my futile wish is for people to understand that "sex scenes in movies/TV don't have to serve the plot and can genuinely just be for pleasure" and "sex-repulsed people are allowed to complain about how rare it is for media made for adults like them to be something they can enjoy completely" are both true statements. unfortunately society hates both sex and people who don't like sex, so everyone gets far too defensive about any sex or lack thereof in fiction to actually have this conversation
need binary trans peoplepeople to understand that being nonbinary/genderqueer/gnc and getting euphoria from being androgynous/"genderfuck" doesn't actually mean that experiencing the misandrogyny and dehumanization that comes with being recognizably outside the binary any better. all it means is that there is no hypothetical endpoint, there is no "if i could only xyz then everyone would see my real binary gender and treat me like any other human being and i could escape being treated as an disgusting creature that doesn't fit in anywhere" because the thing that makes you feel real, the thing that relieves your dysphoria and makes you feel like yourself and not want to die, is the very thing that makes you be seen as a disgusting creature. so its either never transition or swap one closet (binary cis person) for another (binary trans person) or just accept that this is the price you pay for being nb/gq/gnc and open about it, and even then people will forcibly stuff you back into the closet, and also you may not even be able to access the gender affirming care you need on account of you not being binary and your goals not being binary.
& like. misandrogyny hurts all trans people because we are all outside the binary to some degree in the eyes of patriarchal society. there are nb/gq/gnc people who may be less personally affected by it day-to-day than some binary/gender conforming trans people! but it does drive me insane seeing people be like "no one in the world could ever understand the immense suffering caused by being read as androgynous more than me, a white binary trans woman, and frankly every nonbinary person who gets euphoria from androgyny is valor-stealing from Me Personally because they must not understand that being androgynous is bad" as if when you get queerbashed for being an obvious tranny, its somehow less painful if you get euphoria from being androgynous in instead of experiencing androgyny as an inherently lesser state of being to be escaped.
#Helios was declawed by his former owners so he doesn't just slap things he dislikes like most cats#he really only feels confident in hissing at them#Especially because a lot of the thing he doesn't like are bugs and those are sharp sometimes :(#Selene has figured this out and now when she hears him hiss she sprints over the kill the fuck out of the bug#Helios has learned she will do this so he'll hiss at stuff louder and louder until she hears him#A nervous old man and his emotional support homicidal maniac
tags by @gallusrostromegalus
I couldn't reblog without the tags because the context is hilarious
A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)
Yes, he is more than twice her size.
Yes, he is five times her age.
Yes, he cries like a big baby until she kills Unacceptable Scary Things (earwigs) for him.
Oh by the way if you view nonbinary people as having to be either transmasc or transfem, or being man/woman-lite, or tma/tme, or literally anything except what they tell you about their gender, you are transphobic
Stop forcing nonbinary people INTO A FUCKING BINARY.
If I ask nicely will people reblog this and tell me what their most common breakfast is? Not your favorite necessarily, just what you have for breakfast most frequently? 🙏🏽
“I mean—I mean, no, Ilyukhina brought it up, but. Apparently lots of people think this.”
Stratt sighed. “Is there a problem with your coworkers, Dr. Grace?”
“They think I’m sleeping with you!” It felt irrational to be getting worked up about this—oh no, your coworkers think you’re sexually active and sleeping with the most powerful woman in the world, the horror. But now I was also getting worked up about Stratt not being particularly worked up about it too.
“Have people been saying things to you about this?” she asked, still extremely not worked up about it.
“I mean,” I said. “Uh. Mostly no. I only learned about it today.”
“Was anyone pressuring you, making uninvited or invasive comments, distracting you or themselves from your jobs?”
“Well, Ilyukhina made a joke,” I said. “But that’s just how she is.”
“I can have a talk with her, then,” Stratt said, and returned to the invoices.
“I think she felt a little bad because she did drop it,” I added, feeling like I needed to defend Ilyukhina’s honor. “It’s not—it’s that lots of people think this.”
“You’ve said,” Stratt said, clearly exasperated. “So what’s the problem?”
“What do you want me to say? People think I’m having sex with you!”
“Yes!” she snapped. “People think that. And I’m asking you what part of that is making you so upset. Are they concerned because they think I’m taking advantage of you?”
“What? No! No—or, jeez, I don’t think so. Not that anyone said.”
“Are they accusing you of taking advantage of me?”
“No!”
“Are you interested in another woman on the project and you’re concerned she’ll think you’re already taken?”
“No!” Why was every suggestion Stratt came up with such a nightmare?
“Are you interested in a man on the project, and you’re concerned he’ll think you’re straight?”
“What?”
