the blog of dave strider

I BLOCK TRANSANDROBROS AND COP APOLOGISTS.

[antlerfolk]

hi im dave i use he/him mostly

i dont have a dni but tl;dr i dont fw transandrobros zionists or anyone that would agree with something donald trump would say about marginalised groups

i am on discord at tertiaryapocalypse and i am a moderator at @kinburger

tag + type list is under the cut. DO NOT REACH OUT TO ME ON ANON A8OUT CANONM8S.

'types:

HOMESTUCK: dave strider, dave lalonde (roseways), dirk strider, vriska serket. mule deer; specifically from the western rockies, i believe green man (of the fairfolk), conifer tree of some sort computer program

tags:

#vis ref: fictionkin visuals #mems: fictionkin memories more to be added.

[courtkossai]

oh hey , wingsday approach - may 15th !

since 2003 , as start by easalle and silverie from livejournal ;D

'Wear' Are Your Wings?! Calling all winged creatures! The first annual "'Wear' Are Your Wings" Holiday is nearly upon us! Birds, Dragons, Faeries, Angels, Bags, Bats and all that flutter and flitter, spread your wings and soar with pride! Thursday, May 15th, 2003!! Wear your wings! Buy or make your own, if you don't have any at home to wear. Wear them no matter what you are doing. A good idea is to wear a pair small enough to not be too intrusive. Note: Wings and Cars don't mix. Walking and Biking are environmentally better anyway! Make more wings to hand out to others if they haven't got their own. Use paper, feathers, foam, and fabric. Be creative! Attach them with safety pins, tape, Velcro or something else! Go out in the world and hand out your wings to everyone you meet! Spread the joy of magic and dreams! Don't forget to wear your wings too! Wear your wings with pride and joy! Spread the love and beauty of fairy magic! Have fun and love life!

of course , short notice at this point to come up with full pair of wearable wings ... but maybe still some fun ideas to express wings !

[intrulogical]

i have a theory that the growing purity culture in fandoms come from the fact that white queers and neurodivergents do not think they have to decentralize their whiteness, which shifts fandom to be a mode of moral posturing and performativism in a way that touches their unconscious want to become a white savior like what evangelical christians want to do

[nanoraydx]

I think we should let animals smoke cigarettes

[signofthesignless]

im tired of talking about current discussion bc i feel like im beating a dead horse at this point but it really has made me want to talk about how i do, truly, think the community needs to get more political. i want to write up a proper post on it, but like. i feel that as a community we feign away from politics, about how society has an influence on our identities. i think part of it does have to do with how antikin & other bad faith actors have used these things to try and make the community look bad, like raceclaiming discussion within fictionkin communities many years ago. but it's like damn...

i do really feel we need to have more discussions about how our identities are influenced by politics, and how our identities influence how we interact with others politically in the world. there's a lot of young folks in the community who are learning about the violence of police dogs for the first time because of this discussion, and it's blowing my mind! folks love to talk about animal rights within the community, but i rarely ever see the discussion of animal rights overlapping with discussions of racism, ableism, etc.

there will be some folks who disagree with me; who think the community should be a source of escapism, who think that kids don't need to be this heavily involved in discussion of politics. to that i say: i had to learn about racism when i moved schools when i was five and a girl with blonde hair and blue eyes asked what was wrong with my appearance. this is not a fandom community, this is a community of folks who are not in the norm when it comes to human identity. it is important that we discuss these things. teach folks about these things, further our own understanding of these things, and work towards a better community that actually makes a difference when it comes to the liberation of others. let's talk about white supremacy within the divine communities, or how folks will use their alterhumanity as a shield & cling to victimization when it comes to conversations of privilege. lets talk about the glorification of subhumanization within the community that feels painfully ignorant to how truly destructive subhumanization is. how discussions that are very explicitly bigoted are tolerated because it's about alterhuman-related feelings. we all need to be better activists, better allies, and work towards the liberation of marginalized folks. we have to teach eachother how to be kind to eachother and help eachother. any type of community that ignores or discourages topics of bigotry is just treating white supremacy as the default.

