Untold Introvert

Howdy, I'm Miles (he/they) and I'm here to reblog things, rant and generally be an unproductive member of society. Come join me if you feel like it.

[jay-rayart]

In honor of Pride month I want to share this comic I made about growing up queer. We live in a world that tries to cut us down, I am so glad I stayed around long enough to write stories about finding the light. If your looking for more Black, Queer, and Magical storytelling consider backing FLY on kickstarter

FLY : A Magical Black Boy Series - Pilot

A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.

[disorganizedguts]

my first deltarune chapter 5 fanart. it's good to be home./silly

[sackboy166]

holy shit oh my go what the fuck

it's real

[viily]

so sad forever twitter killed bot api thing because fiskbot has been like crucial to my grammar vocabulary essence development

[viily]

like i am constantly referencing this thang

[encephalodyspareunia]

some other gems from fisk bot

and my personal all-time favourite:

[cedarwool]

being an everything crafter is great but also sucks. like i want to get my watercolors out but i need to put away my microcrochet first. i want to do some leatherwork but my oil paints are on the table. i want to whittle but i'm using the bucket i catch wood shavings in to hold my papermaking mush. i want to write my book but my hands are too busy knitting a sweater. i want to code another video game but i'm too busy studying nalebinding. do you see my problem. the problem is that i need more hands

[liberalsarecool]

Republican regressive reactions are malware for a society. Peak MAGA weakness is cratering.

[meorpin]

DELTARUNE RIGHT NOW???

[meorpin]

COMING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[avantgarden-er]

damn [PRONOUN] your pussy is crazy!

the pussy:

[magentasnail]

Roots

[canichangemyblogname]

This June, I need Gen Z queers to understand that some people are closeted.

[canichangemyblogname]

I am saying this as a Gen Z queer, before y’all get your guns out to fucking shoot me.

But I need y’all to understand that if someone doesn’t give you their government name in a queer space, it’s not because they’re “mysterious,” and you do not have permission to take it upon yourself to figure out their “real identity” and go digging for them online like a private investigator. First, that’s creepy and a violation of privacy and reasonable boundaries. Second, some of us keep our private and professional lives very separate because we need to keep food on the fucking table and a roof over our heads, and our private life could jeopardize that.

[canichangemyblogname]

“Why won’t you tell me about your parents?” “Why can’t I know your real name?” “Where do you work?”

1.) Not all our parents would bake us a fucking cake when we come out. Some of us are closeted. Surely you understand this? You also do not need to know my parent’s names or occupations; we are both adults. I do not need nor want to mix you and my private life with my parents and my public life.

2.) Trans people do not owe you their dead name or government name

3.) I’m not telling you for the sake of job security. I am a government fucking caseworker working amidst a fucking lavender panic!

“There’s no way you’re a different person outside this; you’re still you at your core. What harm is there—”

No, I am a completely different person. A different person with a different personality and different interests and a different name and presentation. I am a completely different person because I keep this life and my public life private to avoid fracturing 90% of my interpersonal relationships and 100% of my professional ones.

“You’re not out? But you’re so confident.”

See— that’s part of the issue. Y’all assume someone is in the closet because they hate themselves or lack self-identity. Some of us know exactly who we are, but need to prioritize financial stability or else our entire life gets exponentially harder immediately.

[canichangemyblogname]

You meet queer people over the age of 40 and one of the first/earliest questions is “who knows?”

I need y’all to start bringing that energy. Because it’s not always safe for someone to be out and not everyone is safe to be out around.

There is a misnomer that “the closet” inherently means “doesn’t know they’re queer” and not “isn’t out widely and publicly.” “Outness” is often a patchwork.

[depsidase]

[busket]

I think a lot of yall will hear a trans person talking about a legitimate experience and respond like "uhh isnt that a terf talking point 🤨" without having the critical thought to know WHY its harmful when terfs talk about it.

like I just saw a transmasc who drew a short comic about reading BL as a teenager and thinking "wow I wish I was a gay man too" and growing up to be a trans man. and a reply said "isnt this a terf talking point"

no. its not. the terf talking point is that straight girls pretend to be gay men to fetishize them as a form of autoandrophilia. or that exposure to gay male relationships or trans men will groom little girls into wanting to be gay men. that is an extremely harmful view because it deligitimizes a trans man's existence. but plenty of trans men DO grow up reading MLM/gay media and BL and do grow attached to it, because they are seeing themselves. even before you know who you are, you will be drawn to who you want to be. transfem lesbians also become attached to WLW media before transition and are also treated like creeps and fetishists. but they are just young gay kids seeing their true selves reflected back at them. terfs see these kinds of common phenomena that happen all the time in the trans community and try to explain it away with bigotry and hateful stories. and then they talk about it so fucking much that it confuses people and before you know it you got trans people sharing their real lives and being accused of spreading terf talking points from people who never think about anything.

