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#but I don't know whether I'm bi or lesbian
watermelinoe · 6 months
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people on here will say that bi people experience homophobia but then get mad when bi people say they experience homophobia
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So I'm signed up for this online 30's speed dating event for WLW and sapphics right?
Here's the thing: It looks like they aren't even bothering to regulate it at all because I see tons of people who aren't in their 30s and even some men are listed in the people who are signed up for the event.
What's even the point of a specific event for 30 something WLW if just anyone can join it? :/
#As a 30 year old I'm not interested in 18/19 year olds and yet a bunch of them are signed up for a event for women in their 30s???#any one who is in their 30s and wants to date teenagers is a total creep#I hope they realize that because I don't think they do#18 and 19 year olds look like children to me now#if you promise an event for women in their 30s please actually deliver it :(#If I'm using a site that's for women loving women- men shouldn't be allowed? I'm not looking for a man!#now I see why the lesbians and other sapphics get angry#I'm debating whether or not this is even worth my time because I'm not confident that it will be run well at all#so many people failed to understand the prompt or purposely don't care#they are either too young or the wrong gender- if you're not a woman in her 30s it's not for you?#If a woman is in her late 20s that's different but it was a bunch of people under 25#dating is inherently exclusive- most people aren't attracted to everyone else???#A lot of people fail to realize you CAN be pro equality and still not want to date most other people- it IS possible#Now selfish people are going to ruin something that isn't even for them :/#I am the target audience for this event and they are making me not want to participate#I'm 30 and sapphic- questioning whether bi or lesbian but I belong there#Should I be surprised? I really don't know what to think honestly#I'm a little angry that they don't seem to care who attends because I paid for a ticket- not too much but still?#mychatter
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fandomsandfeminism · 2 years
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Just a reminder that we aren't gatekeeping Pride.
I know it's only April, but I just saw such a rancid take on Tiktok (and the person blocked me, woo!) That I need to vent somewhere.
The argument went "bi/pan/queer people with cishet partners shouldn't bring those partners into queer spaces/Pride because it makes those spaces unsafe for lgbt folks."
Which is a frankly awful take for many reasons.
First of all "makes a space unsafe" is not an identity. It is a behavior. And ANYONE who is making those spaces unsafe, regardless of their identity, *shouldn't be there.* Whether they are a cishet man or a lesbian, if you are making people unsafe, you shouldn't be there.
Secondly, it's blatantly unenforceable. You can't clock someone's identity at the door. You don't know if they are bi or trans or nonbinary. And no one should have to out themselves to a bouncer.
As a caveat to this, you also don't ever know *why* someone might bring their cishet partner to pride. Whether that's because this is an important part of their life they want to share with their partner, or they are disabled and need help managing their meds or mobility aides, or the partner is a designated driver. You just don't know. So even if you did know they were cishet, maybe they have a "good reason" for being there.
So between it not solving an actual problem to not being enforceable, all this discourse does is create an EXTREMELY hostile environment for, well, bi/pan/queer folks especially. Always. We always get targeted for this kind of stuff.
But also anyone who might worry that *they* aren't queer enough or not look queer enough. Trans folks who haven't socially transitioned, non-binary folks who aren't androgynous enough, ace and aro folks, people who are newly out- they see this rhetoric and think "Oh no. What is someone sees me and thinks I'm cishet? What if someone tells me I can't be there? What if I don't really belong?"
So we aren't doing it. It's shitty snd hostile and biphobic and exclusionary.
Everyone can come to pride.
Except cops.
Fuck cops.
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ileaveclawmarks · 1 year
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An interview with Leslie Feinberg appearing in the Oct/Nov 1998 issue of On Our Backs.
Please click on image to read or find the transcript below:
Feinberg and hir activist peers have transformed the landscape of current queer politics: they have introduced "trans" (even into the mission statement of the National Organization for Women) as an umbrella term for transgender and transsexual persons. "Transgender" refers to any person whose gender expression appears at odds with his or ber biological sex, including transvestites, drag queens and kings, intersexed persons, "passing" men and women, feminine men, and masculine women. "Transsexual" refers to men and women who challenge the sex they were assigned at birth, whether they choose sex-reassignment surgery or not. Feminism popularized the distinction between "sex" (as biological sex) and "gender" (as the social expression of masculinity, androgyny, and femininity); the trans movement took this distinction to the streets.
Feinberg and hir activist peers have transformed the landscape of current queer politics: they have introduced "trans" (even into the mission statement of the National Organization for Women) as an umbrella term for transgender and transsexual persons. "Transgender" refers to any person whose gender expression appears at odds with his or ber biological sex, including transvestites, drag queens and kings, intersexed persons, "passing" men and women, feminine men, and masculine women. "Transsexual" refers to men and women who challenge the sex they were assigned at birth, whether they choose sex-reassignment surgery or not. Feminism popularized the distinction between "sex" (as biological sex) and "gender" (as the social expression of masculinity, androgyny, and femininity); the trans movement took this distinction to the streets.
Feinberg discusses her struggle with the health care system in hir new book, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Released in October, Trans Liberation chronicles Feinberg's career as a public speaker and collects the addresses s/he delivered to a variety of groups, from Gay Pride organizers to straight male transvestites. We spoke with Feinberg about why sexual freedom is impossible without freedom of gender expression.
On Our Backs: Trans Liberation was released this fall. Can you tell us about what you're working on now?
Feinberg: I'm deep into a novel titled Drag King Dreams. It's about a working-class, Jewish trans person who has a foot in both the diverse trans communities and also the lesbian, gay, and bi communities. It's a book about figuring out what "home" means and who your people are. I'm also trying to write a fable titled "Tale of Two Hearts." it's really a love song to Minnie Bruce Pratt-my wife, my lover, and my friend. It's just one chorus of the love song I write to Minnie Bruce every day of my life.
On Our Backs: Your relationship with poet Minnie Bruce Pratt, thanks in part to her book S/he, is well known. What is your advice to those of us seeking a long term relationship as loving as yours?
Feinberg: I just know that for me, this is a relationship unlike any other I've ever had. I wasn't looking for a lifetime commitment when I met Minnie Bruce. I°d been dating nonmonogamously for quite a while, nothing serious. Minnie Bruce and I both did a lot of work individually to grow up, get sober and work hard at developing our political consciousness and activism. We were ready for each other. Ready to be loving, to communicate, and to listen.
On Our Backs: Pat Califia once wrote that she wishes there would come a time when we don't pick a sexual partner by his or her gender, but by other criteria, such as whether the person is a top or a bottom. In your ideal world, what would attract people to one another?
Feinberg: It's hard for me to hypothesize. In the world we live in, individuals do organize their preferences around gender expression. But a spectrum of sexuality existed in ancient societies that predated state. sponsored repression of human love. That leads me to think that these preferences might continue to exist in future societies in which no form of sex or gender is outlawed or demeaned. I don't think the problem today is preferences so much as prejudices. For example, I read personal ads in which people say "no druggies or butches need apply." Wow! That's preiudice. If you say in an ad that you're looking for someone feminine or androgynous or some other form of preference. that's very different from saving "no butches." As more and more prejudices are defeated, and in a world freed from divide-and-rule bigotry, people will be freer to explore their preferences about gender and about individuals.