“I am trying to determine what the problem here is,” Stratt said. “If nobody is bothering you, nobody is making accusations of sexual coercion, and it’s not interfering with any actual sexual interests you have—then why are you being so insistent? What do you want me to say?”
“I…” I didn’t know. I guess I wanted her to commiserate, maybe. Acknowledge that it was stupid and wrong and they were stupid and wrong for thinking it.
She stared at me for a few seconds, then sighed, put down her papers, and rubbed her eyes. “Dr. Grace, are you trying to ask if I want to have sex with you? Is that what this is about?”
“No!” I whined. “That is—that is not what this is about.”
“Then what is it about?”
I stared fixedly at the titanium reports. “I don’t know,” I eventually mumbled. “Just, it doesn’t bother you? That people think that?”
“Dr. Grace, if I let it bother me what people think about me, I would not be able to make this project happen.” She paused, and waited for me to look up at her. I was regretting ever raising the topic, but when I met her eyes again, she didn’t look annoyed anymore. Just tired. “People will think what they want. I thought you, of all people, would know how to handle people thinking unfair things about you.”
It’s not like I haven’t given myself this pep talk before, or had conversations like this with students before. It’s not like I didn’t know this. And it’s not like people thinking I was… with… Stratt changed anything about my life. But it still felt like something deeply weird and wrong that I was desperate to correct.
“It doesn’t hurt at least a little, though?” I asked. “When people are just… really convinced they’re right, like they know who you are better than you do and you’re just lying about yourself for no reason?”
“Lots of things hurt,” Stratt said. “And people think unhelpful things all the time. But until it interferes with what they actually do, then they’re just thoughts, and all you can do in response is write it off as their own problem to deal with and refuse to dwell on it.”
“Inspirational.”
“The world is dying. It’s the only way to get through the day.”
I managed a halfhearted grimace. “That does put it in perspective.”
“Mm.” Stratt took a sip of her coffee, which I knew was not decaf and definitely was not healthy this late at night. “If it helps at all,” she added, “I know we’re not…” Her lips twitched into what was almost a smile. “…‘together.’ And I’m entirely happy to keep it the way it is.”
From someone else it could have been an insult. From her, I think it was genuinely meant as a reassurance. And darn it, it really did feel like one. “It does help, a little,” I said. “Thanks.”
Ok, so, as I’ve mentioned occasionally, I used to also be in the school theater troupe, and for a role, I learned basic sleight of hand, the kind magicians use for such stunts like card tricks and ball tricks. Mind you, I wasn’t doing Criss Angel Mindfreak levels of shit or redefining the capital H in Houdini, but I knew how to do basic sleight of hand with small objects, which I used for party tricks and other such parlor tomfoolery.
But I realized I wasn’t using my newfound power to its full extent, so I got an idea one day. I arrived early to the chess clubroom and pocketed a few extra pieces from the other chessboards (which didn’t matter, the club never had enough members to actually use all of the chessboards at any one time), then I challenged the club prez to a game. Now, this guy already didn’t like me too much, dude was kind of a cunt and held a grudge against me because my cousin ended up with one of his crushes and then I ended up with his next crush, so he had bloodline beef with us. So he accepts to the match and we set up the board.
Now, this guy was pretty good at chess, objectively better than myself, but I wasn’t here to win, not at the game, at least. We start playing, it starts pretty even as we develop our units, he castles better and faster than I, and then starts putting pressure on me. It’s at this point, the midgame, where my Belmont to his Dracula would shine in full force: Whenever he looked away (to answer someone’s question about where to find something or about some chess rule), I would put One (1) pawn down from my sleeve.
Initially he didn’t notice, but he did look twice at some placements. But as time went on, he started to visibly grow frustrated and confused, until it became so fucking ridiculous and obvious that he called a pause and counted a total of 14 black pawns on the board (you only have 8 pawns, for reference), at which point I couldn’t hold my laughter anymore. He starts insulting me, I look behind him, to the door, and pretend I’m addressing a teacher that had just come into the room, he turns around, sees no one had actually entered the room, and when he looks back at me and the board, there was suddenly a second black queen next to his king and I just fucking lose it when he makes one of the faces of all time and starts saying colorful things about mine mother.
Anyways I got banned from Chess club after that but it was worth it.
This is Good Bi Gender. A comic I made to express some feelings I have about my gender. I don’t really have that much else to say about it. Here it is.
[Image Description: A digital comic made with sharp, angular abstract lines and only the colors white, blue, pink, and black. The featured character is all white, except for facial features and hair colors, which changes from panel to panel. The comic reads: Cover Panel: The text “Good Bi Gender”, the words colored with the trans flag. It shows a glitchy person’s face, half pink and half blue. Panel 1: White text reads: “Hello. My name is apparently irrelevant. And my pronouns are he/him and she/her. But you can’t call me she/her. And here’s why.” Someone with a half-pink and half-blue shirt looks to the side. One eye is covered with hair, and the other eye is pink while the iris is blue.
