at risk of sounding just fully out of touch with the common man I do fully forget a lot of the time that other women like for serious wear bras and do makeup daily and shave on the reg for real. like that's so silly that's only in movies. but no it's real. I see a hairless leg and get jumpscared.

transphobes I can't stop you from reblogging this but I despise you.

I really don't think we're going to get anywhere on gender shit until we understand why we crave each other's trauma and heartarche. Being raised as a living weapon sounds great when your whole life has been a struggle to be taken seriously and being raised as an incubator sounds great when everyone's been suspicious of you wanting to be around kids since you got a puberty. Never mind the whole Desired/Lonely thing. Trans people you're our only hope

i never feel more queertrans than when i read an article by a straight woman who keeps saying "like all woman, I..." before offering up the least relatable sentence i've ever read

I was hanging out with a friend last week that I hadn't seen in a while, and I told her she looked really hot.

And she said that her new hairstylist was also a fashion/style consultant, and at their first appointment the stylist looked at her and said "so how much of your gender presentation is code switching and masking and how much of it feels like you?"

So anyway I had to explain fuckor to her.

"why are people suddenly saying kink isn't always sexual" hello! you seem to have picked up on something that is actually de facto considered true in IRL kink scenes and often trotted out as one of the basic foundational truths of kink in educational contexts (i.e. beginners' workshops, it'll be in guides for first-timers at dungeons, etc). come take my hand and let me introduce you to the vast and wonderful world of IRL kink.

"kink," contrary to what a lot of internet-only kinksters seem to think, is not referencing your relationship to a concept--it's referencing the concept itself. for example, "bondage" in this context is not referring to "being turned on by tying someone up/being tied up," it's referring to the concept of being tied up/tying someone up itself. this is one of the most common kinks you'll see people playing with in entirely nonsexual contexts--most rope groups have at least a handful of players who are asexual or entirely sex-repulsed, for example. at a lot of rope play sessions, sexual activity will be banned entirely & you'll generally be expected to not show signs of sexual arousal while in that space. because it's not the space for that--sexual play parties are their own thing.

so what makes something a kink vs. a "normal" interest, if it's not a sexual aspect? mostly social stigma. the group of interests considered "kinks" have developed a shared umbrella due to a shared societal pathologization of those interests in similar ways, and one of the ways that pathology manifests is by considering those interests fundamentally sexual. there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a sexual dimension to your kink, to be clear--but society sees sex as inherently disgusting, and sexualization is frequently weaponized to pathologize all kinds of people.

portraying interest in domination/submission as inherently sexual, for example, means those explicitly navigating consensual d/s play are relegated to the realm of "the bedroom" and signifiers of their relationship (i.e. a collar) are considered "obscene" and not fit to exist in public--even when equivalent signifiers of vanilla lifestyles are allowed and not considered obscene, i.e. a wedding ring. if you portray an interest in roleplaying as a dog as inherently sexual, it means anyone roleplaying as a dog in public is subjecting the public to nasty, perverted sex, it can be classified as obscene, you can arrest people for barking and wearing leashes even if they are deriving zero sexual pleasure from it whatsoever and are not exposing themselves or harassing anyone.

why are most kinks expressed sexually to some degree, or have a sexual dimension to them? because sexually active adults tend to enjoy sex. i don't know how else to explain this, genuinely. if you are a person who experiences sexual arousal and sexual attraction, then you will often be aroused by your interests in a sexual context.

like, i am really into fandom. i love a lot of different things about fandom. one of the things i love about fandom is that it's horny; i'm a big enthusiast of smut, horny cosplay, et cetera and so on. but that doesn't mean that i don't like fandom in completely non-horny contexts, or that my interest in fandom is always sexual and can never be separated from sex. just because i cosplay erotically doesn't mean that i don't also cosplay in other contexts entirely. cosplay turns me on, and i also love cosplaying at conventions and for entirely non-horny reasons.

kink is the same. sometimes the exact same person is both turned on by petplay and interested in it nonsexually. this is actually like... really common, it's not even just "sometimes," i would say it applies to the vast majority of IRL kinksters active in my local scene, and i would hazard a guess that this isn't a major outlier, it's fairly common in scenes across the world. but if you can understand "i like cosplaying, and sometimes i'll cosplay at a convention, and sometimes i'll cosplay for sex, and sometimes i'll cosplay for fun alone in my room, and sometimes i'll cosplay to jack off, and sometimes i'll cosplay for money, and none of these are The Only Reason I Like Cosplay, and sometimes when i cosplay i will do it in a way that only includes some of these reasons and not the others at all," it shouldn't be too hard to apply the same reasoning to kink.