On Our Backs: Do transgendered persons have sexual representation-pornography, erotic fiction, videos made for and by themselves?
Feinberg: Right now, there are many people trying to write erotica that bends gender. And I think it's very important. For many of us, it's very hard, never being able to identify with the sexuality we see everywhere in the dominant culture. [So] it was very important for me to write about sexuality in Stone Butch Blues. In the novel I'm working on now, I've been thinking a lot about how to write about sexuality that's not necessarily masculine or feminine, or gay or straight.
On Our Backs: What do you mean by "sexuality that's not necessarily masculine or feminine"?
Feinberg: I see masculinity and femininity as forms of gender expression. But a person's gender expression doesn't necessarily determine their sexuality. It doesn't determine whether you'll be attracted to someone of a similar gender expression or a dissimilar one. It doesn't mean you'll be sexually aggressive or submissive or both. That's what makes me so angry when I hear people derisively refer to someone as "thinks she's so butch but she rolls over in bed." It's an assumption that masculinity translates into being a top sexually. It limits the range of sexual expression of masculine females. And it's a sexual attack on someone who is, by virtue of their social oppression, already sexually wounded.
On Our Backs: Both sex scenes from Stone Butch Blues were excerpted for collections of lesbian erotica. Did you intend the scenes to be sexually arousing for readers - to be erotica - when you wrote them?
Feinberg: That's such an interesting question. I have to say that when I set out to write the sex scenes, I began to be aware of internalized censorship: "Can I or should I write about this or that?" So I consciously blocked out any thought of readers with this odd mental trick: I told myself that whatever I wrote, I didn't have to publish it. First write it, then decide. By doing that, I discovered that I could write about the kind of sex that i thought was true to the emotional makeup of the characters. If it was erotic for readers, I think it was because I was true to the characters themselves, so the sex was "real," if you know what I mean.
On Our Backs: Can sexuality exist without gender? Or is gender an essential component of sexuality?
Feinberg: Certainly everyone is gendered - quite complexly. And we infuse much of who we are, as gendered people, into our sexuality. But sexuality is so complicated by oppression right now that it's really hard to study it removed from its social soil. Jesse Helms defeated funding for a study that would have backed up much of what Kinsey revealed decades ago: that human sexuality is not two opposite poles- one normal, one not. Sexuality is on a spectrum, and many individuals move along that continuum during their lives. But lesbian, gay, and bisexual love is outlawed in the majority of states in the United States. So how can a truly objective, intensive study of sexuality even be conducted? It's like doing a study on religious beliefs and affiliations during the Nazi regime in Germany. So much of what we will learn about the relationship of gender and desire, as well as unraveling other questions about the matrix of sexuality, will be tied to the victories of our liberation of humanity from oppression altogether.
On Our Backs: In Trans Liberation you wrote about how frustrating it is voting for a two-party system when both parties are backed by big business. Do you vote? Should poor, queer, and trans people even bother voting?
Feinberg: Well, politics is about more than voting. It's also about finding ways to move people to action. In a particular situation, voting on an issue in an election or a candidate could help advance the movement. In general, though, I don't think voting for Republicans or Democrats - both supported by wings of corporate America, as are their parties - advances our struggle. I believe we need to build an independent liberation movement that's not tied down by waiting to see what happens in the next election. Everything our movement has ever won, including progressive legislation, has been won based on the strength of our struggle.
On Our Backs: Lesbians who accept transgender liberation in theory often balk at making alliances with transsexuals. Why is this so?
Feinberg: First and foremost, transsexual men and women helped build the modern lesbian, gay, and bisexual communities and movement. I know of at least one transsexual sister who fought the cops at Stonewall. They haven't always been recognized for their valuable contributions. But I believe strongly that those in the lesbian communities who are opposed to building coalitions with the diverse trans communities are just one current, and very often a minority current. The question is: Which current of any movement will lead? Those who seek to narrow the movement, or those who seek to broaden and strengthen its collective power?
*In this interview, On Our Backs refers to Feinberg with the pronouns "hir" (pronounced "here") and "s/he." We choose to do so because Feinberg has stressed that if society is to accept transgendered people, our language must expand as well. S/he gives as an example Ms., a common term now, but unacceptable before the women's movement.
Source.
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gothhabiba · 8 months
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A few months ago, an article by Just Like Us about a survey of young UK adults regarding LGBT topics (and other articles on The Pink News and Gay Times UK that reported on that article) did the rounds on here.
The headline of the Gay Times article, written by Amy Ashenden (a cisgender butch lesbian and the interim CEO of Just Like Us, who hired the consultancy that conducted the survey) was "Lesbians being anti-trans is a lesbophobic trope"; of the results of the survey, she writes "I’m so glad that we finally have the research to demonstrate what most lesbians already knew: this narrative is completely false."
A lot of this initial reporting focused on the claims that "most anti-trans adults don’t know a trans person in real life" and "lesbians are the most supportive of trans people of any identity group, and it's a lesbophobic trope that they are anti-trans." These articles were written before the full report of the survey's data had been released.
The full report that these claims are based on is now out, for anyone who wants to take a closer look at the results for themselves. The pdf appears to be OCR readable but not image-described. The survey deals with many topics including being "out" and "feeling supported" at school and at work, but I'll just try to break down the evidence for the above-mentioned two claims.
How respondents were selected:
Just Like Us's report says that "Participants were drawn in partnership between Just Like Us and from Cibyl’s independent database of UK students and young adults" (p. 69). Cibyl offers "bespoke studies and focus groups," and says that "Using our Cibyl-ings student panel, we can source specific students to look at themes and topics important to you and ask the unique questions you want the answers to." This is rather vague.
Sample group and size:
3,695 young adults aged between 18 and 25. 86% cisgender and 12% transgender; 47% LGBT and 53% non-LGBT (used as a control group to compare LGBT responses to); 72% white; 79% students; 54% "female" (self-declared), 36% "male", 8% non-binary (pp. 69-70).
Support for the articles' central claims:
There is no full breakdown of the data resulting from the survey that would allow anyone else to do their own statistical analysis. Here's (what Just Like Us gives of) the data that the "most anti-trans people don't know a trans person in real life" claim is based on:
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[ID: Headline reading "Attitudes towards transgender people. Question reading "How supportive are you of transgender people? Of people who "know a transgender person," 64% said "very supportive"; "supportive" 23%; "slightly supportive" 10%; "not supportive" 3%. Of those who "don't know a transgender person," 33% said "very supportive"; "supportive" 28%; "slightly supportive" 20%; "not supportive" 18%. Second question "Do you know any transgender people?" Result: 28% "Yes, someone I'm close to"; 38% "Yes, someone I'm not close to"; 34% "I don't know any transgender people." Further breakdown of the question "Do you know a transgender person?": 49% of "non-LGBT+" people said "yes"; 84% of LGBT+ people; 94% of non-binary people; 93% of transgender people; 82% of asexual people; 85% of bi/pan people; 80% of gay men; 92% of lesbians; 75% of questioning people. End ID]
The "do you know any transgender people" question is worded slightly differently each time—plus, the Just Like Us article and the report (p. 8) adduce the phrase "in real life" to "know a trans person," but this page doesn't—so I don't think we're getting the exact wording for that question that the survey respondents saw. The data for "how supportive are you of transgender people" isn't broken down according to whether the respondent said they were "close" or "not close" to the transgender person or people they knew; it also doesn't seem to be broken down into trans or nonbinary versus cisgender respondents.
