On one hand it's kinda funny that a significant amount of people misread this and misunderstood what the meme is saying. On the other hand, I'm glad you all got a little chance to rant about being fetishized it does very much suck 🫶
I wish we didn't have to worry about people fetishizing us AND worry about people assuming anyone who's attracted to us is fetishizing us. Life contains evil fucked up multitudes
I don't think cis men commit 90% of violent crimes because they are naturally more violent than cis women. I think cis men commit 90% of violent crimes because they are afforded more opportunity and leeway by society to do so.
I think there's an incredible correlation between insulating cis boys from the consequences of their actions and the prevalence of violent crime.
I think we teach cis boys from a young age that violence will be tolerated from them as long as they perform masculinity to society's standards.
That second part is the salient factor here. Because we also teach them that violence will not be tolerated from them if they defy society's standards of masculinity, even if it's self defense. If they're picked on for defying those standards, it's the violence against them that's validated.
I think cis boys who are performing masculinity to society's standards get in no real trouble for snapping their classmates' bra straps or pulling their hair or whatever else gets written off as "he likes you" & it sets them up for a life of violence.
It doesn't guarantee it. But it raises the probability that they will continue to express their desires via violence when they're adults.
long rambling about gender worldbuilding in This Place is a Message
So my D&D group was talking about gender in fictional societies and I did a longass braindump at them about gender in the world(s) of This Place is a Message and it occurred to me that this might be something people who (unlike my D&D group! who are lovely people! but who have limited interest in MCYT and I love that for them honestly) actually read the fics.
Content note that this description contains discussion of some pretty awful stuff. Eugenics has been a background theme in the fics; these are also societies with sexism and cissexism present. None of these places are meant to be utopias!
Also, you can't generalize about whole planets without leaving some nuance out; while none of these planets I've described ever gets away from the binary, in general when I worldbuild societal expectations, it's because I am interested in the places where they don't work for everyone. I don't really plan on focusing on gender stuff specifically in the fics, but it is something I keep in mind as I'm writing.
Btw, if you are like "oh but the way I think of xyz character has [specific headcanon I have contradicted here] vibes" I don't want to take your fun away! I'm probably not going to change how I write them, but often fanfiction is an exercise in reading against the text and I really genuinely think you should read against my text if that's more fun for you. Also, I personally am cis so if you have better things to do than read however many words of rambling about fictional gender worldbuilding from a cis woman, you should enjoy doing those other things instead of reading this bullshit.
Before we get to the main populated planets, a brief note on medical science and medical transition! In this world medical transition has been relatively easy and cheap for a long time, but has within about a generation become SO easy and cheap that if you have no major medical issues you can change your outward appearance in a week or less, depending on what changes you want to make, and if you are willing to have some more intensive surgery and keep up with post-operation treatments, can become capable of impregnating someone or carrying a child. (This was an outgrowth of me realizing that if Scar could survive his horrific accident because of medical nanites, logically people without his immune issues could substantially remake their bodies very easily.) Obviously this has been a big deal for all kinds of people, from cis guys who really want to be able to grow nice beards instead of scruff all the way to people who emphatically don't want to look human, but when I talk about medical transition here I am mostly talking about people who want to read as a specific socially-recognized gender and perhaps have different genitals, which is leaving out a ton of people, I know!
On reproduction: personally, I don't think there are many people on worlds with access to this type of technology who have functional uteri, because having experienced the wonders of a functional uterus, I don't enjoy it. Menstruation sucks. We should have something different. However, on planets where the technology is less available or the population is shrinking, there is often heavy social pressure on some genders to be capable of carrying children. While I am going to put my characters through The Space Horrors, I don't think I'm going to make anyone go through menstruation while they're doing that.
Anyway, here we go:
Mercury is an absolute fucking nightmare garbage fire of a planet, politically speaking, and I don't want to go into great detail with the Mercury worldbuilding here because it's depressing (if you've read the fics you know there is some Bad Shit going on on Mercury) but basically for horrific sexism and classism reasons the first child of a wealthy or (rarely) upwardly-mobile Mercurian couple is always raised as/considered a boy regardless of biology; the second is usually raised as a girl. Gender has very little to do with one's interests or skills and is primarily about how one will be useful to one's family as either an heir or a product to be sold off in marriage to someone else's heir. Similarly, marriage is not about love, it's about reproduction.
