#i just think our oppression tends to be more invisible | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

roughstar · 10 months

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We need to talk about intersectionality again.

I see a lot of people debate on here about transphobia/homophobia/misogyny/etc. but a lot of the time while they may disagree on some things the general consensus is things like misandry and white racism aren't real because men/white people aren't an identity (as in they're invisible, people don't say they're proud whites or proud men without sounding incredibly bigoted). This is wrong. Flat out. Incorrect. If me saying "white people is not an identity" upset you, then good, you understand at least a little. Because it is actually an identity that people can identify as without having to feel guilty about it.

But here's the big thing, people have more than one identity. People can be black AND gay and their experience will be unique based on experiences they share with similar black people and gay people, but not all of their experiences will be shared from either group. This is easy enough to understand. So then when we have white gay people, do they only get to claim experiences from the gay community? No, we all know and understand this. Their experiences come from being white AND gay AND every other identity they have. Because people all aren't just one thing, even those people who make one thing their whole identity. They still experience things from all the other identities they have at all times.

This is kinda what makes Taylor Swift's version of feminism tone deaf for a lot of other feminists, because she's experiencing misogyny from a high class perspective while most of us aren't high class. This is why intersectionality is important.

But earlier I said that things like misandry and white racism are real, even though most of Tumblr is programmed to believe they're not despite being super liberal, TERF, far-right conservative, or basically anywhere else on the political spectrum. (Because "oppressors" cannot suffer from bigotry or some shit). Here's the thing, if you believe gender is a social construct, the patriarchy is a social construct too so the oppression is a reflection of that society. News flash, not every society is the same. Some cultures experience stronger identity roles than others, with all sorts of power imbalances built in and people in those cultures can and do fight any kind of imbalance they find unfair all the time. Ours is no different.

So why would we then purposefully exclude usage of words for particular instances of societal bigotry based on our own subjective understanding of our own society? I bet some of you would say things like "but I'm not part of another society, I'm a part of this western colonial society rooted in Europe and the Americas" or "because you're full of shit and this power imbalance is singular/universal". But, for the first point, how would we then accurately describe an observation from another culture, or describe such an observation to someone of that culture? For instance, if we were talking about misogyny/misandry to say the Amazon women, they may feel just as strongly that misogyny isn't a thing as we do about misandry, that men and women being assholes to other women is always an individual issue and never rooted in the roles of their society. If this were the case, our understanding and communication of these ideas would utterly fail as we've handicapped ourselves into only being able to see other cultures through the lens constructed by our own, with all the same biases and social structures that we ourselves believe to be universally true. This ties well into that second point, which is that such structures are actually NOT universal and believing so is only hindering yourself and your own understanding of them across all cultures.

Another way to think of it is about how malleable we tend to believe they are in the first place. Every time someone says "destroy the patriarchy" we are talking about changing our societal structure. We want to remove gender roles given to men and women which inherently give men power over women (such as making men the typical breadwinners and the head of every household). So why stop here? Why do we only believe and want some aspects of our society to be malleable but others are immutable (sometimes even being the same thing, as in this case, specifically referring to power imbalance between men and women in social structure. Why are we able to "destroy the patriarchy" but men cannot suffer societal injustice, when they both literally are cause-and-effect related)?

And another thing, if someone who is firmly set in their own culture moves into another culture, let's say with their family or whatnot, would they then be forced to change how their family power dynamic is described? Taking the Amazon women as an example again, say that it's typical for men to be like little househusbands there and an Amazon family moves to the US, granted they'd probably be welcomed pretty well here but wouldn't the casual misandry from that Amazon culture still apply in their situation? Would that not still be misandry even if it's in a different culture?

And last point, just because someone develops a strong prejudice against a whole group that's typically known as an oppression group doesn't mean they can't be labeled an appropriate -ism or -phobia for that group. There's an individual prejudice and a societal oppressive structure to each one of those words. You can describe a racist as someone who adheres to racist social structures just as well as someone who innately hates all black people just the same, and we can use context clues to figure out when some individual is described as a specific type of bigot versus just someone maintaining a status quo of societal oppression. And, tying in to intersectionality, every social group or any way to divide/categorize people has a potential for it's own discrimination, as described by a specific -ism or -phobia word. Even if in the context of our own society there is a plain lack of oppression for that group.

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nothorses · 3 years

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I know this is gonna be shocking to some folks, but transmascs are the ones you should be listening to about transmasc experiences.

So many people fully just come up with shit and decide they’re Real Transmasc Experiences, and the invisibility of actual transmascs means that these things tend to go fully unchallenged.

TERFs say they love us, and people believe them, so “transmascs aren’t targeted by TERFs and don’t have to worry about them”. When we speak up to say that’s a lie, that we are targeted, that we as individuals have been harmed by TERFs or know someone else who was, we’re brushed off or silenced.

Radfems say we experience male privilege & are treated as cis men by society, and people believe them, so “transmascs are exactly like cis men, trans men are oppressors”. When we speak up and say that’s not true, that we personally have experienced, at most, negligible, momentary “privilege” reliant upon being stealth and keeping a massive part of our identities a secret- that transphobia as a system prevents anyone from seeing us as Real Men on a systemic level, even if we want to be- we’re disregarded as “misogynists”.

Cis people say we can’t experience misogyny, because only women do, & it’s “respectful” to our identities to deny our lived experiences. And people believe them, so “transmascs shouldn’t take up space in women’s issues”. When we speak up and say that erases our experiences with oppression, that we still need to be included in conversations about misogyny, reproductive rights, and patriarchy as men and as transmascs, we’re scolded for “misgendering ourselves”.

This theory and these definitions were not created with transmascs in mind. Invisibility has always played a huge role in our community’s struggle, and by shutting us down when we try to broaden the discussion, make space for ourselves, and speak to our own experiences, you are only enabling further violence against us.

Listen to us when we speak to our lived experiences. Don’t let TERFs, radfems, cis people, or even other trans people define what a transmasculine experience is. Don’t even let one of us speak for all of us; put in some work here. Include more perspectives, contradicting voices, and think critically about what seems truthful rather than convenient.

#transmasc #trans #transgender #ftm #trans men #not horses

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vaspider · 3 years

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'only tenet of TERFism is transmisogyny' EXCUSE ME NO ITS ALL TRANS PEOPLE. They don't want any trans person to exist. What the hell.

Some people just gotta center their own suffering always, even when they're hurting other people by doing so. I've seen this a lot in younger queer folx of all stripes, this need to be the one that hurts the most, you know?

There's a reason the phrase Oppression Olympics exists, and it's because it's a common behavior or phenomenon in oppressed communities. I see it in the disability community, too.

What I think is important to understand when we talk about how trans people suffer under transphobia is that different groups are targeted differently. I'm not the first person to say this, of course.

Now, like, this is very rough sketchy stuff, and each person's individual experiences will vary, but in my general experience, the rough breakdown of the way in which transphobia lands on trans people kind of breaks down like this:

Binary trans women tend to suffer under a lens of hypervisibility. Everything they do is seen, analyzed, and torn apart. Their struggles are generally the ones centered in the arguments of allies, "allies," and transphobes. Even when trans women are the focus of helpful attention, that hypervisibility can cause exhaustion, because they need to perform perform perform, and be perfect, all the time. It's hard for trans women to just be without feeling like they're on camera, all the time. A lot of the time, they are on camera, because trans women's bodily autonomy and right to privacy are just never respected by transphobes (and often by supposed "allies" who feel free to ask the most invasive questions and get upset when trans women won't answer them), and even if they're not literally on camera, they're supposed to perform as the best examples of transfemininity, because if they don't, then they become the next 'look at this bad trans, all trans are this bad trans' example that TERFs point at and use as a broad brush to paint all trans women. If they're not perfect all the time and have a day where they snap at someone while someone is recording, or make a mistake, or anything, it has a horrible tendency to go viral. You can think of at least three instances right now off the top of your head, right? Right.

Binary trans men tend to suffer from hyperinvisibility. This comes from inside and outside the community -- a lot of trans men talk about being told they can't lead in community because they've 'got male privilege,' that their struggles are discarded, that they're talked over and unable to discuss the things they face, which means they don't get the support they need. Now, there are TERFs and transphobes who absolutely do focus their attention on trans men to the exclusion of or to the deprioritization of the oppression of trans women -- that's where we get Tavistock and Irreversible Damage and Fourth Wave Now and all the other bullshit which focuses on the idea that trans men are "transing the gay away," specifically "transing our butch lesbians" and "stealing butches." But again, generally speaking, trans men face harmful levels of invisibility where trans women face harmful levels of visibility. That's why transmascs in general have issues like lack of understanding even by supposedly trans-competent doctors as to how HRT affects our bodies, why trans men (and transmascs in general) report things like transphobes attacking them with transmisogynistic comments and assuming that every trans person online is a trans woman, etc.

