trans focused sideblog

place for me to post about trans stuff. lots of posts about transmasculinity i guess? by virtue of who i am as a person. (he/him, 21+)

[write-on-beat]

wasn't going to do an intro post - now i'm doing an intro post. funny how that works out. hi! i'm eli. i'm over 21 and have only very recently come to fully embrace being transmasc. i've lurked for a very long time in a lot of public tags but i'm a real shut-in when it comes to private conversations or communities.

mostly this is just a blog where i can post about a lot of the stuff that relates to my trans experience. prior to id'ing as a trans man i've spent a lot of time being vocally open online about being nonbinary, and while that umbrella is not necessarily something i fit under anymore, it was a very intrinsic part of my development as a person and still carries a lot of influence over how i see the community and world at large. i absolutely don't have patience for people who minimize nonbinary and/or intersex voices in trans spaces in service of binary trans voices.

i'm also on the aroace spectrum, but you might see me talking about or reblogging things about sex and romance because i'm a little odd in that respect, hahaha - i really love to think about both of those things, but only in hypotheticals. i have no desire to actually engage in anything like that with anyone.

i'm white and american, so please feel free to correct me if there's ever things i say that come off badly because of that.

anyway ! here are some things you can expect to find here ...

-- social commentary ... maybe. i'm not formally educated and i haven't done much reading, but i have a lot of thoughts based on my lived and observed experience. i believe in both transmisogyny and transandrophobia, and i'm willing to have civil discussions but i'm not tolerant towards anon hate.

-- personal musings about my transness!! sometimes on its own, sometimes as it relates to other identities of mine.

-- transmasculinity in media. this is really my major wheelhouse. i have a lot of thoughts about transmasculine narratives, canon or otherwise, and a lot of my processing of gender reflects in the sorts of characters i see myself in. more broadly speaking i also think a lot about general masculinity, and will probably post about characters i DON'T consider to be trans, but i think my reading of them is inseparable from my identity as someone who is trans.

-- general community with other trans people of all kinds! i'd like to have more friends who are trans.

and, as a fun aside, you should definitely talk to me if you're interested in any of the following! whether that's in dms or just asking me questions on anon, i have a lot to say and i will happily say it.

baccano!

saiyuki

critical role campaign 4

toilet bound hanako-kun

witch hat atelier

the witcher

vocaloid

moriarty the patriot

log horizon

monster high (mostly g1)

ever after high

pixie hollow

[write-on-beat]

aaaah ~ things aren't going very well just generally speaking, but i wish everyone a very happy pride!

let's keep on living together, okay? i'm looking forward to a tomorrow where we can all be ourselves without being afraid to try. :)

[write-on-beat]

it frustrates me that from trans spaces it's a very common response when someone is visibly gnc to say that they must be trans ... first of all, letting people be gnc without putting any pressure on them either way is a good thing in general, but it's also very exorsexist in the way the response happens, since it's almost always assuming that person could be like. binary trans.

[write-on-beat]

generally speaking, it hurts more people than it helps to see someone experimenting with gender and decide you know more than they do about who they are. there's a very large difference between encouraging people to figure themselves out and pushing labels they didn't ask for onto them in an attempt to slot them into anywhere. often that kind of thinking really erases nonbinary identities entirely.

also, so much of this is just based on "feminine thing = woman, masculine thing = man" ways of thinking, which is just bad for everybody. you can't fall into thinking like this about cis people because it reinforces very "clothes = gender" ideologies. it might SEEM harmless and even encouraging to act like this when cis people do some gender presentation experimentation but it's very easy for it to spiral.

how long does it take for "that [cis] person is wearing clothes that don't match their gender, transitioning would save them!" to turn into "that [trans] person is wearing clothes that don't match their gender, they must be faking!" ?

anyway, that sort of thing has been on my mind lately.

[write-on-beat]

it frustrates me that from trans spaces it's a very common response when someone is visibly gnc to say that they must be trans ... first of all, letting people be gnc without putting any pressure on them either way is a good thing in general, but it's also very exorsexist in the way the response happens, since it's almost always assuming that person could be like. binary trans.

[horrid-thing]

I love living my irl life stealth until someone looks at my incredibly transgender art and I out myself and die a little inside. Maybe I'll reblog this with an explanation later, but rn I trust Tumblrs ability to look at something with nuance.

