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inthestarsme · 1 year

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Astro Notes pt. 7

These pictures are not mine! I have taken them from pinterest, the second one seems to be from "Rachel Home and Life" on Pinterest.

‼️Don't repost my Observations without consent and mentioning my page‼️

I very much respect non-binary or trans people. If i'm talking about man or woman, i'm talking about cis-men or woman i know, because often, due to societal coding/standards, there can be differences depending on the gender. But it could very much apply to you if you are non-binary or trans. Just take what resonates and leave what doesn't, as spiritual people like to say.🫶🏻

If you don't agree with my observations, please don't send any hate. They're only my personal observations that i'm posting just for fun. Especialy the specific ones can only apply to certain people. So don't take anything you read too seriously. It's not a science, just pop-astrology!😎

I'm back again! Hope y'all had a great start into the year and some beautiful or at least peaceful holidays. I'm not going to explain to much about my absence (i feel like me not posting regularely or as it works is just a thing now) and just jump right into it.

So, here we go! Ready.... Set..... Okay i'm kidding. But yes, let's go!

Moon in the 3rd house: I always need to talk to a friend about my feelings when i feel overwhelmed, sad, angry, etc. If i try dealing with it just in my head, it feels like a hurricane up there. Sometimes i like writing things down too, but i prefer talking it through and getting a second, reflective opinion and reaction. This kind of fits this placement, so maybe this could help you, if you haven't figured this out about yourself yet.

Chiron in the Solar Return-Chart: I feel like Chiron here shows you a wound that developes over the year, that you might only start seeing at the very end or in the next year.

Leo Risings: You guys really are these confident, radiant, extroverted, even loud types of people. Very social and outgoing. You "shine" and are quite populare. As i am an Aquarius rising (so my rising falls into their 7th house) i tend to attract these kinds of people (as friends and also partners/ love interests, but love interests more so sun in leo as the sun is the heart) even though you wouldn't think so because i tend to be more shy and reserved. But it really doesn't mean that is how you truly feel inside. It is one of the most prominent parts of your personality and how people know you, but you can still hold a lot of insecurities inside yourself. Also: blond hair tends to be typical for these people, also the darker blond shades. But it isn't a must, i've just noticed this. Maybe also just hair that "shines" or somehow stands out.

North Node in the 12th house: Learning how to deal with addictions and any kind of mental health problems, that could've or did get you into any kind of facility (prison, etc.) is a big and important part of your life and souls journey. You need to learn how to take care of your physical health and get a healthy routine and sorted out everyday life, so you can deal with your mental health problems, and not use drugs etc. as a way to deal with your every day life/ to run away from your everyday life/ to make your addiction, mental health struggles, etc. your everyday life and make it mess up your health. You may naturally have always been so focused on work, routines and everyday life, etc., that you always have tended to forget about your mental health and anything to do with that.

Jupiter in the 9th house: Things like religion, philosophy, higher (college) education and traveling can be a source of great happiness and success in your life. In which way really depends on other placements and if you are religious or not, etc.

Moon in the 9th house: You might really need religion or certain philosophical theories placed in your life to feel emptionaly secure and stable. They don't need to necessarily be a typical kind of religion or a academicaly accepted philosophy, but just something that exists inside yourself that fits into these categories.

Empty houses: I think a house being empty just means that in this life there isn't really a focus on this area in your life, or it tends to sort itself out naturaly through other areas in your life that are more in focus. As you have your ruling planet of the house sitting in another house and do not have anything putting more of an emphasis on this house, i think the energy of the house plays itself out through other areas in your life or are influenced by other areas. It still exists in your life, but it isn't in focuse just for itself (i know this isn't necessarily how this is interpreted in general, this is just how i see it).

Scorpio MC: I feel like, as Scorpio and Pluto have a lot to do with ego deaths, a lot of people tend to see me in a bad light and as problematic because i kind of go against their ego, because i trigger something in them they don't want to face and they are hiding with their ego. Also, I'm not necessairly the secretive type of person, but if i stay more secretive, people tend to be more interested and intrigued by me. I also get peoples attention if i present in a "shocking" way (as would many), but i like it honestly (my aquarius rising just loved being weird), and i feel like often people just silently watch me and even admire (or at least noone has ever complained or said anything negative).

I hope you enjoyed this one again. Please leave certain aspects you want me to get into in another post in the comments or just any kind of post you would like to see from me.

I wish you a wonderful year! Byee🫶🏻

#astro community #astro observations #astroblr #astrology #moon in the 3rd house #chiron #solar return #leo rising #north node in the 12th house #jupiter in the 9th house #moon in the 9th house #empty houses #scorpio midheaven

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johannestevans · 1 year

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Okay so similarly to last anon about topping as a trans guy/trans masc, how do you build the confidence within yourself to top someone with a penis? Cause my partner is super kind and willing to let me learn but I struggle with my own mental barrier of lime not being "manly" enough or confident enough for topping. I know a lot of it is internalized transphobia but I just wasn't sure if you had any past experiences that helped you over come that or other fears surrounding newness and such.

my directory of work / / tip jar

That sounds like a tough set of feelings that are all mixed up together!

I'm gonna unpack some gender stuff and ungendering things first, and then specifically get onto feelings of masculinity, because I think those are two separate mental processes that are (understandably) tangled up.

Before I go on, though, there's a lot of thoughts and exercises I'm going through in this essay, and I just want to say that more valuable than anything I'm about to say re: your sexual relationship with your partner, is to talk to them.

]Everything below is ontological gender thoughts and then feelings about your own confidence and masculinity, but given that the important thing here is your sexual chemistry and dynamic and relationship while the two of you fuck, their feelings and thoughts might well be super valuable here!

Even if you just say, "Hey, I asked this pretty writer fag for advice because I've been feeling these feelings and it's been tough for me, would you also like to read what he said?", that might be very helpful and valuable!

All these big feelings and big problems often feel less big when we share them with those we love and are intimate with. A problem shared is a problem halved - an insecurity shared with a trusted someone is one that can be soothed and be specifically treated with gentle gloves. If your partner doesn't know about it, they can't do that!

Anyway, on to me talking too much:

Me and my boyfriend were at a kink event yesterday that was very straight-dominated, and one thing that sort of occurred to us that we don't tend to think about, because we're not really in community with cishets and their sexual culture, is that for a lot of cishets, "pegging" - a cis man being penetrated with a strap-on, by a woman or by someone else without a cock, is in itself considered a kink.

And Lewis was like, "And that's ridiculous because it's just like... It's the woman topping. It's not special or important because it's just two people in a relationship and she's the one topping, but because they're straight, it becomes about him being humiliated and her dominating him when it's literally just normal."

And he's obviously right, like...

People often assume that in a sexual dynamic:

the top = the dominant partner = the more masculine partner

the bottom = the submissive partner = the more feminine partner

But the act of topping or bottoming (which I'm using in this context to refer to someone being the penetrating or penetrated partner, although "top" and "bottom" are often used to refer to a partner acting versus a partner acted upon, which is explored and discussed a lot in this glorious piece, Top or Bottom: How do we desire? from The New Inquiry a few years ago) is not in itself an act of domination or submission.

You mention not being confident enough to top, and link that confidence with your masculinity - do you think of topping as an inherently more confident act than bottoming? Is there a certain security you associate with topping, or a certain certainty of thought or intention, that you might not ascribe to bottoming, because you think of bottoming as passive and topping as active?

To be penetrated is not to be subjugated, nor is penetration in itself an act of subjugation, or emasculation, or even domination.

But while we still think of penetration as domination, we automatically association that act of domination with masculinity, with butchness, with being (as in the essay) the brute, with being the actor upon the acted, with being the "active" (as opposed to passive) partner, etc, because in cishetero ideals of sex, sex is something done by the man to the woman.

But you know trans girls that top, do you not? Whether that's them fucking boys or girls or other people entirely, there are trans woman who top. They are not less feminine for doing so, they're certainly not less womanly.

And you know cis men that bottom, yes? And not just twinky, effete, fairy boys who are fruity with lisps and grabbable hips and pretty eyes - there are big, hypermasculine butch men with glistening muscles and thatches of thick hair on their tits who just stepped out of a Tom of Finland poster who love to be fucked. It might well be those ethereal fairy boys who are doing the fucking.

Perhaps they like to be bent over and fucked - perhaps they like to lie back and cup the faces of their partner and coax them into fucking him, smiling sweetly, saying, "That's it, come into me, you're doing so well, yes," and treating it as an act of love and tenderness, but also, one in which he is still undeniably in control and the dominant party, but not by way of typical masculine, patriarchal performance. It can be anything it wants to be, depending on what the parties involved are intending, what they're thinking, feeling.

What the fucking signifies and what it means is in the eye of the fucker.

Is a cis woman topping her cis man boyfriend masculine? Is she actually taking away his masculinity, or is she having any for her own? Is she less or more feminine because she uses a strap-on? Is it more or less so if it's matched to the colour of her flesh?

What if it's pink?

And all of what I've just said really assumes a binary of tenders, of the transfeminine and transmasculine as extensions of the cisfeminine and cismasculine, as parallels of their gender thinking that in themselves are, you know, constructed by the dominant culture - white Western imperial culture, where that binary was constructed and where those boxes exist to oppress and to control, through a flimsy defence of "biology" and also through constructed social roles.

How much do you believe in that stuff?

Play it out as a mental exercise - make a list (you don't have to write it down, you can just think about it in your head) of the sex acts you and your current partner do together, and the sex acts you've done with other partners, and other sex acts that you've dreamed about or fantasised about, and ask yourself...

Do I think of this sex act as more masculine or feminine or is it gender-neutral, or do I think it's genderfucky in some way? If it's genderfucky, in what ways is it genderfucky?

Is it genderfucky because it particularly adheres to or particularly subverts certain gender roles in or outside of the bedroom? Is it genderfucky because it exists in some way outside of the gender binary for you, whether that makes it genderless or genderful, or abstracts it to some entirely different kinds of gender?

For example, if a cisgender man is penetrated by someone else's homegrown cock, how does that feel, genderwise? What if it's someone else's cock as a strap-on? Does the colour or consistency or size of that cock matter in the equation? What if the person penetrating him is an android, and their cock is part of their body, but it's metal or silicon or otherwise matched to their robotic body? What if the person penetrating him is someone who's had a phalloplasty, and their penis was made via surgery and a cool skin graft from their arm? What if it's a fantasy universe where the person did have a clitoris, but they drank a potion and it turned into an average or more-sized typical cock? What if the person penetrating the man is a tentacle monster or some other kind of alien creature, and they do not conform with the bipedal constraint of the human form?

