Saying Sanji is "straight-washed" might be the funniest thing in the whole world because yes, his character is heavily queer-coded and reflects queer experiences, and no, it is not about his sexuality. It's about his gender. You got it a bit wrong, bestie.

not to be a woman womaning all over the place but i feel like if you genuinely like. do not have friends that are women then you have something to work on. if you cant think of any female characters that you treat the same way you do male characters then you have something to work on. if you cant handle even seeing "i dont like being called a guy/bro/lad/etc because it doesnt feel gender neutral to me" but can understand when one of your masc besties is uncomfortable with being called girlie or sister then you have something to work on. if your default in regards to how you handle other people and even characters is to assume masculinity then you have something to work on. if you cant even let women and otherwise feminine people speak about our experiences without bringing up how you suffer too then you have something to work on.

it doesnt matter if youre queer or a poc or a minority in whatever which way, if you do not include women in your life and cant even stand a fucking inch of genuine feminism (and i dont mean terfs but god is it fucking agonizing that thats all you people can think of when you hear feminism anymore) where the point is to treat women, all women, equally then you have something to work on. listen to women, even the ones whose experiences completely dont align with yours (hell ESPECIALLY the ones whose experiences completely dont align with yours). just like how we all have to check ourselves for racism, ableism, queerphobia, we all have to check ourselves for misogyny too. stop acting like it got solved at some point. it still exists and it exists within you and you have to actually fucking work on that. "women should be included in your life and you should listen to them" shouldnt be a hard goddamn pill to swallow.

i hate that there is so much hatred for women in the world, so much hatred for girls, even little girls. cant even express how much love my heart holds for women, i love being a woman and i love women more than anything. everything about women, everything about trans, poc, cis , queer, butch, disabled, religious, neurodivergent, fat, old women, everything about all women is so so beautiful. and yes there are women that suck and womanhood isnt about being a cute little innocent person, but oh how i love women and i love women who love women and i love women.

its so funny hbomberguy uploads a video like once every millenia, but when he does he manages to send every person he scrutinizes into oblivion, never to recover

I think it's funny when people say trans men don't experience misogyny. I experience it alot as an out and proud and obvious trans person. Most folks are good, they don't blink an eye (even in the rural south) but for some you can see it like a switch. The biggest tell in my experience is they start treating you like the world's biggest idiot. Like you couldn't possibly know more than them about anything. I also tend to get babied, people stop letting me do things I was doing previously such as lifting heavy stuff and outdoorsy type work.

I just think it's ridiculous that the most basic elements of misogyny, elements that have been defined and discussed for years, no longer count as misogyny because it's directed at a trans guy. How do people even claim it's "misdirected" (which is such a bullshit word irt oppression) it's all very clearly directed at me for having formerly been a woman*. And what of my time spent living as a girl? Does all that misogyny mysteriously disappear, all of my former experiences rendered moot by the fact I'm now a guy*.

I haven't even gotten into how cis men can be misogynistic towards each other but rad fems and people who pretend they aren't rad fems but boil misogyny down to "woman only oppression" like to ignore that. What do you call it when a cis guy shames another guy by calling him a pussy? "You hit like a girl" anyone? You can't explain this away as "misdirected" because the intended target is not a girl, is not mistakenly being perceived as a girl, it is a deliberate act of misogyny in order to enforce the patriarchal status quo.

One of these days I will write about the nuances of The Black Church and how it acted both as a force for good; providing food, shelter, and community to those in need from slavery onward, and as a force for destruction, actively treating drug addicts and LGBT people as diseases and cutting them off from that sanctuary. I should do it at my most powerful (Now during BHM) but alas.....

very controversial trans take; detransitioners are not our enemy. they're people who took the time to question their gender, to explore their identity inside and out, and came to the conclusion that their identity best aligns with what they were assigned at birth. i wish everybody could take the time to sit and think deeply about the identities they hold, particularly things like gender that are inherent, but also deeply socialized. the detransitioners who are spouting anti-trans rhetoric have been taught by the system we live in that even questioning your gender is wrong, so for many of them, that rhetoric is a survival tool for assimilating back into cis society. doesn't make it okay to hold anti-trans views, for certain, but it does expose the fact that the enforcement of a restrictive gender binary hurts everyone, even cis people.

blACK WOMEN 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖💖

It's me. I'm the cis, heterosexual, aromantic man. I will never marry, I will never be married, I will grow into middle age and elder age and I will die unmarried. I will be forced to support a household of myself on only my wages alone for the rest of my life. I will be asked about women and marriage and children by my family for the rest of my life (or men, the progressive ones might say). I may not ever come out to them. I feel like I burned my coming out on something stupid. I don't want to explain it. I don't want to run them through the definitions and intricacies. I don't want the acceptance without understanding, placating me with ceased questions and poor explanations to other, drunk adults.