This isn't meant to make a statement for the whole trans community, this is art expressing my personal experiences with transitioning.

[write-on-beat]

i keep having dreams where i'm my favorite cis guy oc... aaah, it's really nice. i wake up and there are a few moments where i forget i haven't started physical or social transition, and i get really happy in those moments before the grief sets in...

[json-derulo]

I'm not gonna articulate this well, but there's this phenomenon I keep seeing on the left that I'll call "bean soup rhetoric," wherein someone fails to understand that they are not the target audience for a particular message, or just can't conceptualize why a speaker would craft their message differently to resonate with a target audience that doesn't already completely agree with them.

"The 'God Made Trans People' billboard is stupid! God didn't make me! I'm an atheist!" Okay. The billboard sits along a major highway in Kansas. We can deduce that the target audience is not you—it's the centrist evangelical Christians driving along that road who could probably be persuaded to become allies as long as we choose our words carefully and don't make them feel attacked for not already knowing everything about trans rights issues. Another one I see a lot is, "We shouldn't be talking about how right-wing legislation catches [privileged in-group] in the crossfire when [marginalized out-group] suffers far more!" I know. I agree with you. Which is why you and I are not the intended audience of this argument!

The entire point of rhetoric is to win over someone who doesn't already fully agree with you. In this case, let's say that someone is Jennifer, the moderate center-right mom in your neighborhood who doesn't really know or care about transgender issues but would be absolutely horrified by the idea of her teenage daughter having to submit to an invasive inspection of her body just to be allowed to play soccer. Tell her, "Banning trans students from sports will inevitably subject all student athletes to invasive gender-policing," or "Legal restrictions on gender-affirming care will make it harder for you to access the hormone replacement therapy you take to treat menopause symptoms," and she is more likely to question her existing beliefs and listen to the rest of what you have to say than if you lead with leftist talking points that she already has a calcified opinion about or which she thinks do not personally affect her.

Tailoring the argument to the things she already cares about does not mean we're forgetting that she has more privilege than most—entirely the opposite, in fact. A privileged ally can be extremely valuable. Jennifer votes in every election. And so do all the other ladies at her book club, and church, and in the PTA, and those folks listen to Jennifer. There's a reason both parties were courting suburban women so hard in the last election cycle! If we can find common ground with her on this, if we can get her calling her representatives and talking to her friends and phone-banking and door-knocking and making a stink, that's how the needle starts to move. If I can convince her to take her support away from the candidates who are actively restricting my rights and throw it toward those who want to restore and expand those rights...then I'm sorry, but Jennifer is a more valuable ally to me than the people who agree that the legal boundaries of gender ought to be abolished altogether but refuse to actually do anything except complain online about how both sides are equally bad because the right is trying to force everyone to drink the cyanide kool-aid while the left keeps serving bean soup and they don't like bean soup

[write-on-beat]

i'm really ... really tired of spending what little time i currently have to be online and engaging in my hobbies blocking people who can't abide with a trans man existing.

i'm in a fandom where there are characters that are canonically transfem and canonically transmasc, and the reception to both of those things is very drastically different. since both of the main examples were thought to be the opposite gender for a really long time, there are a lot of people who don't really know or stick with calling the characters using their old pronouns.

regarding the transfem character, most people in the fandom on tumblr will get extremely up in arms if anyone refers to her as a man or by her deadname. and usually rightfully so! a lot of people who do that are being very deliberately transmisogynistic by refusing to acknowledge her, even though she hasn't really begun transition as of yet.

but a lot of people don't really have the same energy regarding the transmasc character - he's regularly she/her'd in the fandom and a lot of people seem to very vastly prefer referring to him as a woman, even though he's very textually transitioned and is open about his identity.

i'm not upset that the transfem character's identity is being respected - i'm really glad that as a fandom that's the case, at least on tumblr. i just wish that the gender of the transmasc character was taken even half as seriously.