What if all of that is the same, but the cisgender man being penetrated is now a transgender man? What if all this happens to a transgender woman? What if all this happens to a cisgender woman? What if all that happens to a nonbinary person?

If that nonbinary person was assigned female at birth, or if they were assigned male at birth, does that change your feelngs or your assumptions? Why? If that person has had different surgeries of their own - phalloplasties or vaginoplasties, penectomies or mastectomies, metoidioplasties, or any other kind of genital reconstructive surgeries? Does that change anything?

And that's just the act of penetration, but you can think of any other kind of act that you do during sex or as a lead up to sex - kissing, massage, biting, frotting, using a vibrator, nipple play, spanking, dressing up, etc etc. How does gender play into it? What are you gendering, and what are you not gendering? What about the language you use? Say, calling a cis man's chest his tits or boobies or breasts or his mommy milkers, but calling a cis woman's chest her pecs or her chest, or even her man boobs?

What acts do you see as adhered to specific gender identities or presentations or ideas of gender, and which acts are more flexible or unattached? Why are they different? What makes them different?

So that's part one of this, yes?

And all of that is. A lot of thinking and a lot of ruminating, and by no means am I saying you have to sit down and get it all done tonight like it's homework due tomorrow - that's more a set of thoughts and ideas that you can start unpacking as they come to you? As you think of new things, you can play with those thoughts and unpack them, and compare them and contrast them to each other, and see how much actively thinking about and deconstructing them in your head changes your feelings about them - and how much your feelings stay the same.

No matter what thoughts come up as you go through this, no matter what biases you find you have, or thoughts you find that you don't agree with once you start examining them, that is okay. There is nothing wrong or bad about how you think or feel.

None of the above is intended to lecture you, none of the above is intended to make you feel bad or insecure or like you've done wrong by having different thoughts or feelings about the different genders of things.

You have not transgressed by holding a bias, or by thinking of a sex act as masc or fem rather than neutral, or anything similar.

You have not transgressed. You have not sinned. You have thought thought bad thoughts, and subsequently are a bad person, or a bad queer, or a bad trans person.

This business of unpacking and untangling gender and sexuality from specific sex acts, of ungendering things or adjusting our lenses of gender, is hard and difficult and complicated work. Many thousands of essays have been written on this subject by other queer people, by BIPOC, by disabled people, by trans people, by intersex people, by everyone who has not been written into the constructed white imperial gender binary and its associated ideals of sex (which themselves have been escalated and fine-tuned and commercialised because of capitalism and other forms of white cultural supremacy), because it is hard and difficult to do. Because these are things we all have to unlearn, which is difficult!

A lot of these feelings, when we start unpacking them, cause us pain and make us feel discomfort, nausea, dysphoria, shame, uncertainty, fear.

They make us feel that way because by our existence, we are transgressing - because we exist in the way that we do, outside of this constructed binary (and unwilling or unable to conform to it, or at least feign / perform conformity), we disrupt it and we break its rules and we twist it and we bend it. Simply by being, we do those things.

And then when we start to look inward and really start doing that work, it can feel insurmountable and impossible and agonising, because how are we to unpick a framework which we've been sewn into our whole lives? How can we unpick our threads from a tapestry when we're sewn into it with surgical thread?

It's not our fault. It's not your fault or my fault, it is not our partners' faults, it's not even our parents' fault or our teachers' fault or any individuals' fault.

But it's a process.

So. Coming away from the broader thought exercises and zeroing in on your personal feelings about your own body, your own gender, your own role during sex.

How do you feel more manly? How do you feel more confident? How do you get past that barrier and feel "ready" to top?

If you want to top while feeling in control...

Does your partner normally top you? What positions do they usually top you in? Are there any positions they top you in that make you feel more vulnerable in some way, more controlled by them, in a way that you enjoy? Do you think that using those positions, you would then feel more like you're in control?

Would you feel more confident, for example, topping doggy style rather than in missionary?

Have you considered fingering your partner first and penetrating them not while fucking them, but during some other activity? So, blowing them while also fingering them, or using toys on them? Using a vibrator or a dildo on them while giving them a handjob? Even watching them fuck themselves on a vibrator or dildo while you give instructions - so not touching them or moving them down on it, but they only move as instructed by you?

All of those are playing with you being in control and dominating while they're also being penetrated, but is not necessarily topping them while fucking them with your own cock - you can use them to ease yourself more into the mental role or more of the confidence of what you want, rather than plunging directly in (pun intended).

There's roleplay, where you could play out a specific fantasy or wear a particular costume or outfit or something similar, that lets you feel more or at your most manly and confident, so that it's easy to really lean into a butch persona if that doesn't normally come naturally to you?

If you think you'd be more confident topping while ceding some control, have you thought about different positions for that? For example, you lying back and your partner riding you, and easing themselves down onto you?

Or you topping them while they instruct you exactly how to move, or you're being guided by them, acting more in the service top area?

Another option is double-ended dildos! I'm not sure how comfortable you are bottoming or being penetrated, but if you do enjoy such things, a double-ended dildo means neither of you are topping, but you're both bottoming, and that can be somewhere interesting to start that's focused on the sensation and experience together.

All of the above you can then use to transition into topping your partner more the way you first envisioned, or first fantasied about.

Sorry that's a lot to chew on, Anon, but I hope it helps and I wish you love and luck! Like I said to the other guy that asked about topping, so much of this is like...

Because it's new and because you haven't done it before, it can feel like it's a huge and impossible thing, and then once you do do it, a lot of that mystique and that sense of infinity (infinite things that can go right, infinite things that can go wrong, infinite emotions one way or the other) fades away a bit!

#musings #anonymous #transmasculinity #topping #gender #long post for ts

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chipped-chimera · 6 months

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So, I'm a Lesbian I guess.

So uh, life update. I came out to my Mum, so I figured I'd do so here too.

I've done a bunch of self reflection, healing. I reached out to my ex and we had a good conversation and I think that just made everything even clearer for me.

So yeah, this is me saying I'm not bisexual. I'm lesbian. And I probably always was.

More context below the cut if you want it (it's long). But anyway, here's to finally feeling like I'm finding the real 'me' in all this rubble.

❤️🧡🤍💖💜

I thought I was bisexual for ages. The fact I even got to think that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for my ex, who identified that way and I felt in a safe enough environment to express it. In the past two months I went through some self reflection, and talked to my ex for the first time in 2 years. It was good, and it's too complicated to explain easily but at least on my end I was getting a double dosage of the comphet juice between just regular expectations and the undiagnosed autism (also jesus christ, being a teenager in 2005-2010 that environment was just fucked up for anyone who might be trying to come to terms with not being straight). Kids in my school were more accepting, but also in the same breath using 'Gay' as an insult).

We were both undiagnosed neurodiverse people and maybe it was just the first time we'd encountered someone who just actually understood for once. Who saw who we were and were okay with that. The 10 year relationship, put in that context makes a lot of sense. So I don't blame him for how it ended. If anything I thanked him for breaking it off, because I was in such a goddamn state after being used by the Australian government (see Robodebt) there was no way in hell I had the mental tools or even brain space to realise anything about myself because I was too busy just trying to fucking survive. I would have lived and died in that relationship simply because at least it was safe, and stable. But it wasn't genuine.

Past two years since that relationship ended were fucking rough. For most of this year I kind of just turned into myself I guess, but I was letting it happen because after finding out about the high comorbidity of chronic health conditions with Autism and how it's likely related to long-term compound stress from masking for so long, I really asked myself when was the last time I just let myself 'rest'? Didn't do anything I didn't want to do or feel compelled to do because of some social contract or guilt?

I couldn't come up with an answer.

So I rested. And I think that's basically given me the strength now to finally 'wake up'. I dunno. That's how it feels. I only recently noticed my thoughts about women were structurally very different than the ones about men (and yeah it's goddamn fuckin' embarassing to say but uh thanks Larian specifically for giving me a female love interest tailored to my exact preference which FINALLY connected some dusty neuron in the back of my head or something. It was Karlach. MY GODDAMN GAY AWAKENING WAS KARLACH, ffs) and the more I examined it, the more everything became clear. I was hesitant to remove the bi label from myself, wondering if this was just a really extreme 'bi-cycle' swing but the more and more I thought about it, went through memories in my life, how I could never see myself with someone else it was always characters together and really it was the relationship and intimacy between them, regardless of gender that I was appreciating.

I thought I was grey ace but after going 'huh these thoughts are kind of different' and realising that yeah, I could imagine myself with a woman - it wasn't some weird other shit I'd told myself like it was just visceral self hatred or something, placing myself with a guy it was literally I did not want to be with a guy - it became obvious. So fucking, embarrassingly obvious.

I'm not sure where things will go from here. I am incredibly socially isolated in real life. My best friend is my Mum. I don't have a social circle at all outside of online spaces. I'm 30 and that's a fucking weird age to be thrown out into the world essentially experiencing goddamn delayed idk mental puberty because you suppressed it that hard. I haven't used a dating app in my LIFE. I'm still kind of scared of being hurt by others and I'm aware it's not entirely logical, but I just feel fragile. I'm also still picking up the pieces of my life.

I've confirmed a C-PTSD diagnosis with my psychologist, which explains why all the CBT tools I'd learned over the years just stopped working (CBT doesn't always gel well with PTSD or Autism) so that's probably going to inform treatment going forward. My intense fatigue issues are probably caused by having to carry all this fucking trauma and suppression of myself. As I said to my Mum, it's like I'm just 'Tired from being alive' at this point. I'm really, really fucking hoping it's not Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/ME. The new medication I'm on seems to be keeping me going past the 4hr mark though, so we might be onto the right medication mix (I do not appreciate the 7:30pm crash, like clockwork, where instead of feeling unfocused and tired like before I now feel jacked up as hell like I'm waiting for someone to punch me however :V)

I don't know where this is going. Or where I'm going. All I know is 'I'm going'. When the breakup first happened, when I hauled myself out of the Mental Health ward and back to my parents home where I had to figure out what the fuck to do after any kind of certainty of my future had been completely obliterated - I saw a lot of snakes. I'm kind of vaugely pagan, if I'm honest. I don't know how to put it. I am very scientific but I also don't think we know all the answers.

My ancestors were likely heavily Celtic, likely some Viking and Pictish influence as both family lines go back to Scotland and Ireland. I know through my reading that natural signs were important to them, so I start noticing when I see multiple occurrences, especially in odd places (I'll be real, I just remembered earlier in this relationship when I was more into pagan shit I saw a lot of Moths. Yeah. Yeah I feel like smashing my face into my desk about that. No I never figured it out then EITHER). I know quite a few things about snakes. Snakes are an animal that is both used as a symbol for medicine, but also classed as 'evil', especially in the modern christian context.