anyway, trying to relegate "kink" to only and solely refer to "this set of stigmatized interests and relationship dynamics, but only in reference to sex specifically" is closing the barn door after the horses are gone. sorry y'all but the kink community developed in response to medical pathologization and severe social stigma. there's no post-hoc way to turn it into an ontological classification of some form--kink is messy and abstract as a category because it isn't a category based in, like, scientific observation or ontological meanings of words. it's a category based in "we think these people are freaks and we need a diagnosis for their freakishness" lol. the forcible sexualization of every aspect of kink is part of the initial classification of this loose social realm as "fetish" and/or "paraphilia." sex is not evil or scary or bad but equally the structures doing the pathologization do consider sex to be evil and that's not something you can just ignore when discussing how sex is utilized rhetorically in these discussions.

okay maybe this is overly harsh but I genuinely think that if you say this shit you're probably not actually gay. SORRY

when people bring up religious factors in these kinds of conversations, its always hard to sympathize with their concerns. The idea that women have to shield parts of their body from men - any part, for any reason - is misogynistic/transphobic! There is no non-terfy reason that a man and a women to be treated differently. If your religion dictates that a man and a women should, it's misogynistic and transphobic and thems the breaks

the only thing I can think of when people bring those reasons up is analogizing gender to race - its quite clearly racist, even if your religion dictates it!

I would not specifically call it terfy, but yes.

lots of religious rules about gendered interaction were developed by societies with very different views on gender than ours, and you're gonna have to deal with that if you want to follow those rules in a modern society.

and the thing about gender segregation in particular is that society used to be more gender segregated and has been gradually becoming less so, and like. that's good. But it's definitely going to cause friction if your religious rules relied on the existence of gender-segregated spaces and they're being taken away.

which, like, I get how that sucks. but i only have a limited amount of sympathy for it, because the gender segregation is being taken away for what I think are good reasons.

Because people have nagged me to shower, whereas nobody has nagged me to play more video games or eat more chocolate or such.

Post That Criticizes Feminism Because of Its Lack of Intersectionality In Relation To Autistic and Neurodivergent Women

Since I started to talk about this I’ve gotten literally dozens and dozens of messages and asks from autistic girls and women who feel alienated from feminism due to things related to their autism. So I’m gathering this message into a call to action:

Conversations about makeup culture and about performing femininity need to take into account that autistic women often can’t fully “present” in a feminine manner due to sensory issues and the difficulty of understanding social rules about these things. We don’t make an active choice to present “GNC,” people will often read our femininity as wrong or off no matter what we do. We often have experienced a lot of coercion and social pressure related to makeup and feminine dress and behavior, and it’s frustrating to hear it discussed as if this doesn’t happen.

Many, many autistic women feel more comfortable in male-dominated social groups, and there are real reasons for this. It’s been extensively discussed how women are socialized to be more sensitive to others and less direct in expressing disagreement and dislike. This makes being autistic among women often very difficult. The social rules of interacting tend to be more subtle and complex among women, and interaction between women tends to have more social ritual, in my experience.

Virtually every autistic women has been hurt by other women because of things related to her autism!!! Many of us have had traumatic experiences being bullied as children or teenagers by other girls. Discussing the “sisterhood” we supposedly have while basically saying that female bullies are a made up patriarchal trope and that oppressive and harmful standards for women are only enforced by men comes off as REALLY tone deaf to us because many of us are messed up well into adulthood from the things other women did to us.

Making an active choice not to perform femininity for Feminism reasons and being chronically unable to demonstrate that you can are wildly different things in how other women respond. No matter how supportive female social groups are of people rejecting “femininity,” acceptance among them (read: being thought of as Normal) often involves showing that you can perform femininity. Some level of gender conformity is a part of being read as “normal.”

Please stop talking about those annoying men who are obsessed with some war in history or with their music or something and how cringy they are. All we can see in it is how similar we are. I’ve had similar super niche special interests. (One was Lewis and Clark.) In general stop making nasty jokes about men who are weird or socially awkward. They really, really don’t come off like they’re truly about them being men.

if you make fun of men for autistic traits, you’re showing you don’t support autistics, the end.

Stop having the face of internalized misogyny be a girl with few or no female friends, who isn’t overtly feminine, and who thinks she’s “not like other girls.” This stereotype is so obviously autistic/neurodivergent-coded it makes my eyes bleed, and it makes me so uncomfortable when “not like other girls” girl is openly portrayed as wrong or irrational for not embracing the friendship of other girls, when 99% of the time in real life she was abused, mistreated and rendered a social outcast by them in the first place. Portraying her as the enemy and full of superiority and hatred feels so insidious when many of us were that girl and would have burned our eyeballs out to have female friendships. That comic going around where “Not Like Other Girls” girl falls in among a group of girls she used to disdain and finds friendship there makes my heart hurt and I hate that what we’re supposed to get out of it is that she was wrong about the “other girls.” I can’t describe how wonderful it would have been to be accepted like the girl in the comic is.