[thetadelta]

@fangsnclaws Hope you don't mind me adding your tags

To any white person reading this: if you are going "oh shit I might know less than I thought" right now, I highly recommend following @/creatingblackcharacters (and particularly reading her lesson posts) for some great Racism 101.

If you are not actively, daily working on combatting internalized racism in yourself and others I can pretty much guarantee you have a ton to work on.

[thetadelta]

And the thing is, some parts of the community are more politically aware than they were 10 years ago, but only around things that affect white people. This community used to have a pretty universal ableism problem and now if someone posts something disrespecting people who experience delusions five people will immediately jump down their throat about it, but if, for example, someone calls their kintype the name of a creature from a closed culture (you know the one I'm thinking of) nobody says a word. Calling out ableism online has become a norm, but white people are still too uncomfortable with racism to even touch it, let alone acknowledge that they might have privilege or hold damaging beliefs.

Any identity that deviates from societal norms is inherently political. All of the societal pressures that make it hard to express alterhumanity publicly come from real systems of oppression. It is not possible to create a world where alterhumanity will be accepted without first fighting against the racism, ableism, queerphobia, religious discrimination, etc. that dictates what kind of person it is "acceptable" to be– and that fight has to start from within the community.

Being authentically alterhuman means being politically involved.

[canineblood]

Reverse Therian

[dinocanid]

Crash Course From A Black Otherkin

Preface

I encourage everyone to read this, especially if you are white. I made this post long enough to talk about the points in decent detail, but short enough to be digestible. It is about the different ways the nonhuman communities make people of color feel unwelcome and why.

My askbox is open usually all the time, so I'm also open to answering questions about this. I want people to read. I want people to ask questions when they don't understand. I even want people to do research on their own time to learn more (and I mean actually researching and not asking ChatGPT to think for you).

Where To Begin

"Wow, this is a really long post on the police dog discourse", except this isn't a post on the police dog discourse. That topic is more of a springboard for me to segue into where exactly things go wrong and how it causes people of color to feel unsafe participating in the communities (which can suck, because nonhumanity can be very isolating with no one to talk to about it!). So if you feel as if this has been done to death and are thinking "oh boy, this again", I encourage you to continue to read the post all the way to the end. With that, this leads us to...

The Dilution of Topics

It's important to understand that when something like this comes up, POC are chiming in to explain the situation and how it affects them. It is not the time to bring in unrelated things in an attempt to use that as credentials for weighing in. I'll use the K-9/police dog example again because it's honestly such a good discourse to dissect for this. The main focus of the conversation was between black and brown people (not exclusively, because other POC included, but mainly) and those who identify as police/military dogs (therians, otherkin, whathaveyou). Not anyone else.

"As someone with a problematic (or villain) kintype--"

This isn't about you.

"I'm police or military creature from another world--"

This isn't about you.

"I acknowledge it but don't glorify it--"

This isn't about you.

What these comments do is not only watering down what our actual concerns are, but it speeds up the "internet telephone" until the conversation morphs into something different entirely. This happens all the time when people of color try to bring to light something that bothers us. Everyone wants to make it about themselves but it's not about everyone. The topic of "Glorification of these institutions that actively harm isn't good" is not the same as "What kintypes/theriotypes/etc. should people be allowed to have?", but it was turned into that very quickly because way too many people failed to realize and understand what isn't about them. Many, with a quickness, found a way to victimize themselves.

All that is without even getting into people adding exclusions that were not originally there. "This discourse is US-centric and doesn't apply to other countries" is not only incorrect but you need to educate yourself on how police brutality (and police brutality that utilizes attack animals) exists outside of the United States. This isn't even just for the dog thing. This also extends to racism in general because people love to talk about how not racist their country is (when in fact it often is).