Non-binary (here used as an umbrella term for all identities outside of binary man/woman, to include agender, genderfluid, non-binary, and infinite other identities) AFAB people tend to suffer from a different, very specific form of hypervisibility, unless they start to appear too masculine, and then they slip into hyperinvisibility. This is where we get things like "women and non-binary people" that codes all non-binary people as "AFAB people I can sort of squint and view as women," and people who fall into this category tend to get a lot of attention, a lot of derision from all sides of the spectrum. This is the "blue-haired tenderqueer" sneering that we get from both within and without the queer community, where there's an assumption that these people are just cosplaying an identity, that they're not really trans, etc. Having been in the visibility category and slipped into the invisibility category within the last, oh, year or so, and having two binary trans women in my family to compare notes with, the experiences are unnervingly similar. The difference between the experience that those women have had and the experience that I have had is that according to transphobes, I'm a traitor to my womanhood and performing femininity wrong and taking on a fake identity to escape female oppression because I'm not strong enough to bear up under it, but too cowardly to become a trans man, or... something, whereas they're taking on a fake identity to sneak into women's spaces because they're perverts.

Non-binary (umbrella identity etc) AMAB people tend to suffer from their own very specific form of hyperinvisibility, unless they start to present "too feminine", and then they slip into the hypervisibility which affects binary trans women, but with a little different fuckery in which everyone just assumes they're a trans woman, and therefore they get misgendered by everyone across the spectrum of queer/non-queer/etc. Non-binary AMAB people are generally treated like they don't exist, and when they are spoken about, are often discussed in the context of 'they should just admit they're trans women or gay men,' or if they present 'too feminine,' are subjected to the same sort of horrific attention that trans women get.

Again, a lot of this is very simplistic, and doesn't add in a lot of other complicating factors like race, disability, class, etc. Trans men of color, for example, can run into a different sort of hypervisibility because as they move further through their transition, they begin to be seen in the world as a man of color. It's not really mine to speak on beyond that, but I don't want to neglect saying 'this is really really simplistic and there's more to it than that' over and over.

I really hate breaking it down this simply because it feels like creating another binary (our society does like a binary!) for non-binary people, but like, I can't really talk about my shared experiences with other trans people without putting some framework around it. Someday, I'll be able to do that without categories. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I think we do our entire community a huge disservice when we talk about transphobia as if it's a single snake trying to take bites out of only one part of the community, and not a many-headed hydra, able to attack us from multiple different directions. I also think that focusing on one form of oppression keeps us from forming meaningful solidary and coalitions; the more divided we are, the easier it is for the people who literally want us all to stop existing to pick us off one by one. We see this all across the queer community and it's only ramping up as the attacks on our community escalate from without; people tend to turn on the ones closest to them when they get really scared, and to blame the person standing next to them for the pain they're suffering. It's the "close enough to hit" phenomenon, and it's why we see ridiculous things like "bi women make cis men think that lesbians can be won over," rather than acknowledging that bi women aren't the ones causing that: cis men are the ones causing that. The bi women in that case are close enough to hit. Transmascs are close enough to hit. Trans women are close enough to blame for the problems of transmascs, which makes it possible for TERFs to lure transmascs in and attempt to detransition them, subjecting them to gaslighting and manipulation and then using them as sock puppets.

TERFs do focus a lot on transmisogyny. They focus a lot on transmisandry, too. Debating which one is more prevalent and 'worse' not only misses the point, because transmascs and transfems face very different and totally rotten attention from cis society as a whole, including cis queers. We need to like, not do that anymore: we need to give each other the space to talk about our unique circumstances, but we also need to work harder on looking at each other through a lens of solidarity and trying to see that our struggles are different but not unrelated, and that if we keep downing on each other like this, we're not going to get anywhere except in a much more difficult situation as the people who don't want any of us to exist keep picking us off.

#transmisogyny #transphobia #transmisandry #queer issues #trans issues #long post

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degenderates · 2 years

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I don't want to be insensitve but there this woman book reviewer who got upset at women writing M/M claiming they were glorifying abusive relationships, fethizing queer men and they had internalized misogyny. I unfollowed but I still can't get her words out of my head. Is she right?

i'm gonna be completely honest, all three of those arguments from that reviewer are red flags to me. somehow many female book & fanfic readers find a way to demonize other female readers and writers of m/m romance and erotica with the same stupid arguments. so let's break it down:

"fetishizing queer men"

this is one of the most common takes i see from people who are against women creating and consuming m/m content. it's also blatantly false. there are many reasons why a woman might want to read m/m romance or sex - it's a reprieve from politicized male/female sex roles; if it's fanfiction, there are more well-developed male characters in whatever media it is; and men are sexy so of course they like the idea of men having sex with each other. it only becomes fetishizing if you go up to real life queer couples and expect them to perform for you, like how men expect lesbians to have sex just so that they can watch. those are real lesbians, real gay men - not fictional characters.

also there's the matter that some women relate more to male characters egg moment and are attracted to men, hence m/m. projection onto fictional characters is almost always to some degree involved in storytelling. reading m/m helped me as a trans man realize that i was trans, so i'm grateful for that, and the idea that women or closeted trans+ people are simply fetishizing stories that they relate to for whatever reason seems a little transphobic to me.

"internalized misogyny"

why? because they read m/m and not m/f? newsflash to the people out there who say this, but m/f makes a lot of queer people incredibly uncomfortable, and many female m/m writers are queer.

okay, so why not read or write f/f? i don't know, i'm still working on my gender, women's and sexuality studies degree, but i have noticed a trend that m/m stories tend to be darker and kinkier while f/f ones are desexualized and almost "sterilized" to the point where interactions are barely romantic and a kiss is a huge deal but sex would corrupt the story. i think this has a lot to do with the way that society sees queer men and women, the former as evil and hypersexual and the latter as invisible despite having more onscreen representation. sapphics can get away with more rep because they aren't seen as much of a threat as queer men are (queer men destabilize masculinity and the patriarchy; queer women are ignored in their sexuality because straights can't get the idea that women don't need men).

my point of that being that i do think there needs to be more f/f, especially kinkier f/f and darker sapphic stories that aren't just "uwu lets hold hands and kiss in our cottage" not that that's a bad thing but right now it's the only thing. and so queer women don't feel that erotica is welcome in that genre. THIS IS JUST MY THEORY THO TAKE IT WITH A GRAIN OF SALT

"glorifying abusive relationships"

this is far by the stupidest argument imo. it sounds blatantly homophobic, implying that relationships between queer men are inherently toxic or abusive, see again my previous assertion about the way society sees queer men.

but if people do choose to write about abuse, a lot of the times it comes from their own experiences or otherwise a way to solidify abstract feelings of being used, out of control, oppressed, and other situations. those people shouldn't be demonized. demonizing dark fiction is anti-survivor, anti-feminist, and anti-queer.

not to mention that enemies to lovers and general kinky scenarios are often conflated with abuse. as that classic tumblr post says, is it really ETL if they haven't tried to kill each other at least once? imho people use “ETL” wayyy too liberally these days, like to talk about school rivals or mildly disliking someone. and i wouldn't be surprised if that's what OP was talking about. i'd have to see the og post to know.

---

so that's my 2 cents. also this could be a whole essay but majority of the time, these arguments especially in conjunction with each other tend to be terf dogwhistles, or baby terfs on their way down the pipeline. and it's especially a problem on tiktok nowadays, i've noticed. i hope this manages to get some of that out of your head, anon<3 and to anyone else who has been thinking about this lately!

#m/m romance #dark fiction #slash fanfiction #m/m books #slash fic #queer fiction #queer fanfiction #pro fiction #letters #anon #maven discourses

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doberbutts · 3 years

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What do you think about the term transmisogyny exempt (tme)?

In honesty it's a New Term for me because I do not engage with the majority of the trans community online, and thus only learned about it just halfway through May. Admittedly my understanding is still fairly minimal and I do not claim to 100% Get It, but...

From my understanding, it rebrands transmisogyny to only apply to trans women and transfems, and thus those who are trans men and transmasc are somehow "exempt" from transmisogyny.

This is a really bizarre way of thinking for me. People who are transmasc are not exempt from being affected by misogyny, nor are they exempt from the specific form of transmisogyny that transfems are subjected to. In fact, I can recall a relatively recent gross interaction with a chaser/fetishist that specifically was talking to me because he thought I was a trans woman and did not understand the difference between trans men and trans women. I had to explain to him several times before he finally got it, and then he expressed that he thought I was really gross for "wanting to be a homo". WTF, dude. You're just as obsessed with sucking cock as I am, just because you're straight for wanting a woman's penis does not mean I'm wrong for wanting a man's, but okay I guess.