Adults get the option of one of two gender markers on their IDs. It is probably hard to transition biologically unless it's specifically for reproductive purposes, in which case it is still relatively expensive but also your family will probably pay for it. This is an improvement, because as a society Mercury went through all the usual outcomes of strict gender roles and sexism (there was a lot of infanticide, for example) and "let's just pretend that all our firstborns are sons" was the easiest solution. It obviously isn't a good solution but Mercury has bigger fish to fry. (There's a terrible joke about mercury poisoning I could make here.)
Outside of the upper classes, there is a pretty strict gender binary in theory but birth order doesn't come into it and in practice everyone needs to be working to support the family so while there's a gendered division of labor it's divided into what can be done while nursing a baby vs what can't, so, for example, anything you can do at a computer while sitting down is considered feminine on Mercury unless it pays really well.
There is no substantial Mercurian diaspora because most people who would like to leave Mercury can't afford to do so permanently; the small pockets of Mercurians on other planets are frequently discriminated against if they are visibly Mercurian, so they tend to be very insular and traditional.
(Grian is Mercurian on his father's side and Terran on his mother's side, and I genuinely haven't decided what kind of anatomy he was born with, but at this point he has a dick, he has had several other things previously, and I don't think he thinks much about gender. I think if he did he'd actually be happier because maybe his dad's legacy wouldn't have such a weird hold on him? Anyway, obviously even for a Mercurian firstborn child who grew up to identify as male, having a uterus, etc. would affect his adolescence and how he grew up, but Grian's childhood illness and neglectful parents affected him much more. Grian does have a younger sister and I know that she is cis; it was important to Grian's dad to have An Heir or he would not have named his child fucking Grian Grian Grian III, but he was willing to do things the Earth way with a second child.
Bdubs is also from Mercury! He also has more going on with his everything, because Mercury is a hot mess, but he's cis. I think this man has many gender issues but they are all to do with ridiculous amounts of insecurity pretending to be confidence.)
Venus is the most complicated one here because it is the only planet with a sizable diaspora population that is markedly visibly different, as most offworld Venusians retain their green-tinted photosynthetic skin. Venus likes to present itself as The Utopia Science Made, where everyone has enough to live well and everyone is happy and beautiful, and Venus is the planet with the most gender options, hooray! Venus is a wealthy planet with an artificially tiny population. They have outsourced any kind of production that needs human workers to more desperate worlds with cheaper labor, legally limited who is allowed to reproduce, and heavily incentivized and, in earlier times, outright banished people with genetic defects from the planet. Their artificially low population exempts them from the wider Solar System's anti-eugenics laws because they're still classified as a frontier world, but they aren't fooling anyone who's actually been to Venus; this is a heavily developed, tightly-controlled, extremely terraformed world.
The stereotypical Venusian-born Venusian is well-educated and cares deeply for the environment. Because this planet used to have an atmosphere full of sulfuric acid, the ancestors of the people who settled Venus are keenly aware that planetary environments are fragile and require dedicated care and upkeep. Unfortunately, a Venusian education emphasizes soft eugenics and keeping a population small and culturally unified as a major requirement for a well-functioning, peaceful world. While it is true that the Venusian homeworld has historically been the most politically stable world in the Solar system, Venusian colonies have a long and storied history of revolution, revolt, and general chaos, and the stereotypical off-world-born Venusian is aggressive, cynical, and likely to ask politically inconvenient questions like "why do people in these neighborhoods keep suffocating if the oxygen scrubbers are being kept up?" and "so is the guy whose company makes the air scrubbers related to the guy who made the laws?"
But more about the Venusian diaspora later! On Venus proper, there are three fairly rigid gender roles and, legally speaking, five gender markers, and you have to have one (only one) (and you can't opt out) and you have to pick one at a big coming of age ceremony in front of your whole family. And you will have to explain why if you pick something nonstandard or that people weren't expecting, and it's very fraught. You can change your gender but it is a process and you will get a lot of relatives trying to make this about themselves somehow. (You get those relatives everywhere if you change any part of your identity, of course, but having the big ceremony gives them more leverage.)
