Wanting to Heal

Black lesbian. Attempting to combat my feelings of dysphoria and internalized misogyny. Icon art by @cryptidstogether

[violetvibrations]

@ toastedbyeli

[ursulaklegay]

actually i love growing older and learning how i work as a person like realizing what kinds of fabrics feel best on my skin or what brand of yogurt i like best or how I want to be touched. watching myself change, enjoying brussel sprouts when I used to hate them as a child, understanding why I got angry in that one conversation 10 years ago… there are so many mysteries inside me that i have yet to unravel and there will always be more and sometimes i think maybe its all worth it

[bestyouuniveristy]

The best part of being authentic is that there is no image to maintain. You will delight some and disturb others, and none of it will concern the truth of your being.

[sapphos-darlings]

If you struggle with your female body or the expectations of womanhood, I have a quick tip for you:

Detatch yourself from influencers, lifestyle vloggers and celebrities now. Stop giving your time and energy to people who have been professionally stylized, filtered and photoshopped. Stop watching, modelling and comparing.

Cut off negative voices that are feeding your stress.

Instead, pay attention to women in your real life. Look at the older women of your family. Look at the energetic and hopeful young girls. Look at the women you work with, look at the women you meet every day, listen to your friends and relatives.

Get out of your head, stop comparing and daydreaming, and instead go out and be a person who actually does something. Get in touch with the real world and the everyday life that is here for you.

[akindplace]

Sophia Joan Short

[freshpickle]

kira cyan

[ayliffe]

– R. Todd, 1925

[propertiesofjoy]

rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet

[theoptia]

Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-1927; May 21st, 1927

Text ID: I have no other god but myself.

[akindplace]

Stuck on survival

[tordenvejr]

it is not an evil thing to look at yourself with kindness. your life was never meant to be a punishment

[lovespreadsroses]

bell hooks, all about love

[mareshida]

lovespreadsroses: bell hooks, all about love

[katell-radikal]

Failed boy

Fun language fact of the day! In French, “tomboy” is “garçon manqué”, which could be translated as “failed boy”. That’s the idea, if you are a gender non conforming girl you are a failed boy. The opposite technically exists, of course, “fille manquée”, a failed girl, for gnc boys, but I never actually heard it, as gnc boys are more often called gay. 

I was a gnc girl, grew up being called a failed boy. One of the dudes. A boy stuck in a girl’s body. My mum would joke “Oh, I wanted a daughter, but instead I got two sons and Katell”. Because, of course, I wasn’t a whole boy, a whole son, either, I was just a failed boy. A little girl who was loud and wanted to play rugby and didn’t like dresses and skirts and dug her heels in the ground so hard at her dance group (that my mum signed me up for, it was that or nothing) when we had to dress up as little princesses in our end-of-year show that the teacher had to give in and allowed me to be the river, wrapped in 10m of plastic. But that kind of girl isn’t a “proper girl”, so I was a “failed boy” instead. 

Then I grew up. And met other gnc girls and women, and was exposed to more diverse media through the internet (which wasn’t so readily available before), won some battles with my mother. Realized I wasn’t a failed boy, or a boy trapped in a girl’s body, and I wasn’t a failed girl either, I was just a girl failing to live up to society’s shitty expectations of me. And that was fine with me. 

Now I’m a gnc woman. And I just find it so fucking funny, in an absolutely not funny and I’m pissed off way, that the “failed boy” accusations are coming again, but this time not from a bunch of backward ass French people from my asscrack-countryside, but from the crowd that pretends to be as progressive as it gets. And even from (liberal) feminists. I’m not gender conforming so I must be a man trapped in a woman’s body. Or, wait! Maybe I’m “non-binary”! But here are the good news, they have a cure! They can make me a whole boy, a whole man, give me the right body to fit my behaviour. Several times already I’ve been pushed about my pronouns, told I have more “she/they” (???) or “he/him” vibes, more male energy. Can’t y’all see how fucking backward you are? 

Fuck, when I’m told I have “she/they vibes” it feels exactly like my mother saying “I have two sons and Katell”. When I’m told I have “male energy”, it’s the failed boy all over again. It’s the exact same thing. Except somehow worse because while my mother only had complaints about my failed boy behaviour, the gender ideology crowd has meds and surgery. 

