. Labelling as MTFTM or FTMTF or transfemasc has presedence in both intersex and bigender communities. Bigender people as a whole often accept that it is transphobic to bigender people to not accept such labelling—people who try to binarize things like transfem/transmasc, AFAB/AMAB, inherently ignore and erase bigender people. Bigender people have many things in common with intersex people, as both groups are erased by both the binary concept of sex and gender. Things within the queer community often still function by a binary within gender. Even in nonbinary places (like you see how transfem and transmasc are often seen as wholly separate).

I will encourage anyone as many times as they need: you can label and identify however you want. You can mix and match labels. You can "contradict" labels. Anything at all. If you want to send me another ask and answer by just saying, you can label as transfem, I will.

And, also, you don't owe anyone any information on your personal identity. Just how a trans man doesn't owe anyone information on what surgeries they've had or even want to have, you don't owe anyone information on how and in what ways you are the label you identify as and are.

As to your last question...yes and no? It depends on what experiences you have. Many intersex people who were AFAB with hyperandrogenism, especially with PCOS are prescribed different things to reduce or cope with their hyperandrogenism. For example, some people take oral contraceptives (birth control pills) as these usually contain estrogen.

I take testosterone HRT and used to take estrogen-based birth control pills for my period and generally speaking, this is a bad idea. It gave me hot flashes and caused even more painful periods that lasted over a month with significant blood clumps that were just. Not normal. I experience hyperandrogenism but am still on T HRT to increase my T levels further for transgender reasons. If you are on testosterone, talk with medical professionals before going on any estrogen. But note they might not have an answer. There isn't a lot of published information to rely on.

Breast implants exist for those with small chests. Many MTFs get breast implants. Some people will gain weight to get larger breasts as well. There are also feminizing surgeries such as facial feminization surgeries. All of these have risks and reasons, so research a lot.

So, if you have hyperandrogenism, you can discuss treatments that can lower your testosterone count. If you have physical appearance things like small breasts or facial features, there are feminizing surgeries.

There's also things you can do that are technically "masculinizing" that you can do if you want to have a body more like a pre-transition or pre-OP MTF.

(I have no idea what genitalia you have so apologies if this doesn't apply to you.) Bottom surgery can just be gotten by cis people (although for all these surgeries, I'm not discussing medical or financial barriers). If you want to have bottom surgery to get a penis via phalloplasty, in theory, you can. And you can just think of it as your penis, in a transfem way. Some countries have topical cream you can apply to increase clitoris size (unavailable in USA afaik, as much as I wish it was available). Many people with hyperandrogenism already experience clitoromegaly, however. Metoidioplasty is a form of bottom surgery that "releases" the clitoris to create a penis, which could be done to affirm yourself into having the body you want. (This is a case where some people might label as FTMTF, transitioning to "male" so they can transition to female.)

There is a reason I use trans+ in my post. The + is for anyone who undergoes experiences commonly associated with transgender ones, but aren't necessarily transgender. There are cisgender butch lesbians/sapphics who go on testosterone HRT, who get top surgery, and who get bottom surgery. It is completely okay to get any of these types of things even if you are not transgender or transgender in a traditional way.

Sorry for going on such a ramble that isn't well organized. I hope you can understand what I mean. If you have further questions or need clarification, let me know! I'm just very passionate about this topic. My partner is a transfemmasc intersex bigender and so am I (although in a bit of a different way).

So, basically, it depends on your intersex variations and what your goal is. You can do things to affirm your body to be more like someone who is a perisex MTF that doesn't have surgeries, such as bottom surgeries to change clitoris appearance or to get a penis. You can do certain things to reduce hyperandrogenism. You can get surgeries that are considered feminizing for the face or even some other places.

Also, it isn't medical, but you can look into ways transfems/MTFs socially transition without medical transition.

I'd really love it if you reached back out to me and gave me your thoughts or let me know if this helped. I know it's odd, but I truly care about every single person who sends an ask here, and I want to make sure I can make their lives better regarding their intersex experience. I very much want to do what I can to make sure you are happy with that.

TLDR; No, it isn't weird, and it's super common among intersex people who were AFAB. There are intersex people who were AFAB that identify as transfem. There are intersex people who were AFAB that identify as both transfem and transmasc. Intracommunity experiences are a thing. You should identify and label however feels right for you. Medical transition depends on your intersex variations, but cis intersex women with hyperandrogenism often take treatments to reduce hyperandrogenism, there are feminizing surgeries for places like the face or chest, and trans+ people who get surgeries that are "masculinizing" (like bottom surgeries to get a more penis type look) in order to feel affirmed as MTF/FTMTF or adjacent to those).

I am interested in no discourse or arguments on this post. I am interested in genuine feedback or additional information or other inclusionist perspectives. If anyone sees information they think was phrased poorly or any typos, let me know! I also jump around while writing posts so let me know if something just flat out makes no sense.

#asks #questions #advice #transfemmasc #transfemasc #transmascfem #ftmtf #intersex dysphoria

[thegaslightbrigade]

Peter Graves May Have Set Mark For Gray Hair Vogue Sarasota Journal - Monday, March 1, 1971 by Joyce Haber

Image sourced from [Here]. Shout-out to @chiickies for putting me onto this fansite! Transcription of the above image below the "Read More".

When Peter Graves was in Louisville last year for the Kentucky Derby, two of his women-fans came up to him and asked what he used on his hair to make it silver. “Nothing,” Peter answered. “It’s natural.” “Come on,” said one of the ladies. “You don’t have to play that game with us.” As the suave, decisive, unruffled and prematurely-gray chief of the impossible missions force, the only game Graves actually plays is on CBS’ suspenseful, Emmy-award winning series, “Mission: Impossible” which is in its fifth season. This year, he took the Golden Globe Award from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for best actor in a dramatic series for his portrayal of Jim Phelps. But the lady was wrong. Peter Graves is, for the most part, precisely what he seems. His hair, for example, began going gray when Peter was in his mid-20s. “I woke up one morning,” he says, “and there was this patch of gray right there.”