The Venusian system isn't truly nonbinary; the three social genders are male, female, and androgynous, a midpoint between the two binary genders. (The other options legally are "Other" and "None," but people who identify this way tend to be assumed to be actually androgynes who just can't commit or something.) Medical transition is free, assuming you would like to change your appearance to match the gender you picked out and if that gender is one of the three socially accepted ones. (Androgynes are heavily expected to have reproductive anatomy compatible with reproduction with at least one of their spouses, and to change it if necessary, regardless of their own comfort.) If you don't want to do that, it is still going to be cheap, but it will be harder to find someone who will do exactly what you want unless you go off-world to Earth or Mars.
A standard Venusian marriage is a triad marriage -- the ideal is a man, a woman, and an androgyne, but many people have two members of the same gender and one member of a different gender. (Having all three be the same gender used to be the ideal, but it is now considered selfish and old-fashioned, because Venus' population is getting too small for economic comfort.) Because of its artificially small population a lot of these marriages tend to have at least one offworld spouse; they are often subject to societal pressure to conform or lose their citizenship. Off-worlders are allowed to be mildly eccentric in behavior but they can't stray too far from a visual presentation that aligns with the gender they picked when they got married. Because they are not Venusian they are frequently not treated as particularly intelligent and are expected to be primarily ornamental regardless of gender. It is usually not possible for an off-world spouse to get a job, for example. That said, among Venusian-born Venusians, the patriarchy is alive and well on Venus and a Venusian man usually has more opportunities than a Venusian who isn't a man.
The Venusian diaspora is large because, again, Venus has heavily incentivized emigration of people who don't fit within their arbitrary standards, so most people in the world of TPIAM who are "Venusian" were raised offworld and have never been to Venus. The Venusian diaspora population tends to be VERY cynical about the world of their ancestors and will often describe leaving Venus as a bit like leaving a cult. Many of them openly reject a lot of Venusian traditions, but ideas about gender usually aren't the first thing that gets jettisoned, and as with diaspora populations throughout history, Venusian diaspora traditions have changed significantly and become almost more concentrated than they are on-world.
A traditional off-world Venusian family will still do the big ceremony, but in day-to-day life most off-world Venusian families' views of how to do gender publicly are more heavily influenced by their home planet, but privately retain a trinary view of gender that is a lot stricter and more codified (but also less binary) than actual Venusian gender roles. It is relatively common for someone's public and private/family gender not to match, but rather than this being hidden from the family it is acknowledged as a point of cultural pride, and similar to having a different persona at work than with friends. With less traditional families they will often still have a public gender and a private gender, but the two are more likely to be similar, especially on Earth. In off-world families marriage expectations are considerably less strict regarding gender and number of spouses, and there is significantly less pressure to have kids.
(Cleo and Lizzie are both Venusian diaspora; Cleo's family has been on Mars for several generations and two of Lizzie's grandparents was Venusian but she was born on Earth. Cleo's family is more traditional, but their family is also a bunch of absolutely stereotypical political agitators and they were very accepting of their child feeling that none of the options available really fit; the party was kind of a "good news, our child is a gender anarchist, we had not considered this option before but we like it" kind of thing. Lizzie's family tend to keep their head down when it comes to politics. Also, she's half-Terran, so half her family just did not have these traditions. She probably picked female at the little party they had and is sometimes reminded that the Venusian female gender role she was raised with is a little different from the Terran female gender role but it is not a big part of her life.)
On Earth most people raise their kids as their assigned gender at birth but are chill if they want to transition. There are pockets of people who are transphobic, still. There are also pockets of people who raise their child with no gender and like the idea of letting their kid pick at a specific age. (Sometimes they go full cultural appropriation about it with poorly understood mimicry of Venusian traditions, which is awkward for everyone involved.)