You’ve got to understand the amount of anger a lot of us still have over this stuff. It wasn’t a choice! A lot of our anger comes from how desperately we wanted those female relationships when we were younger!

For every post you make urging girls to overcome their “internalized misogyny,” and surround themselves with other women, you have to make a post about how girls bullying other girls is real, is abuse, and should not be tolerated. that’s the rule now.

The ableism of women hurts other women. Get rid of the ableism first, and THEN talk about “sisterhood.”

Supporting autistic girls isn’t just reblogging a post that says “support autistic girls,” it’s also learning about autism and being accepting of autistic qualities

Btw, saying autistic trans people only think they’re trans because they’re autistic is messed up. We’re not incapable of understanding our own identity and existence due to being autistic. Your take on how autistic girls are made to think they’re trans because of being gender nonconforming isn’t as helpful as you think it is, you’re just making your transphobia ableist. Trans autistic women are women and trans autistic men are men.

@autistic girls: your abuse was real and it shouldn’t have happened, and you didn’t deserve it. You’re not alone in feeling alienated and rejected by feminism. I’ve gotten more messages about my posts on this subject than about ANYTHING else I’ve ever posted. I hope we can make feminism better for autistic women. I love y’all and things will get better.

I’m also tagging this with adhd because I feel like my adhd girls out there also might be able to relate. Feel free to chime in if you want.

"We need to reintroduce brutally oppressive religious patriarchy, because of this graph the CEO of OKCupid posted for SEO juice back in 2009" is a depressingly common take.

I feel like we're rapidly converging on Born This Way discourse about weight.

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea that body fat is purely an index of willpower is dumb, it's clearly more complicated than that, there are clearly relevant factors beyond how much one eats and how much one exercises (not to mention factors outside of one's control that affect appetite and ability to exercise). But I also don't think evidence actually supports the claim that every body has an absolute set point and that any attempt to lose (or for that matter gain) weight is doomed a priori. Also, this is health science we're talking about, it was hit hard by the replication crisis, so even if studies were more univocal on the point than I believe they are, we should still take them with a grain of salt.

But above and beyond that, as with sexuality, we shouldn't concede the point that being fat (or any other weight) is a dire moral failing even if it is purely a choice. People's bodies are theirs to do with as they wish.

I just got a Facebook ad saying "You need HRT!" with big "Before HRT"/"After HRT" headers and bullet points underneath, and had a moment of psychic whiplash before reading the copy and realizing it was an ad aimed at menopausal women.

Getting a bit sick of all the "ooh I'm so glad Laios has a soft body!" "Laios is built like an average guy" style posts. Because he doesn't and isn't.

Laios is built like a fucking professional wrestler. He isn't like, super chiseled or anything but he does not have an "average" body, he his built like someone who does a LOT of physical effort and training.

I have nothing to add to the Maintenance Phase episode on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which is very good, except that (so far, I’m only about halfway through) they have not stressed what I think is the most obvious objection to parents’ transphobic bullshit, which is that 1) parents are often (obviously, in the case of many ROGD anecdotes) deeply emotionally invested in their child’s gender and gender presentation, and 2) most parents don’t know shit about their adolescent children’s inner lives. Indeed, many parents rarely seem to imagine that they *have* inner lives, and will struggle even when their children are adults to treat them like fully autonomous human beings. It is easy to be surprised by someone’s behavior when you invest very little energy in understanding them as a person in the first place.

An important definition of terms:

As far as I'm concerned, an assimilationist is someone who believes that queer people must assimilate in order to advance the cause of queer rights. An assimilationist creates a dress code for marches like the Mattachine Society did, fights against queer self-expression at Pride because "it holds back the movement," and believes that the only way for us to move forward is for all queers to live as cishet people do, but with little rainbow flags taped on.

An assimilationist is not "someone who wants the functions and institutions of cishet society to be available to queer people." It's someone who believes the only way to live is assimilated into cishet society, and anything else "holds us back." It's someone who wants Sylvia and Marsha to march at the back, and who prizes cishet aesthetic over practical liberation.

A liberationist is someone who believes that queer liberation is not contingent upon public performance of identity.

Let me repeat that, so we're absolutely clear: a liberationist believes that queer liberation is not contingent upon public performance of identity. ANY IDENTITY.

That means a sufficiently cishet identity and a sufficiently "respectable" identity, but it also means a sufficiently radical identity. If you actually believe in queer liberation, you don't just believe in liberation for people who look, act, and believe like you. You believe in liberation for people who genuinely want to get married, have babies by IVF and live in the suburbs as well as for people who want to live childfree on an anarchist trans commune/Llama farm.