As we sat in Hollywood’s famous restaurant, Scandia, which boasts, among other things, a superb array of dishes ranging from Caesar salad to smorgasbord, Graves touched his left temple and laughed. “I thought ‘Oops’ - and it just continued. When I started going gray over-all. I appeared on a big TV star’s variety show. He started kidding me about it right on the air - as did everybody. Next day he came and apologized. ‘I’ve been gray myself for 15 years,’ he admitted, ‘But I touch it up.’” If gray is in now in Hollywood, as it seems to be, Peter started the trend. I noticed that actor George Kennedy, at the Golden Globes Awards, was completely silver-polled. He used to be very blond. But gray wasn’t always in, not even for Graves. Only three years ago, when Universal cast him opposite Doris Day in “The Ballad of Josie,” director Andrew McLaglen took him aside. “Listen,” he said, “no big star has ever been gray,” and; against the star’s protests McLaglen took Peter to makeup, where they “put on something from a bottle called Frivolous Fawn.” Andy McLaglen took one look and said, “OK, you win. We go back to gray.” The late Martin Melcher, Doris Day’s husband and manager, took a look at Graves’ first day rushes, gray and all, and asked him, “How come you aren’t a big star?” Quipped Graves: “Because I’m not married to Martin Melcher.”

But Melcher was wrong (Miss Day hadn’t started her TV series at that point). In terms of audience, Graves was even then a big star. “More people have seen me on TV in two nights,” he once put it, “than the total number of people who have paid to see ‘Gone With the Wind’ for 30-odd years.” Graves recalls a conversation with Joel McCrea in which the movie actor referred to Graves’ brother, Jim Arness, the seemingly eternal star of “Gunsmoke”. He commented on what a great job Jim had done and talked about how many years he’d lasted. He said when he was in studios seven years was the average endurance of a star, not the big ones - the Gables, the Bogarts - but take Dana Andrews.

"I’d guess,” says Peter, “if you look back, he was a star for only seven years.“ “In a sense, the stars today are on TV, because that is the medium. Movie stars, as we knew them, no longer exist, but I think they can again. For the past 10 years, everything has been anti-hero, but I sense a change. The heroes of the ‘60s were the John Kennedys or the John Glenns. People now want a hero they can identify with or admire. Once the motion pictures straighten themselves out, the first girl to make three good pictures in a row will be a star.” Graves, who once made a movie with Gary Cooper (“The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell,” 1955), was impressed with the late great star’s reply when someone asked him to what he owed his success: “Good parts in good pictures,” said the man who was spare with words, on-screen and off. “No truer words were ever spoken,” says Peter. “You can do bad parts in good pictures or good parts in bad pictures and maybe get a little personal satisfaction. But the key to it all is good parts in good pictures.”

It occurred to me then that for Graves, the “good part” might as well be the one that reflects his own self. He sat, the debonair man of 6 foot 3 inches, conservatively dressed in a Madison Avenue-gray worsted suit, a Rep tie that evoked the Brooks Bros. (logo [illegible] and all), a pale blue shirt that duplicated the costume-requirements of the early days of color TV. “Do you know what parts are right for you?” I asked. “Well, I think so. I doubt very much that I’d remove all my clothing and simulate any sex act on screen,” said Peter soberly. “I think that kind of appearance on screen is strictly faddistic and confined to its time. It fascinates me that the Readers Digest has had one article an issue for the past 40 years on sex education. I don’t know if that means that everyone is uncertain about sex.” “I think the general public’s attitude, particularly in the United States, has changed greatly vis-a-vis sex. I think whatever the Puritan ethic was that dictated restrictions on sex is being broken down. I think that’s a good thing, particularly concerning the teaching of the young. I think the pornographic movies do appeal to the prurient in us.” “People do want to read about sex in the Readers Digest. But they also want to see it on the screen, but pornography on the screen can be faddish, because the screen belongs first of all to the writer. When writers write good stories, people will go to look at them.” “Watching the sex act may turn you on for a while, but it’s got to get tiring. Pornographic films cater to the basic instinct, but not to all that instinct implies - which is love. I think that’s the reason for the high success of ‘Love Story.’ It’s about two people who go to bed together, yes - but mostly they’re in love.” Graves learned about love, and the Puritan ethic, as the son of a traveling salesman for a surgical supply company. He was born Peter Aurness on March 18, 1926, in Minneapolis. “I think we were born 6 feet tall and then started to grow from there,” he says.

His brother, Jim, is three years older and three inches taller than Peter. “My dad’s not particularly tall, only 5 feet, 11 inches," but his mother was almost 6 feet and straight as a ramrod - "a German woman who used to scare the hell out of me.” During high school, Peter took up the clarinet and the saxophone. At 15, he became the youngest member of the musicians’ union, playing with local dance bands for spending money. He once turned down a request to play with the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, then on tour in nearby South Dakota. “I was at school, so there was no chance.” He’d joined the staff of radio station WMIN as an announcer at the age of 16. Upon graduation he enlisted in the Air Corps. After his discharge two years later, he wanted to go to the Julliard School of Music, but finally entered the University of Minnesota instead. Peter majored in drama, which led him west to Hollywood. His brother, Jim, already was here, but he’d had no degree of success. “He was a disaster case,” says Peter. “I came out with a friend from school, (director) Jack Smight. I remember we told the porter on the train we were going to be actors, and he said ‘Don’t. They’re all going the other way - to New York.’ “Jim met us at the station and said, ‘Go back.’ We wouldn’t, so he checked me into the Hollywood YMCA, which is a far cry from Hotel Bel-Air, I’ll tell you. Jim gave me a copy of the Hollywood Reporter and said, ‘Go.’” “We went, making the usual rounds of agents, but the going was rough.”