"How supportive are you of transgender people?" was the only question dealing with this issue, and the responses "very supportive," "supportive," "slightly supportive," and "not supportive" were the only options available; there's nothing breaking down what "support" means in terms of policy (e.g. support versus non-support for consent-based clinics, national funding for transition care, non-discrimination laws, bathroom laws, &c. &c.). There is also no distinction made between "support" for trans women and trans men.
The claim "UK adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who answer 'not supportive' to the question 'How supportive are you of transgender people?' are several times more likely to also answer 'no' to the question 'do you know a transgender person' (or maybe 'do you know a transgender person in real life')" is supported, in my opinion. The sample size is large enough for that 3% to not be random noise.
The analysis in the Just Like Us article groups together "very supportive" and "supportive" when providing percentages of respondents of given identities who support trans people:
Of all LGBT+ identities, other than trans and non-binary people themselves, lesbian young adults were most likely to say they know a trans person (92%), and most likely to say they are “supportive” or “very supportive” of trans people (96%). In comparison, 89% of LGBT+ people overall said they were  “supportive” or “very supportive” of trans people, and just 69% of non-LGBT+ people said the same.
There is no full breakdown of how many people are "very supportive," "supportive," "slightly supportive" or "not supportive" of trans people by identity label. The relevant data is on p. 63 of the report:
"Looking at who was the most supportive of transgender people:
non-binary respondents were 97% supportive or very supportive with 1% of respondents indicating they were not supportive;
lesbian respondents were 95% supportive or very supportive [everywhere else in the report and in the reporting says 96%, so perhaps this is a typo] (3% were not supportive);
bi/pansexual respondents were 92% supportive or very supportive (2% were not supportive).
Of respondents who were gay men, 82% were supportive or very supportive of transgender people, with 7% indicating they were not supportive.
Among non-LGBT+ respondents 69% were supportive of transgender people, with 12% indicating they were not supportive."
It's not clear to me how they dealt with e.g. lesbians who were also transgender. Pages 69-70 of the report go into the questions that people were asked to identify their identity label for the purposes of statistical analysis ("Is your gender identity the same as the one you were originally assigned at birth?"; and "What is your sexual orientation?"). The fact that these are separate questions (as they should be) tells me that there's overlap between groups throughout the study; any data that says e.g. "83% of lesbian respondents" is combining cis and trans lesbians, and any result that says "67% of trans people" is combining heterosexual and LGB trans people.
So, while narrowing the respondents down to just cisgender LGB people to compare their support for trans people would have been one way to analyse the data, I'm guessing they didn't do that (plus, there's the article's wording of "LGBT+ people overall"; it wouldn't make statistics-analytical sense to compare cis lesbians with all LGBT+ people, plus it would presumably make the higher support % of lesbians less stark, which seems like the opposite of what Ashenden wanted to do).
When the article says "other than trans and non-binary people themselves," they don't mean that they excluded trans and non-binary people from the percentages given; they mean "other than the number you get if you measure support for transgender people just from trans and non-binary people." We're not given the number that would result from doing this. The number we're given in the report for non-binary people is 97% supportive (this number is not included in the article); we are not given a number for just trans people, but we can probably assume it also approaches 100%.
This means that the 96% support presumably measures support from cis and trans lesbians; the 82% of "supportive" and "very supportive" gay men includes cis and trans men; &c.
There is a major statistics-analytical problem with acknowledging that trans and non-binary respondents have the highest rates of support for trans people, but then not controlling the results of this question for whether the respondent was cis or trans. If a higher percentage of lesbian respondents were trans than the percentage of gay men respondents that were trans, this would itself skew the numbers for lesbian support higher. There's no reason to suppose that this did happen, but there is not enough information given about the data that Just Like Us collected to rule it out. Again, at no point are we given information about overlap between LGB and trans groups or a breakdown of what that overlap looked like (how many trans respondents were heterosexual versus LGB, &c.).
As I mentioned above, some of the survey focused on whether respondents "felt supported" at home and at school. Some snippets on the results of these questions can be found on pages 45-49 of the report. "[M]ore than 1 in 4" LGBT+ respondents "felt unsupported" in school compared to "1 in 10" non-LGBT+ respondents; 37% of transgender respondents and 39% of nonbinary respondents said they felt unsupported in school. Despite the survey's focus on the outcomes of felt support, and despite all respondents being asked if they were "supportive" of transgender people, no question asked transgender respondents if they "felt supported" by cisgender LGB people.
Generalisability of claims:
The sampling of the data (which is drawn entirely from people in the UK aged 18-25, mostly students) also means that the claims are not generalisable to the entire UK population; you can't say the "majority of anti-trans adults don’t know a trans person in real life" (the headline of the Just Like Us article) or "Most anti-trans adults don’t actually know a trans person in real life" (the headline of the Pink News article), since the survey did not take a representative sample of all adults. You can't say "lesbians are not anti-trans" (the url of the Gay Times article), since the survey is not representative of all lesbians.
Funding sources:
The report was sponsored by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a firm offering professional services (accounting, auditing, consulting, financial advisory, litigation consulting, and other services offered to businesses).
Cibyl, an independent research firm in the UK, "led on research design and delivery, then worked in partnership with Just Like Us to produce the report." They include the report ("Positive Futures") as an example of their work on their website. Their summary of the study focuses on the claim that "support in LGBT+ young adults’ teenage years" is necessary to the future development of their careers, and on what "employers and careers professionals can do to help LGBT+ young people feel safe and supported." This is the same kind of thing that Deloitte talks about when it comes to LGBT+ issues (namely, inclusion versus exclusion and support versus non-support in the workplace).
A video that Asheden produced with Mags Scott (partner at Deloitte) also focuses on how "support" for LGBT+ people "at home, in school, and in the workplace" leads to confidence in "career prospects" and ability to be onself "at work," and is necessary for LGBT+ people's mental wellbeing.
Just Like Us has an interest in promoting research that suggests that support for LGBT+ people in school will benefit them in their careers, since they sell training resources on forming LGBT+ groups, and talks with LGBT+ speakers, to schools. Just Like Us is a non-profit organisation.
Declaration of conflicts of interest and peer review:
This is an industry-sponsored study and not an academic one. There is no declaration of conflicts of interest required, and the study was not peer-reviewed.
Tl;dr:
Some breakdown of data was revealed in the report. The exact questions that respondents saw were not given. The data is not given with enough granularity to allow for anyone else to conduct statistical analysis based on it.
There is not enough evidence to say whether the study supports the claim that (cis?) lesbians are more supportive of trans people than any other identity group, since the survey was not clear what "support" means (someone may claim to support trans people as individuals while not supporting transition care, for example, due to some kind of "love the sinner, hate the sin" logic).