I like my hair to be long, I spent a year with it dyed a golden blonde with dark roots because I like the trashy party girl aesthetic. I want to dye it again with pink tips. I like painting my nails, black and blue are my favorite colors. I like wearing chokers. I also like wearing baggy jeans and ratty hoodies. I like having stubble. I like having chest hair. I like having a square jaw and broad shoulders. I wish I had a flatter stomach and a thinner profile frame. I don't know what this makes me, perhaps this is something no more GNC than Machine Gun Kelly. I think about this a lot, how queer my appearance truly is. I should think about it less. I have thought long and hard about if I could be trans or if I could be non-binary or if I could be genderqueer and the conclusion I ultimately came to is that I most enjoy being a man open to whatever self-expression I want.

I don't date, but I've thought about it. I would like to meet people, and I would like to have sex with them. But I don't want to hurt them. I fear if I explain what I am beforehand it'll scare them away. I fear if I explain after they'll feel manipulated or abused. I don't know how many people in the dating scene want what I want. I fear my own lack of experience will make me a bad lay, an embarrassing story to tell to confidants in hindsight. I fear my own virginity, a boundary to those I wish to be like. All of these fears are baseless, as I've not been able to even begin a single relationship in my life. Despite this I still heavily identify with terms like "slut" and "manwhore" and "thot" because my interests lay so deeply within casual sex, sex without great intimacy or emotion. This may be some form of stolen valor. I hope the true sluts are not too mad at me.

I made this blog several years ago because a mutual of mine reblogged memes making fun of aro and ace people, making fun of the concept of aphobia, and in addition well known aphobes. I didn't feel comfortable talking about aro stuff on my main blog, for as little as I talk about it. Living through the ace discourse of the 2016 era has largely caused me to cringe in embarrassment any time I am forced to discuss my orientation with people who aren't aro or ace themselves. I no longer follow this person. I unfollowed many people I was mutuals with from that time, most of them because they posted too often about how much they hated men and I didn't want to see that, some because our interests simply drifted too far apart, only one for explicit aphobia reasons. (Also one because they became a "both sides are bad, any vote is wasted" libertarian, but that's unrelated.)

I guess at this point I don't care deeply about what strangers on the internet think of me. If a trusted friend told me that they don't think I'm truly queer that may hurt. But I am going to continue to use the word for myself. I take up no resources. I go to events that are open to me. If an event was not open to me, I think I'd not want to go anyways. I am not a hypothetical, I am not a strawman, I am a person with lived experiences both within and exterior to the queer community. If you hate me, I will permit you to continue to do so. But ultimately, I am who I am, I cannot change these facts, and I would not choose to do so even if I could.

it's always so fucking funny to me when terfs are like "how can you say trans women and women are the same thing! being born as a man makes you different!" because like. yes. trans women and cis women are different. so are black women and white women. and straight women and queer woman. and women from different countries and different socioeconomic statuses. there's diversity in the experience of womanhood? what a wild concept

random thought but it was really really weird of marvel to make valkyrie a "king" of asgard when they had explicitly had hela call herself a queen? and like. pretended that it had always been the case that a reigning queen of asgard would be called a king? literally like two years after it was unambiguously established that no they absolutely would not?

In the wake of the whole james somerton fiasco and inspired by this post, I wanted to share a few of my um, soft signs, like, orange flags to detect when someone is bullshitting you.

First of all, I am on the spectrum which means 1) I tend to take what people say at face value and 2) I have a strong sense of justice which makes me prone to biases, all of which combined means I am at perpetual risk of swallowing the bullshit.

So, what to do about it? You turn on the critical thinking and pay attention.

As one of my favorite youtubers, Hannah Alonzo, likes to say: "consider the source, remember the motive". Who is talking to you?? What do you know about them?? What biases might they have?? How do they interact with your own biases?? Where are they talking from?? Is it anger?? happinness? boredom?? Also, why are they talking to you? Are they trying to sell you something?? Are they trying to convince you and why?? How do they go about the finantial motivation, if present? If you have, in this case, a white cis gay man talking to you as it he has it the worst of the worst in the world, there's probably some exaggeration and you should start to wonder. There's a good chance he's bullshitting you.