Trans men may not be killed at the same rates of trans women, but that is because trans women are hypervisible (which is not great) and trans men are invisible (which is also not great)- meaning when someone "clocks" a trans man they usually think he is either a trans woman or a butch lesbian, and comes under fire for that assumption because it's not like those identities are safe at all in larger society either. Trans men are still killed for being trans, as well as subjected to beatings and rapes and homelessness and drug addiction and more, for similar and yet different reasons that trans women are.

In other words, I think all transgender identities are more alike than they are different, and I think pitting ourselves against each other to try and claim that one is more oppressed than the other will get us no where. I think recognizing that we all come under fire because of our gender expression and that while these things may affect us in different ways, the problem is not that one identity or gender has "more danger" than the other, but that these problems manifest in different ways because we still live in a very gendered society and are marginalized from the getgo.

Caitlyn Jenner may not be TME due to being a trans woman, and I may be TME due to being a trans man, but she has more privilege in this world than I will ever have, while still having a target on her back due to the simple fact that she is a trans woman. I don't think it's fair to erase others' struggles and oppression simply because one group's problems are more visible than the others'.

Additionally, transmisogyny was coined to include both binary genders and nonbinary genders and how it was misogyny and the closeness to women that fueled violent acts of transphobia. The idea being that trans men are women, trans women are men who want to be women, and nonbinary people are a mix of soyboys and confused tomboys, and thus it's all bad because it all relates back to women in the end, and thus our fellowship in misery because the world cannot accept that we are what we say we are.

At some point, there was a gear shift, and transmisogyny was put fully on trans women and transfems, which entirely erased trans men and transmascs from the discussion. If I were to hedge a bet on exact timing, I would say likely whenever the idea that all men including marginalized men are bad also spread, and trans men and transmascs began to be attacked and forced back into the closet and made to feel ashamed for being male or male-adjacent. This is also about when the argument to use the words transmisandry or transandrophobia came about, to differentiate the struggles between the two "sides".

As an aside I really wonder where peopble who are gender neutral or agender get sorted in this discussion, and whether those nonbinary who do not claim "transmasc" and "transfem" as a term to describe themselves feel similar or different regarding this discussion. I have always been very binary so I really can't tell you, but I do find that these discussions tend to leave this group out to argue on a gender binary level.

#and esp like #I know amab masc nb people #I have dated a few!#they are not transfem at all #and they don't claim transmasc either #but they get pegged as trans women if they do anything GNC #it's all a mess and the lines really are not that easy to draw #rather than quibbling over this type of thing #why not an open and honest discussion about how we each face different struggles #but due to different reactions based on our bodies #and what people assume about them #TME just feels like it's... a label to slap on with really no meaning #idk it's just my opinion I guess #take it or leave it

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cryptids-and-muses · 3 years

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Blood and Bonds: Chapter 1

Ao3

The field was lit by the last rays of daylight. Just enough so Sypha could see the warlocks doing this perfectly. There were 10 or them, all in matching cloaks. Most of them gathered around the stone altar in the center of the field. The altar sypha was tied to.

“Oh Valefor! Duke of Hell! Come forth with your many heads and many limbs….” the warlock chanted as sypha struggled against the bonds tying her to the rock. They limited her magic but she struggled anyway, refusing to just give up.

“You’ll regret this.” She spat, but the cultists paid her no mind.

Trevor thrashed, restrained by two of the cultists, “If you so much as touch her I’ll rip your arms off and shove them up down your throat!” He shouted.

The head warlock didn’t listen, instead rising an ornate dagger to the sky, “Oh lord of thieves! I Beseech thee, accept this offering! Fill our bodies with her strength! Fill our veins with her blood! Fill our minds with her knowledge!”

A hiss escaped Adrian as he tried to stand. Struggling against the invisible weight pressing down on him. The mage in front of him smirked, and Adrian felt the weight increase. His vision blurred as he tried to breath under it. Tried to do anything.

Sypha tried to call her magic. Tried to slip her hands out of the chains. Hell, she even tried to kick the man leading the ritual. But nothing worked. The head warlock’s chanting reached a climax, “Valefor! Steal this offering’s power and make it our own!”

He brought the knife down.

Sypha screamed.

Something in Adrian snapped.

Trevor heard a snarl and the room exploded into chaos. A flurry of movement Trevor’s mind couldn’t keep up with. Just a red blur and the sounds of an animal attack. Claws tearing through flesh. Screams. The wet sound of bodies hitting the floor.

Then, just as suddenly as it started, everything went still, and Trevor could see the aftermath of whatever just happened. Blood drenched every corner of the field. Limbs and other bits of gore were scattered around in some grotesque display. The two men who had restrained Trevor were heaps on the floor. One had been torn open from collar to stomach. His intestines hanging limply outside of his body. The other’s heart had been ripped out, along with several bits of rib that had gotten in the way. But Trevor barely noticed. All his attention was on Adrian.

If he could even call the thing in front of him by the same name.

He stood by the altar, at the center of the carnage. His white shirt had been stained dark red, and was speckled with chunks of gore. Some of it even hung in his hair. Bits of flesh hung from his claws, still posed to strike at a moments notice. And his face…..Trevor felt nauseous looking at it. There was no humanity there. No concern or recognition. No trace of the man he loved at all. His lips were curled into a snarl, exposing bloodied fangs. His lips and chin were smeared with the stuff. Solid red eyes stared at the corpse at his feet. The man who’d stabbed Sypha. His throat was torn out, and around the wound were the tell-tale impression of vampire teeth.

Trevor’s hand fell to the morningstar, “......Adrian?”

There was no response.

Trevor's grip on his weapon tightened.

But then Adrian blinked, and the red cleared from his vision. What happened? He’d been pinned and then he heard sypha scream and then....

Rage.

He remembered rage. Like nothing he’d never felt before.

But everything else was blank. A sea of red and adrenaline.

He shook his head, trying to clear the remaining fog. That’s when the smell hit him. The smell of blood hung thick and choking in the air. Adrian looked up in panic, and finally got a good look at his surroundings. His eyes widened at the carnage laid before him. The butchery.

He staggered back.

What. Had. He. Done.

Adrian covered his mouth. His hand came away wet. He realized there was blood on his lips, on his fangs, that he could feel it sliding down his throat-

He fell to his knees and vomited. Bile and freshly swallowed blood splattering the grass below him.

Sypha knew something was wrong, but the world swam around her. The only thing she could make out clearly was the searing pain in her stomach. Her boys, she needed to get to them. Something was wrong and she needed to find them. She tried moving, but heat shot through her body, making her cry out.

“Sypha!” Trevor ran to her. He could see the blood soaking into her robes. She whimpered as he tried putting pressure on the wound. “Shit,” they needed to do something, fast. He looked over at their third, who was still staring in horror at the destruction around him.

“Adrian!” Trevor snapped, this time more forceful. They didn’t have time for this.

Trevor’s voice broke Adrian out of his spiralling. He looked over at the altar and it hit him. Sypha . He scrambled to her side. Those horrible chains were still around her wrists and ankles. He snapped them, and tried to not think about how much easier it was than usual.

Trevor looked around the field, “We need to leave.” There was a brief hesitation as he glanced at Adrian, “Can you carry her?”

Adrian was shaking. He ran a hand through his hair, god it was in his hair, but nodded. Focus on now, on what he needed to do. He could worry about what he’d done later. He scooped sypha into his arms and began to walk back to the town they were staying at. Pointedly not looking anywhere but ahead.

Trevor didn’t let go of sypha’s hand. He was silent as they walked, unable to get the image of Adrian with blood red eyes out of his mind.

------

It was silent as Adrian tended to Sypha in the cramped inn room. She fell asleep part way through, Adrian continued to clean her wounds. Trevor watched him from across the table while holding sypha’s hand. Neither met each other’s eyes. The tension in the room was palpable.

Eventually Adrian puts the cloth down, and lets out a shaky breath, “She’s going to be fine.”

Trevor nods, finally letting go of her hand. The silence stretched on.

“Are you going to tell me what that was?”

Adrian looked at the floor, “I don’t know.”

Trevor’s jaw tightened, “You killed ten people in the blink of an eye. You bit a man’s throat out.”

“I don’t know!” He shouted back, he hugged himself, “I’ve….I’ve never lost control like that before. I didn’t even know I was capable of that.”

Trevor sighed, “Do you remember what was going through your head?”

“Barely. I just remember sypha screaming. Then everything went red.” Adrian didn’t meet his gaze.

That oppressive silence fell again. This horrible distance between them. It took a while for Trevor to build up the courage to speak again, “I still love you, and I swear to god I always will. But.....”

Adrian gave him a sad smile, “But you can’t trust me.”

