Little Flashes in the Wires

Hi, I'm Liz! She/Her (🏳️‍⚧️ o7) , 20s <3 Women <3

[gardengnosticator]

getting teary eyed thinking about gerda gottlieb's paintings of her wife after she transitioned

[gardengnosticator]

[narcissus-thee-squeekual]

thing is, for a lot of these paintings it wasn’t “after” lily elbe’s transition. there was no after to it. the one op posted was painted in 1928. this was 2 years before lily legally changed her name and began undergoing revolutionary gender affirming procedures. unfortunately she died due to complications of an experimental uterine transplant in 1931.

up until that point, during the day lily continued to dress in masculine clothing and even attended galleries showing gottlieb’s paintings of her. which was kind of iconic. she got to stand in a room full of people who were marveling her beauty, not knowing she was right next to them. it must have been such a cute little secret for them as a couple.

here’s gerda and lilly together

not to mention that for most people there is no real “after” to a transition. especially for these trans historical figures who had to balance identity and safety at all times.

i think having a wife paint these portraits must have felt really amazing for lily. to be able to see herself through the eyes of someone who loved her. i’m very much seconding op on the getting teary eyed.

here are some of my favorite gottleib lily paintings

[escuerzoresucitado]

[distantwave]

[moth-grrrl-mavis]

My dad is a home improvement nuthead and has made me work with tools since I was five, I have thought a magnetic screwdriver was the shit since before I could fucking read.

I let go of the screw and it stays? Are you fucking kidding me? The world is beautiful.

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

you'll feel like a total dipshit train wreck and no matter what some girl is gonna see you and think "role model". you can't kill yourself you have to go be clocky in the gas station so a 14 year old can have the trajectory of her life altered forever

[nine-hyacinth]

i hate astronomers so much.

[nine-hyacinth]

this is getting ridiculous. the file extension for this cannot be .sex it just cannot be. what the fuck SExtractor. astronomers aren't real.

[nine-hyacinth]

to extract the parameters you run SEX -DP ????????? this cannot be real.

[pipewire-official]

this was literally me when people told me about lisp programming like wtf do you mean what the hell is a sexpr

[vi-official]

it's a sex pull request

[mousidy]

How do you personally define being a woman for yourself? What does being a woman feel like for you? The cis women I grew up around made being a woman out to be this horrible thing you can never escape and that no one would ever choose to be a woman. I know you didn’t choose, I know that’s not how it works, but you get what I mean. I just want to know what being a woman is like to you.

I don't know. when I was a little girl and my brother and I would play out stories with our cow plushies, they were married like my parents and mine was the wife, and I liked that. when my mom would sing "brown eyed girl" in the car, I thought she was singing about me, because I had brown eyes. as I got older I was taught to repress all that, and so I did. but when I started going through puberty, I was jealous of the puberty the girls in my class were getting, and I would lie awake wishing I was growing boobs too. as I grew up I looked in mirrors less and less and tried to ignore what was happening to my body. when I went to the mall with two of my closest girl friends, I had this deep uneasy pang in my stomach when we all had to use the bathroom, but I had to use a different one

then one day, shortly before turning 18, I saw my face through the fog on the mirror after a shower, and my head kind of auto-filled the details. my ideal version of myself was looking back at me, and I knew that was who I wanted to be when I became an adult. and suddenly it made sense that I always changed in the stalls in the boys' locker room, it made sense that I was terrified of sex (or, the role in sex a "boy" is supposed to take) and avoided it like the plague

the fact that I'm a woman is the key that makes sense of so many things that didn't make sense without it. and now I get to go through the puberty I always wanted. now I choose to have mirrors in my spaces because I like looking in them. now I like getting dressed for things. now I like having sex, because it's in a body that feels more right, because I'm being perceived in a way that feels right, a way that allows me to be a participant. now I can participate in a lot of things and genuinely feel like a participant

I can't sum it up in one single qualia, you know? the knowledge that I'm a woman is like the imaginary number in mathematics. at first blush it seems like a stupid, totally useless, made up idea with no concrete grounding, but it solves so many problems and explains so many things that it's an indispensable staple of modern mathematics. at some point in every mathematician's life she shakes her head, shrugs, and starts rolling with it

[autogynophelia]

It's frustratingly common for cis women to tell trans women things like "But being a woman is awful!", like they imagine a pre-transition trans woman looking at a menu with two options, "suffering" and "no suffering", and saying "Hmm, I think I'll have the suffering please!"