White Privilege and Nonhuman Superiority

This section is probably going to ruffle some feathers, but if it does ruffle your feathers then it might be time to start deconstructing why exactly that is. White privilege in particular is important to point out here because it is common to assume that privilege is a "balance scale". Privilege doesn't cancel out from marginalization. You can be queer, or disabled, or neurodivergent, etc. and still benefit from white privilege. I point all of that out because the nonhuman communities have a large portion that are in one or many of these marginalized groups, and the assumption that it "cancels out" white privilege may be part of the driving force behind what's covered in this post.

An easy starting example of white people underestimating exactly how deep things can go is the entire gatekeeping discourse about defining therianthropy as "wears gear and does quadrobics". How this whole thing started with people insisting therianthropy required these performative aspects, I'm not even gonna pretend to know. What I do know is that it is a form of gatekeeping popular on photo and video-based social media websites like Instagram and TikTok that then subsequently bleeds over into other places like Tumblr and Discord group chats.

"Real therians wear gear and run around outside on all fours" makes me desperately hope for young POC to be careful. Black people especially have a disproportionately higher chance of being arrested or shot. I never want anyone to be pressured to do dangerous things from these imaginary guidelines on what makes nonhumanity "valid". It's exclusionary from both a "therianthropy doesn't require any of this" standpoint and a "you are overestimating how safe this activity is to do" standpoint. This isn't fearmongering, I'm not saying that this is never safe. I'm saying that those who are unable to safely do it may subsequently feel like that disqualifies them from identifying as a therian. Similar things can be said for other minorities other than racial ones, but that's a different topic (and I encourage anyone wanting to talk about that to make their own posts about it, rather than using this one).

The insistence that nonhumanity should have "racial colorblindness" and "be above politics/apolitical" are also very privileged takes. Identifying as nonhuman doesn't erase the fact that most of us still live in and are affected by human society (whether some want to be or not) and people of color especially do not have the freedom to completely divorce ourselves from the world because our very existence has been made political. Not only that, but culture is still important to a lot of people as well. We are not all the same just because we identify as nonhuman. We are not a monoculture. We are different and there needs to be room to celebrate that.

The aspect of "everything is for everyone" that often comes with white privilege appears in even blatant ways. I've witnessed people in the community saying that closed cultures are silly. Although slightly less common today (and by slightly I mean very slightly), at one point it was common for people to constantly appropriate North/South American indigenous cultures because their understanding of it was as shallow and stereotypical as "Pocahontas Colors of the Wind". I've even had someone say "well it's not our fault black people are so trendy" directly in a conversation about how black people regularly have our culture taken from us when we're barely even allowed to have it ourselves without being looked down on. It's gross and insensitive, and the very reason so many people of color leave these nonhuman communities. "Do whatever you want forever" exists within reason.

Identifying as nonhuman isn't an excuse to look down on humans either, especially in the misanthropic sense. Being anti-human and blaming humanity as a whole for the results of colonization (species extinction, habitat loss, climate change, etc.) goes against the marginalized people that have been harmed historically and currently and lumps them into the same category as their oppressors simply by existing.

It is Always That Deep

The last point that I'll use to close this whole post is that I can't stress enough how often us POC are told again and again and again that what we are seeing is either not real or irrational, or "just drama".

I remember the reaction to "maybe don't say you're an entity from a closed culture if you're not from that culture".

I remember the reaction to "don't use monkey/ape as a derogatory term for humans".

I remember the reaction to "don't glorify institutions that actively harm and kill us".

I remember the reaction to "please don't say dehumanization is good actually".

People will fight tooth and nail to speak over and ignore POC voices almost as a knee-jerk reaction. Then maybe if we're lucky, after they're done arguing, they'll do some research and come back later with an "oops my bad". I'm glad they learn in those cases, but that's not acceptable. Listening first is important, ask questions (respectfully) if you have to, but it should not be a fight-or-flight situation.