Earth is still recovering from severe damage to its climate and ecosystems, and the drive to maintain that recovery has driven a lot of cultural change. Specifically, cities are much denser and larger and there is significantly less suburban sprawl. Rural populations are often people with agricultural, technical, or sustainability expertise, and tend to be more spread out than they are now. No one owns very much land; a lot of that rural land is considered public land and is run by one of the Venusian sustainability concerns that many of Earth's local governments have outsourced climate control to, or is corporate agricultural land. This isn't some kind of urbanist utopia -- a lot of people are pretty unhappy about it! So Earth's very dense population is a big driver of space colonization, much more so than some idealistic desire to explore space. But also, people on Earth tend to be a lot more willing to be like You Do You, Just Don't Practice Trombone At Midnight. Because access to resources like gravity and oxygen are free, it's less risky to be openly kind of a weirdo, because no one's gonna cut off your air supply and you don't have to pay for it.
Legally, Earth doesn't bother with gender markers because there isn't a particularly good reason to keep track of gender specifically. In a world where you can change so much about your appearance so easily they're probably struggling with how useful IDs even are. (They are probably considering implementing some kind of DNA-based identification method that will be a privacy nightmare. Sorry, Terrans.)
Transition is relatively cheap and relatively safe and you do not generally have to justify what you want done to a psychologist. If you are going to change your face/body it's generally considered polite to let people know, but it's fairly cheap and not difficult to revert or adjust if you realize later that you want to look different. And for the price of a nice three-day-weekend at a nice hotel, an adult can experiment with a different set of genitals for a week or two and then, if desired, go right back to what they had before without ever having to take time off of work for recovery and without any visible changes while fully clothed; it's pretty common for people who can afford it to experiment a little bit with this even if they don't consider themselves trans, either out of curiosity or because they have a kink they want to try.
(Specific characters: I've obviously written a lot about Scar, who's a cis guy; Scar had an unusually rural upbringing, which is how he didn't know he was allergic to those medical nanites until his accident. I do not think he had much occasion to think about gender pre-accident, but pilot training changed his original body a lot and gave him a second body that he has limited control over in terms of its shape or how it looks, because he literally does not own it; what Scar has going on is its own weird thing that intersects at an odd angle with, but is not exactly about gender.
But also… I decided a while ago that Etho was a trans guy; he transitioned before the era of magical nanites, via hormones and surgery. I don't think most people are aware of this other than Bdubs and probably Martyn. Etho generally is unusually private about his medical stuff in a story where most of the rest of the characters have given their employer a DNA sample and Etho does considers this to be Personal Medical Stuff and not something he particularly wants to talk about for many reasons. I think initially it probably started out as "ugh this is private and uncomfortable and a lot of people in my chosen line of work are sexist," and turned into "well I really don't want to talk about my private life now that the thing everyone knows about me is that time I nuked Europa."
Most of the characters I haven't mentioned here are from Earth, and Grian spent his adolescence and young adulthood on Earth, so he kind of counts too.)
Mars was settled by techbros (Well. Tek clones. Look, the pun was not intentional but it should have been, I'm ashamed of myself) and is fairly regressive, but also very corporate; the big companies have offices everywhere and often have to play nice with other planets' existing anti-discrimination laws. They are also much more likely to be policed on this than some little Mercurian mining concern. So the Martian authorities/Martian culture disapproves, but it can't stop you from being trans or nonbinary -- and especially with the advent of easy transition via nanotech, they would prefer not to regulate this technology because Mars holds its identity as being at the cutting edge of technology dear and does not want to regulate any technology if it will limit profits.
Because of this, despite the cultural baggage, Mars is where you want to go if you want to do something really unusual with your body. It may not be as safe -- it may be entirely experimental, in fact -- but you will find someone who thinks they can do it and will charge you money for it. There are a lot of lurid tabloid horror stories, though, and if someone can pull it off safely on Mars it'll probably be available on Earth in a few years.
Legally, Mars, very grudgingly, has three gender markers (male, female, other) and it is a pain in the ass for people to change them, but also, any Earth citizens who work on Mars or regularly travel to Mars often enough to have a Martian ID is is by default "other" unless they change it intentionally, and there are a lot of Terrans living and working on Mars, so people with an "other" designation are generally unremarkable and often cis. There are also a lot of Martians who have lived and worked on Earth for a while, so attitudes are shifting slowly but surely towards "you know, we could take more people's money if we were less shitty. Maybe we want to be richer."