His college sweetheart, Joan Endress, followed him from Minnesota, and after he landed a job in a feature, “Rogue River”, with Rory Calhoun, Joan and Peter were married. Joan worked for some time as a doctor’s receptionist to keep them afloat in those difficult days when TV was just starting and giving the movie industry problems. Peter had taken a name from his mother’s side, Graves, because his brother was using their simplified family name, Arness. Peter’s first big break came with Billy Wilder’s movie, “Stalag 17”; “Paramount had seen me in a couple of Westerns, and said ‘No, Graves looks like an all-American. We need someone who looks like a German spy.’ My agent, Paul Kohner, persisted. He knew Billy Wilder. We went to Wilder’s house on afternoon and he kept walking around and looking at me like and going like this-“ Peter spread his hands on either side of his face, imitating the director’s gesture that simulates what you see through a camera lens - the frame. Wilder gave him a screen test and the part. But after the movie, at option time, “Paramount said, ‘Forget it. We’re only going to make two pictures a year. Not only that, but you’re a German spy. We’re looking for an all-American boy.’”

A new producer, Howard Koch (“Odd Couple”) used Peter in several films. With “Beneath the 12 Mile Reef” at Fox, that studio took an option for a contract. “I thought that was it. We were shooting in Florida and they kept saying, ‘Darryl Zanuck likes you.’ Pretty soon came word that Zanuck did like me, but he was dropping me because Fox was only going to make one picture in the next year.” The picture was “The Egyptian,” an extravagant project intended for Marlon Brando, who dropped out. Zanuck wanted to test his then-girlfriend Bella Daryl, for a role. He asked Graves to test with her. “It was massive,” he recalls. “Full wardrobes. Huge sets. We rehearsed for two weeks in Michael Curtiz’s office. Leon Samroy (a very top cinematographer) shot it. Well, anyway, Bella got the part but I didn’t.” (Edmund Purdom starred in the film.) Peter’s one try at Broadway was unsuccessful: He played in Paul Gregory’s “The Captains and the Kings,” which got “so-so notices,” and folded after 10 performances. Graves really found his legs, so to speak, in TV. Paramount’s “Mission” is his fourth series. The others were “Fury,” “Whiplash” and “Court Martial.”

Joan and Peter live with their three daughters in a house in Santa Monica, Calif., which Peter says is haunted. It was built by a German couple called Von Lichtenberg. “There was some sort of tragedy. I’ve never seen the ghost, but I’ve heard it. We have a cukoo clock that hasn’t worked for 20 years. Occasionally it strikes.” Although he works for the American Cancer Society, he hasn’t given up smoking: “I enjoy it, and I haven’t gotten to the point where it’s affected me. I resent the label on cigarets. If they’re going to warn you why don’t they put the same sign at the entrance to every freeway, or on every banana that’s sold? You can slip on the peel, you know.” The only “romantic lead” Graves ever wanted to play is the starring role in a remake of “Dodsworth”: “That story could be updated to now and would make a great picture. But I think Sam Goldwyn still owns it.”

On the other hand, with his conservatism, it’s unlikely the man who is as he seems would back a film. “You cannot simplify human intelligence, emotion, and growth. To watch the frills and foibles of a human psyche is fascinating. All of which adds up to the fact that I might not put a dime of my own in a movie right now.” With “Mission” and Graves both near-institutions, it’s not very likely he’ll ever have to.

#peter graves #old hollywood #mission: impossible #mission: impossible (tv) #mission: impossible (1966) #interview #transcript #feel free to add tags- I'm not sure what else I should include lol

[cascadianights]

Something I've been thinking about a lot and don't have the words for yet is... the way many leftist spaces are really quick to either 1) list all aspects of their identity as proof they can be talking on this subject (therefore if you do not ESPECIALLY if someone disagrees w you you are by default assumed NOT part of the group speaking out and over it) and 2) in the lack of those identifiers assume privilege.

Not just in the terms of "I disagree so you must be outside this group/not have this apply to you" but also in terms of the thin slice decision based on a profile picture or an intro of how oppressed you must be (not) and how much privilege you carry (assumably all of it). And the way that interacts with my whiteness and any trace of femininity I can't squash because people see a picture of me and come up with a story (str8 yt probably cis girl from Large City California and Money) and that story is inherently at odds with almost all parts of my identity ESPECIALLY the ones I'm struggling with most in terms of them being visual.

The real world does not doubt my poverty as I walk through the store with holes full of clothes and a tennis shoe half flopping off at the bottom. The bullies in school never doubted my queerness or the way my looks othered me - my thick eyebrows my thick, dark body and chest hair on top of large breasts sagging against a dollar store sports bra. The people in public may doubt my disability, until I start rocking back and forth and pinning my ears bc the lights and screens and dance music at the tmobile store is Too Much or I faint mid conversation and wake up confused and bruised. My being trans is easy to overlook some days, completely at odds with everything about me another. My being assumed to be a str8 cis woman burns in my veins and gut like poison. My skin is pale and white and that means I've never faced racism, but it also means that when my dad tried to explain how important his native ancestry was to him and how his father (long dead by the time I was born) and grandmother (actually native) cared so much about it and it was his connection to them, I basically told him we couldn't be native because we are white and destroyed most of the things he gave me related to that bc I was taught that anyone who looked white pretending to be native was a liar and a colonizer, and it took me until I was TWENTY EIGHT listening to a native activist talk about how those ('liberal leftist') ideas were based in and perpetuating blood quantums set by the government and the idea that we just needed to breed the Indian out of the man by diluting it and teaching the next generation to ignore and walk away from it and my entire worldview on a part of my identity and how Id internalized how I was meant to view it cracked and I still haven't figured out how to renegotiate that or the way I treated that ancestor and all the ancestors of hers by internalizing those beliefs, or the way that poverty means most of my family died young or in abusive relationships and I have DESPERATELY little to go off in terms of family stories or traditions or knowledge or trees farther back than my great grandparents. Every woman in my family as far back as I know married an abusive man, and at least one was killed by her husband! Some of my family came from Ireland and Scotland as refugees, hundreds of years back, and just stayed in the north until abuse and poverty chased them south. My family tree is one of unspoken mental illness and autism that gets talked around, one of poverty, one of abusive men and strong women fighting to survive.

