it's only a model

Gender business sideblog for @eschatoLegation Trans woman; she/her Tricia/Trish

[whirlybirbs]

honestly i’ve stopped caring if media is good. all that matters is that Me, The Most Important Person, is having a good time.

[muuutant]

You ever just realize how lucky you are that you did that weird thing that led to you being friends with the people you are friends with?

[andreii-tarkovsky]

To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

Dir. Beeban Kidron

[brehaaorgana]

This was such a formative movie

[musicalhell]

This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.

[aqueerkettleofish]

To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.

This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.

[aqueerkettleofish]

Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.

If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.

Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.

And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.

And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.

When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.

Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.

“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”

And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:

And you can FEEL her pride.

All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.

[impossiblemonsters]

the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once

[darkshrimpemotions]

This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.

You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.

[hussyknee]

On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.

“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.

“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”

Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”

Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.

Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”

On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”

“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”

Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.

“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.

“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.

“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”

Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”

Source: How Hollywood heartthrobs and Steven Spielberg helped make a drag queen cult classic

[essence-of-armbarring]

you ever just like “wow that’s my voice? people listen to this clown on a daily basis?”

[birlinterrupted]

Is it just me or does a lot of “sex positivism” these days is just intentional and perverse obfuscation/justification of abuse and just... really bad shit like rape and grooming and shit? As a former sex worker and a survivor of abuse it has made me reluctant to engage with self-proclaimed sex positive people and spaces. I don’t know. It might be just me? lol am I secretly a vanilla prude?

I think that the double bind in capitalist sexist societies (and esp places like America) is that expressions of sexuality are treated in contradictory ways to reinforce misogyny - repression and commercialization/exploitation. Arguing against either of these expressions of misogyny can therefore be co-opted into the other. I’m not sure i agree w the idea that it is something new abt ‘today’ - feminists have always had an ambivalent relationship w ‘free love’ and Playboy’s attempted branding as a feminist movement (after all, Hugh Hefner was an amicus in Roe v. Wade).

Obviously a framework of sex positivity that doesn’t include some understanding of sexism within it is insufficient. But at the same time, I think that there are many aspects of ‘sex positive feminism’ that have made navigating sexual relationships markedly better for women (and everyone, tbh!). Discussions of navigating consent and female desire, the right to sex education, destigmatization of non-str8 sexualities and embodiments, our bodies ourselves, these are all important pieces to dealing w certain aspects of misogyny.

I think that most serious sex-positive-feminist thinkers would never have contended that everyone should be kinky, or have sex w people they didn’t want to, or have to field a bunch of sexual attention they don’t want. And I would say that some of the biggest forces of abuse and grooming in our culture are sexually repressive or controlling (The Church, the military, police, prisons, fathers). The issue we see at hand is that people who are vulnerable are going to be exploited - sometimes this happens in the language of repression, cover-up, shame, sometimes this happens in the name of free love or pressure to not be frigid. I’ve experienced both of these things, but I guess I would say that the benefit of more sexual openness is that at least that allows me to speak on the experiences I’ve had without my openness abt sexuality being the real scandal.

I think there’s a lack of symmetry going on here - I think it’s possible and perhaps reasonable to imagine a sex-positive feminist outlook that accepts the reality of someone wanting to be celibate, non-sexually active, or generally with just one partner/monogamous. It’s harder for me to imagine a ‘sex negative’ framework that allows for people to exist outside its allowed forms of sexuality - and that seems to me to be the issue. People are different from each other, and what might be generative for one person could be stifling (or exhausting) for another. I think the important piece is combating negative attitudes toward certain demographics of people, the power structures that make them vulnerable, like, giving people the world where they can set the terms of their own engagement rather than trying to find the ‘right’ form and amount of sexuality that is supposed to work for everyone. I dunno, it’s a complicated question, but to me I guess coming from an experience of v. sexually repressive backgrounds (but also being a sex worker too) the issues at play for me seem across the board to be class/gender/social power/racial heirarchies that can be used to pressure people into acts and lives they don’t desire - something that we will only fix by taking on the ways our society makes people vulnerable rather than out of hand rejecting sexual expression or having an ‘anything goes’ approach

[gahdamnpunk]

Reblog to make a transphobe uncomfortable eating M&M’s

[0nighthawk0-deactivated20200912]

They did the same with the Brown M&M

Clearly they’re together too, two happy Trans Women Lesbians.