There is also a statistical problem with the support for this claim, since overlap between "transgender" and "cisgender" respondents is not controlled for. There is not enough data given in the report to allow anyone else to control for this factor. The results would hold if we assumed that similar percentages of e.g. lesbian, bisexual, and gay male respondents were transgender.
The results apply only to people in the UK aged 18-25 and cannot be generalised to all adults in the UK.
Summaries of this report given by the firms that funded and conducted it centre on the idea that "support" of LGBT+ people at home, at school, and in the workplace is necessary to allow them to thrive in the workplace. Just Like Us, who put out the report, sell LGBT+ talks and training to schools.
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vaspider · 2 years
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Pete Buttigieg is not the fucking point.
Truly amazed at the people whose big takeaway from that thread is "you hate Pete Buttigieg" like buddy did you not... read... all of it?
I genuinely don't give a shit about Pete himself. If you think this is about Democratic self-devouring or whatever the fuck, please mentally substitute Ellen or George Takei or Rachel Maddow or your favorite Other Respectable Gay. I hear some dude named Rubin is even a conservative who is getting turned on for adopting a baby? I don't know who he is and I don't care (do not tell me, I do not care) but if it makes you feel better, substitute any of those names.
I think the ones that actually make me sad are the people who keep insisting that 70% of people support gay marriage, and that I'm just 'acting out my trauma', and we won't see things turn against us, we're perfectly safe now, how dare I say that cishets won't put themselves out for us when it counts, it's different now.
Honey, 99% of people want tomorrow to go on pretty much like today, and what they'll support when it doesn't cost them anything has nothing to do with what they'll support when it does. Those of us telling you 'we were abandoned before, and we were the ones who took care of us then' aren't telling you because we're incorrigibly bitter misanthropes. I am annoyingly hopeful, actually, and in love with humanity and the beauty of life. Seriously, I have to write poems about it because I love the universe and all of humanity so fucking much. One of the things I love about humanity is its fragility and its uncertainty. I love the ways in which we fail.
And humans, over and over again, turn our eyes away from tragedy.
If you are lucky enough to have cishet friends and family who will put themselves out for you when it really matters, that is fucking fantastic. That's not nearly universal, and I'm afraid that you're going to find out sooner rather than later that it's far less universal for you than you'd like to believe.
At the end of the day, you can believe me or not about all of this. You can say that I'm just a bitter old transfag, an angry old dyke, a traumatized old queer if it lets you sleep better at night, if it allows you to just close your eyes and say 'this is all going to be fine, because 70% of people support marriage equality!' and get some rest. I can't make you pay attention.
And the thing is? I'd love to be wrong. I would absolutely love for every cishet who has ever said "one of them" or said "well, I mean, I just don't want to see it, they can do whatever they want in private" or whatever to turn out to be the raddest fucking ally the world has ever seen. I know it can happen! My in-laws went from being Baptist homophobes to getting weekly chatty update phone calls from the two trans women refugees from Latin America who they housed and helped get their papers sorted and who are now living in New York and call them Mom and Dad. Like, truly, it can fucking happen!
But you can't count on that from the vast majority of people, because when it comes down to it, most people want tomorrow to go on pretty much like today. You're much more likely to be able to count on someone with a dog in the hunt.
More than that, though, the point of that essay -- which, when people miss it, they miss it so hard that it feels deliberate, honestly -- is that all of our bullshit infighting doesn't mean dick. I've been saying that for years, begging people to think inclusively about our community, begging people to stop all the bullshit infighting because I could see this shit fucking coming, you didn't need to be Cassandra to see it coming but sometimes I felt like I was screaming until my throat was horse, the fucking tsunami is coming, it's coming, motherfuckers, can't you see the way the water is pulling back?
And here we are, and all the arguing about whether bi lesbians are "valid" doesn't matter, and everyone's attempt to gatekeep butch and femme doesn't matter, and everyone's arguments about whether neopronouns are bad doesn't fucking matter because we are all just fags, dykes and trannies to them, they do not care for one fucking second about any of this. None of them care for one second about our infighting. No one is going to stop and ask you what your orientation is so they can call you the right slur when they're gaybashing you, kids. They. Don't. Care.
So now here we are, and people are acting like the point of the essay is that I wanted to call one particular dude a fag, rather than that it doesn't matter how perfectly primed you are to fit into Respectable WASP Society, it is your queerness which is objectionable. It is your gayness. It is your transness. It is your bisexuality, your asexuality, your lesbianism. You will never be granted rights and respectability. You have to defend your rights, and stop giving a shit about respectability as a metric of whether or not someone deserves them.
I mean, for fuck's sake, some Iowa voters tried to withdraw their caucus support once they realized that Pete was gay. It literally fucking happened. There's video. Someone they supported above all the other candidates in the Iowa primary was immediately disqualified for them to the point where they tried to retract their support the minute they found out he was gay.
That's the fucking point. I don't care who you use as your Proxy Respectable Gay.
Pete Buttigieg is not the fucking point.
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systemrestart · 1 month
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From Alison Bechdel's "Dykes to Watch Out For". Strip name "Au Courant", from 1994
I'd never seen this strip get posted, so I want others to see it. Mo, the character expressing 'concern' over the inclusion of trans women (as well as bisexuals) in lesbian culture, is often portrayed as being overly self-righteous, jumping to conclusions about others, and not critically examining her own biases and worldview. She was also the character in the comic commissioned for Transgender Warriors, where she learns she was wrong for being anxious about sharing a bathroom with a trans woman.
Mo is often either the butt of the joke, or receives a stark lesson in these interactions (whether by confrontation or just becoming socially isolated, because she's difficult to be around). And I found this framing important, especially as I've heard discussion of TERFs trying to claim Bechdel as one of them.
This comic was not made to validate Mo's opinions or feelings. The characters in Bechdel's comics are often messy, short-sighted, even bigoted. They're human. This comic does not valorize or 'condone' these flaws, merely shows them for what they are, as well as the consequences that come with them, and the effects they can have on your communities.
Transcript of the comic below the cut:
[ID: A "Dykes to Watch Out For" comic strip by Alison Bechdel, featuring the characters Mo and Lois. The conversation is as follows:
MO: Oh, jeez. Here's a submission for "Madwimmin Read" from someone named Jillian who identifies as a transsexual lesbian.
LOIS: Cool.
MO: The cover letter says, "I hope you'll consider changing the name of your reading series for local lesbian writers to be inclusive of transgender and bisexual women writers too." Oh, man!
LOIS: Guess it's time to get with the program, huh?
MO: What am I supposed to do? Have bi women and drag queens come in here and read about schtupping their boyfriends?
LOIS: Why not? I'm sure they'd have a unique perspective on the topic.
MO: Lois, I'm still trying to adjust to lesbians using dildos! What am I supposed to make of a man who became a woman who's attracted to women?!
LOIS: Love is a many gendered thing, pal. Get used to it.
MO: Well fine. Let people do what they want. But I'm not gonna add this unwieldy "bisexual and transgender" business to the name of my reading series. I don't even know what transgender means!
LOIS: It's sort of an evolving concept. I mean, we haven't had any language for people you can't neatly peg as either boy or girl.
LOIS: Like cross-dressers, transsexuals, people who live as the opposite sex but don't have surgery, drag queens and kings, and all kinds of other transgressive folks. "Transgender" is a way to unite everyone into a group, even though all these people might not self-identify as transgender.