They are considered symbols of rejuvenation, of immortality, much like the Phoenix, they are constantly reborn through the shedding of their skin. Shedding is critical to a snake, because if it does not shed it's skin, it will die. This is a legitimate concern for zookeepers with snakes that have scars - they often struggle to shed completely, and they have to soak the snake's skin in water so they can cast off the skin.

So it's shed or die.

I have struggled to let go of things. Of everything that was done to me, but I knew it had to be let go. And today I have shed a lot of that shit. I am crying on and off but this is probably the first time it's easy. It's not physically painful, like knives in my throat, or something I have to shove down and keep contained for fear of being rejected. It's happy crying.

Because that skin being shed - it wasn't mine either. I needed rest, I needed to soak in that goddamn water dish so I could get through all the scar tissue. So it's probably the strongest image I have in my mind of everything. Of who I am. My entire life.

If you're going through difficult shit in life, all I can say is - you're strong. You're strong as fuck. Strength isn't being able to get into a physical fight, or being super confident around people - it's enduring life and the chaos thrown at you. It's being able to be broken down and rebuild, just like the snake casts off skin for their new selves. You will endure things and be stronger for it, than those who have lived all their lives without any pain whatsoever.

But it could be better, I know. It doesn't justify the pain. But please listen to yourself. Listen to your body. If you need to be selfish? Be fucking selfish! Don't want to do that thing? Don't do it! If you know it is costing you, if it is adding to that scar tissue - stop. Take the time you need to reset, to regain your breath. Ask yourself who you are doing this for. Ask what skin you are wearing and whether that is something you want to keep. Shed it. Let go.

It will hurt, but this is just the beginning. Change feels like a broken bone. But it will heal.

#kerytalk #lesbian #lgbtq+#sorry this got real long and kind of spiritual at the end but yeah #this is I guess the culmination of 30 years of my life and a lot of pain #uh yeah that spn tattoo I provided was taken directly from that idea bank for my own tatt because I felt it fit #and it's a good message to carry I think

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groenendaelfic · 9 months

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I've been thinking a lot about trans!Simon lately, specifically transmasc Simon, and the idea both saddens and infuriates me.

Not the part about Simon being trans of course, but how the Royal Court, the government and a not insignificant chunk of Sweden would react to Wille dating a trans man.

Because even if Kristina & co are told in the same briefing they find out he exists (unlikely but possible), they would hear his name first and assume he was AMAB.

Of course Kristina and the Royal Court would prefer if Wille dated a cis woman, but compared to a cis guy? They'd be delighted.

Transmasc Simon has a womb, to the best of their knowledge a fully functioning one, and that's all that matters. That Wille is enough into someone with a healthy womb that he's willing to marry and have children with them.

It's basically a win/win for everyone.

Wille gets to be with the person he loves, Kristina gets a happy son and hopefully grandkids and legitimate heirs in a few years, the government doesn't have to bother with pesky changes to the law and can still pride itself on Sweden being one of the most modern and progressive countries in the world, all without lifting a finger other than to permit the Crown Prince to marry the love of his life.

And if the relationship doesn't work out? Well then everyone can rest assured that Wille can manage to get it up for someone with a womb, so there's still hope. Yay.

Oh, except for Simon. It'd be a nightmare for Simon, because if he does not get pregnant, whatever the reason might be, then he'll be torn to shreds by the media etc and being called selfish will probably be the least of it. He will be pressured from day one of the marriage.

If Wille steps down? That is going to be a major blow to trans rights and acceptance, and terfs and transphobes will love it. I'm not saying that makes being a transmasc spouse to the future king worth it, I'm just saying there's no choice which won't be shit and leave Simon feeling guilty and most likely requiring therapy for life.

But if he does choose to get pregnant? He will be feminized to hell and back. He might enjoy being pregnant, but he also might not, and it as well as the entire circus around it might also cause the worst kind of gender dysphoria.

In fact I think it's very likely. And yet the pictures of him pregnant (and maybe photoshopped to make him appear more feminine because lets not kid ourselves people suck) will keep being posted and published for the rest of his life, whenever a "halfway plausible" reason arises, or maybe just because it's a slow news day.

And you know what happens after you have your first child? The questions of, why bother getting your figure back? Why not go for a second one immediately? Wouldn't that be easier? start coming up all day every day, even by "well intentioned people"'.

It'd be absolute hell for Simon, and that's why I'm never going to write trans!Simon (and/or pregnant!Simon of any kind). Apart from the fact that I would have too much anxiety about not being able to do the topic justice.

(I do know that there're a few trans!Simon fics out there I've yet to read, and that is awesome, because more fic is always good and because I admire those authors so much. This post has nothing to do with any existing trans!Simon fic, but is rather in reply to a few anon asks I got re Basket Baby and choosing to make Wille the one who gets pregnant, despite me generally seeing Wille as someone who prefers to top more often than not, and Simon to bottom, although they do switch plenty enough and want to try everything with each other, because they're Wilmon)

#basket baby aka the fic where Wille gets pregnant and has to give up the child is still going to happen though #one day #long after s3 comes out #but it will be abo or something similar #(it will happen the first time they decide to switch)#I'm never going to write pregnant Simon though #not even of the abo etc kind #this is in reply to a few anon asks but I couldn't decide which one to pick as the one to properly answer #so a fresh post it was #random ramblings #young royals #wilmon #trans Simon

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postmail · 1 year

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okay so biggg trans hc dump up ahead. idk how read mores work and i was sleep deprived as hell when i wrote this so idk

okay so trans maxwell right? trans maxwell. but consider that if one part of a pair of identical twins is trans then typically the other one will be too. so trans jack.

and thats just dandy and opens up a lot of interesting paths you could take with that. and look, ive got a whole deleted version of this post thats twice as long going over the whole wendy and abi thing, so just trust me when i say that ive thought about it, lol

and just listen to me. the idea that both jack and maxwell are trans makes me feel so much. perhaps the reason they seem to be rather close is because they share this one aspect of themself with the other.

imagine a nervous william admitting his darkest secret to his twin and finding out that the other has been dealing with the exact same thing the whole time. or jack putting on a brave face and telling william that he wishes he was born a boy and william saying that he feels the same, and that maybe they werent born that way but they could become who they know they are inside. neither of them will face this alone, so long as the other is there

contrast this with trans, hirsute wilson. wilson, who feels like no one in the world understands. no gets why hes happy he has hirsutism, and why he refuses to shave, because they think hes a woman. he cant tell them that he feel like his body has finally got the memo thats hes a man, that it feels right to be able to grow a beard. its no becoming cis over night, but it makes him feel better. gender euphoria and all that jazz

wilson feels like who he is in the inside is finally being reflected outwards. and if other people dont like the truth... well, he doesn’t need them anyhow. he knows who is, and thats all that matters.

when wilson moves to america, it is very much like turning a new leaf. here, he decided, he would live as a man- and nobody would ever know the truth. and it feels great. but it also feels very lonely. it feels very isolating, and he has a dark secret all over again. hes not lying to himself or others anymore, but he knows how fragile this new life is. one wrong move, one wrong person confided in, and this whole new life hes constructed for himself will crumble in front of his eyes.

all of this considered, is it so much of a shock that he withdraws himself, swearing the only friend he needs to be science? refusing to interact with others unless absolutely necessary, never letting himself get close to anyone. to protect himself

all of this compounds into living alone in a rickety shack in the woods, far from anyone else. never seeing anyone except the postman on the other side of the window.

wilson might pass much better, but he lacks something maxwell has- a support system, someone who understands him. this isolation protects him from the transphobia of the outside world, but its loneliness all the same

its this that makes him willing to listen to the smooth talking stranger over the radio. he has no one, and when even science itself seems to fail him, hes eager to hear out the first friendly voice hes heard in a long time.

when hes trapped in the constant, it almost feels like reality has come back to smack some sense into him. of course, of course this would happen, who was he kidding?

when he frees maxwell and then precedes to be freed himself it takes them both a long time to figure out that the other is trans. they are both very well trained in hiding this specific part of themselves, but theres only so long you can hide this kind of thing from some one you are literally surviving in the woods with

so when someone inevitably finds out, i think it would be a whole ordeal. if its maxwell figuring it out then i think he would be more chill about it but wilson would lose his goddamn mind. for the first time, wilson finally has someone who understands him and doesn’t judge him.

it would change everything. wilson gets more comfortable with maxwell than he ever has with anyone else and maxwell can understand and he can understand maxwell

its been so long since maxwell had had another person like him around, and its like a breath of fresh air. he doesnt have to watch what he says, he doesnt have to make sure that his voice doesnt sound too high, he can just be honest with who he is, and wilson wont judge him. infact, wilson almost seems to like him more because of it

maybe they try to go back to how they were after this reveal but they just cant. they know too much now to just go back to the way they were. and maybe they find that they dont really want to, anyways

they might be in hell, but theyve got each other.

all of this to say, t4t maxwil is the best maxwil. trans rights baybeeeeee

#long post #txt #dst tag #maxwell dst #jack dst #headcanon #theory #wilson dst #maxwil #uhmm #this is... a wall of text. lol #trans ppl......#this is the cheesiest most romantic shit ive ever written #ask to tag #is this weird? is this a weird thing to post? social norms evade me

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olderthannetfic · 2 years

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post/692135292953624576: what OTNF is talking about isn’t an *essential* part of gender or biology. What she is talking about is basically how a child is trained/encouraged to behave generally. And society does differentiate between how AMAB and AFAB children are expected to behave. Undoing all that baggage and differentiating between “I want to be this kind of person” and “I do this because I was taught to” is a lifetime effort. It doesn’t make someone less a man or woman to not have the 1/2.

post/692135292953624576: training as other men or women. (And NB folx also have complicated relationships with it). And there are cis men and cis women who don’t exhibit the expected behaviours (frequently they are subjected to mocking by society). TL:DR OTNF is talking about nonessential, socially imposed differences in how we raise children based on how we perceive their gender and how that influences their adult life. NOT “men are this by definition” vs “women are this by definition.” 2/2

Well said.

And I specifically would not use 'masculine' or 'feminine' or any terminology like that because the traits I'm thinking of most are some fairly invisible ones that aren't the stereotypical masculine/feminine ones.