And anyways none of that can be put into an intro section or summarized into neat lines and boxes of identity and my whiteness is inherently entrenched in generations of poverty and refugees and questions of identity and the way my femininity is seen as amplified no matter what I do, and that part of me being seen as the Exact Same in a conversation or quick slice judgement as a Berkeley blue eyed white woman whose family owns a house in the hills and has 300 generations back of middle-upper class wasps (this is about a real person and I can name 3 similar ones off the top of my head) feels so wrong and debilitating and undermining and invalidating and without a doubt almost always Additionally poses me as str8 and cis and then I am told passing as such is a privilege when every part of my being is screaming to be seen as my actual self or as some more realistic version of my actual self or at least not as some immediately discarded Karen talking about shit I know nothing about instead of a disabled queer person who grew up in poverty left my home state and family as an early political and climate refugee and has spent years engaged in real world activism

#this goes so many places #the struggle to decide my identity for myslef is hard enough nevermind finding ways that identity can bring me joy or belonging #on a severe budget #the struggle to decide where you belong what youre x enough for to discern whst that means for you and how its all hard as hell #without the immediate assumption that if a white bitch is speaking all other nuance and parts of myself die and are silent #without the immediate assumption and then ACTING on that assumption that I am not Other enough to be part of this Other #plus i hate being assumed a straight cis woman i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it i hate it #i hate the idea that you can only speak on an issue if youve made it clear in 3 ways what Right you have to speak on it #queer #i just hate assumptions idk theyre always wrong about my queer disabled but walking around ass and it hurts on every single level #and its worse online for sure for sure but it happens sometimes too elsewhere #the default should not be you disagree w me so youre obviously not my type of Other #therefore you have Only privilege and no nuance in the way thst relates to your multiple overlapping identities

[butch-reidentified]

Honestly I I feel that some of my problems would go away if I just... go on T. I'm a woman in STEM and I know how male voices and male names are prioritized over women's, I know that I would be better respected in my field (mathematics) if I had a male presentation. I already dress masculine and go by a male preferred name but I still "identify" as a woman (pronouns, etc. this ofc raises some eyebrows from my friends and uni faculty, as if GNCmity aren't a thing.) People typically think I'm a man until I open my mouth to speak. I know it's selfish, and it's cowardly, and it's society's misogyny, and other women are suffering too. But God the easy way out is so tempting. I wish I could have a male voice so that my female friends can safely call me when someone is following them at night. I remember my bestfriend calling her (ex-)friend when an old guy was harrasing her, and how he immediately asked for sex in exchange for helping her. I see my friend who has PTSD from sexual abuse afraid of leaving relationships because she believes she needs a man to protect her from 'the next rapist.' I've been successful in helping her get out of bad relationships so far and offering her a safe place. All the women in my life are in somewhat similar positions... having to rely on a man for their own survival... It's an irrational thought but maybe I can give them a sort of social protection if I present myself as a male person they can go to when they need help.

Do you feel/know if other detrans radfems feel the same way? Sorry deeply emotional as I write this and I needed a different perspective.

Have a nice day!

Hey, I'm sorry to hear you're going through these things. While I don't really feel the same, I've heard from many, many women who do. I'm gonna go one topic at a time here.

STEM-related:

To be honest, my being a woman in science is actually a major part of why I HATED the idea of being viewed as male even when I was on T and a libfem. I never ever wanted to be a guy. First off, because ever since I was really really little and boys were mean to me for being a girl, I've been completely convinced that we are the superior sex, no matter what anyone told me. Men always struck me as weak, easily manipulated (they'll do literally anything if you challenge them or imply they're cowardly or wimpy), impulsive, rude, emotionally volatile, childish, self-centered, etc. They brag about things they have not earned. Boys I knew in elementary would brag about their ALLOWANCE. Like... bro, your mom gives you that from her income, you ain't did shit for it 💀 In STEM in particular, I felt that my accomplishments would be less deserved, less earned, if I were viewed as male. I HATED that idea with a passion. I read about that one FTM researcher who was told his work was "so much better than his sister's." He didn't have a sister. Fuck that, I want to make my name on as true merit as possible. So while I can't say I relate to your feelings on this, I certainly understand where they're coming from. The only advice I have is to try to see from the persepctive I described above and see if you find peace in that.

Social Protection:

This is a bit more complicated. Again, I've never wanted to be a man, but I am fiercely protective of other women and girls, so I get why you feel that way. I understand feeling powerless to help in some situations as a woman. You may not be able to pull the "back off man, I'm her boyfriend" card or similar, but you can still look out for the women you care about, as you've shown by helping your friend get out of relationships before. It took time and conscious effort, but I trained myself to be brave and confrontational with men. With enough practice, it's become instinctive and reflexive. Meaning if I'm with a friend walking downtown at night and a man says some shit to her, I don't stop to think before I get in his face and tell him off. I will absolutely get in physical fights if necessary and have before. I also carry a knife and 1-2 pistols on me most times, which helps with the bravery bit, though I was doing this before I bought my guns or got my concealed carry permit. You might not be able to intimidate men by being one, but you absolutely can still intimidate or frighten them by being loud, aggressive, bold, and a little unhinged. AND you get the element of surprise as a woman.

As for the calling you when being followed, they should do that regardless. The threat isn't a male voice, it's the existence of a witness. If you're talking to a friend and she says she feels unsafe or threatened, then mysteriously the call cuts off, you're immediately going to call 911. I've found that even just faking being on the phone dissuades most creepy follow-y men.