LOIS: In fact, the point is that we're all just ourselves, and not categories. Instead of two rigid genders, there's an infinite sexual continuum! Cool, huh?
MO: How do you know all this stuff?
END ID]
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keithbutgay · 1 month
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vat7k headcanons?
oh my gosh my time has come (you will probably regret this)
so first off imma reference my like three other posts i've made on the topic because i'm a nerd
starting with lgbt+ headcanons-
hugo is genderfluid and likes men i don't make the rules (he/she/they)
i am very much a trans varian truther. in my mind they use he/they pronouns and is also very biromantic
transing nuru's gender too- i love transfemme nuru (she/her) and also she's a lesbian definitely
yong gets the aroace nonbinary treatment
okay moving on to headcanons about languages-
its canon that varian speaks like three languages but i headcanon that he is fluent in coronan, saporian, and is learning the dark kingdom's language
hugo definitely knows so many languages because he gets around. i like to think he's fluent in ingvarran, coronan and bayangoran
i love the idea that yong is still learning coronan and that hugo sometimes has to translate for him or they repeat things for him sometimes because varian talks too fast or they use an unfamiliar word or like accents trip him up
on a seperate note in my mind coronan is german, bayangoran is mandarin, ingvarran is farsi (based on this post)
one of my favorite possible vat7k storylines is when hugo finds out about varian's past and i love the idea that he found out because of a wanted poster they found- perfect angst potential. on that note, i also believe that the rest of them would have heard about varian (the alchemist) when he was still wanted for example
hugo would have been told about him from donella, whether he was always told to be better and be like varian, or that he admired varian and thought he was really cool and dreamed of working with him
nuru had heard about him through horror stories about the kidnapping and attempted murder of the royal family. she most likely would have been scared of varian when she found out, not trusting him not to hurt her
i honestly think yong wouldn't understand. i don't think his parents would have told him if they even knew, and he would have been like seven at the time, so
hugo was varian's bi awakening except not really. he had liked guys before that but hadn't realized that was what he was feeling
they definitely met cass while on their adventures and she definitely had a girlfriend
ruddiger and prometheus hate each other
hugo is extremely jealous of ruddiger as well. ah yes him, his boyfriend, and his boyfriend's raccoon that's taking up all his attention
firmly believing in hugo showing up one day with period products because he might be a loser but he's not a jerk and nuru not knowing how to tell him she's trans while varian (also not out) comes up and just takes the pads being like 'thanks i needed these'
varigo-
t4t obviously
also they're both neurodivergent i dont make the rules
they hate each other but like not
like in the sense that, if they were asked if they liked each other, they would be like ew gross no i hate this man
and then at the end of the conversation varian kisses hugo on the cheek and is just like see you at home babe and everyone is like w h a t
they argue nonstop, to the point of being violent, and then someone changes the subject and hugo's in varian's lap
obsessed with that one au where they were in prison together
also obsessed with hugo dropping the piano on eugene's head
this entire post
might add to this later but here you go have fun!
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bughugz · 2 months
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DNI minors, zoos, pedos, transphobes, homophobes, racists, detrans, eating disorder blogs, self harm blogs, cishet men, 'men dni' blogs, ableists, blank and ageless accounts there's probably more if any of these things are you or you give off a not good vibe or whatever i'll block you
you can call me bug, bun, or worm (if we're moots and you're curious to know my real name i'll probably tell you) i'm a 20 year old 2spirit gnc trans man i only use he/it pronouns please perceive as like effeminate boyish and creaturelike with some sprinkling of cultural and spiritual context to confuse the masses i'm also neurodivergent and chronically ill please be patient with me and maybe use tone tags
i'm very non monogamous and don't really label my sexuality sometimes i say bi or gay but sexuality is confusing i'm simply attracted to gender fuckery usually very t4t and i love woman and nonbinary people but i have a big masc lean kind of a fag boything and i mostly post transmasc for transmasc content - i do not identify with being sapphic or a lesbian pls don't tag my posts as such but hi you're welcome here if you like boythings / nsx or sx
single but please feel free to flirt with me and be like gross and horny i love attention my dms and asks are open you can also send pics if you ask nicely and i might send back i may however also choose not to respond to your advances if you wanna tip me my cashapp is $bughugz
i'm basically a subby bottom bitch boy i would not feel comfortable domming most people i'm just occasionally feral and sadistic and might power bottom if i feel like it and i do love to service but i'm much more shy and inexperienced when it comes to topping!
kinks & limits + terminology and names you can use for me + some stuff to get to know me outside of kink below cut:
key to my heart as a sub is petplay (mostly bunny sometimes puppy) but here is a way too long list of other things i like and may also post about in no particular order:
intox (420!)
cnc (might include uncensored use of the word rape)
edging
overstimulation
restraints
somnophilia
praise
crying
nipple play
choking
degradation (not of looks)
dumbification
manhandling
slapping
spanking (hands and some paddling)
general sadomasochism
breeding (not pregnancy)
hair pulling
biting
marking / bruising
free use / public play / anonymous sex
group sex / gangbangs / spit roasting
sex for material favors
objectification
hard limits ie things that i am very unlikely to post about and may get you blocked if they're all over your account:
ageplay
abdl / ddlg / other variants
scat
beastiality
incest / fauxcest
piss
vomit
race play
iffy on excessive weapon use
there's probably more i could add to either of these lists if you're curious to know more of my thoughts on something that is or is not here send me an ask or dm!!!
terminology and names you can use for me include:
chest, tits, t/dick, cunt, hole (bunny, puppy, or boy prefixes are fine ie puppycunt, boytits, bunny hole)
bunny, puppy, mutt, bitch, angel, baby, good boy, love, slut, whore, (fuck)toy, pretty boy etc
i also like masc compliments and being called pretty! if i refer to myself or body using a name or term that isn't here that's not permission for you to do the same but you can definitely ask most pet names are fine besides like anything with girl or princess!
get to know me outside of kink:
i'm indigenous (coast salish, river and plains peoples)
i'm an herbalist and i love plants and ethnobotany especially
i'm in college slowly working towards an environmental science degree
i love bugs and crystals and anything miniature
i like cozy games and fashion and books
i'm a fiber artist and like to experiment with lots of different mediums and styles
i like to roller skate badly
exploring in nature is one of my favorite pastimes whether it's tide pooling or admiring all the little things in a small stretch of forest
this is 100% a horny blog and i will be spamming my silly horny and sometimes non horny thoughts so often that you might hate me not great with words mostly rambling. but please don't hesitate to try and befriend and get to know me and ask me about any of this stuff i probably will not dm first though i am very shy and struggle with social anxiety!
pics of me are tagged #wormy pics
audios of me are tagged #wormy audios
original text nsfw and sfw is all mostly lumped into #bun ramblings
asks are #wormyasks
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gravedangerahead · 3 months
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I don't know, buddy. I think this should make you rethink saying stuff like "I hate microlabels" in the first place? Not to put you on blast or anything, you're just the latest in a long line of people I've seen making arguments like these.