[signofthesignless]

this thanksgiving lets bring attention to the rampant anti-indigenous american racism within alterhuman spaces, and work on being better allies and lifting the voices of indigenous american alterhumans. lets be reminded of the terrible origins of this holiday and take the time to address the problems of racism within and outside of our community as well.

please respect folks from closed cultures when they tell you how you should be treating and discussing their culture. idgaf if your theriotype is involuntary, you still can control how you present & discuss your identity. a lot of you very deliberately speak over others by acting like they are stupid and just don't understand you, and say extremely racist stuff under the impression its okay because its alterhuman-related. please listen to indigenous american alterhumans when they tell you you are being hurtful. your alterhumanity doesn't erase your privileges that you may associate with human society, and doesn't erase the harm that you can cause. we as a community need to make a stronger effort at making this community safer for indigenous beings, and that includes not letting behavior like this continue.

(indigenous folks are absolutely allowed to add onto this. i myself am not indigenous, just think it is important to bring this up especially after recent discussions, but ultimately i am not an expert on the topic.)

[workdailylog]

Bro strider pretty pleaseeee

11/25

[antlerfolk]

transandro bros are so annoying. I remember when I accidentally put the word transandrophobia in my tags once and I got anon hate for DAYS.

I hope they leave u alone soon

im built different dont worry

[lesbianchemicalplant]

it's honestly very funny how many trans men are constantly throwing tantrums over women perceiving and treating them as men

same for these nonbinary transmascs, they'll be 5 years on T, name legally changed to Jack Jackington, socially transitioned to A Dude Who's A Chill Guy, etc. and in all of that time have furiously refused to accept that women around them could, at some point, start considering them to be a man

women didn't make you guys do any of this LOL

[graham-tails]

I don’t know how to phrase this but I haven’t heard that many talk about the relationship between being alter or non human and a person of color so I basically wanted to ask how any of you experience both of those identities at once. Like animals or other nonhuman creature don’t exactly have an equivalent to race so how does it work exactly?

Edit: I guess I should also look at this from my perspective being white but to be honest whiteness itself I don’t think is really a part of my identity. Sure it’s part of who I am but not in like a really identity feeling way if that make sense.

[antlerfolk]

Hi! I'd love to answer this for you, keep in mind I'm just one person though and every being will have their own unique experience.

For me, my asianness doesn't really translate to my theriotypes. When looking at this we should keep in mind that race is a social construct, so therioforms don't have an analogue to it because there's no structured, complex societies that we're aware of right now; and it's not a biological component. This may be different for other alterhumans of colour, though! The closest thing I can really consider to "race" would be geographical variations in the same species, lol.

I'm very connected to my "humanness" in a way I imagine a lot of other therians are not, so my experience of racialisation isn't something I really feel incongruous with when it comes to my experience as alterhuman. I do tend to look at geographic roots for species I consider (need to do this for tigers, and I've heavily done this with deer), but that's about it.

(Aside, the reason you do not consider your whiteness a part of your identity is the same way a cisgender person doesn't consider their cisness as part of their identity: I assume you live in a society where white is considered the default, which allows it to fade away into the background of your identity in lieu of the things that deviate from the norm. For racialised groups, there is no choice to allow the racialisation to fade away, since it is a deviation from the norm and will always make itself known. Most of the stuff I can find on this are academic articles, but hopefully this one suffices.