Trevor opened his mouth, then closed it again. He could still see specks of gore tangled in Adrian’s hair.

“It’s okay,” Adrian looked at the floor, “I can’t trust myself either.”

It was painful to see him like this. So distraught and scared, but Trevor forced himself to keep talking, “We can’t just ignore this. Pretend like it can’t happen again.”

A sob tore out of Adrian,”I can still fucking taste him. Can feel his blood giving me strength. I feel like a monster . If this happens again….” He was shaking, “I-I don’t want to hurt anyone.”

Trevor took Adrian’s hand, “Don’t worry. I won’t let you.” He gulped, “If this happens again-“

Adrian’s eyes snapped to Trevor, “No.”

“But-”

“ No.” Adrian squeezed Trevor’s hand, his still teary eyes full of determination, “I know what it's like to have to kill someone you love. And I refuse to put you or Sypha through that. I would take myself out before I made either of you do it.”

Trevor’s throat was dry.

But what if, he wanted to say. What if you’re so far gone I don’t have a choice.

But he didn’t, he just stared at Adrian with sad eyes, “Okay,” he pulled the dhampir into his arms, hugging him tightly, “Okay.”

He wanted to say something reassuring. To tell Adrian it would be alright. But He couldn’t. So he stood there, holding Adrian as his love cried into his shoulder.

#castlevania netflix #blood and bonds #castlevania #trevor belmont #adrian tepes #alucard #sypha belnades #trephacard #trevor x sypha x alucard #trevor x alucard #trevor x sypha #sypha x alucard #trevorcard #my writing #fanfiction #chapter 1

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bookofmirth · 3 years

Note

How is Lucien disabled?

"A disability is any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions)."

His golden eye actually improves his vision, doesn't it?

About Lucien being POC, yes, he is mixed, and white passing since no one, not even himself, ever questioned he was Beron's son. But despite all that, is racism even a thing in Prythian? Half of the highlords are POC, and to my understanding there's oppression towards lesser fae, regardless of their skin color. And Lucien is high fae and a highlord's son.

Also, wouldn't Azriel be a disabled POC as well? He is most definitely not described as white or white passing, on top of that he is Illyrian, and a bastard as well. His hands got burned and are now full of scars, and I can't speak about his mental health because I don't have enough canon content yet, but it looks like he's still dealing with his childhood trauma and trust issues.

So yes, Lucien's eye could be argued to improve his vision, but he can't be without it and not suffer the consequences. For example, my brother has diabetes and that is considered a disability, but taking insulin or other meds doesn't negate the fact that he has diabetes. It is just being managed. He would suffer if he lost access to that aid. Another example, depression and anxiety are also often seen as disabilities (from a legal perspective, I know that they are protected as disabilities in the workplace in the US), but the fact that people can effectively manage those with medication doesn't make those disabilities non-existent.

A good way to think of it is - does this person need an aid to interact and participate in the world around them in the way that others do (using the key words from the definition you provided)? Do they need a ramp to get into a building? Do they need extra time on a test? Do they need glasses? A hearing aid? Etc. Even if those things are provided, that doesn't negate someone's disability.

Azriel could definitely also be considered disabled if he has PTSD or unresolved trauma. So yes, there is potential for him to suffer an invisible disability.

There is an important distinction between invisible and visible disabilities here, but I can't speak on it too much because (dis)ability is one of my weak points when it comes to social justice and equity issues. If someone else would like to jump in, please do!!!

Whether these characters are POC or disabled isn't necessarily the issue in the original post. None of this conversation has ever been about pitting characters against each other, or seeing who would win in the Oppression Olympics. In fact, claims that we are pitting characters against each other or trying to prove who has the most trauma were two of the points that OP used to explain how we participate in white feminism.

Instead, the entire conversation is about the way that the fandom talks about these characters, and how that conversation is influenced by the racism, ableism, and white feminism in our society. Because while that stuff may or may not exist in Prythian, it does exist IRL, and the fans are people living in the real world and being influenced and/or using these ideas to dubious ends.

In fact, that original post wasn't even about Azriel or Lucien - it was about how we discuss Elain. All of her examples were about how Elain's white womanhood is used to support very problematic arguments in the fandom. I know that it was a long post, and my addition didn't make it any shorter, but we are losing sight of the point:

The fandom tends to use white feminist tools, tools which yes, are frequently racist and can be ableist, in order to support arguments about a ship war. The fandom uses Elain's white womanhood to further this narrative. That was it. That was the tl;dr of the entire post.

I am 100% sure that someone, somewhere, is wondering "but Leslie, how is it different when you talk about Azriel being toxic, compared to talking about Lucien hovering over Elain?" I can answer that question, because it is complex and nuanced and requires understanding context and history. So yeah if someone wants to know more feel free to ask, but I have to teach a class and grade some stuff first. :D

#acotar #acosf #azriel #lucien #ask #anon #acotar fandom

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blu-eh · 4 years

Text

after school summons

[AO3]

or: Danny gets summoned. He doesn’t like it.

It starts with a tugging feeling in his very core.

Danny Fenton pauses. If there’s one thing he’s learned in the last year, it is not to ignore random things that are definitely ghostly in origin. He has just enough time to place his pencil on the desk from where he had dutifully been doing his homework—for the first time in two weeks, mind you—before his vision goes white, he hears a snap, and suddenly he’s not in his room anymore.

For a moment he’s weightless, lost in the feeling of falling. Then, his body jerks and he has just enough time to think, oh fuck—before he’s slammed to the ground hard. His knees buckle under the unexpected weight and he goes down, clumsily, and trying not to throw up what little he’d managed to eat between homework packets.

“Ow,” Danny says.

He lies there, just for a moment, taking in the cool concrete underneath him. He tries to steady his breathing just enough so his mind can process what the hell just happened in the last thirty seconds. He’s still blinking stars from his eyes when he hears the hushed whispers echo around him and a heavy pair of footsteps approaching him. All in all, very bad signs when mysterious (and somewhat painful) things happen to you suddenly.

A gruff, questioning voice asks, “A child?”

“Oh, man,” Danny says, because that definitely does not sound good. Then he forces himself to his knees and looks up.

The first and foremost thing Danny notices is that he’s not alone. He’s on some sort of altar or platform, elevated a foot or so above the ground. A couple feet away, a group of no more than a dozen people surround him in a semi-circle, faces all covered by tattered cloaks. Another cloaked figure, dressed in much more formal robes with gold trimming, stands on the platform a mere couple feet from where Danny is. They all seem to be staring at him, waiting.

Danny hastily gets to his feet. He shifts a little into a sloppy fighting stance, just in case things were to get messy.

The dimly-lit warehouse room and the head covers don’t give him much to work with in the facial feature department, but he’s pretty confident that none of them are ghosts. Mostly from the fact that none of them are glowing and/or ranting about how much of a pain in the ass he is, but it still pays to be wary. Especially when Danny’s situations tend to quickly dissolve from bad to oh my god there are ghosts lose in Amity Park and also he maybe-sort of-possibly died in the process.

Which brings him back to his next brilliant deduction; he’s definitely in ghost form. He definitely was not in ghost form before this. His ghost form is rather obvious considering he sticks out like a glow stick in darkness of the warehouse. He doesn’t even feel the need to check his hair color, this time, but that’s more due to the fact that he doesn’t want to take his eyes off the weird people who managed to summon him from his bedroom and forced him to change into his ghost form.

(He desperately hopes that they hadn’t seen him change—weird warehouse people are not people that Danny generally associates with secret keeping.)

“Is this a cult thing?” Danny asks before any of them can speak. He takes in white line that surrounds him, and the red liquid (which he very much hopes is not blood) used to paint runes and symbols that circle him, and their weird cloak-like robes, and says, “This is definitely a cult thing. Oh my god, did you summon me? Seriously—”

Before this, he hadn't even known he could be summoned. It's just the little ghostly things learned via accident, sometimes, that truly take the icing on the cake.

There’s a tiny spark of anxiety in his gut, but honestly there’s a large difference between humans threatening him and ghosts threatening him. On one hand, he’d take weird cultist over Skulker’s lair any day. On the other hand, pure white walls and experimentation tables aren’t super high on his to visit list either. Worst comes to worst—before they sacrifice him to some ancient gods, more likely—he puts on his scary face (and maybe adds a couple of explosions) and slips out before they even notice he’s missing.

“Silence, creature,” the robed man snaps. Danny zeros in on him and immediately deduces him to be leader from vibes alone. Also the gold trimming on his robe, which very much screams leader of weird cult that summons ghost kids.

“I—okay, you know what? That was just rude,” Danny says. He points to the white line that surrounds him, “Is that cocaine?”

Danny has a feeling he doesn’t want to know the answer to the mysterious red liquid and painted symbols, so he doesn’t ask.