What do you think it says about how miserable it is to be a closeted trans woman, that being an out trans woman (who feels the full force of misogyny + transphobia + transmisogyny) is typically a massive improvement? What do you think it says about just how bad transmisogyny is, that for most out trans women, the idea of being treated like a cis woman in society is like a beautiful dream that's tantalisingly out of reach?

That's not to say that being treated like a cis woman is not bad, or that it doesn't involve serious suffering, of course it does! But it should tell you something about the severity of transmisogyny to know that experiencing "just" misogyny would be the best best best case scenario imaginable to a typical trans woman.

For a cis woman to tell a trans woman that womanhood is suffering is for someone in a lifeboat to tell someone drowning in the sea that it sucks to not be on dry land. Thanks for the insight, could you make a little room in the lifeboat please?

[vacilators]

“flirting* if you had to kill me how would you do it

[alliezweihander]

"if you forgot then it obviously wasn't important to you" is an ableist thing to say and i'm tired of pretending it's not

[alliezweihander]

I've forgotten *my own birthday* before. There are several years of my life just straight up missing. In the past I've forgotten silly little frivolous things like NAMES OF LOVED ONES or WHERE MY HOUSE IS. But obviously none of that was important. Fucking awful, ableist thing to say.

[maliwart]

I've finally had time to draw for fun again oh my god!!!

Some Kleya/Mon to ease back into things <3 Mon keeps telling her she needs to unwind...

[mortalityplays]

I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter was one of the best works of sci-fi of our generation and one of the best works of transgender fiction ever written, and there are world renowned authors who still have successful careers after they publicly assassinated the nascent woman who wrote it. I don't think they should ever know peace.

[mortalityplays]

Isabel Fall is the patron saint of works unwritten and art unmade by a culture that cannot tolerate trans women

[mortalityplays]

I think this constantly and then I get angry for thinking it, because trans women should not have to be martyrs or saints to animate our politics and our art. that work should have been her debut, not her epitaph. I should be moved by her career, not her absence. I could spit.

[mortalityplays]

read it again

[notahorseindisguise]

everytime i wear an outfit like this i think about this tweet

[polyamandhellaglam]

Polyamory is safe for work. Polyamory is safe for kids. Polyamory is safe for day time tv. Polyamory isn’t more sexual than any other relationship and it can be just as romantic, sweet, and healthy.

[lesbith-circuit]

She livesss!!

.....on live support. But thats Okay!

[lesbith-circuit]

she was a lil naughty yesterday when i put her together tho

[lesbith-circuit]

She livesss!!

.....on live support. But thats Okay!

[nongunktional]

i do think the negative interpretations of "im probably nonbinary but i have a job right now" are kind of reaching. it's obviously a waste of time to theorize the op's intended meaning, so instead i think it's better to recognize how the phrase can be a useful framing device to criticize how much of a fucking hassle it is to get gendered correctly. "but i have a job" e.g. will face discrimination that could threaten livelihood; e.g. don't have the mental bandwidth to explain gender to others; e.g. don't have the time and energy for the soul-searching necessary to confirm. all three of these are labor issues. yes you could interpret it as "but being nonbinary isn't important enough to worry about", despite that being a blatantly bad-faith read. it's more useful to interpret it as "but being publicly nonbinary requires a lot of social effort that, in many cultural contexts, will create more problems that you can't afford to deal with". like cmon it's a really good jumping off point for productive conversations about queer labor rights

[stellaluna33]

I can't believe we live in a world where there's an AI company unironically called "Palantir," and it isn't a parody. It's a real thing. I remember seeing a picture of an advertisement on here and thinking, "This HAS to be a joke. This is too on-the-nose to be real. They wouldn't honestly name an AI company Palantir, after the Seeing Stones from Lord of the Rings that are supposed to offer knowledge, but famously also might be feeding you misinformation from evil sources because 'we do not know who else may be watching.'" But then here I am listening to the BBC News discussing why the CEO of Palantir just published a Manifesto that sounds like it was written by a supervillain.

[sgt-cookie-2]

Me (A time traveler visiting 20-year old Mozart): OK, so, this is called an electric guitar, basically instead of the body functioning as a resonance chamber, it produces music by harnessing the power of lightning. Do you have any other questions?

Mozart (Currently shredding Violin Concerto No. 1 on the guitar, having figured it out within 30 seconds): What other music can be made from harnessed lightning?

Me (Loading up some heavy dubstep): Oh, we're just getting started.

[haruzan]

This specific cutscene... I gotta redraw them in the meme