Heart of a Salamander @sheepishmastectomy - Tumblr Blog

Wait so. Elliot Page’s role in The Odyssey is to be unwillingly sacrificed within the first five minutes of his appearance and THAT’S the “complex and interesting” role that people have claimed was personally gifted to him by Nolan for transitioning into a man?? Five minutes of screen time where he’s immediately killed?? Are we actually fucking serious right now. I’ve had to deal with post after post on every social media platform telling me that The Odyssey is proof that Elliot Page transitioned into privilege and the role in question is the most insulting, transphobic, nothingburger I’ve ever seen in my life. Am I missing something here because I feel like I’m losing my mind.

this-is-trans-joy

These people think a trans man existing in public is proof of privilege. These people think a trans man being allowed to live and breathe is proof of privilege. These people don’t want trans men to exist btw call it out for what it is at this point.

childofpasithea

Sinon is a very important character in The Aeneid. He pretty much singlehandedly brought the downfall of Troy.

this-is-trans-joy

This is about Christopher Nolan’s movie adaptation of the Odyssey, not The Aeneid book.

this-is-trans-joy

I get that Sinon is an important and complex character, but when we’re discussing the context of Elliot Page playing him and how his character was handled in Nolan’s adaptation:

1) His character doesn’t exist in Homer’s Odyssey and was taken from Virgil’s Aeneid and given to him instead of giving him an actual character in the Odyssey. If someone were to visit the original source material, his role will not even be there.

2) He is essentially the dead wife of the plot, and is also one of the youngest characters. He haunts the narrative, which is a pretty common role given to women so as to not actually write them into the plot, but please do keep telling me that there is absolutely no transphobic or misogynistic biases towards why Elliot Page was specifically selected to play Sinon.

3) He still only gets a combined amount of about five minutes of screentime, and considering this is the most notable role he’s recieved since coming out 5+ years ago… I don’t think this is proof that transitioning has benefited his career. Every time Elliot Page is even mentioned by name, the internet goes on a horrifically transphobic crusade for months until he’s forced back into obscurity. His acting career has objectively tanked since coming out.

4) Elliot Page has already worked with Chrisopher Nolan and was given a (noteably) bigger role in Inception pre-transition. Christopher Nolan did not “wait” for Elliot Page to transition (whatever the fuck that means), the two already knew each other from previous projects.

Edit: Personally, the only real win to me is that a trans man got to play a cis man without his transness being considered an issue, but the way in which Nolan went about it felt more like throwing Elliot Page a bone while benefiting from the outrage caused by Elliot Page simply existing, and instead of celebrating the small win that trans men received, every single side of the internet decided to rip into him and either call him a mentally ill woman or a privileged man benefiting from misogyny.

genderkoolaid

it feels like people trying to use Page's role in this movie to make a point about Nolan's misogyny are falling into the age-old trap of treating trans experiences purely as a means to prove cis women's experiences.

like, the OP of one particular post that went around got mad at people in the notes for calling them out, talking about how they were just trying to use this as an example to talk about misogynistic writing and "see, you derailed this post about how women are treated to talk about a man!" but its more than just an ill decision on their part.

people are so eager to make the joke that Page transitioned as is now getting better roles, regardless of whether or not its true. people are eager because its a joke that paints such a clear, pointed image of how cis women are affected by misogyny. its the same reason people love "if men could get pregnant..." jokes and sayings even when they are supposedly trans-inclusive. its the same reason that gender studies classes motherfucking love talking about how binary trans men and women in office jobs lose or gain male privilege, because it reduces trans experiences to a vehicle to illustrate cis women's oppression and cis men's privilege.

and people get really mad when you point out that they treat real trans men's real experiences as an allegory they can play around with to talk about how bad cis women are treated. like with "if men could get pregnant," people talking about how Page transitioned and suddenly got a "better role" act like you are spoiling their fun or missing the point, and they insist: but I wasn't even thinking about trans men! I was just trying to talk about how badly women are treated! and don't understand that, yes, that is the problem.

yellowistheraddest

OH YEAH IF YOURE EUROPEAN PLEASE REMEMBER:

TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE ON AUGUST 12TH ~(8PM IN CENTRAL EUROPE) !!!!

THE COVERAGE IS GONNA BE LARGER IN THE WESTERN SIDE WITH TOTAL COVERAGE IN SPAIN!

yellowistheraddest

SOLAR ECLIPSE TOMORROW!!!

rubysapphrald

the reason green lantern adaptations almost unilaterally suck is that everyone doing the adaptations knows hal is the best lantern but fundamentally misunderstands WHY he’s the best lantern, which is not because he’s a badass playboy pilot but because he’s a broke crazy freak, and also all his best stories involve him being gay or transgender

rubysapphrald

there’s sort of a two-part issue where a lot of good stuff with hal in it incorporates other people that no one at DC seems to care about, and also they misunderstand what’s appealing about the lanterns they actually DO apparently care about. like you can’t adapt the actual best hal jordan story, which is emerald twilight, without extending a large amount of care and honor toward the character of kyle rayner, which no one will ever ever do. but every other DC thing these days seems to have a very stripped-down and mischaracterized version of jessica cruz that misses the point of why she’s a good character worthy of being written about. so we’re just in this perpetual state of good stuff being kneecapped and bad stuff getting recycled forever

