#gender is a construct

[lgbtranswoman]

Ice cold takes from a Transgender Woman:

Men are not inherently Evil

Everyone has the capacity for evil

Transgender Men are men

Transgender Women are women

Excluding Cisgender Men from your spaces requires Transgender Men to out themselves if they want to engage (Same for Women)

Anyone can be Non-Binary, there is no "look" or requirement

Non-binary masculine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces, many are just treated as men and predators

Non-binary feminine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces without being seen as "Woman-Lite"

Edited the wording on the first point because too many terfs keep thinking I'm their friend.

[cephalopod-celabrator]

It is inherently fun and sexy to say statements that swap the traditional genders of pronouns and terms mid-statement, such as: "I'm going to make him my wife" "She's my boyfriend" "Who says a guy can't be a pretty princess?" "That girl's the coolest dude I've ever met" "She's a madman who has to be stopped" "It's not his fault he's a material girl" Gender is a set of watercolors and the prettiest shades come from mixing the paints together.

[ravencp86]

Gender - Jegulus, Wolfstar - @jeggyverses-jegulus-microfic - word count: 996

Regulus stood outside of Sirius’ front door, hand raised poised to knock, but he couldn’t do it. He was chewing nervously on his bottom lip and he could feel his heart pounding in his ears.

Just as he was about to give up and run away, the door flew open and he was suddenly staring up at his older sibling.

“I got bored waiting to see if you would actually knock.” Sirius told him in answer to his silent question, pointing to the camera on the side of the door Regulus hadn’t seen. “You gonna come in now the door is open?”

Regulus swallowed and nodded, stepping over the threshold and into Sirius’ flat.

Remus was sitting on the sofa, he had his feet up on the coffee table and there was a book resting in his lap.

“That’s a good one.” Regulus pointed at the book. “I finished it last week.”

Why was his voice so quite? Fuck.

“Reg, you alright?” Sirius asked, as they placed a gentle hand on Regulus’ shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s…I just…” Regulus sighed heavily and collapsed down on to the sofa next to Remus.

“What’s happened?” Remus put his book down. “Is it James? Did he do something?” Remus asked firmly, fury flashed across his eyes and Regulus was quick to shut it down.

“No, no, he didn’t do anything. He’s really great.”

“Then what’s going on?” Sirius asked as they sat down and placed a fresh cup of chamomile tea down in front of Regulus.

“I…I…” Regulus took a deep breath and then sipped at his tea, collecting his thoughts. “I need some help.”

Normally, Sirius would make some kind of joke at that statement. There must be something on Regulus’ face that was telling Sirius how serious this situation was. Remus stood up with his book and excused himself. Leaving the Black siblings to it.

“You can ask me anything, you know.” Sirius rubbed their hand up Regulus’ back and Regulus breathed in deeply, relaxing into the touch.

“How did you know?” Sirius stayed silent, giving Regulus the space to get his words out. “That you’re not always a boy, I mean.”

“Ah,” Regulus heard the smile in Sirius’ voice. “What do you want to know, Reggie?”

“How did you figure it out?”

“Well, I didn’t really have the words at the time, but I knew that there was something different. So, I started small. I tried eye liner and nail varnish, only when mum and dad weren’t around, obviously. Then, one day, I was out shopping with Lily and Marlene and they caught me staring at the skirts they were trying on. So, they dragged me into the changing room with them and encouraged me to try one on.” Sirius was smiling fondly at the memory and Regulus found himself smiling back. “The rest is history.”

“Do you…can I…” Regulus chewed on his lip again and Sirius pulled it loose with his thumb.

“Stop chewing on your lip, you’ll make it bleed.” His sibling gently chastised him. “Come on.” Sirius took his hand and stood up.

They went to Sirius’ bedroom, where Remus was sitting up on the bed and reading.

“Switch.” Sirius said, as they let go of Regulus’ hand and went over to the chest of drawers.

Remus didn’t ask any follow up questions, just smiled and left the room.

“Right, here.” Sirius held out a black skirt to him and Regulus’ eyes went wide.

“What? Now?”

“No time like the present. Remember, gender is just a construct. If you don’t like it, then you don’t need to try anything else on.”

Over the next hour and a half, Sirius helped Regulus try on multiple outfits from their wardrobe, some more feminine than others, some more neutral. Sirius said it was because some days they were more they than he or she.

“Reggie? How’s it looking?” Sirius called to him through the bathroom door. “Is that the one?”

Regulus’ hands were shaking as he looked at his reflection. The black dress fit his curves and accentuated his hips and made his legs and arms look amazing. Add in the subtle makeup and half up-do that Sirius had done for him and Regulus couldn’t believe how comfortable he felt.

Not just comfortable…

“Hot.” Sirius said from next to him. “Soz, but when you didn’t answer I thought you might be freaking out, so I thought I should just barge in.”

“It’s alright.”

“You do look amazing, though.”

“Thank you, Siri.” Regulus felt himself welling up, but Sirius shouted at him.

“Don’t! You’ll smudge your makeup.” Sirius beamed at him. “Fancy showing off your new look?”

Regulus laughed. “Alright.”

“One last thing, to really make your legs pop.” Sirius held up a pair of black heels. Regulus gulped and just nodded. “Here, I’ll help. They’re a bitch to get used to.”

Once the shoes were in place, Sirius led Regulus into the living room, calling out to Remus as they walked.

When they stepped into the room, Regulus froze and the smile dropped from his face.

James was staring at him unblinking and Regulus felt like he was going to vomit. Why was he here? What if James hated this? What if he thought Regulus was a freak and wanted nothing more to do with him?

“Reg, you look…” Regulus watched the lump in James’ throat bob as he swallowed.

