@swordsdance - Tumblr Blog

a surprising number of people see the term "social construct" and think that it means something is not real when it actually means something is so very real because it was created by us and is constantly enforced, often violently

k1ntsug1-r0b0t-g1rl

livelovelaugh-777

gothredy

what-even-is-thiss

You know as an American born in the late 90s I’ve watched my country blow up foreigners on tv supposedly in the interest of national security since I was a toddler but quite frankly we live on a natural fortress of a continent with friendly nations to our north and south and have been attacked on our own soil literally two times in the past hundred years and we have military bases on every inhabited continent on earth. It’s never made sense to do these things for “national security”. It never will make sense unless you value the shareholders of weapons companies over the lives of children. And apparently a concerning amount of people do.

psychotic-gerard

sorry i will never understand cis grief. your daughter is living her best life and going around with friends and feeling like a human being. your son doesn’t feel like he needs to crawl out of his skin anymore and can actually smile. your children are happy and no longer see their existence as the worst thing in the world. why are you grieving this lmao. grow up.

teaboot

Do you think the devil grieves for angels

tetress

Over Thanksgiving, my wife's mom said to her that she grieved "the son she lost". It pained my beloved so much that she asked me if I ever mourned her like that (we had been dating for like 10+ years before she realized she was trans). I said no; and, when asked why, I thought about it for a second.

Being a very metaphorical thinker, the image of a butterfly came to mind. This beautiful thing that grew out of something else. No longer what it was before, but something new and wonderful. A continuation, a becoming, a realization of self.

I turned to my wife and said "you do not mourn the caterpillar".

She loved that so much that I got @vaspider of NerdyKeppie to put it on a pennant to hang in our home.

vaspider

(I'm ordering stickers this week.)

ineffectualdemon

The thing is when my kid came out to us it didn't make them magically a new person

It just made them happier

Our main concern was how other people would treat them and we wanted them to know that we were firmly in their corner

But they were still the same kid

Researching trans and non-binary stuff also unlocked my own gender journey but that's unrelated

But my husband, who is as cis as they come, was like "yeah that's the same kid"

And maybe that's because we had put no expectations on our kid. We just wanted them to be happy

swordsdance

imho i think that the feeling of grief is valid, but it’s something that needs to be processed in therapy and not with your trans kid.

annabelle--cane

what I mean: "sexual intercourse" is as much a social construct as "romantic courtship," and you discover this very quickly as a queer person if you try to talk to able bodied straight cis people who literally think the only thing that counts as Actual Sex is penis-in-vagina penetration, like they call oral "foreplay" it's so dire. various people have a lot of vested interest in cleanly defining "sex" vs "not sex" for a whole slew of reasons (ex. censorship dodging and enforcing, conferring the social clout of virginity and prowess, finding and closing loopholes about premarital sex, deciding what relationships "count" as serious partnerships, ligating what is general assault vs sexual assault vs Something That's Definitely Probably Fine And Not Sexual At All, Actually, etc.), and it's really not something you can just fall back on as obvious common sense that people are dumb for questioning.

what I say: sex isn't real and you can't have it