#dc #hal jordan

tsukasacest

This took like. 10 minutes

#yugioh

About to quit my job & switch back to a part time one... maybe i will have more time for posting and spend less time just laying in bed lol

keysmashslushy

sigh. Having thoughts about something I can’t articulate in a good way. I feel like with how often Batman and Robin 2009 is referenced in fanon (or at least, like, the concept of Dick and Damian’s dynamic in that period) the fact that people get so shocked and appalled when you call Jason sexually violent is like. Sure the average ‘disregard canon’ user doesn’t know about it in the first place, but that’s because several people in the information chain before them decided to leave it out. And for some of them it was because they like Jason and for some of them it was because they just thought it was too icky and some of them didn’t see it as particularly violent at all just bc Jason wasn’t getting pleasure out of it. where’s that one post. Fandom loves to excise SA from a narrative when it’s from a long running and beloved male character and not a niche woman they can call a bitch and write angst fics about

And it’s not even that I consider the stripping Dick and Damian thing to be like, his worst crime. Obviously. He’s killed people. But I do find that more often there is at least a passing acknowledgement of ‘oh yeah he used to use guns’ in fanon than an acknowledgement of what he did with the livestream, and that again feels like a lot of people making decisions. The SA makes him Irredeemable so it needs to be scrubbed away so he can be a Good Happy Family with the bats where no one has lingering resentment to him and if they do he’s the victim. No one ask what it says about the personhood of SA victims that it’s considered more unforgivable to assault someone than to be a serial killer

dickgraysonsptsd

good post.. sa is seen as so uniquely and intensely evil and as carrying such a fundamental taint that it can't exist in our understanding of character or narrative without it utterly damning the perpetrator (and the victim; see how often people reject nightwing #93 explicitly because it "ruins" dick's heroic character). sheepishmasectomy talked about this recently re: bruce as perpetrator of violating and controlling behavior towards women and that's another example where i think the fandom collectively pretends it didn't happen or "didn't count" and people deliberately choose to leave it out of the info chain.

and idk what to do about it beyond continuing to talk frankly about sa irl and in fiction. we have got to be able to talk about scenes that happened in the comic books without people seeing it as #Character Hate #Anti The Character. we have got to be able to talk about forms of sa that don't line up with people's sense that sa is The Evil Ultracrime without people reflexively defending it as "not bad enough to be sa" because they can't risk the character immediately becoming irredeemable.

#dc #jason todd

ilynpilled

ngl when it comes to every discourse about misogyny in fandom and shipping and media and what not im still gonna ultimately prioritize how u actually interact with and talk about the real women here

ilynpilled

*feministly* u dumb cocksucking male obsessed stupid whore with nothing but dick on ur useless hag brain. i think u should be dogpiled

letterful

Translated from the Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter.

prokopetz

The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!

sharkedboy

how it feels to read any post-secret six (2025) jon kent comic

#jay nakamura #DC

mili-milo-process-graveyard

They're on a lunch break (soup again).

I haven't seen the newest season of X-Men 97 because i am NOT getting a disney+ subscription, but I imagine it's pretty good. Here's a comic dedicated to Scott Summer's enfatuation with soup and Kurt's oddly cat-shaped sillouhette.

grimstone5252

Of course its soup again

#marvel #x men

lumsel

are you tme or tma

"i know you're nonbinary but which of these two arbitrarily constructed gender categories do you fit into" genuinely are you having a laugh

theothin

gwenderling

Referring to the distinction between those who are and aren’t affected by transmisogyny as “arbitrarily constructed gender categories” tells me exactly which of the two you fall into lmao

thewarmvoid

evergreen lmaooo

liondrakes

The application of TME/TMA terminology stops making sense once you take intersectionality into account. Dark-skinned women, particularly dark-skinned black women, are victims of masculinization and often experience this because the concepts of womanhood and femininity (at least in western societies) are usually measured by eurocentric beauty standards, bias rooted in featurism and colorism, and a general proximity to whiteness. TERFs, LGB bootlickers and transphobes of all kinds often pull from the playbook of white supremacy. In this context: violent transmisogynists shoot first, ask questions never.

Michelle Dionne Peacock was a 59-year-old black woman who, by our communities’ definition, would’ve been transmisogyny-exempt on account of being a cisgender woman. However, she was killed on account of Tommy Wayne Earl’s misogynoir AND transmisogyny, even going so far as to refer to her as a “male acting like a woman” when questioned on the murder. Earl had no grounds for his accusations apart from Peacock’s appearance which, last time I checked, doesn’t indicate anything save her blackness. Considering Earl also had to be separated from black inmates due to “not getting along with them”, I think it’s warranted to assume his transmisogynistic motive is equally rooted in misogynoirist behaviors/mindsets that masculinize black women. In other words: he’s just as much of a violent racist as he is a violent transmisogynist, and whether or not Peacock was actually a transgender woman meant nothing to him. Only his ideology mattered, therefore it was the only part of his crime he recognized. Most transphobes are like this.