Anyway, I don't know if any of this is helpful to you at all, but it definitely works for me. Please feel free to hmu if you have any questions or want to talk. Oh, and don't apologize for having emotions. You didn't do anything wrong, that's just femsoc & it isn't benefiting you 💕

If anyone else has anything to contribute please do!

#ask #anon ask #mine #femsoc #detrans support #detrans #radblr #radfems interact #radfems do touch #radfem safe #radical feminism #radfem #detrans woman #ftmtf

[transmascore]

i feel like im going insane. i have literally, literally, identified as everything in the lgbtq+ acronym. literally every single thing. ive "come out" as every sexuality, claimed i was every gender, and yet i still feel like im wrong. im so tired of not knowing who i am. i feel like a fraud and a fake, like an idiot for not knowing who i was when i was like 3 and just stucking with it forever. i wish i was just normal. do you have any advice for figuring it out?

I understand the frustration. It can be scary to not know who you are, and to want to have a definite answer - to have closure. Identity is a complex thing. 

My own understanding of myself has changed over time. From identifying as a woman, to nonbinary, to a man. From woman-leaning pansexual to gay. From feminine to masculine to feminine again. From using one set of pronouns to another, and then another. I've absolutely felt that imposter syndrome and that need to pin myself down as something specific. To know myself fully and feel stable in my identity. 

I don't want to claim that identity is fluid for everyone - there are people out there that find themselves day one and little changes for them. But I will say that, in general, part of life is that people are always changing. One's understanding of oneself evolves over time. We're not the same person at 30 as we were at 20, as we were at 15. I resent the notion of "a phase" as it's often used dismissively, and that's used to invalidate a person's identity and experiences. I don't really believe in "phases" so much as "this point in time is part of my journey."

When I said I was nonbinary at 17, that wasn't a lie. It wasn't a phase; it wasn't me faking anything. It was who I was at that time, my authentic self. Just as 10 years later, me living as a man is my authentic self. And in neither scenario am I taking up unnecessary space.  I understood myself as being attracted to women for most of my life, and that was my understanding of myself then. Now I'm a Kinsey 7.

My biggest piece of advice is to go with the ebb and flow, and not to beat yourself up about it. A big part of the queer journey, for most people I'd say, is to keep exploring until you find what sticks. What feels right to you in the here and now? What makes you feel happy and at peace with yourself? If you find yourself at a loss for an answer, that's okay. You don't need to have one. You can exist as you are without labeling it (unlabeled), or by using an umbrella term to signify that you're LGBT without getting into specifics (such as queer or genderqueer). 

There's also terminology out there, neologisms, that describe people whose understanding of their own sexuality and gender are in flux - like abrosexual and genderfluid. Because you're far from alone. Many people cycle through the acronym and aren't quite sure where they belong. Even if those specific words don't necessarily click with you, I recommend looking into their communities and speaking to the people in them. You may find answers and make friends with people in a similar situation.

Ultimately: You cannot be a fraud when it comes to your own gender and sexuality. If you come out as a lesbian one day and a gay man the next and a bisexual that afternoon - there's nothing wrong with that. You are you, whatever your understanding of the situation is at the time. 

Good luck on your journey, and take it one step at a time. Go easy on yourself. And if you can, do something nice for yourself today. Treat yourself! Figuring out who you are is hard work. ❤️

#asks #anonymous

[trans-axolotl]

Okay so I'm going to preface this by saying you've answered a very similar question once in the past, but I'm asking again myself because I feel a lot more comfortable getting my own answer ya know what I mean? It's also very long so I'm very sorry about that.

So I think I may be intersex, specifically I think I have NCAH. I saw it mentioned once on a post about intersex conditions and looked it up because I didn't know what it was, and upon reading more about it a lot of things started making sense?

The biggest thing for me was that within the past few months my voice has gotten significantly deeper and I'm not on testosterone. I couldn't figure out what caused it, I thought maybe I just like accidentally did voice training type stuff? But it would make a lot more sense if it was caused by NCAH. I mean I sound like I'm a few months on testosterone. It's a really noticeable difference.

But of course I wouldn't be coming to you if that was the only symptom that matched up.

The next one that made me kinda suspicious is that I'm definitely more hairy than the average afab person. I used to shave my whole entire body as a teen because I was so self conscious about it. But now that I've stopped I'm like, very hairy. Enough that I've had hairy women comment on it in solidarity. The place this is most noticeable is on my legs, but the little pubescent boy mustache I've got going on is definitely a close second. I was also quite tall for an a fab child, but when I hit 13 I capped out at 5'4" and just stopped growing forever.

I can't really remember if I got pubic hair early, but I know my periods came in a bit later than the girls in my grade and they were irregular enough that I once had a pregnancy scare because my period was so late. I've also read from a few different sources that NCAH can cause frequent dehydration? Because some of the hormones affected are ones that are supposed to regulate your sodium and potassium levels. And gee I definitely have that one. I had to buy these little pedialyte drink additives because just drinking a bunch of water wasn't helping.

So that's basically my case for why I think I have NCAH. Now for the actual like, question part.

I do intend to go get tested. I know that there are tests for NCAH and I definitely want to get those done to be sure. But until then (because I don't know when I'll be able to actually do that) is it okay for me to identify as intersex? I've been reading up on the experiences of other people who have NCAH and I find myself relating to so many of them. I've read and re-read and re-re-read all the sources I can find about NCAH. I have a track record of correctly self diagnosing various things so I think I trust my judgement enough to feel comfortable calling myself intersex before getting it confirmed. I just don't want to intrude on a community that I'm not 100% absolutely sure I'm a part of. Intersex people already get treated so poorly, and as a trans man I don't want to just turn out to be another perisex trans person that thought they were ~special~ or something (because I have seen perisex trans people say all kinds of shit about "wishing they were intersex" and that shit is awful). I just want to be as respectful as possible during all this, but god it feels like I've finally found a missing piece of the puzzle. Like this little lingering question in the back of my mind has finally been answered.