Panel 2: The character sits happily, imagining facial hair and a masculine voice. “I don’t want top surgery. I love my chest. And I dream about being on testosterone someday soon.” The character looks at a phone, frowning. The phone shows the male symbol with an “X” through it. Text next to it reads: “People don’t seem to think that the features I dream of are very pretty though… Or they think even worse of them than that…”
Panel 3: The character’s features are all pink, and sits in a blank frame. The character reaches over to a blue frame, frowning. “I don’t like the animosity. I really despise it.” A photo of the character shows an all-blue frame and blue hair, with pink outlines and facial features. “To be a boy… I aspire to be one. I aspire to be masculine in all its handsomeness. All its prettiness.” Panel 4: The character sits in an all blue panel, but reaches back out to the pink panel. “And I’m still a girl too. I was so excited to have both. To love both. To have handsome femininity. Beautiful masculinity.” The frames break and connect, and pink and blue swirl together. The character smiles in between the frames, with one pink eye and one blue eye. “So excited. And yet I get asked…”
Panel 5: Two hands hold out two different pills to the character, one blue and one pink. They ask “Male? or Female?” using the male and female symbols.The character, facial features an array of pink and blue, looks between the two hands, distressed. “It’s both! I’m both! They’re not opposites. Not narrow boxes. I say I’m both despite the insistence that I can’t be. And I know what I look like. I know I look like a girl to most. I know that if I say people can call me she, that’s all I will get from most. Because it’s “easier”. It “makes more sense”. To have my masculinity, I am often forced to be unflinching in it and it alone. To never use she. Because if I don’t, I will never get to have he.” [The words “she” and “he” are italicized.] Panel 6: Text reads: “I’m still very happy to be so comfortable in my identity. To know, despite all that, that I am indeed a boy and a girl and both. But you know. Telling people to only use he/him for me. Guarding my masculinity all just to have it. All at the expense of the part of me who is happily and unashamedly a girl.” The character cries from one pink eye, the other hidden. The character holds a pink girl in a sea of blue, the girl crying out. In the midst of the blue, text reads: “Well, it fucking breaks her heart.” End ID]
Edit: @starberry-skies wrote an ID for the comic, so I added it to the og post with its permission!
This month is the one year anniversary of posting my poem “Condolences” to TikTok and Instagram, where it amassed millions of likes and tens of thousands of comments.
Since, people have used the poem for adaptive art pieces, short plays, books, and class work. For your piece of art to be transformed into another…it’s difficult to describe.
After several rejections from poetry publications a decade ago, I decided to post my work online instead. The responses were overwhelming. I realized that an official publication doesn’t make you a poet. Writing poetry does, and bonus points if you manage to resonate with just one other soul who needed to hear what you needed to say.
I was utterly taken aback by the response to this piece. People have asked me many times to explain it, but from the response it was clear that the meaning can be explicated with a little time.
Some people who didn’t understand it until it was explained were angry when it came together. It wasn’t written for them.
I’m only grateful that it reached the people who needed it.
I feel that the imagery is part of the piece, but I know not everyone can or cares to listen to a video. Here is the poem:
———————
They buried a girl in my hometown today.
“A young woman, gone too soon, in the prime of her life,” they all said.
My friends and I all knew her. We grew up together.
We were in all the same classes and hobbies and we made up games together at recess.
But none of us went to her funeral. We weren’t invited, because the people planning it didn’t think we’d understand. They said it wasn’t our loss.
So we got together for drinks. We laughed all morning and played card games all day.
At 4 o’clock, we heard the church bells. We saw that long, sad procession of cars stretch like a creek through town, up the cemetery hill.
We heard strange rumors that night, that the casket was empty. That they put it hollow in the ground.
So we went to the plot first thing in the morning. They buried her empty box next to her dad, down the row from an estranged aunt she never really knew all that well.
There wouldn’t be a stone for months, but the little placard had my name on it. But not the one I go by these days.
“How strange,” we all said. “What a waste of good crying.”
All of this mourning for me, and I was down the street the whole time, laughing and drinking.
But some people will never understand. They’d rather plan a funeral than learn a new name.
My friend said she felt sorry for them, in some small way.
What a sad notion—to lose a daughter who never lived—
Recently I performed at a poetry event and spoke a slightly updated version of this (not many changes) and someone accused me of plagiarizing myself, hahaha! It's not the first time that's happened when I've performed a poem I've posted online, but none have gotten so much attention as this one. Someone made a beautiful zine a few months ago adapting this piece, so it's been on my mind again. Thank you for all of the love.
I'm bad at naming things please help @mangofeeesh - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