“It’s salt,” one of the other cloaked figures answers, like it should be obvious.

(It’s not actually obvious, and actually leaves Danny with more questions than he started with. Mostly in the realm of how did a group of cultists summon him with salt. He knows salt is supposedly an anti-ghost measure, but Danny is pretty convinced it has little to no effect on him considering the amount of Nasty Burger fries he’s consumed haven’t taken him out yet.)

“Salt,” Danny repeats. He pauses, then awkwardly tags on, “That’s good, I guess, because drugs are bad. Uh, don’t do drugs.”

A cultist quietly, and a little slowly, answers back, “We, uh, don’t.”

“Right,” Danny says. His eyes catch another section of weird in this already weird, cultist warehouse. At the base of the platform sits a variety of bones, so fresh that some of the muscle still clings to them. “Are those bones? Oh my god, did you sacrifice someone? That’s not cool! Murder isn’t cool!”

“Those are goat bones,” another follower says.

“Oh,” Danny says. “Well, I mean, that’s still fucked up on a variety of levels, but I guess that’s better than murder. Unless it's considered goat murder? Uh.”

For a second, there’s silence. The nature of the interaction is so awkward and oppressing that he almost goes invisible just to save himself the scrutiny of these random people and get the hell out of dodge. His curiosity is the only thing that holds him back—that, and the fact that he’s not quite sure if any of these people are secretly hiding ecto-weapons.

Danny very much does not want to be shot tonight.

He looks around the room, eyes taking in every inch of the sparsely decorated warehouse. There’s nothing that immediately grabs his attention, nor anything that really screams danger but it pays to be suspicious of his surroundings in his line of work. A few of the cultists notice this, and start shifting awkwardly as Danny looks over them as well.

Then, Danny’s eyes flicks back to the lead cultist and he says, “I’m going to be real honest here and say that I have no idea what the heck is going on.”

The leader makes no inclination that he acknowledges any word that comes from Danny’s mouth. Instead, he brings an old, wrinkled hand up to his face, like he’s thinking about some complex problem. The leader circles Danny once, then again, and Danny feels something inside him defensively coil like a spring.

He tries not to be bothered when people treat him as something lesser—it’s not, exactly, uncommon for him to encounter. He dealt with being shoved into lockers long before he died, anyways. It doesn’t stop his shoulders from tensing just the barest amount.

Instead of showing this, he brings his feet up to his chest and crosses them mid-air, and fakes a yawn for good measure. A few of the other cultists gasp in wonder and fear. The leader simply stops his prowling and turns to face Danny.

“So this is the fabled Ghost King,” the man says, like he expected better.

Danny feels he should almost be offended if it isn’t for the tiny detail that these cultists—who summoned him by using salt and goat bones—assume he is the ghost king. “…Did you seriously confuse me with Pariah Dark?”

The man pauses, and asks, “Pariah Dark?”

“Yes! He’s like fifteen feet tall, has a huge sword, is a pain in the ass, and has, like, an entire ghost army. I have, I dunno, pre-calc homework in my bag. We are not the same.”

Some of the followers in the background shift uneasily. Danny bares his teeth in their direction, just to see them squirm. A couple take worried steps back and Danny fights off a satisfied grin.

Hey, poke a bull and get the horns. In this case, summon a ghost-teenager and get the ecto-powers.

(He’s slowly becoming more and more aware that these people have no idea what they’re doing.)

“I see,” the leader says. From his tone, he definitely does not see. “It doesn’t matter. Our book summoned the King of Ghosts and that is you, so you will do as we tell you and your pain will be lessened.”

“I am still not the Ghost King,” Danny tells him. “And no thanks. I’ve already used my yearly cult sign up and I can’t say I’m thrilled to join another. If you’re going to hold an initiation ceremony, at least decorate a bit first. Uh, not counting the goat bones and salt, of course.”

“You have no choice,” the leader snaps and steps a bit closer to him. Danny merely raises an eyebrow. “We are the Followers of Infernal. We have summoned you to serve us. You are bound to our will and bound to our grace, as the book foretold. Now bow, demon, for we are your new masters.”

There’s a very large portion of Danny Fenton that is convinced any good karma he held in life did not pass with him during his death a mere year ago. An even larger portion of him is convinced that these guys are no more serious than the GIW is. Danny does not tell the cultists this.

Instead, he squints and says, “Alright. I definitely failed US Government, but I’m pretty sure that’s not legal. Don’t you guys need like, a permit to summon undead beings of mass power?”

“It thinks it’s funny.” The leader’s face is mostly hidden by his robe, but Danny can imagine the sneer there from his tone alone.

“Trust me, I’m not the one who’s a joke right now,” Danny says. He looks back over at the dozen or so followers and grins at them. They don’t seem too keen that he’s not following their master’s orders and bending to their will. He turns back to the leader. “What’s in it for me?”

“What?”

“If I follow you and stuff, what’s in it for me?”

The leader pauses, then says, “You will be spared of punishment.”

“Hmm, that’s not good enough,” Danny says. He angles his body so he's once again looking at the followers and points at one in the middle. “Hey, you! With the cloak. No, not you, the other dude. To the left. Yeah! You. What do you have to offer me?”

The follower looks so startled that he cowers for a second. Then, seeing as he hadn’t been reduced to a pile of ashes from Danny’s gaze alone, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and silver. “Uh, I have a paper clip, your ghostliness.”

“A paper clip,” Danny repeats. “Yeah, sure, fine. Whatever. That sounds neat.”

“You’ll submit to us?” the man sounds so hopeful that Danny almost feels bad for being a jerk. Then, he remembers that they summoned him out of his nice, warm bedroom at ass-o’clock in the night and feels significantly less amounts of pity.

“No, dude, I’m not being your sack of potatoes for a paper clip. Man, you guys are stupid.” Danny rolls his eyes and floats just a bit higher. The other followers shuffle around again, uncomfortable. In front of him, the leader remains impassive as ever. “Where even am I?”

“The lair which you will spend the rest of your afterlife,” the leader says.

“Okay, this is definitely a warehouse, firstly. And secondly, dude, I meant what state.”

“…Wisconsin,” the man allows because of course everything terrible happens in Wisconsin.

“You chose the worst state to have your crappy lair,” Danny tells them. Now he has to fly a couple hundred miles home and hope he gets there by morning, all the while avoiding his creepy, obsessed arch-nemesis. He wonders if Vlad is even aware there’s a ghost-obsessed cult in his home state. Probably not. “Nothing good ever comes from Wisconsin. You can take that as, like, ghostly wisdom or something.”

“Hey,” one of the cultists says, offended. “The Packers are in Wisconsin.”

“Nothing good,” Danny repeats, firmly.

“Enough of this nonsense,” the leader says. “It’s trying to distract you because it fears control. Briar, bring me the orb.”

“Yes, sir,” one of them says.

The followers mutter to themselves and teeter around in their positions. The woman who spoke, on the end, bows and scurries off. Danny watches as she runs through the darkness of the warehouse, footsteps echoing around them, until he can no longer see her among the darkness.

“Hey, if they already listen to you then why do you need me?” Danny asks. The leader doesn’t answer, so Danny floats a bit on his side and puts his arms behind his head. “What kind of orb are we talking about, anyways? Like one of those Spirit Halloween ones? Or is it more like orbeeze? I can’t saw I’m super excited from your ominous it fears control statement, but—"

“Silence, beast,” the leader says.

Danny huffs. “I’m just asking. No need to be so snippy.”

The man ignores him which, rude. Danny’s just about to see how far he can test this guy’s patience when Briar comes back, just as quickly as she had disappeared. She jogs through the warehouse and up the steps of the platform. Danny can’t see her face, but from the way her hood moves to glace at him every so often, he figures that she’s probably nervous. Specifically about him lounging around in a circle full of salt.

“Father Johnathan,” Briar says and bows. In her hands is a glowing, silver orb. It really did look like a generic orb one would find in a Spirit Halloween. “The orb.”

“Your name is Father Johnathan?” Danny asks. He eyes the orb for a second, but doesn’t feel the tingle of ghostly energy from it, so he ignores it. He turns right back to the leader, not able to keep the grin off his face. “Your name is really Father Johnathan?”

Father Johnathan gently takes the orb in his hands as Briar scurries off towards the rest of the followers. Then, he sighs and says, “Yes, creature, my name is Father Johnathan and I shall be your new master.”

“Oh my god,” Danny says, positively gleeful. “I meet real life Papa John and he summons me with salt and threatens me with a Spirit Halloween orb.”

“Laugh all you want,” Papa John says. The nervous air shifts into something a bit more predatory. “You will not be laughing much longer.”