Anyway, thank you for running your blog and helping people learn about intersex experiences. You're really doing something so important and I'm sure so many people appreciate you. I hope you're having a good day/night/whatever it is where you are! Thank you again!

hey anon!

So first off, I want to say that I agree that it definitely sounds like it could be possible that you have NCAH. It sounds like you have a lot of symptoms of hyperandrogenism. The thing you mentioned about dehydration is definitely more significant in people with salt-wasting CAH who will go into adrenal crisis, but I wouldn't be suprised if that is also showing up in a milder way for us with NCAH.

On to your second question:

I'm not in charge of who gets to identify as intersex, or of deciding when have done enough research to self diagnose. What I can say is that I'm glad that reading and learning about intersex topics has made you feel validated and seen. I think that with your experiences, it would be okay for you to seek out intersex spaces that are welcoming of people who are self diagnosed or questioning (message me off anon if you want a link to the intersex discord server I mod). It is perfectly fine for you to be honest about where you are in your journey and tell people that you are pretty confident that you have NCAH and are intersex, and leave it up to individual intersex spaces that you would want to join about whether they are comfortable having you there. I think that there are a lot of ways that you can start to participate in intersex community without having a professional diagnosis, and I feel like the best approach is usually to just be honest about where you are in your own discovery. You can celebrate intersex awareness day, and join open intersex spaces, and follow intersex creators, or create art with the intersex pride colors, or many other different things that don't require you to have a professional diagnosis.

Intersex community is generally pretty welcoming to people who are questioning, or intersex adjacent, or who has a complicated diagnosis story. What we are wary of is the fact that there is a long pattern of people, especially trans people, faking being intersex when they know for a fact they are dyadic. It sounds like you're aware of that history, and I appreciate how you are trying to be considerate. And truthfully, some people in some spaces might react badly if you went into those spaces and said you were intersex and they later found out that you didn't have a professional diagnosis, because of the way that intersex people have learned to be wary about fakers entering our spaces. (I don't necessarily agree with that reaction or their approach to diagnosis, but I think that you should know that this is how some intersex people believe.) But honestly, I think you could avoid getting that reaction by just being honest upfront and explaining that you think you are intersex, you're in the process of getting diagnosed, but you don't know for sure.

That being said, I don't think that you owe it to other people to explain all your medical details or your personal story anytime someone asks. I don't think there's a huge problem with you saying that you're intersex if you're talking to an acquaintance, or a dyadic person who doesn't really need to know, or a casual intersex person you meet, or really any situation where it's not an intersex person who you're actually sharing community spaces and building a long term relationship with. You don't owe it to people to share all your medical records or life experiences just because they're curious, and you don't need to go around explaining everything to people who aren't in your life in a long term way. I just think that if you're going to be in intersex spaces, building solidarity, supporting other intersex people, speaking authentically about where you are in your own experience and really listening to other intersex people is the best way to go.

TLDR: I can't tell you what you can or can't do, and what feels right to you is probably the best way to go. There's probably nothing wrong with you casually mentioning that you're intersex in situations where you don't want to share your medical story, but when you're entering intersex spaces, it might be a good idea to share that you're intersex questioning and find spaces that will embrace you.

Other intersex people, if you want to add on with your own thoughts, please feel free!

#asks #intersex #generally with things like this i say: follow ur best instincts and the norms of any community spaces you are joining #there's not hard and fast rules

[coochiequeens]

If Jenny Salesa thinks hiring a violent man is ok then I hope the women of New Zealand vote her out next time she's up for election.

By KATRINA BIGGS MAR 25, 2024

Today, March 25th, is the one-year anniversary of the worst mob violence ever seen against women in New Zealand. Today, I also heard that a Labour Member of Parliament has employed the man, Shaneel Lal, who was instrumental in whipping up that violence, as an executive assistant. Not only was he instrumental, he videoed himself on the day being jubilant about it.

Allegedly, that MP is the Hon. Jenny Salesa, the MP for Panmure-Ōtāhuhu in Auckland, and the spokesperson for Ethnic Communities, Customs. So far, I’ve only had hearsay that she’s the MP who has employed Lal, and phone calls to both her electorate and parliamentary offices to verify it were answered only by voicemail. However, she and Lal do go back a few years, when she selected him to be her youth MP at the age of 18. If it’s correct that Lal is indeed an executive assistant for Ms Salesa, it’s difficult to see how he can be an astute choice as an aide for the Spokesperson for Ethnic Communities, considering his background as a fervent anti-woman activist.  

But, Shaneel Lal has been continuously rewarded and lauded for his efforts for the ‘LGBTQIA+ community’. In reality, his efforts for the ‘LGBTQIA+ community’ boil down to making demands which mainly favour the TQ+ faction of the acronym. From what I understand, and it may have changed from the last time I read this, Lal identifies as ‘queer trans’, and uses they/them pronouns.

Any pushback against Lal’s efforts, like not wanting any man who says he’s a woman to have free and unfettered entry into all women’s and girls’ spaces and sports, he claims are “transphobia”. Shortly after his part in stirring up the violence against women in Albert Park, Auckland, on 25 March 2023, Lal got the ‘Young New Zealander of the Year’ award, whose main sponsor is Kiwibank. Now, he has a job as an executive assistant for an MP.  

It's incomprehensible how so many MPs, including women MPs, turn a blind eye to Lal’s appalling behaviour against women. Seemingly, they’re able to pretend it doesn’t exist. My own engagement with MPs and councillors, though, has demonstrated that it may not be an uncommon practice for some to ignore all those things which could interfere with the implementation of a pet project, or appointment.

It's incomprehensible how so many MPs, including women MPs, turn a blind eye to Lal’s appalling behaviour against women. Seemingly, they’re able to pretend it doesn’t exist. My own engagement with MPs and councillors, though, has demonstrated that it may not be an uncommon practice for some to ignore all those things which could interfere with the implementation of a pet project, or appointment.