Obviously, this isn't your fault!!! This is just how predominantly white culture works. Hopefully this can be helpful, though :) )

[antlerfolk]

why is there fandom and fictionkin in my therian tag bro

[antlerfolk]

idgaf about your f/o

[antlerfolk]

why is there fandom and fictionkin in my therian tag bro

[signofthesignless]

im tired of talking about current discussion bc i feel like im beating a dead horse at this point but it really has made me want to talk about how i do, truly, think the community needs to get more political. i want to write up a proper post on it, but like. i feel that as a community we feign away from politics, about how society has an influence on our identities. i think part of it does have to do with how antikin & other bad faith actors have used these things to try and make the community look bad, like raceclaiming discussion within fictionkin communities many years ago. but it's like damn...

i do really feel we need to have more discussions about how our identities are influenced by politics, and how our identities influence how we interact with others politically in the world. there's a lot of young folks in the community who are learning about the violence of police dogs for the first time because of this discussion, and it's blowing my mind! folks love to talk about animal rights within the community, but i rarely ever see the discussion of animal rights overlapping with discussions of racism, ableism, etc.

there will be some folks who disagree with me; who think the community should be a source of escapism, who think that kids don't need to be this heavily involved in discussion of politics. to that i say: i had to learn about racism when i moved schools when i was five and a girl with blonde hair and blue eyes asked what was wrong with my appearance. this is not a fandom community, this is a community of folks who are not in the norm when it comes to human identity. it is important that we discuss these things. teach folks about these things, further our own understanding of these things, and work towards a better community that actually makes a difference when it comes to the liberation of others. let's talk about white supremacy within the divine communities, or how folks will use their alterhumanity as a shield & cling to victimization when it comes to conversations of privilege. lets talk about the glorification of subhumanization within the community that feels painfully ignorant to how truly destructive subhumanization is. how discussions that are very explicitly bigoted are tolerated because it's about alterhuman-related feelings. we all need to be better activists, better allies, and work towards the liberation of marginalized folks. we have to teach eachother how to be kind to eachother and help eachother. any type of community that ignores or discourages topics of bigotry is just treating white supremacy as the default.

[antlerfolk]

What is a transandrobro? I'm assuming maybe something in reference to TMA/TME? I don't know much about those either

TLDR: people who believe in the concept of transandrophobia, aka specific oppression towards transmascs, in conjuction or in opposition to transmisogyny, the specific oppression of transfems and the intersection of transphobia and misogyny. TMA = transmisogyny affected, referring only to transfeminine people, and TME = transmisogyny exempt; aka anyone else. long version with more theory and explanation under the cut.

Transandrobros are people (typically transmascs) who strongly believe in the existence of a concept called "transandrophobia", which is a framework meant to describe the specific oppression trans men face. Transandrophobia as a term has only been popularised in online spaces as far as I am aware. It is often used to discredit transmisogyny (see below for definition) as its own, unique kind of oppressive force.

Transmisogyny, on the contrary, is a term used to describe the intersection of misogyny and transphobia. It's often misconstrued as "the specific oppression trans women face", and while it does primarily target trans women, that is not the formal definition of transmisogyny. Julia Serrano (a noted transfeminist) originally coined the term in her 2007 book Whipping Girl, though transmisogyny was discussed and present in early queer spaces too.

Tangentially, TMA and TME stand for transmisogyny affected and transmisogyny exempt, respectively, the former being applied only to transfems and the latter being applied to any cis person (including cis men), transmascs, and anyone else. Often times you will see people refer to it as a way of asking "what's in your pants", which is not the case, since as noted above AMAB people can be both TME and TMA.

The reason that many transfeminists argue transmisogyny's validity and not transandrophobia's is that transmisogyny is described as an intersectional oppression, whereas transandrophobia is not. "Androphobia" as a concept does not exist outside of circles of men's rights activists, which are typically built upon a misunderstanding of the patriarchy and gender-based oppression.

It's completely understandable to want a term to describe a struggle you experience, but oftentimes transphobia works just fine. There's ways that transphobia manifests differently for trans men, but it is never in a way which is due to an intersection of two different axes of oppression.