The cultists break into applause and talk amongst themselves loudly. They shift forward, eagerly, as if they want to watch the spectacle up close. They’re only a foot or so away from the platform when Papa John waves at them to halt.

Papa John holds up the orb. It swirls, the silver fog inside consolidating and then dissipating. Something inside it starts to glow the barest amount.

Danny pauses, just for a second, and watches it. There's still no tingle of ghostly energy coming from it. If he hadn’t already thought these guys are a joke, he definitely would’ve been a tad more nervous. As it stands, he thinks nothing of it—no ghostly energy means no control over ghosts.

(Unfortunately, he knows the feeling of ghost-controlling objects quite well. It’s not an experience he’s eager to repeat.)

The orb glows brighter, and brighter, swirling more furiously. The chatter of the cultists picks up to the point where they’re almost shouting, jeering at him. Papa John draws closer and closer, orb outstretched. He holds it through the salt line and touches it to Danny’s chest. The shouting from his followers almost becomes unbearable.

And then….nothing. The orb stops glowing. The fog inside stops swirling. It simply dies in Papa John’s hand.

“Was that supposed to do something?” Danny asks.

Papa John touches him with the orb again, a tad more forceful, so Danny assumes it was supposed to do something. From the panicked whispers around him, it definitely was supposed to do something to him. Danny’s honestly not sure if the outcome is due to him being a halfa or these guys being a joke.

(He’s willing to bet it’s the latter.)

“I think your LED batteries died,” Danny tells him. “Or maybe you mixed up your Spirit Halloween orbs. Better luck next time.”

Papa John stops furiously pressing the orb to his chest and if Danny could see his face, he has no doubts that Papa John’s expression would be livid.

“You will obey us,” Papa John says.

“No,” Danny says. “I won’t.”

“You will—”

Danny swings his feet down so hard that he cracks the very ground he now stands on. Dust kicks up around him as he stands tall, even though Danny’s at least two feet shorter than the leader in front of him. His eyes burn a brilliant green and he crosses his hands over his chest in an effort to look intimidating. The cult thing is interesting and all, but it's late, he still has homework to do, and Jazz has definitely noticed him missing by now so it's probably better to end this before they can get another object from a Spirit Halloween and try that instead.

It works, if the half-step back from Papa John is anything to go by.

“Listen,” Danny says, flatly. “Get a hobby and leave me alone or else you won’t like what I’m going to do.”

He makes his form flicker and the temperature drop in the room, just for dramatic effect.

Some of the followers in the background shift uneasily. A couple take panicked steps back. More than a few look ready to bolt for the door and leave this cult business behind forever.

Danny takes notice and stares at them, smiling wide enough that they could see his slightly-toothy grin. He makes sure his eyes flare, just a touch, and says loudly, “Boo.”

To say the cultists are startled would be an understatement. More than a few stumble back, a couple falling onto their asses. One trips on their robe and is sent tumbling. Another one yells and cowers. Papa John has no time to reign in the situation before two scatter completely.

“Peace!” Papa John shouts over the chaos of a dozen panicking followers. Those that remain do settle down enough to hear his words. “Stand down, there is nothing to fear. It is only trying to scare you into letting it free. It is trapped whilst it remains in the circle.”

Danny snorts. “I can leave any time I want.”

“You cannot leave here, demon—”

Danny raises one single eyebrow and dutifully steps out of the summoning circle.

The warehouse erupts into chaos.

The cultists are yelling now, but this time there’s only because of fear. They scatter over each other, running and tripping over their obnoxiously long cloaks. A couple trample the goat bones to the point where several loud snaps are heard over the pandemonium. It only adds more fuel to the fire as less than a dozen people scramble to get as far away from the platform—and subsequently the ghost-kid—as possible.

“Do better than a paperclip, next time!” Danny calls out to them. They only seem to run faster at the sound of his voice.

Papa John is the only one who doesn’t run. He had stumbled off the platform and away from Danny the second that Danny made it over the salt line. However, in the disarray, he had been knocked to the ground, his orb lay broken at his feet, and his robe’s hood had been yanked off and left on the ground beside him. He sits, frozen, but Danny doesn’t know if it’s from shock or from fear.

Danny takes a step closer to him.

“How…?” Papa John whispers. He’s not looking at Danny—only his old, wrinkled hands. He’s bald, with brown eyes. He looks like nothing more than any generic old man that Danny would see at a grocery store on Sunday afternoon. “We followed the book. We…we took every precaution the book said. We were supposed to have the perfect slave, bound to our every word. We…”

“That didn’t work out too well for you, huh?” Danny says and crosses his arms over his chest. “It’s ‘cause you forgot the dunce cap when you decided to be the class clown.”

“Please,” Papa John says. “Spare me.”

There’s something wrong about this—seeing a human beg for his life at Danny’s feet. Danny doesn’t want to be feared. He never has wanted to be feared.

He presses his lips together and takes a single step back. Some part of him, though, knows that he desperately needs to make his point clear to avoid another situation like this (likely with more weapons, next time).

“I warned you,” Danny says softly. His voice echoes around the warehouse. The man below him shivers in terror. “Do not summon me again, or I won’t be so nice next time.” He pauses, just for a second and can't help but tag on, "Papa John."

He lets his threat linger and hopes the man takes it seriously enough that he won’t get summoned again. Then, the cool strings of invisibility wrap around his body and he disappears from sight. Danny takes one look at the man left on the floor before he shakes his head and shoots up into the Wisconsin night sky. He doesn't hear the shouted response of it's Father Johnathan from several hundred feet below him on the warehouse floor.

Danny waits about all of thirty seconds before he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone.

"Jazz? Hey, yeah, I'm fine. Yes, seriously, I'm fine but you are not going to believe what I just went through—"

#me mentioning my love for spirit halloween no less than five separate occasions #anyways #my fics #danny phantom #i Attempted to mention every single ectober week 2020 in this fic so like. lmao #ectober #ectober 2020 #ectober week #ectober week 2020 #phan phic #phic #tw drug mention #there are no actual drugs but i do reference a drug by name so this warning applies

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mogai-corvidae · 3 years

Note

is it ok for me to identify as voidpunk even if i haven’t had any hateful or bigoted or dehumanizing experiences? i’ve had a pretty good life, i just feel a connection to voidpunk because i’m neurodivergent and have some strange beliefs regarding society and i don’t like people, and i feel that this label and community feels comfortable.

i don’t want to offend anyone by participating in voidpunk when i haven’t been dehumanized, there’s nothing for me to reclaim. i just really like the idea. can i still identify with voidpunk?

Before we get into the nitty gritty of how we feel about this, I want to emphasize that no one can tell you who you are or what you can or cannot identify as. Ultimately your labels are your business, as long as you’re not deliberately using them in a harmful way, and the fact that you are asking these questions indicates that you do care about respecting these terms and communities. If you were hoping for solid answers, I’m afraid we can’t provide any. All we have to work with is our experience in the voidpunk community and using the voidpunk label. I hope this is helpful, at least.

The voidpunk community, in great part, is made up of neurodivergent people. We are autistic and ND in many other ways, and being ND is one of the largest influences that lead us to the community. I have long emphasized that voidpunk is primarily a community and label that is about reclaiming dehumanization, because that’s very true, but there’s some crucial pieces I think I’ve missed in how I’ve talked about it before. I don’t think people realize that dehumanization doesn’t just look one way. Our personal experiences of dehumanization and dehumanizing oppression have often been of the more blatant and “severe” variety, but those dramatic experiences weren’t the only ones, or even necessarily the most harmful. What has far greater contributed to our current identity and our experiences as a whole is not our more intense experiences of bigoted violence, but consistent experiences of subtle and pervasive ableism throughout society as a whole, and social attitudes about ND people and whether we are deserving of the human right of autonomy. These attitudes don’t just manifest in slurs and hate crimes; far more often they look like passive aggressive comments or systemic issues that are so baked into our every system that they’re near impossible to notice.

I’m not here to tell you what your experiences are, but I know as a neurodivergent person that moving through the world we currently living as ND is in and of itself dehumanizing. We also have many views about society and people in general that are often called “strange” or considered weird in some way, and this is largely because of how neurotypicals value autistic and ND thought. Us being neurodivergent doesn’t just result in direct and explicit ableism, it also results in more subtle and pervasive alienation and other less noticeable forms of oppression. Being neurodivergent means living in a world designed to exclude us, and the invisibility of ND people results in us fundamentally existing outside of the boundaries of what neurotypical people tend to understand as human. The way we think, feel, and express ourselves is often considered by neurotypicals to be outside of the realm of human possibility. Even when we are not literally facing hate crimes or life threatening bigotry, we constantly face isolation and other subtle dehumanization. This is an inescapable and unavoidable fact of living in an ableist society. You say you’ve never had any dehumanizing experiences, and obviously only you can say for sure what your own experiences are, but have you ever considered that dehumanization doesn’t always have to seem obviously bigoted and hateful? Do you know that it’s possible to never face any “extreme” bigotry, but to still be isolated and dehumanized by a society that devalues you as a human person?