“Do you like it?” Regulus was shaking with nerves as James stood right in front of him, running his fingers up both of Regulus’ arms.

“Like it?” The look on James’ face suddenly turned predatory. “Fuck, baby, you look delicious.”

“There are other people in the room you know!” Sirius made a heaving sound.

James ignored Sirius as he ran his fingers over Regulus’ hips. “Wanna go home?” He growled.

Regulus nodded.

As James swept him from the room, grabbing his bag on the way out, Regulus called out that he’d pay Sirius back for the dress.

[nonbinarynow]

Do you ever notice how the majority of nonbinary characters are just straight up not human beings? The majority of our non-binary rep is inhuman, which shows how binary society still views us as a literal societal impossibility despite us being here, real people, on earth with them.

I feel like this feeds into the whole thing of enben being seen as like "eldritch horrors" or "other worldly." Even though it might be claimed to be only in jest, it still displays how we are implicitly seen as a human impossibility because of the pervasiveness of the gender binary in society. It's taught to us as "natural" and how "humans have always functioned" despite our modern bourgeois, patriarchal, white-supremacist gender binary originating as a tool of colonialism. That was very recent in anthropological history. (Also note how capitalism is intertwined with binary supremacy here.)

When you delve into this it's wild. It starts surface level but it reveals the core exorsexism and classism of the capitalist society for one, but how it permeates into jokes ("I can identify as an attack helicopter!" "Nonbinary people are little frogs/eldritch beings!"), representation (most nonbinary representation is of inhuman characters) and our legal status (inexistent, which means no civil rights or legal protection of any kind.)

[enbycrip]

On TDOV, a historian’s perspective on the transphobic nonsense some people spout about bones, burials and gender.

We have been finding burials of gender divergent folk and folk outside the binary since we started any form of organised study of archaeology. The 18th and 19th century European and European-derived archaeologists who didn’t recognise that were the ignorant ones, assuming their definitions of gender were “universal”. Including within the binary; their definitions were deeply reductionist and deeply inaccurate, failing to recognise that even societies they actively claimed some form of cultural descent from had very different definitions of what a “man” or “woman” was from theirs.

Notably, they came from a *very* colonialist society that was doing its best to destroy living cultures with fuller definitions of gender than it allowed. We are still living in a framework of repairing the damage they did in how we understand past cultures, and modern media is frequently very unhelpful on how it reports on discoveries and interpretations, erasing or flattening the huge element of interpretation and uncertainty involved even with the exciting level of data that new techniques can give us on any given site.

Anyone who takes even a cursory look into bioarchaeology will find out that “sexing” bones - which every modern archaeologist knows is at best one element in gendering the person they belonged to - is *incredibly* fucking difficult. A lot of the techniques for it involve measuring proportions of anatomical features that may well not be present - it’s rare for a specimen to be intact. And, frankly - humans are a spectrum in every physical feature. Height, weight, bone density, width of shoulders and pelvis etc etc. Cheaper and more widespread DNA testing is slowly making more people realise that chromosomes aren’t the final word they were told in first year high school biology either. For the remains of people from some cultures, we have some written history to cross-reference archaeology with about the meanings of artefacts. In others, we don’t - and even when we do, half the time what we have is the interpretation of two lines from some dude from a different culture altogether, or from an aside in a religious tract, or a recipe book.

Almost every older specimen we have has been reinterpreted multiple times. Probably the oldest remains as yet found in the UK, from circa 31,000 BCE based on current best estimates, were known as “the Red Lady of Paviland” because they were dyed red with ochre, and the person who found them in 1832 decided from that fact and fact that there was jewellery found with them that they belonged to a female Roman-era sex worker. From around 200 years more work, and considerably more data, we now interpret them as having belonged to a male hunter-gatherer, likely from a nomadic or semi-nomadic people who frequently lived much closer to the coast than the place in Wales where the remains were found. We do not have the information about this person’s culture, how their culture viewed gender, the pronouns their language used and if they related to gender; this was minimum 20,000 years before and on the other side of the world from the oldest writing we have as yet found. We are putting data together and interpreting as best we can, with the awareness that there could be a discovery tomorrow that could utterly change that.

I’m sorry if this seems an obscure topic to address for TDOV, but I do know how this idea of “the bones don’t lie” has got into plenty of folks’ heads when they are having a bad time. So I wanted to address the fact that not only is it bawbins, the entire series of assumptions it posits is bawbins of the type that TERFs and transphobes, like racists, misogynists, and fascists in general, like to spew out there - that gender, or indeed race, is biological, fixed, and essential, that their understandings of it are “fact-based”, and that science is a series of fixed, immutable facts that are just lying there like stones on a beach.

And all of that is complete and utter bawbins.

Gender, and race, like all human frameworks of knowledge and understanding, are constructs - tools we use to understand a ridiculously complex and difficult world. They may *reference* objective facts, but are not in *themselves* facts. None of which means they aren’t incredibly meaningful or don’t have massive impacts on our experiences as humans. But they are mutable, ever-evolving, and incredibly open to constant interpretation and re-definition, and while your individual experience of them will be mediated by your culture, it’s also unique to you too.

No one else’s definition of your gender can *ever* be more accurate than yours. Because it is *yours*.

Happy Trans Day of Visibility, everyone 🏳️‍⚧️💛🤍🖤💜🩷🤍💙

[lgbtqiatext]

Requested by watchoutpaul-hemightkickyourhead

[alexander-the2nd0ne]

my pronouns are like santas nesting dolls from rise of the guardians, any of them apply but the further you get the more it genuinely resonates with me

[jasontoddscorpse]

The t4t romance of having your partner put on your trans tape for you