[angrychicagoan24]

i’m gonna say something that will probably piss some people off

i do not think “kill all men” is a good or productive thing to say in any situation

[angrychicagoan24]

obviously this probably fucking sucks to hear as a trans guy but it’s pretty shitty to cis men as well who do not deserve to hear it and honestly it’s not even helpful for men who kinda do deserve to hear it! all you’re doing is adding to hatred on both sides and that literally helps no one

[write-on-beat]

so, very specifically in progressive online spaces, when someone who identifies as a man presents in a way people consider "feminine" it's either "estrogen would save her" or "why be a man if you're going to keep dressing like a girl", but when someone who identifies as a woman presents in a way people consider "masculine" it's "let people be tomboys/butches" and "women don't owe you femininity" and "you're being lesbophobic". which is interesting.

that's not to say i think either of them is better than the other. men who decide to start experimenting with gender presentation are given a very rigid view of the way men and women should be separated by their presentation, whereas women are constantly denied the ability to play with gender expression by people who have got it in their heads that 'masculine/feminine' = 'someone's actual gender'.

as usual, it's the sort of rhetoric that a lot of trans people themselves are guilty of using, but it ends up perpetuating transphobia in all directions. trans women and men see their peers like this and their presentation shifts accordingly, consciously or otherwise. and it's the same sort of enforcement of gender roles that leaves nonbinary people without a proper voice in the conversation of gender presentation and identity to begin with.

[scramratz]

A lot of cis people (particularly cis women) and even some trans people use benign "All men bad" rhetoric to slyly be transphobic towards trans men in particular but i dont think the world is ready for this discussion

[write-on-beat]

how many times lately have i seen someone arguing that wanting to see men in the concept/universe of [x piece of media] is misogynistic and gross, only to look into [x piece of media] and see that it is very clearly selling itself to an audience of cis men who see women as objects? well .... more times than i would like, for sure.

[naga-noia]

glad more and more people are starting to talk about the absolutely Insufferable state of the transandrophobia tag right now because holy shit has it devolved Substantially within the past couple months

[scramratz]

You know the common occurrence of a (usually younger) trans guy dating a cis guy and they start feminizing themselves while in that relationship? I don’t like that it’s treated as a character flaw of said trans dude and not what it actually is, abuse.

[tumblr]

Reblogs in a chain now get their own notes

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!

[headspace-hotel]

This is horrible I can't see the number of notes on my posts at all without adding up everything in the chain

Cursed cursed cursed evil evil evil

[jv]

This is a terrible idea. Horrible.

EXTREMELY BAD HOLY FUCK.

This would kill the entire point of the reblog chain. Staff, please, don't do this. It will transform the reblog chain in just plain twitter quotes.

[jv]

Seriously, this is a tumblr-killer feature. This breaks the most fundamental way tumblr is different from any other social network. This makes tumblr just another blueskytwitterthreads. Or worse: An unfederated mastodon clone.

Please, stop this. Please, don't roll this out.

[jv]

Please, mutuals, post about this, comment and reblog the original post (while you still can without making it your own quote-post). I don't know if staff is looking or if the feedback would matter, but seriously, this is a terrible change that would kill tumblr as we know it. Please, don't roll it out.

[jv]

look, I can endure any kind of UI changes that are supposed to help tumblr-rookies to understand how this works. They may be a nuisance, but that's ok, we have x-kit or we can get used to buttons being here or there.

But this. This changes the data architecture. This changes the SINGLE THING that makes tumblr the "... yes and" website. This KILLS THE COLLABORATIVE POSTING THAT MAKES THIS SITE DIFFERENT FROM ALL THE OTHER MEDIA PLATFORMS.

Please, don't do this. Please, don't ship this.

[dakt37]

Tumblr has explicitly said in the past that they do not look at comments on their updates posts. You have to PUT IN A SUPPORT TICKET AND SELECT FEEDBACK FROM THE DROPDOWN

Tumblr Help Center

Find support resources and documentation for Tumblr

[write-on-beat]

the new tumblr change is very cool! i can't imagine having separate posts for each new addition in reblogs is in any way going to make it easier than ever to quietly target people in communities you don't like and expose their content to a crowd of people who have made their lives dedicated to hating them. that would be wild, if it did that. but thankfully i can't imagine it will.

[write-on-beat]

always found it really weird that trans people are expected to give up, like, hobbies they enjoy that society sees as gendered. oops, fundamentally nothing about your preferences has changed or anything, but you can't do this activity anymore because we think only people who you claim not to be like can do this activity. and if you like this activity you're not allowed to complain about people misgendering you or questioning if you're really trans.