How they talk about women and POC No, no, stay with me. There's a rule I had back when I was dating men: Always beware of how they treat their mother. With the exception of extremes like mama's boys and cases of abuse, how a man treats the woman with whom they have that familial bond is a good indicator of how they are going to treat you. Do they berate her? speak ill of her? are aggressive or controlling? do they dismiss her opinions? Same with creators, and by god I tell you, specially cis male creators, queer or otherwise, always always beware of how they speak of women, how they treat women, how they treat POC. Somerton had a weird vendetta against straight women. It went mostly unnoticed. Then, he was dismissive towards lesbians and other queer women and it was once again overlooked. Then he went ahead and made sinophobic content about genres and cultures he knows NOTHING about. Again, it went unchecked. What I am telling you is IT'S NOT NORMAL. Contempt about women and non white-western cultures is not normal and if someone has them as them as an enemy or a scapegoat, they're probably bullshitting you. Take what they say and fact check it, see for yourself.

If at any point in a video or an essay you find yourself thinking "wait, really??" then it's time to fact check. Is it a bit suspicious?? is your logic telling you that's not quite how this works?? Then take to google, my friend, they might be bullshitting you. At worst, you dodge a fake fact, at best, you learn way too much about a topic you were already interested in.

Beware of the lack of nuance. I can not stress this enough. We all love monochrome, but life and societal issues are never black and white. It's just impossible, there's too many factors to consider. If you are being presented situations or anecdotes as absolute truths, you're probably being bullshitted. If it's too good to be true, it is. If it sounds waaay too convenient, it probably is. A good researcher, a serious investigator, will always have some nuance because they have done the work and checked the sources. If someone provides you 1) no nuance and 2) no sources, THEY'RE BULLSHITTING YOU.

These are the ones I can come up with just of the top of my head, I'm sure there's more and please, add them. Remember that naivité isn't a crime, I'm fairly naive and that's made me distrustful, and these are some of the techniques I've found that help me navigate through a world of information without losing myself.

Transphobia cannot be separated from fascism because it relies on white supremacist principles to function. There are two genders, male and female, each serving a singular biological purpose: the continuation of the race. Anything outside of that binary logic is broken or degenerate. And while not all transphobes might agree that this race must be white, it’s generally white beauty standards that transphobes choose to call upon when trying to determine what a woman is.

The rules prohibiting high levels of testosterone in sports are still more likely to eject black cis women than anybody else, while the assumption that ‘real women’ will always be shorter, smaller, and less hirsute than ‘women who actually men’ leads to the unfair and unnecessary scrutiny of (usually queer, non-white and/or disabled) women’s bodies, sometimes to the point of even the most slightly gender non-conforming cis women being attacked.

Maddison Stoff, Why gender essentialism is a white supremacist ideology

what pisses me off about this whole thing is this has already been happening to black users this mass deletion scorched earth shit has been happening tumblr used to be fucking full of black transfems and cis black women who had big blogs who were targeted and deleted by staff almost the blm protest this has already been happening to us but nobody cares bc were black and god knows the queers on here dont consider us apart of the community so many girls i looked up to had to leave or were outright banned for life during the “russian psyop” bullshit during staff wiping ferguson tags and deleting police brutality post i literally saw that shit with my own eyes so many ppl had to just leave bc nobody but other black people cared, that russian spy shit is still being parroted to this day and we didn’t get a fraction of outcry about it and it makes my heart hurt why is being black not enough, some of the biggest and popular black transfem blogs on here constantly posted about fashion and history and current news and refused to back down on these discussions no matter how much they were targeted and to this day their names are smeared but nobody fucking cared bc we’re black

Something about the pattern of people who don’t experience X form of oppression reacting explosively and with anger or vitriol or severe untempered bitterness to being told they don’t experience X form of oppression (thereby granting them privilege from having to experience X form of oppression), especially because they personally experience Y and perhaps even Z forms of oppression, followed by them being able to blissfully move on from ever having to contend with the reality and existence of X form of oppression and their possible and likely (and hopefully unintentional) complicity in maintaining the systems driving X form of oppression.

Additionally, something about how Complex (that is, multifaceted or intersecting) Oppressive System A and Complex Oppressive System A' are intermingled and related in a messy reality where they’re positioned in ways that sometimes put people who suffer under System A & people who suffer under System A' at odds with each other, and yet also tends to treat people suffering under System A and under System A' as though they suffer only under the one Complex Oppressive System A (if they’re recognized to suffer under a Complex System at all).

