#transtwitter

[jackthundersnow]

TransTwitter: Trans lives need to be protected.

Trans Person: *says something only 85% UwU*

TransTwitter: Fuck you. You worthless piece of shit. Someone needs to backhand you. If another trans person even looks at you I will burn their house down. You scumbag. How dare you hurt other trans people like this

[intransheart]

Marsha's Plate: Black Trans Talk #love #podcast #listening #trans #love #podcast #listening #trans #transtwitter #transmasculine #transfeminine #girlslikeus #boyslikeus #TransIsBeautiful #transpride #transstrong #blacktrans #Blacktranslivesmatter

[onegoodpixie]

secret tech:

transition so your father stops asking you to shovel the snow off the driveway. because historically it was the "boys" job.

[daniela-a-wolfe]

Dayum I haven't used this account in a long time. Well peeps here I am.

Where are my trans twitter peeps?

[luciana-the-rat-queen]

Straight from Twitter’s Elongate.

Hi i am a non binary who started HRT in the month of august.  I’m still on twitter watching the shit-show.  But if Twitter goas down.  I’ll be here.

[schrodingers-eggmode]

A Timeline of Recent Gendermedia

This is not an endorsement of any particular person as a role model or a great human being or anything else. But this is the list that actually describes some recent, formative cultural history in my life, and is mostly chronological.

2.5 years ago, discovering via BoingBoing: Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia , which was maybe the first piece of media – hell, maybe the first intentionally published thing of any kind written by and about being a queer trans woman – I’d ever encountered, even if it mostly just led me months later to go write a Choose Your Own Adventure about my experience having surgery as a child. But it hypnotized me because I’d never played a game like this before. It didn’t seem connected to anything, just a piece of random internet culture, though, so I let it be.

Porpentine’s All I Want Is For All My Friends To Become Insanely Powerful in which a dreary soul-rending murderous world of numb hetero-masculinity-coded routine is eventually torn to shreds by something secret and glittery, also gave me a very clever reuse of the Marina and the Diamonds line, “I know exactly who I am and who I want to be/I know exactly why I walk and talk like a machine”. I was obsessed with every single thing she produced, from Howling Dogs to With Those We Love Left Alive, and felt like it was all speaking directly to me even on things where I had no common reference points. From her work and writing, I discovered QueerTransFemmeIndieGamingTwitter, which for a solid year was the only contemporary culture I gave a damn about. I wrote several Twines of my own at this time, just trying to learn from what she’d accomplished in playing with agency and repetition and words that fight back.

During that time, I ran into the impossibly delightful Merritt Kopas’ Hugpunx (all about hugging neon cuties of indeterminate gender [plus a few cats] as indiscriminately and enthusiastically as possible), which still makes me grin more than almost anything, and it led me to

 Aevee Bee’s post “Towards a Cutie Aesthetic,” which contains the sentence, “So the idea is you don’t have to identify your gender or identity or body type: you can just be cute. Cute is a vague word and it’s used to describe a variety of attractive traits, and that’s important because usually to complement someone you tell them how much they look like whatever gender you’re assigning them.”

(Things went kinda dormant after that, after first I got depressed and then I got obsessed with learning to code and that ate my life. Which itself is a thing that would never have happened without the experience of writing Twines inspired by the people up above here. But whenever I was on Twitter, I was still quietly soaking in the dialogue).

Maybe a year and some change later, someone I was dating showed me the IFComp winners, and I stumbled on Krypteia, a game of interactive fiction about a repeated choice to butch up and go sad and harmless and invisible or become a murderous and sparkly and bloody hard femme who ritualistically cannibalizes your enemies. Set in a fantasy forest world that keeps flickering into the urban actual one many of us livein. I played this three times in a row, and got obsessed with this little unremarkable part where the main character finds and cherishes a sparkly crystal pendant. (I now own an amethyst pendant that always reminds me of this moment).

The whole #whatiwantedtowear series of posts, maybe most representatively this one by Alok Vaid-Menon of Darkmatter. Just the whole question of “What did I want to wear” vs. “What did I actually wear, and for fear of what?” is an increasingly live one for me right now.

Actually, everything Darkmatter does. Noting here that I’m totally ignoring the pro-indigenous and anti-colonial thrust of their work for my own white-person structure of meaning, but that aspect is central and amazing and true and right and you should check it out. But for the purposes of this list, the first one that really wormed its way into my head was the poem Transmisogyny, which includes lines like “Promise me that you won’t love me like a man, kiss me like a man, fuck me like a man.”  Something really ached when I read that. But maybe the lines that had the deepest impression on my brain were “Promise that I don’t have to modify my body to matter./Promise me that you won’t call me a man no matter what I look like.” -- That was honestly the first time I really heard that kind of message in a way that sounded accessible to someone with a body like mine. It was a moment I began to think that messages about gender were things I might conceivably have access to, and I looked at life differently after that. Even though I have occasionally called myself “a femme” for a few years now at certain times around certain loved ones, following Darkmatter on social media was maybe the first time I could hear that as anything but laughable to the rest of the world. It was the first time anybody articulated it as a legitimate way to think about gender except as a modifier for something else. And was maybe the first time I thought of that word, femme, as something I legitimately might have access to, and not be mocking or intruding on or stealing from women (specifically cis women) by feeling that way.  It’s a thing I think about, as part of a possible menu of ways to talk about how I want to function in the world. I still can’t believe it’s so recent, despite the people I’ve been close to, all these years.

[ Aside: I have a really depressing confession to make, which is that in the confines of my head, I misgender Alok of Darkmatter on a painfully regular basis. I correct myself immediately. But it happens. This matters to me in an extremely personal way, not just from its own shittiness, but because sometimes it feels like if I could see them the way they want to be seen, I could see me right. I feel an unexpectedly high amount of very personal sadness around this. ]

Nevada. As mentioned.

Steven Universe, which has made me cry dozens of times, which doesn’t say anything about your gender just your HUMANITY (kidding we can have differences it’s fine I swear WEEP), but also let’s be real, “Giant Woman” and the “Alone Together” episode and all the dozens of little moments of the show actively failing to gender-police its protagonist gave me Garnet-sized grins and numerous moments of sudden unexpected weeping

PWR BTTM’s “Serving Goffman” which I previously linked, which contains the lyrics, “I held my breath in a suit and tie because I didn’t know I could fight back/I wanna put the whole world in drag but I’m starting to realize it’s already like that/Am I making a fool of myself (x3)/I hope so/I sure hope so“.

most recently, A Safe Girl to Love, by Casey Plett, whose stories were sad and real and emotionally complex and sometimes really hot and sometimes really sweet or just alive.

So that’s maybe a certain picture of one side of my last 2.5 years, during essentially my whole time since moving to the Bay Area. It’s a picture that includes a lot of my deepest, most buried feelings since moving here, and a whole side of me that sprung right out of the depths of the Internet, and has accidentally changed my life in a couple of major ways, and set things into motion in me whose future trajectory is yet to be nameable.