[universe-punk]

[dearest-darlingest-diva]

[marsupials-of-mars]

Breaking news: terfs banned from m&ms forever

[its-aighost]

Wait if round means no nuts what about red

[ashbur-deactivated20250915]

he’s obviously a transman you complete and utter buffoon.

[the-autumn-apple-artworks-deact]

Blessed

[iamtypinglike98madmen-deactivat]

The orange m&m as well

[cherryozyi]

GUYS we are so blind for many years! the m&m are rainbow and the gay flag is rainbow.

They were gay all the long!

M&M says LGBT Rights!!

[lil-tumbles]

gay.. and trans? May I say:

rights!

[pine-storm-season]

I’m certain I’ve reblogged this multiple times but I’m doing it again

[deirdreskye]

Lundy Bancroft: if we allow trans women into women's shelters then abusive men would seize on this as an opportunity to dress up like a sexy lady to sneak into these shelters, bugs Bunny style. Perhaps they would kick their leg out from behind a bush, revealing a sexy woman's leg wearing a garter, whereupon the security guards would see this and go "awooga!" and levitate away from the entrance to the shelter

[sounddesignerjeans-deactivated2]

My experience with gender dysphoria is kinda like If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.

It’s not that I always have this constant drive to be female, or that it’s just a thing that randomly comes and goes. It’s more like a constant push in the direction of presenting more femininely.

So if I’m clean shaven, I’m gonna want to put together a nice outfit to go with how nice and smooth my face and legs look (and it might as well be a feminine outfit - that’s what nice looks like, yeah?). If you give me a nice outfit, I’ll want to do my nails and put on some makeup. If I’m in nail polish and makeup, I look pretty nice, and almost like a girl - if only my Adam’s apple was gone and I had some breasts, that’d really complete the look. At that point, I also start getting dysphoric about my shoulders. And if I’m going that far, I should really get facial feminization surgery, otherwise my face isn’t gonna fit with the rest of me. (I understand cute outfits and makeup aren’t every girl’s cup of tea, but this is just about my experience)

It isn’t that I always want to have breasts and rearrange my facial features. When I’m presenting 100% male, those things aren’t even on my mind, and honestly I don’t even want them. After all, if I have facial hair to worry about still, breasts aren’t gonna make me look like a girl; they’ll just make my gender presentation look kinda mixed. So gender dysphoria is kind of a sliding scale.

I say all this because I’ve never seen anyone else say anything like it, but I know I’m not the only trans person whose dysphoria gets worse when I get closer to my ideal presentation, and I wish I’d known about that when I was still trying to figure things out. I thought the reason I didn’t feel very dysphoric was because I wasn’t transgender - it turned out that I just hadn’t been allowed to present femininely enough to really feel how strong the dysphoria got as I moved along the sliding scale.

So, I hope this helps someone. Thanks for coming to my essay.

[sounddesignerjeans-deactivated2]

reblog to help a trans follower understand themselves

[jesin00]

One of the best “manly guys” I knew in college, the guy I looked up to as a shining example of “how to be unapologetically, positively masculine while still being genuinely kind”, turned out to be a trans woman. She later said she had kept her presentation so masculine because whenever she felt a little bit feminine, she got tempted to go more feminine and she was not ready to face those feelings yet.

[catzuntagged]

The first time I cut my hair really short, one day I looked in a mirror and thought: “Oh, I look boyish, I kinda look like my grandfather” and immediately started to sobbing desperately.

Lol.

[ms-demeanor]

While I’m being all vocally and visibly mentally ill and discussing PTSD on main:

It’s okay to mourn for the you that didn’t get to be. It’s okay to be sad about what you could have done if you weren’t stopped and changed and rewritten by trauma. You’re right to be angry if that got taken away from you.