[cartoon-fanaticism]

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

[wassuppeas]

[hollowedskin]

So the funniest difference between me and kiddo's previous foster mother is that she was telling me I've gotta call ahead and make sure all the staff at the hairdressers know kiddo is trans so they don't misgender him, and make sure they know he's a foster kid so they understand why it's me taking him and not his real mum and all that, and I've just said nah that's not how you do it.

I go to the barber, I say "my son would like a haircut", they do not question me about whether he is my son on either point. This has worked perfectly so far. You just don't give anyone a reason to question you? If I say he is my son it is so unbelievably rude for someone else to go "um are you sure?".

But yesterday the barbers apprentice looked at him and asked if he is getting a woman's cut, and instead of arcing up and explaining trans theory and respect for kiddos gender to someone who I knew heard me the first time and had clocked him, I just channeled the spirit of a Christian Mother In The Toy Aisle and said "well, he is a boy so no, he will have a boys cut".

Shuts down bullshit immediately! Nobody wants to be yelled at by someone's Karen mother! Kiddo does not hear this little pricks opinion on trans people or get humiliated by being outed in the barbers. You do not have to tell people all your intimate details! You certainly do not have to tell people all your kids intimate details either, especially if you think they'll be a target.

[stuckinapril]

I think part of getting better is complete ego death. Like you’re not above setting a timer for 5 minutes and focusing on a task. You’re not above doing a very simple 3 minute workout to start. You’re not above reading for 10 minutes a day when you first get out of your reading slump, even if you used to read for hours. You’re not above starting slow and then building up to where you want to be/where you once were. What you are above is total inertia. Doing something really is better than doing nothing. Radically accept where you are, radically accept your limits, and go from there. Don’t let your ego get in the way.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

I think the harm of denying people the right to control their own bodies is so, so much worse than the risk of people regretting the decisions they make. Regretting something you decided to do is a much healthier pain than the pain of regretting that you didn't get to have a choice.

[boythingrobot]

'trans men haven't upheld their weight in the community at the same level that lesbians and trans women have' a lot of those lesbians were trans men and mascs but you're all not ready for that conversation

[genderkoolaid]

#a mixed Black transmasc woman very likely sparked the stonewall uprising (storme delarverie)#and yet somehow we never fucking hear about her! even when people talk abt the trans and Black origins of Stonewall!#& when it comes to feminist stuff as ive said before#transmascs often find inspiration in cis women in history who resisted misogyny#yet cis women REFUSE to ever find inspiration in transmascs who resisted misogyny and transphobia#have trans men failed to uphold their weight or can you not tolerate visible transmasculinity

actually adding my tags. ik op also talked about Stormé in the notes but like. i really do find it so frustrating how he has been completely neglected as a historical figure. to the point where there's a lot of people who will, when talking about the erasure of Black trans people from Stonewall history, will immediately jump to talking about Marsha P. Johnson (who, while a vital figure in US queer history who deserves the attention she has started to receive from the community, did not start the uprising and arrived to them later) and continue to credit her with "throwing the first shotglass." but they don't even know who Stormé is, despite again, it being at the very least equally if not more likely she was actually involved with sparking the uprising.

and its even more frustrating because part of the reason its likely isn't just Stormé's own recollection, but because there are other reports that the uprising was kicked off when the cops arrested, specifically, a person seen as female who was wearing male clothing and was being violently arrested for FTM crossdressing. FTM activists were trying to raise awareness about this in 1989. like people specifically saw (even if it wasn't Stormé) a butch dyke getting arrested explicitly for wearing too many men's clothes and not enough women's clothes.

and yet, no one ever. fucking talks about this. no one who specifically is trying to talk about the erasure of trans people from queer activism mentions this. and we should all be asking, ourselves and each other, why? a lot of people don't want to have this conversation because it asks a lot of us, but that's exactly why its so vital to have responsibly.