Let's talk about a specific practical example to illustrate:

You might stereotype women as "nurturing", but you probably don't stereotype them as "better planners".

One area I've noticed a lot of trans women struggling in is the kind of gendered expectations and behavior outlined in that feminist comic You Should've Asked.

Part of being socialized female is being asked to take on an unfair burden. An adult is rarely interested in taking on this burden consciously and all at once. Even if they were willing, their ability to quickly absorb all that teaching is not great. A lot of the trans women I've known are understandably annoyed when a bunch of expectations slap them out of nowhere and those expectations seem shitty, boring, and hard. They often push back because it's "unfair", not realizing that the cis woman they're talking to has already been doing all this work.

What they don't realize is that this burden is part of passing. Not jumping in to shoulder the mental load pre-emptively and unconsciously makes you read as other in a lot of cis woman-centric social spaces. It makes you less comfortable to be around. Specifically, being socialized female means having an unconscious impulse to jump in and do certain things that is hard to stop yourself from acting on. When a group is only people who are like this, no one is taken advantage of. When anybody who does not participate enters the space, they start taking an unfair chunk of the attention/time/free labor from other members. The immediate unconscious instinct for self preservation says to get rid of the person hogging the resources. That person may have no idea or actively not want this to be the case, but since it involves everybody's bad unconscious behaviors, it is very, very difficult to put a stop to even if everyone knows what's going on and is working on the problem.

So on top of whatever transphobia and other issues a trans woman faces going into a space full of cis women, she may also come across as a boor simply because she hasn't been socialized the same way through no fault of her own. Trans men and other AFAB trans people, meanwhile, usually give off the same unconscious cues and fit in more smoothly.

Sure, not every individual, but I've seen this pattern constantly in nerd spaces among people I personally know, and I'm not talking just one or two examples either. I think it's particularly stark for rich, white trans women who previously appeared to be cishet white men at the top of the heap with few of these kinds of social expectations thrust upon them. Times a billion if they were socially awkward in the first place and society let them get away with not painfully learning things they're bad at because they passed as a man. They may have been personally kicked around by life and treated like shit for not being masculine enough or been secretly internally tortured by the ill-fitting role they were trying to play, but institutional problems haven't really hit them until now. The struggles of female socialization have often been fairly invisible to them.

I very, very persistently see this pattern where trans women are now rejected by their former supposed peers, but whatever group they'd theoretically join that's more woman-heavy also rejects them for giving off unfamiliar social cues. (And yes, sometimes transphobia, but it's not always and only that.) It's sad and it sucks, but it's not entirely on this new group for failing to recognize them as women.

I'm sure similar things happen in the other direction to trans men, but I don't tend to personally observe them.

Anyway, the point is that Contrapoints and other such women can come off as abrasive or odd to a community that runs on socialized-female social norms. Our desire to be inclusive and respect people's actual genders is a good thing, but it can make us nervous about discussing how often this kind of rejection happens and why because the minute you do, people start wondering if you too are a shitty TERF. I don't mind people sending me asks asking for clarification. Being nervous makes sense because the world is absolutely full of transphobic messages. I'm just saying it's tricky to discuss because of this.

I've seen some criticism of Contrapoints that was actually relevant to her, but a hell of a lot of it is basically "She reads wrong, and it makes me uncomfortable".

IDK if I'd like Contrapoints as a friend in person. I love her as a youtuber, but I think that, in person, her social patterns and the milieu that she clearly comes out of would not mesh well with my social circles and the experience of growing up AMAB vs. AFAB is why.

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blissfulalchemist · 3 months

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fear, hate, hide, midnight for carly:3

Thank you Liz! Sorry this took a bit of time but I didn't realize how much I had to say on Carly. Anyway! Hope you enjoy! EW spoilers tw: brief mentions and implications of abuse and suicide just in case nothing is graphic

fear: What is your OC's greatest fear? What do they do when confronted with it? Are they open with their fear, or do they hide it away?

Carly is very fearful of being powerless. She grew up powerless and vowed to never be that way again. Like sure she got out but at what cost to herself? In any universe this is true and it is also true that she is not open about it. Very few people know her story and she keeps it that way. Stasia knows and understands the feelings, but she also figured it out right away or at least overall idea she never asked for details. In ffxiv Carly only ever tells the whole story very vulnerably to Zenos and its a big part of why she's so connected to him, why she gets so angry when he well perishes. He's seen the real her (which is very literal in this case, temporarily, as she let her dark side take over and in that moment her eyes shifted from red back to their original emerald green and her hair to its naturally darker color) and still chose to have her despite the weakness within. You can also see it in little hints here and there if you know what to look for, but she does a very good job in hiding it overall.

hate: What does your OC hate? Why? How do they act towards the object of their hatred?

Carly holds a lot of hatred for the world as a whole because she suffered so much trauma and no one was very kind to her. To get more specific she has a bit more of a hatred to the cis male population from the power they hold in society, to how they objectified her, the way the spoke about her rise to power, and overall just the negatives they have. A lot of this is due to life experiences, and once having power she takes more joy from playing and toying with them. She also has a deep deep hatred for abusers. She may not save the person being abused but she will kill them if she's allowed to (sometimes upsettingly she has to let them live for political business reasons). This is gender neutral and doesn't even have to be a parent to child or partner to partner, she will not stand for those in a town being against a single person as its the same thing in her eyes. This is also where it starts to look like she's killing people for little things which yeah on occasion but overall she's looking for a pattern and she gives you at least a second chance (kind of mostly you get one freebie to say something and then change behavior and she won't give you a warning), but some like in ffxiv where some soldiers make an insinuation that another female half-garlean soldier fucked her way through the ranks and that was an on sight kill (she did politely offer the woman one of them to kill but the other girl didn't want to).

A little more specific hatred she hates Siberite with a passion because she finds her heroism to be very hypocritical and she killed the love of her life. Its a complex situation between them but she will never get over Siberite killing a person when all she claimed to kill (initially) were primal beings/monsters. Zenos was never monstrous in Carly's eyes, and the fact was no one else bothered to try and look past that. Siberite and the Scions all came out of Shadowbringers having a better understanding on listening to the enemy and seeing their side but they still in her opinion never extended the same courtesy to her or Zenos. She also finds it the utmost disrespectful act of not even bothering to try and bring back his body (never mind that she was planning on bringing him back from the dead) so he could at least be given the bare minimum of respect of being laid to rest which is something that Siberite claimed to care about. Needless to say next expansion is going to be quite interesting between these two.

hide: What does your OC hide? Why do they hide it?

Carly really hides her past and her childhood. It is so very very rare for her to divulge anything about it that you are really fuckin' special if you know anything about it. There is a reason why her last name is Doe when I tag things as her human time because she doesn't even use her birth name. She will let you assume (mostly) whatever you like about her past because its not her, she's no longer that person and therefore no longer relevant. In her og verse Stasia knows all the face value details (name, birthday, place of birth etc.) because Carly did care for her younger brother and arranged for funds to be sent to him for his care in his older years and so her nieces and nephews could have a decent inheritance. Other than that good luck, I hope you survive.

midnight: What keeps your OC up at night? Do they have nightmares? Fears? Anxieties? What do they do in the small hours of the morning when they should be sleeping?

Carly used to have a lot of nightmares when she was fresh from the abuse of her mother and in her og verse from WWII being in the London bombings and taking on being a field nurse essentially. It gets a little complicated in that she's younger in ffxiv when she kills her mother and runs away from it vs og verse where she's an adult and uses the war to get away from her, because the dreams themselves are different and present differently.

In her og verse she has a deep fear of her mother coming back into her life and dictating it that she never dreamed of her mother beating her but of morphing into her because of the control her mother would exert. It wouldn't wake her in a cold sweat but in her everyday life you could see it in the way she made choices in life. She threw herself into the war effort of the USO to get sent overseas, once there she had quick and fast relationships hoping to find a decent man to marry so that her mother could have no say in her life since she'd be married. She moved to Vegas under a fake name to get in with the mob or at least someone powerful to just keep the little power she did have being out from her mother. Stasia provided the most for her and it created that deep loyalty to her.

In ffxiv she's 16 when she murders her mother and is on the run and she has nightmares every night of the abuse and they worsen on the days she didn't have much to eat since she was also starved to keep a dancer's physique. She's convinced in some way that her mother would come back for her and it would all begin again, which was unfounded because she dismembered that woman. But it all weighed so heavily because she was a kid and had nothing else to fall back on nor means to really make a name for herself given her half Garlean status, so there was a time where she just figured it was better to be dead then trying to keep looking for something to hold on to. However it was this act that brought her to finding the job stone of a Dark Knight and learning how to fight which would lead to her joining up in the Garlean army and finding herself under Gaius' charge until she was found by Stasia. The nightmares stopped after she took up Dark Knight, but unlike og verse where they stopped because she found power, in ffxiv its because she very literally let her dark side take over and inhabits her body. (a little weird and hard to explain but like it works guess think of it like Venom and their host getting along)

#Thank you again liz! Didn't realize I had so many thoughts on the woman #carly oc #carly chara questions #I just think she's neat!

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addiehour · 2 months

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personal thoughts on the staff post about the situation. under readmore + rbs turned off bc this is more for my archival than anything else

one thing that immediately stands out is the lack of clarification on the ban.

The reality of predstrogen's suspension was not accurately conveyed, and made it seem like we were reaching for opportunities to ban trans feminine people on the platform. This is not the case. The example comment shared in the post linked above does not meet our definition of a realistic threat of violence, and was not the deciding factor in the account suspension. [...] Transition timelines are not against our community guidelines, and weren’t a factor considered by the moderation team when discussing suspensions and subsequent appeals. We do not take action against content that is related to transitioning or trans bodies unless it includes violations of the Community Guidelines.

so what was? if it wasn't the transition timeline (which was repeatedly removed due to 'violating community guidelines', including after appeals) or the threat (which tbf i didn't assume was, on its own, the reason for the ban-- matt always cited it as 'one example'), then like... what exactly was?

the same (second) quote also re-asserts something we already knew. yeah, no duh, the concept of a transition timeline is not against community guidelines (tho it's worth mentioning that jv, an ex-employee, did refer to it as though it was equivalent to a sex worker posting an ad for their onlyfans.)