But you also don’t have to keep chasing it. You’re never going to be the you from before, the way is shut, these halls are closed. It’s okay to mourn that branch; it’s not okay to strangle yourself at the roots to try to get back to it.

You’re different now. That’s okay. You don’t have to be more than you are or healthier than you are or less afraid or more stable. You don’t have to exhaust yourself struggling to get back to before. Before isn’t baseline.

What you DO have to do is find out what your baseline is now and how to maintain it, how to care for yourself and cultivate the growth of who you ARE as a person, not who you could have been.

[onlytwitterpics]

!!!!!

[mackarywrathew]

Trans guys droppin titty for trans girls call that a transaction.

[incendavery]

if wishes were fishes. or retroactive protection. whichever.

[70rgasm]

Candy Darling in Women in Revolt directed by Paul Morrissey, 1971

[sovietshopaholic]

a trans mood

[abbf26]

the inherent horor of being trans is knowing you are the single touchstone a cis person will probably ever have

im reminded of when i went to sit my philosophy exam and had an ex-officer as an invidulator. he asked me if i was trans, something i had no obligation to answer. but if i didnt, i would be cagey. i would now paint an image of all trans people being rude in his mind, so i said yes

that invidulator asked me why, as a trans student, i should have my rights respected if there are so few of us

and instead of rightfully getting pissed off, i had to remember that i am currently representing a community of millions to a single man in a room with just the two of us in it. i could be the deciding factor on how he conducts behaviour with trans people in the future. what if he gets called to invidulate again in 20 years time and has another trans student? what if he remembers the one he met before, and instantly assumes he knows our community?

so i explained to him why i should have rights. and i used my words carefully, because if i slip up even once i have now put a trans person in danger, because he has made a choice based on me

trans people dont get to be angry. cis people always joke about how we demand a space, or we demand the right name, or we demand they bow down to us

think very carefully, did that trans woman demand that you use the right name, or did she correct you? did that trans man hold you at gunpoint, demanding you let him piss in public, or did he look like he wanted to use the disabled toilet to avoid bothering you all together. did the nonbinary trans person have you on your knees begging for forgiveness, or did they ask nicely for you to be mindful of their pronouns?

the transphobic narrative is one of victimhood, meanwhile if i even use the wrong tone cis people will act as a child does, and they will demand that the next trans person they meet apologise

every trans person you meet is aware of this too. we're all very tuned into the fact that we are ambassadors, and that we never asked to be that. i dont want to have to very carefully consider 'will a curt answer mean someome later dies', but every day of my life i do

and cis people need to know that. to be trans is to literally walk on constant eggshells of cis fragility. its why when we see a new trans celebrity we have to desperately hope they dont do stupid fucking shit like caitlyn jenner did. because now everyone thinks trans women are like her. because now negotiations for our right to exist unmolested have gone back another 20 years

and tbh, cis people are pathetically weak. a trans person asked you to use the right name? that did not happen in a vacuum. that trans person has met 50-60 cis people today who refused

and guess what? we get tired too

[puppydeathfarts]

Isolation on autopilot?

Oh damn, this is super interesting. Relatable, too. From the Coping book:

[gay-irl]

gay🚘irl

[rosecrystal]

fathers be like i fucked u over during the most important formative years of ur life and was never there for u but now that ur an adult and theres no help or effort needed from me lets be best friends bud!

[rosecrystal]

“i wanna fix our relationship”

pay me 187k in cash by tomorrow 

[ramonaisonline]

Sometimes the smallest, silliest things feel like huge accomplishments ✨ . One of my favorite parts of transition is experiencing the things I always envied. I had shoulder length hair as a kid, but refused to style it or do ponytails or use bobby pins. I rejected anything that would make me seem like I was doing something “feminine”… even though that’s what I really wanted. As I grew up, my hair got shorter and shorter as I repressed my feelings more and more. Now I have so many hair styles I want to try, and little things like being able to do a braid are really meaningful to me.