Stonewall is as much myth as it is historical event, especially at this point in time. and how we choose to narrate it matters, even though we (should) all know that we will never know the full exact story, nor do we need to because, again, much of its importance is serving as a grounded myth of the birth of organized queer resistance in the US. And the fact is, there is every reason for us to tell a version of this myth which highlights that the inciting moment for queer people being fucking done with the constant acts of violence, was a mixed Black transmasc woman, a drag king who identified as a transgender warrior in Leslie Feinberg's book of that name, being violently arrested for his transmasculine presentation.

and not only is that not the version we tell, there's often no trace of transmasculinity at all in how we remember Stonewall or any queer historical events. & op is so. so incredibly right in prompting people to critically examine that absence. because i do believe if Stormé was a femme lesbian, people would be a lot more invested in making sure people know about the lesbian woman who started Stonewall. almost like, on an unconscious collective level, we see transmasculine figures as undesirable when it comes to being community icons, martyrs, heroes, theorists, creatives, etc.

anyways, for those curious, here's Stormé's recollection of Stonewall, from this interview:

The conversation turned to the night in June of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn where she made history. Quite a few friends, writers and historians over the years have identified her as the tough cross-dressing butch lesbian who was clubbed by the NYPD, which evoked enough indignation and anger to spur the crowd to action. She was identified as the Stonewall Lesbian in Charles Kaiser’s book The Gay Metropolis, and her scuffle with the police has been mentioned a few times in passing by The New York Times in the past couple of decades. Then in the January 2008 issue of Curve Magazine she identified herself as the Stonewall Lesbian in a detailed interview with writer Patrick Hinds, an excerpt of which is below: I asked her if she still remembered that night. She answered in the affirmative. After the cop hit her on the head, she socked him with her fist. “I hit him,” she said. “He was bleeding.” A natural protector, she has worked as a security guard at a few of the lesbian bars in the city. I spoke to her friend, Lisa Cannistraci, who has known her for around 25 years. Now one of the owners of lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson, Cannistraci said that DeLarverie worked as a security guard at the original Cubby Hole, located at 438 Hudson Street, starting in 1985. Cubby Hole eventually moved to the corner of West 4th and West 12th. Then Henrietta Hudson opened at the 438 Hudson Street location, and DeLarverie continued working there until 2005. “Until she was 85 years old?” I asked her. Cannistraci said yes.

also, just to drive home the point, the community ignoring Stormé was not a harmless act. he developed dementia later in life and did not receive the support that she fucking deserved from the community:

In March, Farrell, who lived next door to DeLarverie at the Hotel Chelsea, found DeLarverie disoriented and, uncharacteristically, asking for help. DeLarverie was shaking and dehydrated, and she was taken to and treated at the nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital. No next of kin has been located, and she no domestic partner. Friends say that she had a long term relationship with an aerialist and burlesque performer, but that was “a long time ago.” With no one in her life legally able to make health care decisions, she was given a court appointed a guardian: the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged (“JASA”). She remained at the hospital as doctors ascertained her ability to care for herself. When St. Vincent’s went bankrupt and closed abruptly, she was transferred to the nursing home. SAGE, an advocacy group for elderly members of the LGBT community, has also been offering assistance. Her friends say that communication with the aforementioned groups has been inadequate and a source of frustration, and they feel powerless to improve her situation. [...] DeLarverie continued emceeing and singing after Stonewall — at gay events and at benefits. Her friend Williamson Henderson, President of the S.V.A., told me that she hosted an annual gay nightlife event, The Gay Bar People’s Ball, where all of the movers and shakers of NYC gay nightlife would congregate and receive awards. “It was an event that was well known and a big deal,” he said. In Sam Bassett’s film, DeLarverie said that she continued to sing at benefits for battered women and children, remarking “Somebody has to care. People say, ‘Why do you still do that?’ I said, ‘It’s very simple. If people didn’t care about me when I was growing up, with my mother being black, raised in the south.’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here.'” What does the future hold for DeLarverie? Cannistraci told me that she is currently in the process of petitioning for legal guardianship of DeLarverie and hopes to move her into a brighter, more modern nursing home with a larger staff and activities for the residents — and one where a friend of DeLarverie’s already resides. “She was a protector of the community, and [her situation] is heartbreaking,” she said. [...] DeLarverie’s situation is, unfortunately, not unique, and it highlights some of the issues faced by gay and lesbian seniors. It is unclear whether DeLarverie has no surviving family members or whether she has surviving family members but simply lost touch with them over the years. Many elders become isolated from their families, either because of family disapproval or because they moved away from their families to a big city with a large gay and lesbian population, thereby becoming out of sight and out of mind. If they do end up in a retirement home or nursing home, there is also the issue of whether other residents will have a problem with their sexual orientation. Furthermore, in many states, same-sex partners cannot be legally bound, and if there is no next of kin, one can end up being a ward of the state. If the Rosa Parks of the gay community can end up in a nursing home among strangers like other forgotten elderly men and women, it is certainly a wake up call.

idk not to get on a soapbox here on op's post, but i think Stormé is such a good example of how this "lack" of transmasc contributions to the community is actually a sign of anti-transmasculinity. i want you to think about how Stormé's race and trans*masculinity made the labor she did for the community, for decades, invisible.