I hear people use the term "Assimilationist" and "Assimilationist Victories" to dismiss as meaningless those victories that are insufficiently radical for their tastes, and that to me is only proof that those people are not actually liberationists in any meaningful way. In liberation, there must be room for people who actually do just want to get married and live quiet, content lives going to their kid's baseball games.

The difference between Assimilationist thought and Liberationist thought cannot be simply replacing "we need to blend in" with "we need to stick out." It cannot simply replace "we must be integrated into cishet society" with "we cannot ever integrate into cishet society and anything which permits us to do that if we so choose is insufficiently liberationist." That's the organizational equivalent of yelling YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD, and I'm fucking over it, y'all.

My liberation doesn't have to be your liberation. Your liberation doesn't have to look like mine. What matters is that we are helping each other up the mountain and making long-term plans to get to where we can, and that we recognize that every choice we make is going to leave someone behind, and we account for that and plan for that so we don't leave them behind forever.

We cannot regard gay marriage or gays in the military or instituting a nationwide right to transition or any of our future goals as an endpoint. They are only goals part of the way up the mountain.

We don't get to the top until we are all free to live as we choose without government or societal interference or sanction, and without having to perform an identity for those rights and respect. The freedom to be ourselves must include the right to "blue hair and pronouns" but it also must include the right to "your kid's school plays and a duplex in a suburb." The latter is not an assimilationist lifestyle unless you try to enforce it on everyone.

I'm so, so tired of people acting like they're radical thinkers for poo-pooing the civil rights advances that the community has achieved through literally decades of work as "assimilationist victories." That's not clever, cute, or correct. Every. Single. One. Of those victories is written in tears and sweat and blood. Every single one is wrapped in the funeral shrouds of people who died fighting for it. Every single one was achieved not by assimilationists alone, but neither by people who think the only true victories are the ones sufficiently pure in their leftist credentials.

It is extremely possible and indeed likely that if you judge queers by their aesthetic, you will miss partnering with some of the most radical people and shackle your movement to people who cloak regressive politics in radical language. I've heard some truly noxious words come out of mouths framed by snakebites, and I've known extremely radical thinkers who look like your grandma. And I gotta tell you, in those local elections which keep school boards free from Moms For Liberty? The latter are useful people for liberationists to know and have in our camp, those people who think like liberationists but look like your grandma or your auntie.

Enforcement of aesthetic as a condition of liberation is assimilationist thought. It doesn't matter if the assimilation is to pink hair and tattoos or polo shirts and khakis - enforcement of aesthetic and philosophy as a condition of liberation is assimilationist thought. It's just replacing one kind of demanded conformity with another, and when we say "none of us are free until all of us are free," that also means free to be fucking boring if we want to, full stop.

We talk a lot about how much work goes into being disabled, how much work we have to put into making appointments, and fighting bureaucracy, but this is also true of queer life. Freedom comes with ease, with being easily able to update paperwork, with being easily able to find employment and housing, with being easily able to create the family structures we want to live in. When all of us can wake up in the morning assured of security in our beds, food in our bellies, meds in our med trays as needed, and a day ahead of us filled with chosen purpose and chosen meaning, which ends with us back in the bed of our choice at the end of the day, fulfilled in purpose and secure in our homes and chosen families, then we are free, and not before.

You may notice a seeming contradiction in this, in that my liberationist philosophy has room in it for the very people who are currently annoying the fuck out of me by demanding allegiance to a leftist aesthetic over practical liberation (that is, a movement based in harm reduction and long-term strategy over adherence to leftist purity of thought).

This is not a contradiction.

It is not a bug. It is a feature. My liberationist ideals mean that people have to have the right to be wrong without their liberty hinging on being right, that's all. :)

your bilateral dysphoria piece… holy shit. you GET IT!!!!! thx for inspiring your fellow imp

<3 <3 <3

There is something I absolutely loathe about fashion content on the whole.

"What is your color season? Buy a whole new wardrobe." - I assure you that I am not throwing out perfectly good things I already have.

"Find your aesthetic and build a whole wardrobe around it" - again, this involves getting rid of things and buying new ones.

"Instead of buying this sweater, buy one that is pure wool." - I have news for you about how affordable pure wool is.

"Just go thrifting!" - Thrifting is not the gold mine that people seem to think it is. A lot of influencers are getting lucky because they live in cities where there is a relatively high turnover of stock at the thrift store. My average thrift store visit ends with me buying one or two things that 1. I like. 2. Are reasonably priced for the condition they're in. 3. Are actually my size.

If I had to sum up my irritation with this, it's that a lot of fashion content (and interior design from what I've seen) is that it is built on the idea that your life should have a unified aesthetic. But I would wager that most people have pieces and parts of different aesthetics cobbled together across different periods of their life. And there's nothing wrong with that. You don't have to start over every time your "aesthetic" shifts a bit.