But actually the systems are also highly separable in analysis because, while A' sufferers are perceived as other A sufferers by A suffers much of the time, and the rest of the time as not suffering under Complex Oppressive System A at all (and dismissing the notion of a possible Complex Oppressive System A' altogether), people suffering under System A' can recognize how sufferers of System A are failing to see the way they suffer under System A'.

And something about how people suffering under System A but not specifically System A' cannot easily fathom that they might be laterally aggressing & further damaging people who suffer under System A' because the nature of System A' is such that it invokes feelings of resentment in people suffering much more visibly under System A. And how that resentment is an effect of being unintentionally complicit in the inivisiblized Complex Oppressive System A'.

I think a lot of this shit would get cleared up if people recognized man/woman, masc/femme as not opposites but factors in gendered oppression.

Like…oppression is a combination of what you are, how you are seen, and whether you conform.

For example, cis gay men who are targets of homophobia are, of course, targets of homophobia, but a lot of homophobia is rooted in misogynistic patriarchy also. Men are not “supposed” to be feminine and feminine equals female and therefore is less than. But then the question is, so are men rewarded for being masculine? Not always. And sometimes they are severely punished for it. Men of color sure are. Especially Black men. Fat men sometimes are.

So if we look at homophobia directed at women, queer women are targets of homophobia, can be specifically lesbophobia, biphobia—more specific forms. Women are seen as less than for their femininity, for their femaleness. It’s misogyny. But then are butches rewarded for masculinity? No. They are punished for it. For failing to conform, for masculinity that “doesn’t belong to them.” So then this becomes a more complex form of gendered oppression, I wonder if there is a word for that? Google, what is butchphobia? What is antimasculism?

So are women always punished for femininity? Not necessarily. Women who “conform” are rewarded in the way that they are where they are “supposed to” be. Which is still regarded as inferior to men. But embracing gender roles can give you a leg up in bigoted spaces. Is that a reward? Is it punishment? Is a step higher on the ladder privilege or do you have to be at the top?

So if Black men are punished for their masculinity, are they never rewarded for it? No, especially when leveraging misogyny, masculinity can be a powerful tool, but it is not seen as comparable to white masculinity by society. So are Black women rewarded for femininity? Not necessarily. Not in the way white women are. Are they demonized for their masculinity? Very much so. And oh wait, what’s this? How do we account for the way Black women who are feminine are seen as masculine for their features even when they aren’t? Are they perhaps experiencing a more complex form of gendered oppression that needs language to accommodate? Google, what is misogynoir?

Now, since y’all will just insist you are trying to center transfemmes, let’s discuss transfemmes. How do we view butch trans women? Is she rewarded for her masculinity? Absolutely not. Is she punished for not being feminine? Absolutely. Is she seen as predatory and a faker? What about masc AMAB enbies? Are they rewarded for masculinity? Are they rewarded if their features appear male? No and no.

Are trans women rewarded for their femininity? Sometimes. For conforming. For appearing how she’s “supposed to.” For transitioning the “right” way. Is femininity always rewarded? Fuck no. She’s going to be subject to misogyny too. Even if she’s not masculine, if she’s not feminine enough her features are going to label her masculine, label her male, and then she’s going to be subject to transphobia directed at her inability to conform. Her “masculinity” or perceived maleness is a threat, not conforming. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. A more specific manifestation of oppression which is a combination of transphobia and misogyny (and arguably antimasculism). Is there language for this?

Masculinity and femininity are not straight shot rewarded versus punished. Maleness and femaleness are not straight shot rewarded versus punished. Femininity/femaleness are punished through misogyny viewing them as inferior. It can be rewarded (somewhat) through conformity. Masculinity/maleness can be rewarded through conformity, it is punished when it is non-conforming or a threat to those in power.

Is the masculinization of fat women a reward? Is the feminization of Asian men a reward? Is the hyper-sexualization of trans women a reward? Is the desexualization of disabled men a reward?

Binaries are a wildly incomplete analysis of how actual power manifests, what is considered conforming versus an “attack”, and what behaviors actually grant admittance to the club and what labels you as storming the keep.

Almost as if anything short of the pinnacle of white supremacy has the potential to be victimized and every step on the ladder has the potential to gain a higher foothold if they climb onto the people around them.

“Women are—“ stop, what women? “Trans men are—“ stop, what trans men? Scrub “all” and “never” and absolutes and binaries from your discussions of gender.