It's not 100% the same, but it may help to make a comparison: often times, we see differences in how racism manifests towards racialised men and women. I'll focus on how it manifests for east asians, since I have the most experience as an east asian myself. Often time east asian men are stereotyped to be sexually deviant and socially inept, as well as a general stereotype applied to all east asians that we're naturally smart. This is obviously bullshit. You rarely see east asian women be stereotyped as socially inept, but that stereotype is not rooted in a theoretical "androphobia", it's just because women are placed in roles of social responsibility across the board. However, there is a very persistent fetishism of asian women that is not nearly as bad with asian men, which is due to a) the viewing of women as sexual commodities and b) the exotification of asian people / orientalism in general. The most oft talked about form of intersectional racism and misogyny is misogynior, which I highly recommend reading up on. The fetishization of Asian women is also it's own kind of oppression that isn't present, or at least exactly similar, for Asian men or white women. Intersectional oppression is typically multiplicative, not additive. Keep this in mind.

Similarly, trans women are often made out to be sexually deviant rapists and dog piled whenever they so much as step the tiniest bit out of line, behaviour which is much less common for trans men, especially those who align themselves with the patriarchy. They are also, much more importantly, statistically at higher risk of hate crimes, sexual assault, and financial struggle than cisgender women and transgender men. It's easier to talk about stuff you can witness, so I'll talk about the dogpiling.

Our society expects women to stay in line, play nice, and behave, and when a woman does not do that, she is incessantly ridiculed. I recently watched an essay on how Rachel Ziegler faced a stupid amount of harrassment for simply taking on the role of Snow White in a live action (as well as other subjects of misogyny and racism intersecting), which I think is a perfect example of this! We see this super often with the way trans women are treated on and offline.

Transphobia manifests in a shit ton of ways and I assume if you are on this website you are plenty aware of it, and I'm getting pretty fucking tired, so I'll leave out the long winded explanation. However, the constant association of trans women with sexual deviancy, the rampant misgendering of trans women and transfems who step out of line, the incessant call out posts and banning of trans women who do the same shit anyone else on this website does... it's a fucking nightmare out here for transfems, and transmascs running around bastardising and co-opting their terminology does fucking nothing. I don't care what people "think" is happening, since even just looking at any statistics make you see just how much trans women are shat on. Subjective experiences do not compare to objective statistics, and I'm sick and tired of trans men ignoring statistics!

IF you're a transmasc reading this who has any belief in transandrophobia as a concept: I know you want a term to be unique and concise for you, but please just use transphobia. It doesn't mean what you experience isn't real if you don't have a special boy term for it, it just means it's not rooted in multiple axes of oppression. You can learn and grow.

[antlerfolk]

i need everyone commenting on this to realise i am a trans man of colour with experience both passing and not passing throughout my life. i used to be hardcore into transandrophobia theory before i realised i was not being #feminist with it.

i need you guys to familiarise yourselves with feminism and the "not all men" bullshit people used to pull on this site before you come and try and tell me that trans men are special boys who are soooo discriminated against because women are afraid of men.

women are allowed to be afraid of men and part of transition is fucking dealing with that. you don't get to transition and still occupy the social role of a woman! so many of you are not capable of unpacking the fucking privilege you have because it makes you uncomfortable to have to see yourself as a potential oppressor, as someone who is capable of harming someone else. but you need to get past that if you ever want to be able to exist in a way that betters society.

[ragingcitrustree]

One specific additional note: trans men can and do experience misogyny. The reason trans men experience misogyny is that their gender is denied, which is transphobia. It’s just transphobia that enables regular old misogyny. The same misogyny that all women have had to put up with forever. The same transphobia that all trans people have to deal with.

For trans men, when the transphobia is handled, the misogyny goes away. The better that shit goes for trans people in general, the better things are for trans men automatically. Anything you do to support your trans sisters will fundamentally be of benefit to you because the only reason y’all still have to deal with misogyny is because the world does not accept your gender.

Trans women do not have that convenience. Support trans women. It’s in your best interests too.

[signofthesignless]

me & @antlerfolk if u care

[antlerfolk]

thank fucking god jesus christ