There's basically no genuine problem you can have with microlabels that does not simply apply to labels in general
I think it's important to be in community and solidarity with people independently of whether you have the exact same label, and to realize there are plenty of shared experiences across different queer identities.
Practically none of it is the exclusive realm of one particular identity and we don't need to be atomized. And it is, in fact, in our best political interest to stick together and fight together
Labels are a way of classifying and categorizing the infinitely diverse range of human experience. That can be helpful and that can cause problems. (I think there are criticisms of diagnostics that might apply, and some of our words actually originate in that realm.) It's important to remember that they are not material reality and they do not define your experiences, but are merely a culturally defined tool to help you understand them, that may be more or less useful given the situation
I'm always quick to tell people that labels are meant to be helpful and if trying to find one is stressing them out rather than helping, a label is simply not required. Those people might still feel like it's important to them to find the right words, and I'm not gonna pretend to know better than them
There are plenty of people who are perfectly happy being just queer, and not trying to figure out their identities any further than that. There are people going through intense anxiety while trying to figure out if they're lesbian or bi. Why do we need those intermediary labels then? Do they just atomize us? Are they unnecessary boxes? Or is that only a problem when it comes to those newfangled ones at the end of the acronym?
I think there are more people who feel like they have to figure out where exactly they fall in the big 4 identities than people who are distressed because they feel like they have to figure out a microlabel they fit in, tbqh. And there's plenty of separatist sentiment among them too
Plenty of people find meaning and expression in being butch or femme. Why shouldn't people choose a new word that they feel best defines their own unique gender identity? Why shouldn't somebody on the ace or aro spectrum try to figure out if other people have a similar experience with attraction as they do?
People having more words to describe their identities is not the problem. At all. If somebody has decided to use a microlabel and is happy with it, what exactly is the issue?
If you actually stand with every queer person, if you're in solidarity with every anti-oppression fight of any kind, the problem of political isolation and community dilution goes away.
If you treat all labels as tools that can be played with, experimented with and not gatekept, taken up and abandoned, changed, or simply ignored if you don't want or need one, the problem of emotional distress goes away.
Neither problem is exclusive to microlabels.
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moonandris · 2 months
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Omg, I actually did it! I finally joined a queer dating/friendship app!!! EEEEEEK!!! I'm sooooo nervous!!! I literally have almost no queer friends IRL so I don't have anyone to get excited with me!! 🥳
One of my New Year's resolutions for 2024 was to put myself out in the world more and try my best to be more social, meet new friends (as well as potentially find a partner), and explore all my passions, hobbies, and interests with like-minded people.
As a very shy bisexual woman, it's so hard to meet other queer people, especially when you live in a more conservative area. So when I joined a queer dating/friendship app I was was SO surprised to see how many other lesbian/bi women were located near me.
Also, for some reason I've always had this super toxic thought in my head that queer women wouldn't be attracted to me because of the fact that I'm S U P ER femme/girly and I think I look very 'straight' to the average person assessing me. Trust me when I say I was genuinely SHOCKED at the matches I was getting like??? Why did I think such terrible things about myself and my sexuality? I feel really silly for thinking that and I've realized that I have a lot of inner work to do regarding my sexuality and self-worth.
This is honestly such a new, exciting experience for me and was so healing for my mind and mental health to just be able to communicate and talk with other queer women. I know this isn't writing related but it's really not something I can share with other people or on my other social media (yet) so I knew I had to make this post bc I'm just SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO excited!!!
It honestly makes me wanna cry a little. It's a very emotional feeling and also feels so freeing to just BE MYSELF and not have to hide my queerness or be afraid that someone is going to find out I'm bisexual and act really awful/disgusted towards me, you know?
Regardless of whether I find a partner or make new friends and whatnot, I'm super proud of myself that I'm not denying this part of myself anymore. I'm exploring my sexuality with people who know what it's like to be queer in this crazy world we live in. It's a really awesome feeling. 💕💕💕💕
Anyways, if you've made it this far thank you so much for reading this silly lil post and wish me good luck! Happy New Year!! 🎊
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fixateonthis · 5 months
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I see a lot of asexual imposter syndrome on here. This is just a reminder that labels are DESCRIPTIVE and not PRESCRIPTIVE. In reality, language is imperfect and our words can only describe how we feel 80-90% of the way.
The following does NOT automatically invalidate your asexuality:
• having a diagnosis that affects your hormones, potentially causing low libido
• having any kind of sexual trauma that affects your ability to be comfortable in sexual situations
• masturbating or enjoying porn/erotica etc
• still having sex and even enjoying aspects of it
• having a physical limitation that makes sexual arousal difficult or impossible
• the list goes on tbh, these are just a few major ones.
At the end of the day, what's important is whether or not you WANT to have sex, whether you find someone sexually attractive and want to act on it, and whether you feel it is worth it. If you find comfort in the ace label and community, then that's amazing.
I am now 30 and have identified partially or wholly as asexual for the last 6 years at least. Hormonal imbalances run in my family, I have two invisible disabilities that sap my energy, I have religious and sexual trauma, I masturbate and sometimes read erotic fanfic, etc. At some point I've attempted to use each of these to describe my lack of interest in sex and convince myself I'm actually allosexual. I'm going to list my "interventions" and hopefully this will give some people some comfort. I've done the following:
• been to therapy addressing my religious and sexual traumas, deconstructed my religious upbringing
• started and stopped 3 different anti anxiety medications
• been married (religiously sanctioned sex)
• started and stopped two different kinds of hormonal birth control
• come out as bi, then lesbian, then nonbinary (each revelation ultimately doing nothing to "fix" my lack of sexual interest)
• dated men, women, and enbies (still no desire for sex).
• been treated for my disabilities to maintain a healthier lifestyle
• watched and read plenty of porn to peak my interest in others (it didn't)
• explored kink (makes sex easier but still not something I crave)
None of these "fixed" me (I'm not broken). My point is that after all of this, I would still rather play video games or watch a good TV show, or even just sit outside and drink coffee than have sex. It isn't even because I hate sex and the feeling of it, it's simply not a priority, or even in my list of top ten favorite things to do. Therefore I am asexual, and my gf is asexual, and we're happier in a partnership where we know our boundaries will be respected.
Stop beating yourselves up. Stop trying to poke holes in your identity. Just let yourselves FEEL how you FEEL. There are hundreds of shades of green, but green is still green, and ace is still ace. Go live your best life, and don't do anything you don't want to do.
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goldenromione · 9 days
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Wait so it's a problem if straight women ship gay couples and no lesbian couples? Or is it a problem when you write about them? Or only when you claim you're being progressive doing so? Bc I ship a few gay couples, also hetero couples or poly bi. But no lesbian couples. And this is not bc I'm a mysogonist, but bc I'm just not interested in a lot of the female characters. And I am also not attracted to the male characters, they were either my favourites since I was a child or they are more interesting to me. And being in fandom for me has nothing to do with starting a revolution to support the lgbtq+ community and fight for their rights. I'm not saying that I don’t support them, and I absolutely agree that this should be a safe space. either way. I just don't think that it's my duty to use the fandom for that. I'm here for fun. So... Am I'm not allowed as a straight white cis woman to ship only men? Or did I misunderstand that?