I say this because the feelings you’ve described are very similar to many of our own. It is completely up to you how you label your experiences, but I think that there’s a reason you were drawn to the voidpunk label and feel so comforted by the community. The voidpunk community is a community of people who think and feel the way we do, in a way outside of the typical conceptualization of what it means to be human, and it’s very likely that you think and feel that way because you’ve experienced dehumanization without fully realizing or understanding it. A lot of experiences we’ve had with oppression or discrimination, we didn’t even realize were harmful until we were much older and went back to examine the situation further.

If you truly and completely believe that your experiences and feelings have nothing to do with dehumanizing oppression (though, again, I do think that’s a likely possibility, and it’s very possible to experience things like microaggressions or pervasive oppressive attitudes without realizing, also this is very common with ableism specifically) then it still is ultimately up to you to choose how to identify. It’s good that you acknowledge the community as being rooted in reclamation and I do think it’s important to remember and center those experiences as what makes the voidpunk community what it is, but at the same time your experiences generally sound very closely in line with the community and with our personal experiences. Ultimately, what specific trauma you have should not decide your place in an oppressed community, it’s whether or not you identify with it while recognizing and respecting its roots.

TLDR;If you feel comfortable in the community, go ahead. You’re the only one who can know what labels are right for you and your experiences. I’m certain everyone will welcome you. It’s certainly not a community I’d ever see anyone gatekeeping, and if you do see anyone try to gatekeep voidpunk let me know and I’ll send them a strongly worded message. /hj

#asks #anon

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nothorses · 3 years

Note

Recently I've found some circles where cis men talk about mens issues as it relates to feminism and the patriarchy, and also directly combat misogynist MRA types, which is great. But even though they may explicitly include trans men, it's by name only. They never really consider how the power dynamics between us and cis women are much different, they just tack "and trans men" on. And that's a huge form of erasure that needs to be talked about, acknowledging our existence and assuming we mirror cis men in every other way besides the obvious. It feels very silencing at times, even in an environment with good intentions.

Yeah, I notice this a lot in cis-centric analysis of gender-based oppression. There’s a very similar issue in feminism as a whole, and the way that cis woman feminists tend to see trans women as sort of just... “women on hard mode” (assuming they’re allies at all). There’s very little acknowledgement, if any, that cis women actively and directly oppress trans women; they’re more comfortable thinking of themselves as “sisters in oppression”, as being closely related in struggle, but Of Course Trans Women Have It Worse is thrown in as more of a platitude than a call to action.

The way trans men are viewed by feminist cis women who consider themselves trans allies is itself already an uncomfortable issue. Most of those women would rather avoid it altogether; particularly white cis women, as it threatens the sanctity of their white-supremacist, patriarchal victim status.

Feminist cis men tend to have a weird relationship with feminism to begin with, generally focusing a lot of energy on proving allyship by drawing constant attention to how Aware they are of their privilege.

Add to that how they “claim” us the way feminist cis women “claim” trans women; our transness is seldom acknowledged, and becomes more of a secondary attribute that they feel deeply uncomfortable mentioning at all. We’re doing manhood on hard mode- which means, for a lot of the menslib folks, that we’re at most just More Impacted by the issues cis men experience under patriarchy. Manhood itself is already pretty easy in comparison to womanhood though, right? So how hard could it really be for us?

When I’ve interacted with cis men like this, I’ve had them try to “validate” my gender by extending their feminist “ally” expectations to me: you’re a man now, that means you need to shut up, take up less space, and acknowledge your privilege over (cis) women. Here, I’ll teach you how!

Which is extremely harmful to us, a group who’s struggles are largely defined by invisibility. We’re constantly erased, silenced, spoken over, and spoken for as it is; the issue is only compounded by cis-centric understandings of gender-based oppression.

They succeed in seeing binary trans people as our binary genders, but they fail to acknowledge that our transness is inseparable from the rest of our gender. They fail to acknowledge that the patriarchy does not see us as those genders as well, and sees the rejection of our assigned genders as an act that must be punished, too. They fail to acknowledge that under patriarchy, there are more than just two solitary, binary positions to occupy- and that trans people cannot be sorted into one or the other.

#trans #transgender #transmasc #feminism #not horses #Anon #Ask

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pitiless-achilles-wept · 4 years

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2020 Can Take My Hair, But Not My Hope

My hair started falling out on election night.

I thought at first it might be the anxiety, that I was literally pulling my hair out with worry over numbers I already knew were not going to be definitive before the night wore into morning but which I stayed up until 3:30am watching anyway. I tweeted rapidly, reassuring my jittery timeline that not only had we all known that the night would bring no results but that we had even expected Trump to lead in key states because of the greater number of mail-in ballots from urban areas that would largely count for Biden. We knew. We all knew. But we were all terrified, flashing back to 2016 and already dreading another four years of living life on high alert, in constant survival mode.

I posted a selfie with a tweet that read, "Could be the last presidential election I vote in (blah blah stage 4 cancer blah blah) and I wish it were better and clearer than this but it's a crucial privilege to have voted. Remember, whatever the outcome, the last thing they can take from you is your hope."

To me that last sentence has been a mantra for these years and for my treatment. I have consistently refused, despite overwhelmingly terrible odds, to lose hope. The story of Pandora's Box tells us that the very last thing left inside was Hope--that even once all the demons were out in the world there was that tiny, feathered creature left to hang on to. It hasn't been easy, but I am one of the most stubborn people you will ever meet (and if you doubt this just ask anyone who's ever fought me on anything!) and it has turned out to be a saving grace rather than an irritating personality trait. Feeling like the world was trying to take my hope away made me angry. And when I get angry I will fight back.

I know I'm not alone in feeling like we entered some kind of alternate nightmare timeline on election night 2016. To that point, despite periods of immense personal difficulty, nothing truly terrible had happened to me. Then, in short order, my marriage ended and I was diagnosed with and began being treated for a terminal illness, all against the backdrop of a regime so deliberately hateful that it was truly incomprehensible to me. Then, a global pandemic and national crisis swept away the small consolations I'd found in my new life with cancer. The temptation to feel hopeless was strong and I struggled with it, particularly in the isolation of quarantine. I'm struggling with it now, facing a winter of further lockdowns, social isolation, continued chemo, and the added indignity (and chilliness!) of not having any hair. But somehow the coincidence of my hair loss with election night seemed like a good omen for the future, if a sad thing for the present.

I heard the news that they had called Pennsylvania for Biden at a peaceful Airbnb in the Catskills after stepping out of a shower where lost hair in handfuls. It felt oddly like a sacrifice I had made personally. I joked about this with friends on the text chains that lit up and that (despite my promise to myself and my writing partner that we'd "go off the grid") I responded to immediately. Instant replies, with emojis and GIFs, participated in the fiction: "Thank you for your service!!!"; "We ALL appreciate your sacrifice!"; "Who among us would NOT give up their hair for no more Trump?". The feeling was real for me, though. It was as though the good news demanded some kind of karmic offering. You never get something for nothing, I thought, and really it was a small price to pay.

The rest of the weekend passed too quickly, with absorption in the novel I plan (madly, given that I also work full-time) to work on for "National Novel Writing Month" (NaNoWriMo), walks in the unseasonably warm woods, and nighttime drinks on the back deck under the stars, watching my hair blow off in fine strands and drift through the sodium porch light. My friend and I read tarot and both our layouts contained The Tower, the card for new beginnings from total annihilation, the moment of destruction in which (as the novel's title says) everything is illuminated. "This might sound dumb," he said, "but maybe yours is about your hair." It did not sound dumb.

[shaved heads, the 2020 election, and a couple pics under the cut]

There is probably no more iconic visual shorthand for cancer than hair loss. It happens because chemo agents target fast-proliferating cells, which tend to inhabit things that grow rapidly by nature (hair, fingernails), or that we need to replenish often (cells in the gut), as well as out-of-control cancer cells. But not all cancer treatments, not even all chemotherapies, cause hair loss. In my 20 months of being treated for cancer and my three previous treatments (four, if you count the surgery I had) nothing had yet affected my hair beyond a bit of thinning. This despite the fact that my first-ever treatment (Taxol) was widely known to cause hair loss for "everyone." I had been fortunate with this particular side effect in a narrow way that I have absolutely not been on a broader scale. "Maybe," I had let myself think, "I can have this one thing." The odds were in my favor too; only 38% of people in clinical trials being treated with Saci lost their hair. I liked the odds of being in the 62% who didn't. But--as we all felt deep in our gut while they counted votes in battleground states--odds aren't everything.

