jack

the stars are always on your side he/him 🏳️‍⚧️

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

welp that’s it folks. time to go back to being straight tomorrow

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

every few weeks i’m like “wow life is so stressful right now i just need to get through these few weeks and then i’ll be fine” and then a few weeks pass and i have different things to be stressed about. this happens repeatedly. when will it end

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

the only reason I am asking anonymously is because I don't want this to be an awkward interaction plus you could just avoid public bashing for it

you spoke about the author of little women not even a day ago, to which I want to ask, why not refer to him with he/him pronouns?

if someone tries so hard to live as a man (not even with confirmation of him being transmasc), I think it is far more reasonable to refer to him as he is even after death

transmascs and transmen get enough erasure already, and the author being a man doesn't make his work any less relatable to others and doesn't make it any less feminist

if there is any reason you could think the author wouldn't want to have he/him used for him, please tell me

stay safe out there, all the love from a trans enby

thanks for asking this, i appreciate you sharing your perspective :)

i chose not to use he/him pronouns for louisa may alcott in my original post for a couple of reasons—one being that they used she/her pronouns throughout their life, and i am not sure if they used he/him pronouns with their close friends and family. i didn’t feel it was my place to assume that just because alcott had some direct aspects of queerness/transness in their life, that that meant he/him pronouns were the ones they would have used. gender is such a big spectrum that if alcott was alive today, they might have used he/him, they/them, a combination, or something else entirely. they also might have identified as a gender-non conforming woman, or as non-binary.

all that to say that i used she/her pronouns in my original post to avoid making too many assumptions about someone who is no longer living, but in doing so, i ended up unintentionally making other assumptions. in some ways, referring to alcott as “she” was a tone deaf choice on my end, and it would have been more respectful to use he/him pronouns. i definitely am not an expert on this and just wanted to share a cool example of how queer people have been around forever. :) i apologize if anything in my post came across in a negative way; that wasn’t my intention. little women is a lovely work that is relatable to many, and whatever the author’s gender may have been doesn’t take away from that—i would say it does the opposite.

love from a trans guy who doesn’t always know what he’s doing, but is trying!

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

one of my favorite fun facts is that the author of little women was probably actually a trans man (she often went by masculine nicknames, was referred to as a man/brother/father by her close friends and family, and wrote in her journals things like “i long to be a man” and “i am more than half persuaded that i am a man’s soul put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body”). the character of jo march was written in many ways to take after the author, including in her gender nonconformity. the author also didn’t want jo to end up married to a man (or anyone at all) but was pressured to do so by her editor to make the story more romantic and palatable for readers and the society of that time.

so if jo march were real and alive today, she probably would’ve been considered aromantic and possibly transmasc, but because society wasn’t ready for that, louisa may alcott was forced to write professor bhaer as a love interest for jo. and because it was written in 1860s massachusetts, neither louisa may alcott or her characters had the language to describe how they felt about themselves in terms of sexuality or gender.

i just think it’s so fascinating that a classic story of girlhood and womanhood that has been adapted so many times in different forms of media was actually created by a (most likely) queer author and the characters in the story itself are also deeply rooted in queerness. there’s so much the straight enjoyers of little women don’t know about its history

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

why are all straight people movie subplots like

dumb cis asshole main character meets smart beautiful woman. woman wants nothing to do with him bc he’s lame and lowkey objectifying her. by the end of the movie they have somehow fallen in love and/or slept together

IT’S NOT A GOOD PLOTLINE. it’s so uninteresting and overused

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

can’t stop thinking about them…might need to draw them all…

all art by ben hatke!

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

why am i having dreams about my best friends from high school who are basically acquaintances now. what kind of cruelty is this

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

meow meow meow

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

dhmu this game is all i’ve been thinking about recently

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

yess new album by one of my favorite artists, time to listen to this a million times and nothing else

[vilea777]

sorry i cant hang out i forgot how to mimic human like behaviour

[6qubed]

I mean if you wanna just loom in the corner like some kinda creature that's cool, we just don't want you getting left out

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

see my problem is that i want to rewatch the show i just finished rewatching bc i’m still in the mood for it, so i don’t want to force myself to watch anything else. but then i’d be starting over the same show i literally just finished watching. why does the immediate rewatch feel illegal

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

oh nooo not another sexuality crisis haven’t i had enough of those already

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

pakige

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

your friendly neighborhood spider-man

[sleepy-sunflower-boy]

this is the story of becoming a Hero the Hard Way

i post more art at @/sleepy.sunflowers on instagram :)