Y'all quit sending this dumb shit to my inbox. You know the answer. The problem has never been the ship, and whether you prefer them to be het or gay. The problem is the way you approach the content you consume.
You don't need me or anyone else to coddle you and reassure you that you're doing it with good intentions. You figure that out. If there's not a problem, then you aren't the one we're talking about. Congratulations!
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fandomsandfeminism · 2 years
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So, this is going to be a little meandering and all over the place. But I'm trying to express this...web of thoughts I've been having lately around this issue of queer, and labels, and the way we talk about our history and the way the community conceptualized itself in this very digital age. And it's still kind of half formed, so...let's see.
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So. OK.
One thing I see a lot online, especially with people who are just now coming out, is a sort of...overfixation on increasingly niche labels. Im not saying that having a very specific or newer label is bad, to be clear. Labels are rhetorical tools, use what is useful. They help with visibility and discussing specific issues. No issues there.
But watching people quibble over bi vs pan vs omni vs abro or non-binary vs genderqueer vs demigender vs genderfluid vs agender vs xenogender vs bigender vs gnc. Asexual or gray ace or demisexual or queerplatonic. And whether they are a biromantic lesbian demigirl or bisexual greyaromantic genderuid. And it's always just a little exhausting, ya know? Again, if those labels are meaningful and useful, that's great, but I see people *agonizing* over which they "really" are. Like if they pick the wrong word to describe themselves, they are coming out the wrong way, like they are wrong about themselves if they can't find the exact correct word on an FAQ list of lgbt vocabulary.
And how I think that relates to the way people talk about our CURRENT labels as though these labels have always been there and like the people described by these labels now have no common experiences with other labels. Like lesbians and bisexual women have absolutely nothing in common. Like butches and trans men have no shared history. As though trans women and drag queens have always been completely separate and unconnected groups. As though ace folks and nonbinary folks are somehow new to the scene, and not community members who were always here and just didn't have a separate label until more recently.
I *remember* watching the community make the switch from transvestite and transsexual, to differentiating between transsexuals and transgender, to basically just using transgender/trans. Those labels are not stagnant. None of our labels are some ingrained biological unchanging objective truth. Labels are rhetorical shortcuts to summarize this facet of our identity and lives and experiences- but they are just words.
And maybe this connects to the way people get really...weird about historical figures too. Like whether Sappho was a lesbian or bisexual, as though either of those words would have had any meaning to her. About whether Shakespeare was gay or bi, like he would have conceptualized his own identity that way. About what modern label Dr. James Barry would have used for himself if anyone could travel back in time and ask him.
And then I think about why queer feels so much more affirming, so much more a place of strength, than LGBT+. Not that LGBT as a label is bad, and I honestly probably prefer it for allies and outsiders to use. But as a community label- Queer, to me, says that all our experiences are queer experiences. Queer can be many things, but they are all queer. Regardless of how many genders or which specific genders you like, whether you have a romantic and or sexual attraction to whatever collection of genders, whatever thing your gender is doing today- all of it, ALL of it, once you step outside that cis, straight mainstream sexuality and gender norm- is queer. Equally queer.
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Lgbt+ feels like we are still keeping all those labels separate, little boxes all lined up next to each other- different but a coalition. And while that isn't bad, I also think it isn't totally true.
[A caveat here, that there are times when more specific labels are very helpful. We don't want any specific kind of queer experience to be overshadowed or erased, and having more specific labels facilitates those discussions. Again, I'm not saying that we should eliminate or erase our more specific labels.]
But I think imagining our community as a collection of wholly separate groups that are just allied together, instead of one group that we are all equally in, can make it far too easy for exclusionists to sneak up and say "well ___ isn't REALLY lgbt. THEY aren't REALLY one of us. ___ dont belong."
If we take all the labels off all the crayons- red and pink and purple and blue and teal and green are not hard and fast divisions. They are artificial distinctions we have made- all of them are light, all of them the rainbow.
Anyway. I just think that, while everyone should use whatever labels bring them joy and are useful for them, we might be better off if more folks were ok with ALSO accepting the vast ambiguity of being queer.
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olderthannetfic · 2 months
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https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/739335177994747904/httpswwwtumblrcomolderthannetfic739061849135#notes
I'm the anon on this post. I fully get the point here in this person's reblog and your addition, and I can see how my ask came across as gatekeeping, but I think what I meant more was in response to the previous anon (that Il inked) seeming to think that a LOT of hetero men needed to enter fandom for F/F to become more popular. As I said, there is some good F/F content written by men; I encountered that even in the brony fandom. (That said, that was a fandom where I very strongly was NOT interested in smut, which is not the case with most of my other F/F fandoms, so that's probably part of what influenced my preferences there.) Like, there was a lot of garbage, but there was so much content that there happened to be a decent amount of good stuff as well even following Sturgeon's Law.
I think what I meant more was disagreeing with the idea that the "solution" to lack of F/F is to have fanfiction become a *much* dudier space. I was trying to give my experience of having been in a fandom like that to suggest that it's a very fundamentally different experience than the generally less-dudey places that fanfiction fandom is in most fandoms, and I don't know that that's necessarily better just because we get more F/F, because in effect it still ends up marginalizing lesbian and bi women F/F fans because so much of the content is not only not for us, but often even hostile to us. (In a very different way from the arguments that are made about women writing M/M, where a lot of it is just stuff that isn't what gay/bi men are looking for. I'm sure any lesbian or bi woman who has had to deal with the kind of men who have lesbian fetishes irl, on dating sites, etc. can relate, but I really hate when people compare those things because it is truly apples and oranges.)
I hope I'm being clear, but I just think there's a distinction to be made between "I do not want F/F fanfiction fandom to become a *primarily* male space, and I think there are some big downsides that people who've never been in a fandom like that haven't seen" vs. "We need to gatekeep F/F so it's exclusively queer women writing it." I'm fine with some guys doing it, of course, but I don't think the fact that fanfiction is a primarily female and queer and nonbinary space is a "problem" to be "fixed" even if it means less F/F. I think that's a big part of the draw, in fact. That's what I was trying to say, but maybe not very well.
--
I think the point of the other comment isn't so much that anyone wants fic fandom to become dude-y... It's that for f/f numbers to look like m/m numbers, you'd have to have the reverse situation.
Whether that's desirable is another question, but it puts the endless focus on stats and numbers into perspective.
I don't think we really disagree all that much. They were just putting it provocatively to get people to think about why they waste their time yelling about AO3's overall stats "looking bad" and what the so-called solution to that would be.
It's pretty much bait is what I'm saying.
--
Obviously, as a woman, I only rarely encounter women who are mega annoying about gay men and reasonably often encounter those pestilential men in bars who think "bisexual" means "porn star who wants a threesome". I certainly think they're more of an actual problem IRL... but I'm still not convinced it is entirely apples to oranges when we're discussing online fanfic spaces or... like... stories with plots more complex than "I'm here to fix your plumbing".
Ranma fandom was full of dudes writing f/f that was a little anatomically suspect but reasonably in-character and that sounded like other fanfic with the usual "I like this blorbo and want more content about them" motivations. I haven't seen many fandoms like this, but I run across one now and then. (I agree MLP is fairly distinctive even out of these.)