(As for Martian characters, we have Tango and Impulse, although I haven't decided if Impulse is Martian or Europan descended from Martian settlers. Both of them are cis guys, although Tango is a weird case because he's a clone and there's a lot of pressure in his family to be like the shitty guy he's a clone of. That said, he's rejected this in other ways and his favorite relative is another clone he thinks of as his aunt, who got disowned, so I think he's aware that he does not have to be cis, and he is anyway.)
Most of the other worlds where humans live were settled by primarily Terran, Venusian, or Martian colonists and vary accordingly! The further out you go and the less contact a world has with other parts of human civilization, the more likely it is to have ideas about gender that are very different from their planet(s) of origin, especially in cases where people chose to leave because they had their own ideas about what kind of society they wanted to build and in cases where people settled on planets with environments very unlike Earth's inhabited ecosystems, so there's probably a lot of variety out there.
Jfc I feel so bad for all the people who got swept up in whatever the fuck has been going on with Avid and Marm. I feel really lucky that I was able to enjoy some of their stuff before this came out but didn't have WIPs or anything and pretty much got my fill of most of the narratives I liked the best. I hope people who are bigger fans and/or who were working on fan stuff will be gentle with themselves.
(Also obviously I feel worst for their former friends/coworkers. It keeps hitting me how young most of these people are and how hard it must be to navigate a fucked up interpersonal relationship in a space where your livelihood depends on the performance of being approachable, chill, and friends with everyone. I love the nonstandard storytelling and many POVs that MCYT stuff offers but MAN the labor issues are rough.)
you can download current and past hi-res versions of these over at my ko-fi (ok to print for personal use): https://ko-fi.com/mxmorgan/shop/freedownloads
you can also snag shirts here which go to various orgs: https://mxmorgan.threadless.com/collections/pride
these get reposted a whole lot from here to reddit to twitter to tiktok and on and on, and i don't personally care whether or not i'm credited. i made these for everyone to use, enjoy, and find meaning in them. i appreciate folks who do credit me, but if able, please at least link to the threadless shop in the previous post - folks can get an official shirt where 90% of earnings go to trans led orgs focused on mental health (which is an important matter in general, but very personal to me) and not from a scam bot site selling AI-churned maga garbage where you probably won't get one anyway. i also suggest downloading the files from my ko-fi - they are free/PWYW and you can use them to make your own shirt, patch, embroidery project, whatever. tips are always nice, cuz i do like a pizza now and then, but never required for download.
final thought - breaking the pride tradition and more than likely won't make a new piece. the top one from TDOV is all i'm making this year. i have my focus on other projects currently and i don't want to force a poster design. these came from a specific head space and my current head space is Very Tired lmao so i wanna work on other things. 👍
As a society, we need to go back to understanding that strangers on the internet are, you know, strangers. I feel lately that I'm seeing a rise in 'An author I love blocked me because they took my comment the wrong way' posts on the ao3 subreddit, and then the comment is them calling the author a fucking bitch or something like that.
Don't do this. Tone doesn't translate well in text, and if you don't have a rapport with that author, they are not going to interpret, 'You're a fucking bitch' as, 'Author I hate you for being so talented and making me feel so keenly.' They're going to interpret it as you being an asshole. You can shit talk with your friends because you have an established relationship with them and can distinguish between playful banter and genuine anger. You do not have this with a stranger, no matter how much you like their fics. You will have a much more pleasant time in fandom and not get cockblocked from interacting with your favorite writers if you remember this.
#I don't often see comments like these when I'm reading a fic but there have been a few that made me raise an eyebrow#I don't know if I would block over someone calling me a bitch on a fic I wrote but I'd probs try to gently tell them it's not right#coz honestly I feel like this is an issue with younger age groups who are new to reading fics and might not understand fandom culture#or at least I hope it's younger people who simply don't know better 😬#otherwise... yikes
This isn't some esoteric niche aspect of fandom culture, strangers at the potluck also do not like being called a fucking bitch.