Besides being employed as an executive assistant for an MP, Lal is also said to be employed by Labour as a policy researcher. That is a much bigger worry, in my opinion, even without Labour currently being in government. I would put money on it that he will be researching ways to take the word ‘sex’ out of any policy (or piece of legislation, as well, perhaps) he possibly can, and replacing it with the word ‘gender’. The word ‘gender’ may have been used narrowly once as a polite euphemism for ‘sex’, but there’s no limit to how it can be used now. It’s wide open to be interpreted any way a person chooses. Potentially, any man with a self-described gender-identity of any sort, that has no male words in it, gets a free pass into all women’s and girls’ spaces if he so desires.

It's hard for me to imagine a bigger insult to women from Labour than to employ the man who was instrumental in whipping up the worst mob violence against women ever seen in New Zealand, and which shocked much of the world. Unless they’re well-behaved fawners, Lal is no friend to women. Women who don’t fawn are also entitled to sex-based rights, and no one should be giving them away on us – so why are MPs not only doing that, but employing a man who will revel in doing it?

In the event that we need reminding, after the aborted Let Women Speak rally, Labour’s leader, Chris Hipkins, said he would have been proud to support the protest against Posie Parker (Kellie-Jay Keen). He may have found it politic to change his stance a bit since then, but when Labour then goes and employs a man like Lal, it makes me very nervous.

Labour leader, Chris Hipkins, verifies that Shaneel Lal is employed as an executive assistant by a Labour MP (see the last three minutes of the video)

#new zealand #Shaneel Lal is a violent man #Silencing women #The TQ+ fucking over the LGB #Trans rights activism is men's rights activism #The Labour Party #Let Women Speak

[hardynwa]

Parents padlocks late daughters’ grave to avoid rape in Pakistan

Parents in Pakistan are now putting padlocks on their late daughters’ graves to prevent them from being raped by some randy men. According to a report, necrophilia cases are on the rise in the country and some social media users, including activists and authors have raised the matter once again on Thursday. First Post reports that one such user named Harris Sultan, an ex-Muslim Atheist activist and the author of the book “The Curse of God, why I left Islam” blamed hardline Islamist ideology for such depraved acts. “Pakistan has created such a horny, sexually frustrated society that people are now putting padlocks on the graves of their daughters to prevent them from getting raped. When you link the burqa with rape, it follows you to the grave,” Sultan tweeted on Wednesday Another Twitter user Sajid Yousaf Shah wrote, “The social environment created by #Pakistan has given rise to a sexually charged and repressed society, where some people have resorted to locking their daughter’s graves to protect them from sexual violence. Such a connection between rape and an individual’s clothing only leads to a path filled with grief and despair.” Women’s bodies have been unearthed and desecrated on several occasions in the past. The scariest necrophilia case ever reported in Pakistan was in 2011 when a grave keeper named Muhammad Rizwan from North Nazimabad, Karachi was arrested after he confessed to raping 48 female corpses. Rizwan was caught running away after desecrating a corpse. He had caught the attention of nearby grave diggers and some other people. Most recently in May 2022, some unknown men dug out the corpse of a teenage girl and raped it in the Chak Kamala village in Gujrat, Pakistan. This occurred on the same night the family had buried the deceased. According to reports, the shocking incident came to light when the deceased girl’s relatives visited the graveyard the next morning as per their religious traditions. The kin found the body dug up and lying uncovered. The body showed signs of rape. In 2021, some unknown men had carried out a similar barbaric act in Maulvi Ashraf Chandio’s village near the coastal town of Ghulamullah. In 2020, A man was arrested on February 28 after being caught red-handed raping a corpse of a woman in a graveyard in Punjab, Pakistan. The incident occurred in Okara City in the Punjab province. The accused was identified by his first name, Ashraf. In 2019, a woman’s dead body was allegedly dug up and raped by unidentified men in Karachi’s Landhi Town. The woman was buried in Ismail Goth Graveyard. The woman’s body was dug up one day after it was buried. The caretaker of the graveyard told the deceased’s family that a dog had removed the slab which was covering the grave. In 2013, a 15-year-old girl’s body was found lying outside her grave in Gujranwala and was reportedly assaulted sexually. Following this incident, the then chief minister of Punjab in Pakistan, Shahbaz Sharif had ordered a swift inquiry into the incident. The matter reportedly is still sub-judice. Read the full article

[health4beats]

Who Should And Should Not Use HardWood Tonic ?

HardWood Tonic Side Effects: Is It Safe?

The safety evaluation of any dietary supplement is mandatory because choosing the wrong product can cause long-term health damage.

Many of these damages may be irreversible, so always choose trusted companies and safe products.

The official website states that HardWood Tonic is made with organic ingredients sourced from trusted vendors.

The manufacturing takes place under the highest quality standards, leaving no mark on safety.

The seal on the bottle protects the capsules from degrading during delivery.

The customers are advised to check the seal and if it is missing or broken, inform the company about it.

Take out one bottle and finish it before moving to the next.

And never store any supplement near heat, moisture, sunlight, or water.

When stored and used correctly, as per standard dosage, Red Boost does not offer any side effects.

If this is your first time using a supplement, the body may show a little discomfort, i.e., digestive issues.

These problems go away on their own without needing treatment.

Who Should And Should Not Use Red Boost?

Dietary supplements are generally safe for everyone and never go wrong for the body.

The word dietary supplement means a formula made with ingredients that are a part of everyday food.

People that cannot eat certain foods usually switch to supplements to fulfill their nutrition without changing their diet.

It is much more convenient and simpler than changing the entire diet plan, which is why dietary supplements are a favorite choice of millions of people.

Depending on which type of dietary supplement you choose, it may be effective or risky for you.

For example, testosterone supplements are created for people that identify themselves as male.

They are not suitable for women and any person that identifies other than male.

The dietary supplements are also age-specific.

No one should take these supplements unless he truly needs them.

For example, red Boost is only suitable for men in their late middle ages, and people that do not identify as male or are younger should never use it.