See, I don't think trans accounts here gets banned more often than, let's say, sex workers accounts. Because for Matt / moderation policies, posting a pic of your body to show up how your transition is going to your friends is the same than posting a picture of your body to promote your onlyfans. The context, the intention, doesn't matter much to them, the action is what matters. And of course, for a lot of trans folks here, their body is a very important topic to talk about, to show, to be proud of … but people like Matt don't really understand (or care) about the difference between that kind of self-expression and posting a thirst trap.

ftr, the above was posted before jv had seen the post in question (afaik), so they couldn't have known it was shoulders-up, but like-- this is still a drastically incorrect way to frame things. & transmisogynistic! like, first of all, if trans accounts don't get banned more often than sex workers... so what? they're not all sex workers, and even if they are, as long as their accs don't break guidelines they shouldn't be banned AS OFTEN AS "sex workers" (unclear if jv means sex workers or accounts specifically used for sex work).

it's also ridiculous because people post ootds all the time. people send photos of themselves in clothing made by artists on tumblr all the time, saying 'thanks for the [clothing item] it looks great on me!' i have never seen any of these threatened w community labels. objectively speaking, a trans woman saying 'look how my body has changed' in a FULLY CLOTHED transition timeline is not calling more attention to her body than a cis woman saying 'look how good i look in these jeans.' &, again, even on accounts by (e.g.) cis lesbians made for thirsting over each other (/pos) i fail to see any action being taken against (again, clothed) posts like 'i hear you girls like butches in flannel' or w/e. this is just obviously not true. moderation is not viewing all posts displaying people's bodies equally. (& tbh i disagree that you can linearly describe transition timelines as 'calling attention to the user's body', but like, whatever atp.)

furthermore, txttletale explained:

she was banned because her account was under a unique amount of scrutiny and subject to a mass harassment campaign and yes, that scrutiny came from the controversy around her transition photos.

so idrgaf if staff tells us more than once that she wasn't specifically banned for transition photos. that's like, not even the issue here. she has at least once had her account mass reported for posts like that to the point that she had to email and get it back, but even if it's not specifically over those pics, 1) they're still a major factor 2) wtf was it then lol 3) WHY DID THEY GET TAKEN DOWN.

bc nobody has managed to correctly address thus far why they continued to be consistently removed even after the appeals were re-considered by tumblr staff. i've seen some people posit that it was bc of the harness, which like. 1) i have not seen these labels on historical pride photos featuring harnesses, nor should they be used in those instances 2) whoah maybe that should be in the guidelines then!

like i get why they don't want to get into the reasons behind everybody's bans but at the very least maybe clarify your rules so trans people can better plan their posts for their audience.

Last year, the "mature" and "sexual themes" community labels were erroneously applied to some users' posts. An outside team of contractors tasked with applying community labels to posts were responsible for this larger trend of mislabeling trans-related content. When our Trust & Safety team discovered this issue (thanks largely to reports from the community), we removed the contracted team’s ability to apply community labels and added more oversight to ensure it does not happen again. In the Staff post about this, LGBTQ+ staff pushed to be more transparent but were overruled by leadership. The termination of a contractor mentioned in the original ask response was for an unrelated incident which was incorrectly attributed to this case. We regret that the mislabeling ever happened, and the negative impact it has had on the trans community on Tumblr.

...so there have been multiple transphobic moderation issues. awesome. others have pointed out that it's not clear based solely on this whether the contracted team is still on the job and what they can do (since this doesn't say they were fired or even removed from moderating, just that specifically their ability to apply labels was removed.) and the complaints of transmisogynistic application of community labels haven't disappeared, so this also seems like a failure to address the issue.

When it comes to the experience of trans folks on Tumblr encountering transphobic content, and interacting with bigoted users, we understand and share your frustrations. Tumblr’s policies, and Automattic’s policies, are written to ensure freedom of speech and expression. We prohibit harassment as defined in our Community Guidelines, but we know that this policy falls short of protecting users from the wider scope of harmful speech often used against LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.

also disappointing as a response. excuses the way the policy is written while also acknowledging it "falls short." if it falls short, it needs to be fixed, unless the right of terfs to post about how trans women are rapists supercedes the right of trans people to exist unharassed on this platform. as many have noticed, tumblr doesn't even have a policy against misgendering, which even twitter had at some point.

they proceed to say that going forward tumblr staff is doing xyz, which tbh i'm not even responding to here bc i doubt any of that is going to happen. the existence of the post itself verifies that what trans people at tumblr want has no bearing while matt is ceo.

...ok wait i lied.

Reviewing which of the tags frequently used by the trans community are blocked, and working to make them available next week.

imo, even if there are literally thousands of tags to look through, staff needs to have someone sit down and look through all of them. this puts the burden on the community to report these things AGAIN, which is not long-term feasible or fair. just go through the tags you're blocking and figure out which are fair to block (i.e., "pro ana" "ts porn" etc.) and which aren't (not just tags like "tgirl" but "nsfw art" because nsfw art IS NOW ALLOWED LOL).

idk most of my own thoughts boil down to txttletale's tags:

it is not a very meaningful gesture but it is all that the people makign it are actually capable of so dunking on it seems lazy

it doesn't mean much and most if not all of it is stuff we already know but what else can trans staff do. i'm mostly bothered by the implication in the post that they CAN do anything when we know based on everything leading up to this and this post itself that this is not the case. ofc i think it's incredibly brave of trans staff to do ANYTHING, but still, this is capitalism & modern tech. my hopes are not particularly high.

other people additionally pointed out that this post fails to:

specify that the moderation issues primarily apply to TRANS WOMEN (not lgbtq people in general)

& specify whether there are trans women/transfems working @ tumblr (they consistently just say 'trans people' which like. alright 'trans people' are very often transmisogynistic. but it does seem tho that there are transfems there so probably just wording.)

address the numerous bans of other trans women since avery

& the previous 'unexplained' bans of black and palestinian bloggers

& the entire system for 'report sexual content' which, when spammed, explodes a blog on the spot with no explanation to its owner

& the fact that matt followed avery to twitter to list out her sideblogs

REINSTATE AVERY'S ACCOUNT. lol.

anyway. a few notable responses, as of 2/24/24.

mostly positive:

(one) (two) (three) (four) (five)

mostly critical:

(one) (two) (three) (four) (five) (six) (seven) (eight) (nine) (ten) (eleven) (twelve) (thirteen) (fourteen) (fifteen) (sixteen) (seventeen) (eighteen) (nineteen)

(jv's notes plus reddit corpospeak 'translation') (more of jv's notes) (staff member echo's response) (jv's update on matt's lack of response)

(ex-staff member lara's response)

meanwhile, matt has been silent, after politely declining an invite to pissvortex's live chat & having his wikipedia page changed to say he died feb 19 in a "car hammer explosion." truly incredible

#bentxt #. once again reblogs off/under readmore bc this is really just for me to keep everything in one place #. so.#tumblr

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agp · 2 months

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i cry for the women who wish they were camab but unfortunately werent. i laugh with and at them too, though honestly probably more of the latter. but they have no idea what theyre missing and its sad really. if only there werent systems sorting us into these humanizing and dehumanizing categories on which our very personhood is founded, and those privileging from the current arrangement wouldnt get so much leverage for making their relationship to this privilege ambiguous if not a lie. i hope this kind of complaint is more than vaguely familiar and the parallel im trying to hint at is glaring enough.

transmisogyny demonstrably produces something unique that the exclusion of cis women from trans womanhood does not have as an observable equivalent genocidal force. acknowledging the coloniality of cis and trans as a product of the coloniality of man and woman shouldnt lead us to uphold these categories as universal and eternal, but as specifically bound to our political historical context: the dominant contempory coloniality of gender. the ongoing white christian hegemony, western patriarchy, settler colonialism, 21st century capitalism, (post)modernity, or whatever you call it.

and deep down this is an exlusionary practice on the same partial grounds that we are excluded from womanhood as trans women (i say partial because transmisogyny is also quite incentivizing). our exemption from certain forms of targeted misogyny as children coercively assigned male at birth provides certain privileges in our society that are difficult to talk about because they are consistently used as leverage to rob us of our womanhood again and again. it also makes it difficult to talk about male assignment as something that carries exclusionary demands relating to womanhood: what one could call transmisogyny.

the history of these demands and the leverage they continue to provide those exempt from transmisogyny are that very system. they are the particular forms of treating each other that dominate oppress and exploit us with particular forms of discrimination, in this case on the basis of assigned sex relative to claimed gender. transmisogyny as a system of values sets the conditions for the production of exemptions from transmisogyny in its more direct, active, and violent forms of systemic and interpersonal abuse. it is a history where transmisogyny is a demonstrably genocidal force, and the exclusion of cis women from trans womanhood appears not to be.

thats not to say it cant exist in relatively minor forms here and now, or that it could never develop into an equivalent form of violence. because if we let these systems develop further ways to provide us the material interest to dominate, oppress, and exploit each other relentlessly, with time, i know things could get a lot worse for everyone.

lets be naively thankful for cis womens exclusion from transmisogyny, in the same way trans exclusionary feminists, anti-feminists, or otherwise will continue to claim that the world we live in has been nothing but priviliging to those assigned male at birth strictly relative to the gender binary since time immemorial, and that we therefore do not experience misogyny.

cause idk. i believe cis women experience something particular when people dont believe they were cafab when they claim womanhood, but that calling it transmisogyny without further qualification in the way we demand that transmisogyny categorically qualifies as misogyny isnt as urgent in this political economy? and that defending the integrity of trans womanhood and transmisogyny is a higher priority here and now, just like terfs who prioritize defending the cisexist integrity of womanhood and misogyny over our political concerns.

the contradictions of gender will keep developing in new ways. i hope the political necessity of the duty to exclude cis women from trans womanhood deemed necessary to resist transmisogyny evaporates one day just as much as i wish the duty to exclude trans women from womanhood deemed necessary to resist patriarchy becomes obsolete as well. because they are both products of the same system that inovates new ways to dominate oppress and exploit us every day. and because i care. and because i am a revolutionary.

but maybe i also feel more empowered to revolutionize womanhood than trans womanhood and could use more support from transmisogyny exempt peoples of the world at the fucking moment

#this also applies to colonialities of sexuality. like treating gay/bi/straight as all-explaining for example

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skulltopcomputer · 6 months

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I Have So Much To Say About Transmasc Jake English

Disclaimer: This is my opinion- I definitely don’t think you have to interpret Jake this way, both gender and character-wise. Also, this is just for fun (I swear). Although I am interested in working in the confines of canon for as much as possible, I'm not trying to "prove" Jake is transmasc, I'm sure Hussie wrote him as a cis man. Content warnings under read more.

Content warning for discussions of transphobia and misogyny (if I need to add anything else let me know).