--
I think the basic thing here is that a lot of (hostile, loud) people do see the absolute f/f numbers as the problem to be fixed.
And you are right and they are wrong.
There is no real fix if people keep looking at it from this "Winning at AO3 numbers" perspective. The cure would be worse than the disease for many of the people complaining.
Better to focus on the usual "How do I get my specific blorbo to have more content by encouraging authors and writing it myself?" strategies and let someone else worry about the global AO3 numbers.
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tiofrean · 1 year
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Oh boy... OH BOY... I was reading through comments and tags under that Flint vs. Stede post (and before that in Silver vs. Oluwande post) and OH BOY RANT INCOMING
Feel free to ignore. No, I'm prickly about this.
I LOVE how people are like "Black Sails fans are so mean why are they like that T.T ?" in the tags and comments.
LET ME TELL YOU.
So we have this show that has been marginalized and has been pushed to the side for years. A show that has excellent plot, wonderful intrigue, magnificent representation and well-written, 3D characters that are complex and relatable. You get your edgy queer men (whether you want to characterize Flint as gay or bi, doesn't change the fact that he likes dick whichever way), you get your edgy queer girls (Anne), you get your flamboyant whatever-the-fuck-Jack-Rackham-is (<3), you get sweet gays (Thomas), you get confused bisexuals (Eleanor, Silver), you get straight sweets (Miranda) and straight angery dicks (Woodes Rogers), and competent, edgy straights (Vane). Oh! A competent, master-of-the-house lesbian? Check (Max). You even have asexuals, or that is what I shall forever classify Billy as. You have a f/f sex scene in the first damn episode, ffs. You get threesomes (sexual, romantic), you get couples, you even have Silver in a brothel orgy.
But sexual representation is not ALL! You get goofy pirates (Jack Rackham), you get serious pirates (Blackbeard), you get balls of rage (Flint), you get chill, laid-back sea dogs (Gates), you get competent little weasels (Silver), you get incompetent rats (Dufrense). You also have marvelous extras and side characters (Beauclerc the marksman, Captain Fruit-Fruit, Idelle... OHMYGOD IDELLE <3333).
There's the political plot that's historically accurate, the story's plot that's Flint's big gay rage, there's the sociological context of being painted as a monster, there's the gold hunt, there are ships correctly operated by crews of more than five fucking people, there are guns, blood and realistic injuries. You get quotations and allusions to Shakespeare, Cervantes, Julius Caesar, Marcus Fucking Aurelius, a metric ton of other classical writers. You get so many tropes done right it's astonishing and too effing long to list them all here.
On top of that, there is the picturesque landscape, absolutely gorgeous ships and very accurate portrayal of how life looked back then.
We had to defend that show when it first came out, the actors had to fucking fight homophobic assholes upon the airing of season two (IMAGINE THAT), people who loved it had a hard time going around, although admittedly it's a "fandom" hard time, not a "real life" hard time. We persisted, we persevered, and now we're here, clinging to what's left of our fandom, because we are admittedly all over the place and we don't have "troops" on any one social media, which makes our numbers small in comparison to other fandoms, and makes fandom interactions very limited.
Now imagine that there aired a show... a pirate show promising a lot. And then the show turned out to be an office-type comedy with no lesbian/bi women representation (I may be wrong, but I did watch it out of curiosity, didn't see any, just guys). A show that the whole plot of is just a rendition of the Beauty and the Beast for pirate times with so many historical inaccuracies (couching your crew like a bunch of office workers? Plz. The way they speak and the concepts they talk of that weren't there? It's like they were sitting around a fire, holding hands and singing kumbaya). And don't get me wrong, there's place for those shows as well, and maybe it works for you (and great for you too!).
We tried to ignore it, really we did. We basically gave it the eyebrow-raise-huff-ignore thing that you do on the internet when you want someone to enjoy their stuff and are not interested in it yourself.
But you know what happened? Suddenly there were people on twitter tagging everyone and their dog from Black Sails with renditions of Flint/Izzy (Izzy who comes across as an extreme asshole at best and a homophobic shit at worst and you can't fault people for reading it like this). Let that sink in - our fandom babe Flint, who had his whole life ruined due to homophobia and homophobic assholes is suddenly being shipped with a guy who suspiciously fits the description a bit too much for our tastes. Wouldn't you get angry? Of course you would, we're all very protective of our babes. We are, you are, everyone is. We asked you not to do this, and while I admit that hurling curses your way might not have been the most polite way of asking you to stop, the message was clear enough. What does OFMD fandom do? They all double down. Double fucking down on fanfiction and tagging everything in BS again, pairing Flint and Izzy together, writing things way out of the realm of any possibilities because most of the writers didn't watch BS (I did read their comments on that. They weren't even sorry). If you take such character and throw him into a work of art that can and will be seen as controversial, you should at least have the decency to do your homework on the original work he comes from. Otherwise, to our eyes, you're taking the most wronged man from our beloved show, wronged due to his sexuality, and throw him together with a literal asshole just to see them fuck because they would look pretty (and that's an actual comment from one of the artists, I shit you not). Wouldn't you feel a bit angry about that? I bet you would.
What's worse, people loving Black Sails and not liking OFMD usually point out how narrow the representation is, how improbable the show is and how they're not remotely invested in the plot. It's a cheesy show for your average Sunday afternoon, don't make it into something it's not. It's not a political statement any more than Guess The Tune is.
What's more, when I've seen attempts at people pointing out the obvious flaws in plot, in logic (how many people crew that ship exactly? How is he not dead after being stabbed clean through with a sword?), all we've gotten was "Oh it's not that type of show, OBVIOUSLY", "it's just a comedy, duh" and my personal favorite "you just DON'T UNDERSTAND IT BOOMER". (I'm a late Millennial, thx). Every attempt was chucked out the window. What got me most, tho, was the high praise of OFMD IS THE FIRST SHOW TO [insert whatever queer thing it did supposedly]. No, it's not. There was even a post on twitter that debunked all those claims one by one. I get it, you're happy that you got your gay pirates, good for you. But give credit where credit's due, otherwise you're gonna piss off a lot of people. People who watched our show struggle and crawl so that your show can run today and be fine and accepted widely.
And personally, I felt disappointed watching it because of the lack of representation. Disappointed that Ed turned out to be just as rainbowy as Stede. Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against rainbowy, ultra-sweet characters that are big softies. I love them. But not everyone in the lgbtq community is like that. Actually, it's the minority. There are your sweets, there are your glittery rainbows, but the majority is on the more... inconspicuous part of the scale. And there are edgy people (like myself) who don't like glitter, pink, feathers, fluff and a shitton of other things this show had in abundance. You know what made me wince while watching? When I realized that the only person who I could remotely like for the way they weren't so glittery-rainbowy-sweet was Izzy, and I hated him because he was an asshole. Even Jim got the fluffy af oranges arch. So not my (and others') cup of tea.
So yeah, our recent anger and rabidity is not based solely on one post about an insignificant poll (that you're winning only because our fandom is significantly smaller and most people are dispersed between different sites). It's all those things combined and it's the result of them.
And no, I'm not going to finish it with a "please forgive us if we seem a bit angery, we're coping". Flint wouldn't.
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