[genderkoolaid]

#Stormé DeLarverie#this genuinely makes me want to chew glass every time i think about it#like frankly if you don't know about /any trans men contributing to queer rights/ you should Not be bragging about it#bc it just means you do NOT know your history#are you a queer trans person with access to transition? you Better put respect on Lou Sullivan's name#or hell do you have Actual Access to Medical Transition At All ???#Jamison Green WROTE the policy that formed the groundwork for medical transition AND anti-discrimination policies across the US#i mean hell Gavin Grimm's court case aiming to officially classify bathroom bills as discriminatory was only 5 years ago#and he was a fucking /teenager/ when that ball started rolling#if you think trans men and transmascs are not and have not ALWAYS been involved in community activism#you are simply uneducated and you should be ashamed of that

^^^ all of this + Gavin Grimm not only did that, but he didn't benefit basically at all. he graduated before the case was decided, and he only got $1 from it. Gavin was left traumatized and poor and has since struggled with housing. And I personally have never heard his name mentioned in discussions of vital modern trans activists in the US. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Fuck, I've barely heard his name ever, and I'm a queer from the DMV (region in the northeast USA) who has been pretty involved in my local queer community, so there's really no excuse.

You can still donate to his GoFundMe if you'd like. From this article:

As Donald Trump rolled back LGBTQ+ rights, including banning trans servicemembers from the military and authorizing homeless shelters to exclude trans people, Grimm won repeated court victories. But his school district appealed. One court of appeals judge compared Grimm to the historic American plaintiffs who challenged slavery, Japanese concentration camps, segregation and bans on interracial and gay marriage. A 2020 ruling offered a “resounding yes” in favor of the constitution and civil rights laws protecting trans students from discrimination. Grimm graduated before the case was resolved and never got to return to his school’s boys’ bathrooms. In 2021, the supreme court allowed Grimm’s victory to stand, and the school board was ordered to pay $1.3m in attorney’s fees. Grimm, however, only got a symbolic $1. To secure damages, Grimm would’ve had to give the opposition’s lawyers access to his medical records to scrutinize the cause and extent of his emotional distress, a process he couldn’t stomach after years of fighting. The idea he’d have to prove his anguish was unbelievable to his mom, who can’t shake the memories of her son becoming suicidal. Grimm doesn’t regret moving on without damages. But he desperately could’ve used financial help – especially as the trauma of his childhood began to catch up with him. [...]

Grimm has complex post-traumatic stress disorder and has suffered from stress-induced seizures that have affected his cognition and left him hospitalized in 2021. “The PTSD at its core is about not being safe or understood, being rejected, and the adults in my life not acting responsibly,” he explains. “In high school, I was picked over and hyper-analyzed. I was tortured, harassed and bullied.” He recalls a period when the stress was so severe he’d dissociate as he walked down the hallway, not hearing his friends call his name. Grimm also has autism and struggles with sensory processing, and the combined impacts of his disabilities have prevented him from holding down a job or completing school, he says. He’s relied on a GoFundMe and disability benefits, but has repeatedly struggled to make rent. His mother supports him but also has a tight income, he says. “I don’t have options … unless some rich gay philanthropist tosses me a crispy million.” At times, he’s felt disposable to the broader movement; he says it’s hard not to think of notable gay rights plaintiffs who have not struggled to make ends meet after their victories. “It makes me so angry that it’s so hard for him to find housing stability,” says Camille Gibson, his best friend who moved to England and video calls him on a nearly daily basis. “Some days, it’s almost like he’s short-circuiting because there’s just so much stress.” Still, the two find ways to have fun with each other from afar, often streaming anime. “When he’s not in a complete utter funk,” she says, “we are cackling at each other, because we’re both silly-billy stupid bitches.”

[genderkoolaid]

happy pride! credit transmasculine people or shut the fuck up

while we're here, might as well add on that not only was the Stonewall Uprising likely kicked off by a transmasculine person resisting state violence because of their masculine presentation, but the transmasculine people & other queer (perceived-)women of the nearby Women's House of Detention rioted in solidarity:

"The House of D [was] 500 feet from the Stonewall Inn," Ryan says. "On the first night of the riots, people incarcerated in the prison could actually see what was happening out their windows, and they started a riot all their own, setting fire to their belongings and throwing them down to the streets below while chanting 'Gay rights! Gay rights! Gay rights!'" By the '50s and '60s, Ryan estimates, "around 75% of the people incarcerated in the House of D are queer in some way." In the 1960s, the prison began marking gay prisoners with a "D" for "degenerate," and placing them into solitary confinement because they were considered a "danger to other women."

credit transmasculine people or shut the fuck up.