Just for context, I believe Jake realized he was a boy very early in his childhood. Thematically, it would be most appropriate shortly after Grandma English dies, so basically, as long as he's been old enough to understand the concept of "gender", he has known he is a boy. (I have a lot of ways that I think transmasc Jake would interact with the text of Homestuck, but that's all you really need to know for this post).

Also I’m going to talk about “the narrative” a lot here, which I'm mostly using to mean the perceived author of Homestuck, that is, the person who writes the narration, controls who to focus on and how the plot plays out, etc. I say "the narrative" instead of "Hussie" because 1. Hussie is a literal character within the comic and I'm not referring to them there and 2. I don't think they intended everything I'm going to say "the narrative" pushes here, even if their vitriol towards Jake was very much deliberate. It's important to have a term for this as Hussie's background as the specific type of Internet Poster they were greatly impacts how Homestuck is written- in Jake's case, how the reader is made to perceive his character.

OK onto the actual analysis.

(One of) the whole point(s) of Jake is that he conceptualizes himself in certain ways that aren't reflected in the reality of his actions. Specifically, he thinks of himself as some grandiose, charismatic action hero, even though in reality he’s just kind of a nerdy teen who watches movies all day. There are many reasons he views himself that way, but most relevantly to this post he’s raised solely on media to influence his worldview, and therefore both consciously and unconsciously assimilates the roles of movie character archetypes onto how he thinks of real people. This is easily mapped onto Jake’s perception of himself as a “man”, as (most of) the men he knows are the rough-and-tumble, kick ass adventure type. He thinks that since these are traits of men, and since he is a man, he must inherently be that way as well- even though in actuality, he's done very little to show it.

By the narrative’s standards, Jake makes a lot of mistakes as someone who wants to be considered a “man”. He idolizes female heroes alongside male ones (most likely influenced by Grandma English’s being his first model of what a hero should be), even going so far as to dress like them. He’s not ashamed of his attraction to men. In fact, he's open about his attraction to what the narrative considers to be abnormal (I know in the real world, an attraction to "blue women" would be regarded as incredibly tame, but considering what Homestuck considers a furry it's safe to say the standard of deviance is rather low. I think the emphasis on Neytiri is meant to accentuate Jake's affinity towards blue woman as "weird", especially as the narration highlights her nonhuman anatomy and she's repeatedly described as "furry"). The narrative punishes him for these traits, often in ironic ways. He is given a skimpy, uncomfortable, god tier outfit meant to objectify him (reminiscent of how women are objectified in the movies he likes), he messes up his relationship with Dirk so bad he convinces himself he's not attracted to anyone*, and he is embarrassingly awkward with the real-life blue alien girl he meets. Sincerity, especially among male characters, is often unforgivable to Homestuck.

*To clarify, what I think is happening when Jake says he's not "capable" of romantic attraction is that he's trying to convince himself he can't feel attraction, because he doesn't want to have a relationship where he hurts people/other people hurt him that bad ever again. I don't think it's "wrong" to interpret him as aromantic, and I especially don't think aromanticism should be treated as a "punishment". I just don't think of him as such.

Jake’s whole SBURB adventure is the narrative repeatedly, humiliatingly tearing down Jake’s perception of himself by placing him into situations wherein he is shown to fail to uphold it, both internally to the characters and externally to the reader. The “charismatic” part of his persona is all but demolished in his conversations with Aranea, as well as his relationships with the Alpha kids in the void session. In the Game Over timeline while Gamzee is fighting Terezi, all Jake can bring himself to do is politely ask him to stop. His most damning blow comes in his confrontation with Crockertier Jane, as he fails twofold at what a “man” would do in his place- he doesn’t want to fight her, and he doesn’t want to have sex with her. His admission of “not wanting to be a man and not wanting to punch her in the face” at BGD’s pestering is the narrative finally succeeding at pressuring him into admitting he’s too weak for the standards of masculinity imposed on him, or put another way, that he’s not a "man” at all. (Relevantly, BGD functions as both a Dirk [a character praised for his adherence to masculinity] analogue and Jake’s internal monologue, proving Jake is aware and ashamed of himself in the moment and that he thinks his friends would most likely judge him too). Once the narrative has proven Jake has failed at the standards of masculinity, it forces him into what he, and the reader, would understand as positions typically held by female characters in media (objectifying him, assaulting him, etc.).

Jake is often treated as “silly” and “stupid”, both outright and insidiously. He's the kid who grew up on an island, isolated from society, and therefore doesn't understand how the world "really" operates. He also shares Caliborn's unspecified "learning disorder", which in the narrative's terms, is just another reason he's out of touch. The more characters who think of him as stupid or ignorant, the more Jake's autonomy is diminished- how can he claim to know anything about his identity when he so disconnected from reality? Jake's continual crying falls into this too, as large displays of emotions are often conflated with stupidity, or at the very least irrationality.

All of this is so resonant for me as a transmasc person, especially since Homestuck is so influenced by internet culture. I was never a forum goer but I did a lot of digital self harm on Reddit and the sentiment that transmasc people are stupid, fanciful, confused teen girls that only want to be men because they want to imitate characters in media is (was? I try not to go on Reddit anymore) very common in those types of spaces. (This is amplified if you read Jake as autistic [as I do] as the “confused autistic teen girl” is unfortunately a very prevalent transphobic stereotype). Anyone who did not live up to a very specific caliber of toxic masculinity (wearing only masculine clothes, being attracted exclusively to women, repressing grand acts of emotions, etc.) was labeled as faking, and often subject to misogynistic harassment. I hope by now you can see how this connects to Jake.

(One of the reasons) why John's conversation with Jake in Act 6 Act 6 is so important to resolving his character is that John shows Jake that there's more than one way to be a man. John introduces a new type of masculinity to Jake, that of a "side kick", evidently referencing Robin, as he contrasts this archetype with "bat man". He recontextualizes his outfit meant to objectify him as something this character would wear. Robin- and therefore this role of the "side kick"- is still very much a male character who is allowed to be male even though he's goofy instead of a chiseled, emotionally repressed paradigm of masculinity. Jake shows a lot of joy at inhabiting this idea.

In summary, transmasc Jake is an extrapolation of the themes of how the narrative punishes Jake for not meeting the expectations of masculinity put upon him. There are other reasons why I view Jake as transmasc, but this is the most important one to me, as it's the most poignant. There are few stories that portray the experience of growing up on the internet, fewer specifically with a transmasculine lens, and even fewer that discuss the hardships of doing so in both cases. Ironically, the narrative's contempt towards Jake made for a more realistic, and therefore more evocative, experience for me.

Of course, not all transmasc people are going to view it that way, so please don't generalize. I like seeing negative experiences reflected in media, but not all people do. Also, I don't want to give Hussie credit for all of this- some (probably most) of what I talked about was legitimately intended to be bigoted, or at least rooted in bigoted assumptions. Homestuck is a text you should read critically, as it is embedded in its author's history, for the better and for the worse.

This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg concerning both transmasc Jake and especially Jake analysis in general so hopefully more posts to come. Also, despite the fact I didn’t go into them much as characters in this post, know I am a staunch Jane and Dirk defender (crockertier Jane is not really representative of Jane and BGD is not really representative of Dirk. I also don't think Jake is perfect or anything). They are also both transmasc but that's a post for a different day.

#jake english #homestuck #transmasc jake english #shuttle's writing

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housecatclawmarks · 1 year

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I’ve had a couple instances lately where I’ve seen other trans people processing like extremely justified rage at cisnormativity & cis ppl in general by like channeling it through some kind of spite for nonbinary people and it’s frustrating to me when we let this go unaddressed amongst ourselves outside of criticizing transmedicalism bc it just makes us all so much weaker.

There are a lot of us (trans people) out here & a lot of us have different opinions on pretty much everything to do with being trans but it is just SO fucking necessary to take a reality check sometimes and look at the people actually around you. a lot of you are much more comfortable saying ‘nonbinary people’ than you are saying ‘people with internalized transphobia who are scared of having a Trans Body and being seen as trans’, and those are two VERY distinct things.

I can guarantee you there are nonbinary people in your communities who are in the same hormones you are on, who are facing the same levels of discrimination for being trans that you are, who are being as outspoken visually and verbally as you are. And there are also nonbinary people who aren’t-the same way there are many binary trans people who are afraid to transition, afraid to really come out, afraid to talk to other trans people, afraid to be seen.

There isn’t any one true defining difference between a man and a woman and there isn’t any one true defining difference between a binary person and a nonbinary person.

This misdirection also just makes us less likely to ask the important questions about who is making us feel alone, and why. I.e., I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the fact that gayness has innate gender nonconformity, there have always been cis gay people using different pronouns, doing drag, etc, and there still are-in some ways they share similar struggles to us, but they aren’t being targeted like we are and in my day to day life as a trans person I can feel a very tangible difference between them and me, a difference I don’t feel with nonbinary people who haven’t medically transitioned-because the differences and similarities are SO MUCH MORE about how we see ourselves, what we choose, how we feel than what our flesh looks like, what we wear, etc.

When I hear other trans people talking about their frustrations with nonbinary people, I understand the frustrations, but not the targets-bc being nonbinary isn’t something that makes trans people more likely to hide, or less likely to stand up for each other. and it isn’t something that makes trans people less likely to understand dysphoria, to surround themselves with community, or to present as their gender. it definitely isn’t something that makes them more likely than any of us to cater to cis concepts of beauty and worth in how they present themselves and what they do with their bodies. Calling out frustrating behaviors for what they are and recognizing the specific people doing them is harder but so much more worthwhile than attaching them to a generalized group of people to vent about and calling it a day.

#aaron says things

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inthestarsme · 2 years

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Astro Observations pt. 2

Disclaimer:

‼️Don't repost my Observations without consent and mentioning my page‼️

If you don't agree with my observations, please don't send any hate. It's personal observations that i'm posting just for fun. Especialy my very specific observations can only apply to certain people. So don't take anything you read too seriously. It's not a science, just pop-astrology!😎

So let's go!