[sick-sad-world-revolution-now]

Damn, same experience, same country ! I was called “un garçon manqué” too, I would hang with the boys, play football with them, rugby, I was the only girl with the boys in the male dormitory (because I protested and wanted to be with my friends), didn’t dress in a especially feminine way. I still remember distinctively the negative intentions behind this word, but I didn’t care much and persisted. Honestly now that I can compare that with the current reality of life as a gnc individual where gender activism is so powerful I would choose the time when we were called “garçons manqué”/tomboys rather than this crap. I prefer the word in English because the French one carries sexist stereotypes, like you rightfully pointed, but still the context was less violent than it is for gnc kids today.

I’m grateful that the discomfort I had with my body as a teenager (there was dysphoria) came up right before learning about the very possibility of transitioning. “Tomboys” in western countries nowadays suffocate, they are told that something is wrong with their bodies, that they are some kind of broken, that instead of enjoying life as a happy girl who isn’t feminine they should think of what to do with their growing bodies, how to control it, serious topics that have life-long consequences. I’m sick of seeing gnc teenagers expressing distress at what their “gender might be”, ruminating again and again that question instead of thinking gender is a trap and they should behave naturally without changing a thing about themselves. Especially since so many of these teenagers are teenage girls trying to navigate life while being conscious of the fact they are targeted because they are girls (sexist oppression). It’s miserable.

[mareshida]

more than a woman

[thissoftspace]

If you haven’t yet seen detransitioned woman and force of nature Maria Catt’s Youtube channel, it might be time to check it out, for this message and many more.

[gorgonsong]

I wear sensible shoes and pants with deep pockets, my face is bare, my hair is short. I work with my hands. I look like my mother and her mother before her, each generation taller and larger than the last – in a lineup we form a human evolution chart of new amazons. And then my daughter. I teach her what’s right: that her long legs are for running and her arms are for lifting, that there’s no such thing as girl and boy haircuts or clothes, that while she’s beautiful she doesn’t have to be. I teach her the names of plants and how to shoot arrows. I teach herstory, legacy – I try to give her women to admire, so many that they overflow. She repeats it all back to me, with visible pride. And I too am proud.

I send her to school every day. She learns from and admires her teachers, makes friends. She wasn’t long in school before she started telling me, sometimes, that she wished her eyes weren’t brown and that her hair was yellow. That she didn’t want her skin to darken in the sun. That she wanted lipstick, at seven years old, and that high heels are pretty.  We talk about how friends are important but not always right, and I try to find ways to show her to learn from her teachers but not to learn that. Virtually her whole world is women, but patriarchy lives among us too. Racist patriarchy resides here. Faced with a little girl being raised in it, I don’t always know what to do. What she’s expressing isn’t the discovery of “identity,” and I remember my own childhood well enough to know that home front resistance is rarely adequate to pull a girl through.

[nationalisedgf]

Everyone's features suit their face, but you can't know this through photos, so being online all the time means it's more difficult for you to appreciate this.

Your first impression of someone online is a highly curated and artificial 2D one that you are comparing against contemporary beauty standards, instead of seeing someone in motion, unintentionally revealing things about their character.

It's most evident when you're using/thinking about online dating. If you'd met these people organically through your social circles then you'd have based your impression of them off their behaviour, instead of unflattering (or conversely, overly flattering) pictures and however they want to sell themselves in their bio.

I don't think it's even about "looking past flaws" when it comes to appreciating your friends' appearances, you just accept the second you see someone irl that that's how they look. Those features make them who they are.

And you might notice some things, "her brows are thick" "I never noticed his nose was that shape from the side", but again, those are the things you remember about a person (and I know, again, terminally online people Don't Want To Be Perceived (and I relate, but like, sort this out in your head because it isn't natural and our ancestors didn't think about it, it's an obsession/neurosis about controlling people's perceptions and looking great in a still image from a certain angle then being shocked to see yourself in a candid picture)) and because we choose friends and acquaintances based on their character and not whether they look close enough to an ideal, we subconsciously love these things because it's a feature that makes up your loved one's face. People get embarrassed about their "type" because it's more grounded than whatever the beauty standard is at the time.

Something I keep saved that's relevant:

And obviously this can apply to below the neck as well. I'm focusing on the face because I find the encouragement of treating nose jobs as some magic spell to become happy with your appearance pretty horrifying. What influences the decision to live with bags of silicone in your chest and all the risks that come with that is another post tbh.