What Are The Customers Saying About Red Boost?

A man’s overall health and performance can be enhanced with Red Boost, a dietary supplement.

The product is said to be made of pure natural ingredients, which means that it will not only help you achieve your desired results, but it will also help you maintain them.

It’s made with 100% all-natural ingredients, so you don’t have to worry about your health being compromised by the side effects like those caused by other products.

This product has been praised by many men, who have experienced its positive effects on their bodies and performance. Here are some testimonials from users:

“I’ve been using Red Boost for almost two months, and my performance has improved drastically.

I’m pleased with the results.”

“I’ve been using this supplement for three months now, and I can see a difference in how my body feels when I wake up in the morning.”

Another HardWood Tonic Supplement review claims, “My friend and I decided to try some all-natural supplements to boost our male performance, and so we went online to look for a good product.

We found Red Boost, and after a few days of trying it, I can only say that I am now a performer like never before.”

Where To Buy Red Boost: Pricing And Discounts

Red Boost is only available online and purchased through the official website.

There is no way you can get it from any random online or local store, including pharmacies.

The company has a limited stock, and the orders are only accepted through the official website, so this product cannot be replicated.

Remember there is no official dealership or store selling Red Boost (Hard Wood Tonic), so do not believe any person, group, or website that states otherwise.

Do not fall for the promises and incredibly low price offers by unverified sellers and only trust the official website to place an order.

The actual price of this supplement was nearly $200, but the company is offering a discount so that more people can enjoy its benefits.

Right now, it is available for $59 only, and this price decreases, even more when you order three or more bottles.

Read the following to get complete details on pricing after the discount.

Get one bottle for $59 (30-day supply).

get three bottles for $147 (60-day supply)

Get six bottles for $234 (180-day supply)

[lgbtatuf]

Alejandra's participant observation

As a key component of my research, I conducted participant observation to get a better sense of the LGBTQ+ experience at UF. This included casual conversations with people, and observations from different events. The first enlightening conversation I had went as follows:

         I got to speaking with the girl that sits next to me in one of my classes before class started. Though we only know each other from speaking for a few minutes before class starts every day, we typically have good conversations. She looked to be about my age and was wearing a crop top and shorts. Her hair was in space buns, and she has star shaped hair clips pinned to the side of her head. She was saying that one of her biggest issues with Ben Sasse was that she felt like his presence would lead to increased intolerance and homophobia. She said that she felt like the culture of the school felt relatively safe and accepting now, but that she was worried things would change once he became president. She said that she identified as bisexual and was worried for herself and her friends. From this I concluded that some LGBT individuals feel hostile towards Ben Sasse and are worried about what is to come.

Another insightful conversation is described below.

I was talking to my roommate, we were sitting in the kitchen of our apartment and got to having an interesting conversation. She mentioned how she rarely sees people she knows in person from campus or anything school related on dating apps. She recently switched her dating apps to just women and was surprised that she was seeming fewer people that she knew, as opposed to when she was seeing men on the app. She is not involved in many LGBT+ spaces, such as the Pride Student Union, and this could be a reason for this. After hearing this I hypothesized that because the UF campus and student body is so large, it may not be conducive to the fostering of a unified, singular community. 

A third observation: 

My friend said that he did not feel comfortable tailgating at the frat houses. I assume this is because they are perceived to be not the most diverse or welcoming group.

Described below is an unexpected insight.

         I was warned against continuing text conversation with a man I had met at a party the night before by my friend. The man is a UF student. Part of the reason my friend told me I shouldn’t get to know him is that she had heard that he used the phrase, “that’s so gay” even though he is straight. From this I have concluded that much of the UF student body have no patience for intolerance.

As I was going about my daily activities I noticed this:

UF Gatornights has announced in their most recent Instagram post that they will be showing the hit movie, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” at the Friendsgiving Gatornights event on November 18th. Prior to this, there was an Instagram poll asking which movie should be shown at the next Gatornights. “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” was the only movie on the options list featuring a gay main character and was the one that was ultimately chosen students. From this I have concluded that much of the student body as at the very least, tolerant, (if not supportive) of LGBTQ+ individuals.

A casual conversation with my friend gave me a very interesting perspective.

I had a movie night at my good friend’s apartment. When I got there, she began telling me about her day and how stressful it had been. She said that she attended a “Republican Club” meeting with her roommate because her roommate had contacts in the club from her business internship and therefore felt like she had to make an appearance. My friend said that she had naturally been reluctant to go to the meeting as she does not support this ideology but that it had been even worse than she thought it would be. She said that, aside from her, there has been no people of color or gay people at the meeting. She said during the meeting, she had felt very uncomfortable and angry. She said that by the end of it she was fighting the urge to flip everyone in the club off. She was horrified at the thought that her roommate might be secretly a republican. This depicts common student assumptions about the Republican parties views on LGBTQ+ members.

Finally I observed what I would believe to be one of the most important sources of information for this topic, the Pride Student Union. I observed the Pride Student Union’s Instagram profile and Instagram comments to get a sense of what the online community and dominant culture and sentiment are like:

The UF Pride Student Union’s Instagram is followed by many other student organizations and clubs, which I believe implies that these organizations, at the very least on the outside are supportive of the LGBTQ+ community. A few of the student organizations that follow @UFPSU are UF college democrats, UF Women’s Student Association, UF Hispanic Student Association, UF Gatornights, UF Hoopz, UF Rec Sports, UF Dominican Student Association, UF Hillel, and UF Inter-Residence Hall Association. This seems to indicate to me that UF Campus is largely supportive and inclusive of LGBTQ individuals across different groups. There are not many comments on most of the posts. The posts themselves are all. Very colorful and pretty and informative. The UF Pride Student Union’s bio says that it strives to “provide love and education to the LGBTQ+ community and its intersections.” This to me implies that the UF Pride student union is committed to diversity and strives to be a very warm and welcoming group of people to all.

#participantobservation