Moon 3rd House: I have this placement and if i am going through something, i always need some close friend to talk to. And i feel like, if i had siblings i would probably always talk about it with them (if the relationship was great). I just really need to talk it out, sometimes it doesn't even matter who exactly it is. 🗯 I also am a singer, and this placement can indicate great singing abilities (not bragging lol), or just being great at expressing your emotions verbaly/ vocaly. You might also use singing as an emotional outlet (i did that when i was little and too shy to talk to people about the stuff i was going through). 🎤

Aries Moon: Aries Moon can have really big emotional outbursts and can be very direct and aggressive in communication without even noticing. They aren't necessarily always like this, the ones i've met were actualy very confident talkers and quite patient. But if they get too emotional or you say something that gets on their wrong nerve, they can have quite extreme reactions or be very mean, without meaning to. 🤬Also, some kind of sport might be a great emotional outlet for these people. 🥊

Saggitarius MC: I've heard this thing about Saggitarius MC being seen by the public as the "bad guy" which might not be true for everyone, but i've actualy noticed it in quite a few famous people. Billie Eilish has this placement for example, and one of her most famous songs is literaly called "bad guy". She is also known for this more dark and emo aesthetic/ music and is said to have created the new music genre "emo-pop". ☠️

Scorpio Venus: I personaly have this placement, and when i love i love DEEP, which can also lead to possesiveness and overjealousy. But i am very loyal, and just by my moral standards (my Venus is in my 9th house), i would never cheat on my partner.🖤

Scorpio Mercury: I also have this placement and i loved talking about deep stuff since i was little, and i also have no problem talking about taboo stuff. There is almost nothing that shocks me, and so sometimes i can also tend to overshare mine and others secrets, because i thinks that it's not that big of a deal, even though later on i realize it might actualy be. 🫢

Saturn in the 7th house: You might go through very messed up romantic relationship stuff at some point in your life that could very much traumatize you. It's a fucked up placement to be honest, i wouldn't wish it on anyone. (Cheating, compulsive liers, etc.). One famous example is Johnny Depp. 💔

Saturn 4th house: Your home life could be filled with fucked up experiences, especially in your family. It can go from just very stern parents to domestic abuse. You might need to free yourself from that and bild your own, secure home to have a happy and well regulated home life. 🏠

Jupiter 12th house: Could very much have a lot of secret enemies. People you considered friends might just suddenly cut contact or block you, for no apperant reason. But you could also, depending on what's going on subconciously with you, give off very weird vibes, which might be the reason people react to you like that. Some people just can't pinpoint why they don't like you and keep a friendship with you because they feel bad, and someday just cut off the relationship without explenation, because exept for the weird/bad vibe they get from you, they couldn't tell you why they don't like you. I'm not saying it's okay, but this might be the reason. People can really feel what's subconciously going on with you. So you really need to work on you subconcious stuff and listen to you intuition/ the universe, so you can tell which people are bad for you and which ones are not. Your strong intuition and connection to the universe is one good side of this placement, which can bring you a lot of great stuff if you tap into it. If you heal and give off very good vibes, you could maybe attract some amazing people and even heal people just with the vibe you give off. 🪬

Leo Sun men: I can't explain why, but every Leo sun men I've met has done some marshall art at some point in their life, and even quite successfuly. It doesn't matter if karate, jiujitsu, taekwondo or kickboxing, just something where it's about fighting. 🤼

That's it for today! I really enjoy writing these, so leave a like, comment or share/ repost this to show some love! Bye 🤟🏻

#astro observations #astrology #astroblr #astro community #leo sun #aries moon #saggitarius #scorpio venus #scorpio mercury #jupiter #12th house #3rd house

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roachleakage · 2 years

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tl;dr: Being "uncomfortable" with a trans woman's sexual expression is usually just transmisogyny.

(Before you read this, please take note that this is NOT a post about sexual abuse. I am not talking about people whose sexual behaviors cause actual harm to others, but those who are often mistakenly deemed harmful, due to their identity and/or the kind of behaviors in question.)

Something I've had to unlearn as a trans man is the idea that I, or trans people at large, will benefit in some way by my acting "respectable" - I.E. not acting overly sexual, paying homage to the gender essentialism of our society at large, basically trying to present myself as someone who is not a "deviant" or threat.

Now, I don't mean that I tried to make myself personally conform to rigid gender expectations. In fact, I've always tried to be pretty comfortable defying those, and refusing to let cis people determine what my gender should look like. What I mean is, I felt uncomfortable about expressing the sides of me that could be considered 'deviant'. Whether that be kinks, unconventional ideas about the nature of gender and its relationship to people's bodies, or even just... admitting I had a sex drive. It felt like safety to me. Like I was protecting myself from being judged as a creep or a pervert.

In a sense that was true... but it was also a very maladaptive approach to my life. Because I would see other trans people (particularly trans women) and my immediate reaction would be discomfort. People could express their tastes with the same frankness that a cishet man feels comfortable wielding about his love of women's bodies, and because the taste itself was less than mainstream - or even because the person expressing the opinion was a trans woman - I would think "yeah, that's too much for me". And I would just kinda... turn away from it. Retreat to the safe zone of minimal expression, where I tried not to say anything that could be construed as too deviant, or even worse, as transphobic (because it didn't fit the mainstream, rigid definitions of what a trans person should look like).

And I'm not saying that every case of this was a horrible act on my part. Having your own personal preferences, and setting boundaries around them, is relatively benign as far as behaviors go. But it stemmed from a genuinely unhealthy mindset, which is that it was my responsibility as a vulnerable person not to give others an opportunity to attack. And the fact that I would see a trans woman being open about her sexuality, or expressing that sexuality in a way that was less than 100% cisnormative, and that would immediately ping my "too much" radar? That was transmisogyny, pure and simple.

This is a problem that I see in a lot of TME (transmisogyny exempt) people, both cis and trans. Occasionally TMA (transmisogyny affected) people as well, but TMEs are absolutely more prone to it. And it's not just a relatively harmless thought crime - it's an internalization of a belief that exists specifically to punish and harm trans people, especially trans women and those who are considered trans woman-adjacent.

You see, TMA people are always considered "deviant". No matter what they do, they're labeled as predatory, perverted, degenerate if you will. It's not something that they can escape, no matter how respectable they act. A trans woman (for example) who enters into a monogamous heterosexual marriage with a cisgender man will be seen as just as gross and dangerous as a trans lesbian who wears her kinks on her sleeve.

Now, I'm not saying that it's never reasonable for a trans person to minimize an aspect of themselves that the mainstream won't like in order to keep themselves safe. Sometimes that's just something you have to do, whether it's going stealth or pretending that you're not into gay dragon fatfurs. This isn't about that.

But when you make being "not weird" your entire identity, we have a problem. And if you start lecturing other trans people on how embracing their strangeness is "inappropriate", "validating transphobes' worst fears", or, so help me, fucking "fetishizing trans people's bodies", you are not helping. You are making the problem worse, and you are throwing every TMA person under the bus in the process.

We cannot do this. We CANNOT fall prey to the mindset that there is an actual line beyond which someone's preferences or behaviors are simply too strange to be acceptable. Because the people who fall on the "wrong" side of that line will always be those who are most vulnerable. People who cannot make themselves fit the standard you are creating, and will end up suffering because you made the decision to prioritize your own feelings of discomfort over their right to safety and respect.

#transgender #transmisogyny #this post is for both cis people and transmascs to be clear

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vaguely-concerned · 3 years

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Still thinking about that part in the Albert arc of Part 5 where Lupin specifically disguises himself as Fujiko -- who, among all the other things she is to him, is quite recently also his ex-wife -- to seduce the shitty old art collector dude and get his biometric data. He's got a bajillion other sexy lady disguises (this series is peculiarly obsessed with male-presenting to female-presenting crossdressing, it's -- there sure is something going on there), but he specifically chose to almost embody Fujiko for it like it's the only way to feel her company while they're semi-estranged/in a difficult place with each other. Like. Oh boy. Sentences that make me want to gently dissect his brain in a mildly concerned sort of way and go 'now just what on god's green earth is going in here, buddy?'. It is kind of nice how it makes it feel like she's also a bit of a mentor to him in ways you might not necessarily think of normally. (also it's very droll how he acts like anyone twisted his arm into going the femme fatale route when you could get the exact same amount of data by oh, say, posing as a waiter and leaning in a little closer to meet the dude's eyes while asking him if he wants his bill now and taking away a glass he's been drinking from and getting his fingerprints all over or whatever)

...I know Lupin is the main character and everything so it's not like he hasn't had attention on him over the years lol but I still wish they'd take one page at least out of the book of the woman called fujiko mine and hand an installment of the series over to someone who really, really wants to actually properly look at some of this stuff that's in the character -- whether intentionally or that's sort of accidentally grown into being through the sheer longevity of the series -- and let them get a bit weird with it. (Green vs. Red is kind of the... insufferably straight cis male version of that, where they went 'all he really is is an empty shell, an escapist character for ME and ME ONLY so fuck all the rest of you' and it's why that one's... not very good in my estimation lmao. they took all the identity fuckery and disguise stuff going on and went 'he could be anyone or anything! he could even be you! but only if you're a cis dude tho of course haha let's not get silly here')

Listen they're not going to openly queer this long-running mainstream franchise partially based on the idea that cars and guns sure are cool, I am aware, but a person is allowed to dream anyway right haha

In general Lupin is essentially a lil modern day trickster god and I enjoy the interesting tension that creates if you want to go a little closer on him psychologically, because his entire concept strives against it but from the relationships he has with the other main characters you do know there is like. a real person in there somewhere looking out even if you don't get to look in nearly as often and as an audience you always long to be let in on those feelings because like. that's how stories work, vicariously experiencing someone else's reality and emotions. and often he denies you that beyond a certain depth and then sometimes you get glimpses of a truth and those brief glimpses hit all the harder for it. (as a general concept this is also echoed/more literalized in Jigen as a narrative uh 'echo'? foil? for him, where you literally don't get to see his eyes a lot of the time and it feels a bit Special and weirdly intimate when you do. Lupin is kind of rocking the fully emotional version of that.)

anyway a lot of these themes (especially the gender stuff) I'd actually rather they don't mess around with too much because there's no WAY they'd do so in an intelligent, sensitive or defensible way lol sometimes you're safer in the subtext huh

#again my feelings about twcfm are... complicated! but they are doing some genuinely interesting thematic things there #the way all of it is based around the idea that fujiko says 'keep your gaze only on me' and you do; that's what the narrative is built for #everything you see in that show is on some level fujiko #lupin is... weirdly kind of the opposite through the years -- 'look at everything *but* what I am b/c what I do is much more entertaining'#they're partially doing some of this in part 5 which I suspect is why I enjoyed it so much #but I think they stripped too much of the *oddness* from him in the process to really nail it #emotional groundedness and glimpses of real vulnerability? YES THANK YOU! but why have you given him dignity lol #it's also why I don't mind them going a bit more continuity-heavy with the main installments I think you can build something interesting #with a little bit of that #and it's not like you can't still do completely whacky standalone nonsense on the side like god intended haha #lupin iii #sorry that I'm rambling I'm trying to explain something to myself here I think haha #me @ me: god what the hell are you talking about now -____-#trying to put into words how this series is at war with itself in some interesting ways #like so much of it is so centered in male gaze and then you have this very queer undertone everywhere that it like...#is so interested in in a both obsessive and repulsed sort of way #is it partially the 'you hated women so much it came around and became gay' effect? I don't know!!#it's the 'I'd love to study you' of long-running franchises

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belfrygargoyles · 3 years

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*whispers* I would like to hear what you have to say on reader inserts in the SW fandom because I too have a problem with them and I feel like not enough people are calling it out 👉👈

I’ve made a few posts about it in the past but I think it’s high time I actually Do This and really get into it.