Caster Semenya and her battle against the International Olympic Committee’s intersexist, transmisogynistic policies is another case I think of, though thankfully it isn’t a fatal one. In 2019, World Athletics (formerly the IAAF) introduced new regulations that forced intersex athletes and other athletes with DSDs like Semenya to take medication that would suppress their testosterone levels. Semenya refused, as was her right to. Ever since, she has been pursuing legal action against these regulations. In tandem with her legal battles, transmisogynoirist and intersexist cultural wars were sparked because of the barring of Caster Semenya. Her being a cis woman in actuality did not stop these culture wars from happening. People only cared about the narratives being fed to them, and again, most transphobes are like this.

Semenya is not the first nor the last cis black woman in the sports industry to be subjected to this treatment. Far from it. Serena Williams is infamously made a target by misogynoirist sports reporters and commentators whose actions against her often skew into transmisogynist territories as well (see: Mark Knight‘s political cartoon for The Herald Sun from September 2018). In that same year, Williams addressed internet conspiracies around her having been “born a man” as well. Imane Khelif is an Algerian woman, and another athlete no less, who was subjected to similar treatment as the aforementioned gold medalist Caster Semenya. To no one’s surprise, Head TERF-in-Chief J.K. Rowling fed the fire against Khelif, claiming her opponent “had everything snatched away from her because the IOC allowed a male to get in the ring with her”. Mind you, Khelif is a cisgender woman. But again, most transphobes are like this. They don’t acknowledge anyone or anything else besides their own echo chambers.

Even Michelle Obama has been subjected to transmisogynoirist harassment from American right-wingers who repeatedly make conspiracies and accusations of her “secretly being a man”. Quite recently, UFC fighter Josh Hokit peddled this exact rhetoric on the South Lawn of the White House. Emboldened by the likes of Joe Rogan and in the shadow of the Trump Administration, no doubt. Are you starting to see the trend of non-white women being misgendered, largely to feed racist narratives against them— and if not that— to further erase the existence of intersex people? If you’re this far in, I’d hope so.

On a less public level, I was shared a video by a black co-worker that applies to this; said video was of a black woman being harassed in a women’s restroom. As she’s filming, an older white woman comes around the corner and insists that she is in the women’s restroom, implying that the woman recording shouldn’t be there. She tries to ignore the old lady at first, but ultimately (and rightfully) tells her to leave her alone. Only for that same woman to claim she’s “mean” for doing so, as if she didn’t spend most of her time harassing this woman.

Admittedly, I used to sympathize with people’s reasons for using TME/TMA terminology in communal spaces. I felt obligated to use it since it was the least I could do for my peers. In retrospect, this terminology is flawed. People regard it as another version for AGAB terminology (which cannot be stressed enough that it was appropriated from intersex spaces in the first place), but it’s deeper than that.

I am not a woman, but your average person is going to assume I am a black woman. They have the potential to exercise the same violent misogynoirist, or even transmisogynoirist, mindset against me as Tommy Wayne Earl had against Michelle Dionne Peacock. My experiences aren’t like that of an actual black trans woman, nor was it for Michelle, but that doesn’t change the fact that our societies don’t care about distinction. Our societies can and will operate on its own optics regardless of who we are, and once they perceive us one way, they aren’t going to stop and check if that’s actually true or applies to their beliefs. If American white supremacists can still peddle “Michelle Obama is a man!” conspiracies in 2026 and with confidence, what makes you think society as a whole will suddenly start caring about who does or doesn’t apply to its systems of oppression?

Not only does this terminology overlook the nuances of sex and how it is experienced among people, but it also overlooks nuances like the racialization of gender and sex, especially when those nuances CAN and HAVE led to the discrimination of people like Michelle Dionne Peacock, Caster Semenya, Serena Williams, and many, many more.

You cannot separate these cases of racist, misogynoirist discrimination and violence from the transmisogynistic rhetoric therein. You simply can’t. It’s all connected. The notion that any of these women are men relies on our societies’ fearmongering around black people (and in Khelif’s case, people of color in general) and transgender people alike as well as how they dehumanize us. Worst of all, we see the fallout constantly in our communities, seeing how black trans people— especially black trans women— hold the highest statistics of being hate-crimed out of any other transgender demographic.

The more I looked into these cases, the more I stopped referring to myself as “TME”. If we can acknowledge that transphobia is capable of affecting cisgender people, then how is it any different from acknowledging that our societies’ weaponization of gender and sex can’t be binarized by something like TME or TMA? Cisgender black women— be them perisex or intersex— most certainly are affected by transmisogyny, given the many ways misogynoirist and transmisogynistic ideologies intersect. Those circumstances alone show why TME/TMA distinctions ARE arbitrary.

saturnsickle

Tried to animate Jaime's terrifying magical girl transformation

[ID: A gif of Jaime Reyes transforming into Blue Beetle. It starts with him looking at the camera with his hands folded. His clothes start burning off as the suit spreads on his skin. He ends up in the blue beetle suit after 9 frames. End ID.]

#jaime reyes #DC