Before I start: 1) This will be in specific reference to fanfiction written for the Star Wars fandom, particularly tcw and the mandalorian eras, 2) A lot of the issues come down to racist fetishization of men of color by white women; I am white, so there is much that is simply not my place to make statements on. What I can speak most on is my take from the gender side of things.

I’d honestly recommend reading this post by @nibeul with addition by @clonehub first, as they discuss the core issue with reader inserts in the Star Wars fandom.

And 3) some of this will involve discussion of sexual acts (as they relate to fanfiction) and sexual fantasies. These discussions will be non-explicit, and no pornographic text or content will be displayed.

Also. I’m GNC and nonbinary. I’m also a very feminine looking person that falls under the generalization of “small and petite.” I don’t have dysphoria, I like my body and the traits I have, and treating them like inherently female sends me into a blind fury. This is, unfortunately, important.

For the sake of making sure I come across as clearly as possible, I will be writing as though the reader of this post has never read or is broadly unfamiliar with reader-insert fanfiction.

Without further ado.

Hey, Star Wars reader insert fic writers? Please get your shit together.

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been reading reader-insert fanfiction since I was a grade schooler waking up early to check Quizilla. I love it! It got me into fandom, kept me engaged, helped me make and develop some of my oldest OCs, and it’s just fun to read and write- it’s like a self-indulgent little gift you can give to a bunch of people all at once. Because who doesn’t like the idea of starring in their own little adventure, usually alongside some of their favorite characters? It can be fun, immersive, get you attached in ways other ways of fandom interaction may not, make you feel just a little bit special, or be a way to express some feelings you might have about canon and the way the story went.

Like any form of fiction, it ends up saying more about the author’s feelings than anything else, whether the author realizes it or not. For many, many authors of reader-insert fanfiction, the primary enjoyment comes from writing “themselves” into the story- before the readers, the author most often makes the “reader character” someone they, themselves, can relate to and substitute for themselves. They write to live out a self-indulgent fantasy they have, and their readers can come along for the ride.

Some writers do actually try to write as diverse or as vague of a reader character as possible- as few details about the body, identity, etc. as possible so anyone could superimpose their image without the narrative directly contradicting it. This is not the kind of reader insert author I will be discussing.

The kind of author I will be discussing is the one most common in the Star Wars tag on Ao3: White, AFAB, cisgender, gender-conforming, able-bodied women who assume all of their readers are also White, AFAB, cisgender, gender-conforming, able-bodied women. Yes, you can tell.

ISSUE: fetishization of men of color

Again, this post puts it in the best words, but there is a rampant problem with Star Wars reader-inserts, particularly those involving the clones, Boba Fett, and Din Djarin, fetishizing characters played by men of color as either “physically aggressive and threatening, hypersexual and dominant, big strong men who are scary because they do violence and fuck constantly when they’re not” or “completely inexperienced baby who doesn’t know anything about things and needs a gentle nurturing guiding touch to introduce him to the mere idea of a vagina.” The former is common across all of them, the latter most common among clone trooper fics or Din/Reader.

I went into the Boba Fett/Reader tag on Ao3, because I like him and hoped to find something alright. Here are some stats I tallied up (give or take some) based solely on tags, summaries, and warnings:

There are 284 works in the Boba Fett/Reader category as of the time of this post.

198/284 are rated E for explicit sexual content. 69.7% of all Boba Fett/Reader works are sexually explicit.

259/284 are in the F/M category. 91.2% of all Boba Fett/Reader works involve an explicitly female or AFAB reader.

24/284 are tagged with or mention “Age difference,” “Older man/Younger woman,” “Innocence kink” or “Virginity kink.” 8.4% of all Boba Fett/Reader works are written explicitly with an age gap, with Boba Fett as the older party

26/198 E rated fics are tagged with or make reference to “Daddy kink” or involve the reader being called some variation of “little girl” by Boba. 13% of all E-rated works under Boba Fett/Reader are daddy kink fics, or allude to Boba Fett being a daddy dom/sugar daddy.

102/198 E rated fics are tagged as, make reference to, or suggest in the summary that Boba Fett takes a dominant sexual role with a submissive reader involving rough or painful play, or make reference to Boba Fett being frightening, physically intimidating, having a power dynamic over the reader, or being possessive or violent. 51.51% of all E-rated works under Boba Fett/Reader portray Boba Fett as sexually dominant and/or enacting use of physical force or pain play.

Just using this as an example, because it’s the easiest stats I can gather and also what made me realize there was a pattern.

The problem isn’t even necessarily that people write explicit fic about Boba- it’s that 1) over half of all fics in the category are explicitly pornographic, and 2) the way those pornographic fics are written. The two things compound on each other. They’re dominance fantasies projected onto a character of color in which he becomes extremely sexual, physically rough with the reader, possessive, and demeaning towards a reader character who is always written as White, AFAB, and petite.

This brings me to the next issue.

ISSUE: The way sexual relationships are portrayed.

Let me clarify so there is no chance of me being misunderstood: sex is good. Liking and wanting and enjoying sex isn’t bad. It is not bad if you are AFAB and have submissive fantasies. It is not bad to be sexually attracted to a man of color. You can write about sex even if you haven’t had it. Writing about sex can be a good way to express some more complicated feelings you could have about certain things. It doesn’t even have to be realistic. It has its time and it has its place.

This being said.

Sexual relationships as they are portrayed in the vast majority of E-rated Star Wars reader inserts are… not great.

The reader is always AFAB. I can think of maybe one fic off the top of my head where an AFAB reader was written with they/them pronouns and not just she/her.

The reader is almost always submissive, the dominant character is almost always portrayed as cis male. Even when the characters are supposed to just be having spontaneous casual sex, D/S or BDSM aspects will be introduced with no prior discussion or talks about it afterwards. Sometimes characters will start using dirty talk and it just does not fit at all, but it’s what the author thought was hot.

Sometimes, it just reads like a quick smutty oneshot. More often than that, it reads like the author doesn’t realize that sex… isn’t always a dom/sub thing. Or that someone can take the lead in sex and that doesn’t automatically make them a dom.

It’s not bad to be inexperienced. It’s not bad to have preferences or kinks or specific turn-ons.

But it gets… tiring to read, over and over and over and over, because that’s all there is.

That and… I dunno, it just has me a little worried? It doesn’t make me feel good knowing so many people can only portray a sexual relationship if it’s dom/sub. I don’t know why it makes me so uneasy.

Vanilla sex isn’t a bad thing I promise. It's this feeling of insistence that something "spicy" absolutely has to happen for it to be worth writing that gives... some weird vibes.

I’m going to move on to the next Big-

ISSUE: Every “reader” character is exactly the same

By which I mean the following:

Always cis AFAB female

If a character is written with gender neutral pronouns they will always be AFAB and written like Girl Lite

I have never seen an explicitly stated nonbinary/gnc reader character unless it was a request specifically for a nonbinary reader

I have never seen a gender neutral reader insert fic where the reader was AMAB

I have seen a grand total of 1 cis male reader fic and 1 trans male reader fic. The trans male reader fic was about dysphoria.

The reader is allowed to have one of the following backstories: slave/runaway, mechanic, medic, ex-Rebel, secret Jedi, bounty hunter.

The reader is allowed to have one of the following personality traits: throws knives, babysitter, completely civilian, WOMAN, says curse words.

The reader is never written with any narrative agency- things only ever happen to the reader character or around the reader character, they are never written to take charge and actually affect things on their own. Essentially the sexy lamp trope.

Remember when I said the majority of people writing Star Wars reader-insert fanfic on Ao3 were White, cisgender AFAB women who are gender-conforming and able-bodied? This is how you can tell.

It’s at this point where you can tell they’re really not meant to be reader-inserts, but author-inserts with the names removed- they were only meant for a very narrow selection of readers.

I’m nonbinary, I’m gnc, and I’m a very feminine looking person, generally speaking. I’m used to people looking at me and assuming oh, girl. I’m at peace with that.

I can barely stand reading some of these fics just because of how much the author emphasizes that the reader is FEMALE shes a WOMAN with BOOBS and a VAGINA and FEMININE WILES. There’s barely ever even a chance to give myself room to mentally vault over all the “she”s and “her”s because then I’m getting hit with Din or someone calling the reader “girl” or “the woman.” It’s unbearable, and I even fall into the general description every fucking fic author uses for their generic protagonist!

Even with the “gender-neutral reader” fics, it is just. Painfully clear that they just wrote a female character and changed the pronouns- no, there is no such thing as “male behavior” or “female behavior,” and I quite heartily rebel against the concept of gender essentialism. And honestly, I can barely even begin piecing together how I know it and what it feels like, because it’s just one of those vague conglomerates of cues and writing patterns I can’t consciously pick up on but I know it’s there- it’s frustrating, it’s demeaning, and it feels like you’d have to threaten these authors at gunpoint to get them to write a reader character who was any major deviation from the same three cutouts they use every time.

It seems like they can’t possibly force themselves to write a reader character who isn’t meek and submissive or has the sole personality traits of “mean and can hit things”- you can actually strike a balance between “absolutely no personality” and “fleshed out oc” you know? And you don’t actually have to tell the reader what their hair looks like or how full their figure is

It’s like 2:20 AM and I started this at like 8something PM but.

I’m someone who loves reader-inserts. I enjoy them. I still check for new ones regularly. I’ve been reading them for well over half my life now.

So many of these authors are just locked in on exactly one way to write things and it fucking shows. It’s like a self-feeding loop, they just keep writing the same things and the same dynamics because they see each other doing it and they never think about taking a step back.

It’s… exhausting. I’m exhausted. If you’re a reader-insert fic writer and you want to improve your reader character inclusivity and have also read this far, you can DM me or shoot me an ask.

#star wars #x reader #star wars x reader #star wars reader insert #maintagging because for once i actually want ppl to see this #i hope my points are made clearly enough #if something needs clarification you can shoot me a DM or an ask

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