I had come to treat the "strength" of my hair as a kind of relative consolation (though as with everything cancer "strength," "weakness," and the rhetoric of battle have nothing to do with outcomes). I treasured still having it, not just out of vanity (though I have always loved my hair whatever length, style, or color it has been) but because it allowed me to pass among regular people as one of them. I had no visible markers of the illness that is killing me, concealed as first the tumor and then the scars were by my clothing. "You look wonderful," people would tell me, even when I suffered from stress fractures from nothing more than running or sneezing; muscle spasms in my shoulder and nerve death in my fingertips; nausea that I swallowed with swigs from my water bottle that just made me look all the more like a hydration-conscious athlete; and profound, constant, and debilitating fatigue. Invisible illness had its own perils but I would take them--take all of them at once if necessary!--if only I could keep my hair and look normal.

It was not to be. A part of me had known this, since a lifetime with metastatic cancer means a lifetime of treatments a solid proportion of which result in hair loss. But I had hoped. And I had liked the odds.

The hardest thing for me is having to give up this particular consolation before knowing whether or not my new treatment is also working on my cancer. Unfortunately, there really isn't a correlation between side effects like hair loss and effectiveness of treatment. If it is working then I will feel that--like the election to which I felt I had karmically contributed--it was all completely worth it. Yet, even in this best case scenario, there's a new reality for me which is that while I am on this treatment I will stay bald. When you are a chronic patient you hope for a treatment that will work well with manageable side effects. And if this treatment works--and if the other side effects are as ok-ish as they are now--then I will remain on it.

It's that future that I am furious about more than anything else. I want to continue to live my life, of course, but I don't want to have to do it bald! In part that is because I don't want to register to people constantly as an archetypal "cancer patient" when I know that I am so much more. It is also in part because I don't want to think of myself as being ill, and living every day having to disguise my absent hair will make that all the tougher. I have already noticed that I feel, physically, as though I am sicker because of my constantly shedding hair. How could I not, in some ways, when every move I make and every glance at myself (including in endless Zoom windows) shows me this highly visible change?

For that reason, I'm shaving my remaining hair tomorrow (Wednesday). It's a way to feel less disempowered--less like hair loss is happening to me--and wrest control of the situation back. I will try to find agreeable things about it: wigs, scarves, cozy caps, bright lipstick, statement earrings, and a general punk/Mad Max vibe that is appropriate to 2020. But I don't want anyone to think for a second that I find this agreeable, or even acceptable, or that I don't mind. I mind a whole hell of a lot. My hair was my consolation prize, my camouflage, my vanity, my folly, and my battle cry.

I dyed it purple when I was first diagnosed because I knew (or thought I knew) that I would be losing it soon. I didn't, and I came to cherish it as a symbol of my boldness in the face of circumstances trying to oppress me, to make me shrink, to tempt me to become invisible. I refused and used it to "shout" all the louder in response. Because of what it came to mean to me, I'm nearly as sad about losing the purple as I am about losing the hair itself. It both symbolized the weight I was carrying and also that I would not let that weight grind me down. It was my act of resistance and my sign resilience all at once.

I sent a text to my friends, explaining this and offering, as an idea, that I could "pass the purple" to them in some way, small or large. It would feel more like handing off a torch or a weight (or the One Ring) than anyone shaving their head in solidarity. (After all, if they did that it would just remind me as I watched theirs grow back that, in fact, our positions were very different.) You're welcome to do it if you'd like too, internet friends, with temporary or permanent dye or a wig or a headband or one of those terrible 90s hairwraps or whatever. But I don't require that anyone do it because I feel support from you all in myriad ways, all the time. (But if you do, please send me pictures!)

It's November 2020. The election is over and Joe Biden has won. I still have cancer and I'll be bald tomorrow. I hope it's a turning point, both personal and global, because it feels like one. We've given up a lot in the last four years and I cannot say that I feel in any way peaceful or accepting about having to give up yet one more thing. But in losing my hair I absolutely refuse to also give up my hope.

(On our walk we did also seem to find a version of The Tower, all that was left of an abandoned house)

#life update #my life as a cancer patient #stage 4 #mbc #metastatic breast cancer #losing my hair #unfair things #election 2020 #I just have a lot of feelings #the tower #us politics

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idreamtofmanderleyagain · 4 years

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Hellraiser Fandom and the Invisibility of Women’s Abuse

I’m starting to come to terms with why the Last Drive In interviews stuck with me in a bad way.

It kind of eluded me for a while, but to give you guys the emotional lead-up to what was underlying my sense of discomfort and irritation, let me explain a few things. When I heard the interview was going to happen, I watched some portions of a different Last Drive In episode to get a sense of what the whole thing was about. It’s your standard hosted horror movie show.

It’s also awkwardly sexist. They have a character on it, Darcy The Mail Girl, who as far as I could tell in my first viewing, basically exists on the show to be ogled and be the butt of sexual humor. The men filming would even break the fourth wall to snicker and whistle when she would say something sexual. In 2020, it was extraordinarily cringe-worthy to watch, and I’m at a loss that we’re still living in a world where this is normalized. It was like watching something from the 80′s. She is extremely objectified on the show.

I don’t blame her for this. Apparently, she was the victim of some awful bullying and body-shaming fairly recently, and I don’t want to put more suffering on that girl’s shoulders. I respect her. I think she respects herself. The circumstances surrounding a woman being in a position like this are complicated, and I do not pretend to understand her situation. She’s also allowed her own feelings about what she can and cannot handle, and what is and is not okay with her.

Nevertheless, the segment I saw in that other episode with Darcy was alienating and even rather upsetting. I felt a second-hand humiliation and pain. I didn’t feel like Darcy was put in a position where she was in control of her own sexual expression. Perhaps Darcy’s actress disagrees with me, and that’s fine. But as a female audience member, I was already feeling a sense of unease and unwelcome.

So I was obviously primed for discomfort before the interviews even started.

Joe Bob Briggs (the host) said a few things that did not sit quite right with me. Quite frankly, he repeated some more annoying fanboy statements that tend to stick in my craw. His rather basic interpretation of the film, juxtaposed against the awkward, stifling feeling of watching Doug and Ashley try to explain the deeper concepts that eluded him reminded my of my own frustrations listening to the male fans of these films’ constant comprehension failure.

How many times does Doug have to repeat the words he’s basically memorized by heart regarding the tragedy and complex nature of Pinhead? Why does this get forgotten, glossed over, even retconned so much?

Why does it always feel like Ashley gets disregarded? Every time we see an interview with her (which is comparatively rare), nobody really speaks to the deeper thoughts she expresses on her character or the narrative, but every man in the comments has something to say about her hotness level.

When we got to the point that Ashley tried to explain to Briggs that she thought Pinhead was fair in a certain scene, and that Pinhead was speaking to Kirsty’s accountability for her own desires, Briggs responds incredulously; “You think Kirsty OWES Pinhead?!”

Ashley had spent a portion of the interview having to dismiss the relevance of characters like Steve and Kyle in Kirsty’s life, and was now suggesting a deeper subtext in her interactions with Pinhead that both A) did not cast Kirsty as pure and sexless and without culpability, and B) did not cast Pinhead as her aggressor but as her psychological mirror.

This is the subtext that is most often disregarded by casual fans and some hardcore fans alike, that Kirsty may not be the innocent and sexless Final Girl, and that Pinhead may not be the predatory Slasher monster intent on using a sharp weapon to penetrate her violently for his own gratification, and that dynamic may not be the be-all-end all of their relationship for the rest of time.

I’ve been turning Brigg’s incredulous response around in my brain for a while. And it’s made me realize something about how men experience Hellraiser’s narrative, and why it differs so greatly for many women.

Doug has more than once spoken to the fact that women react to Pinhead very differently than men. He was of course speaking of the sexual interest he would get, but he has remarked upon the fact at least once that he’s not entirely sure why that is, exactly.

It’s...not that strange to me that women desire rather than fear the character, or that Ashley would have a more positive response to Kirsty’s relationship with him rather than her relationships with the seemingly benign boys of the films.

There is an order to which women first learn about sex. For some it’s a little different but I believe this is a fairly common experience: The very first thing we learn is that it’s going to hurt (but maybe also feel good after). The second thing we learn is that boys will want to take it from us and will manipulate and lie to us to get it, but that it’s supposed to happen in a loving relationship. The third thing we learn is that we want it too, but we aren’t supposed to because it’s dirty and wrong for us to want it.

Women grow up with an inherent anxiety around sex, an anxiety that is complicated by our own desires.

Everything in Hellraiser is perfectly reflective of a reality that men clearly do not have the context to fully comprehend, because women’s real experiences of desire, and of male violence, are a blind spot.

The men who hurt women don’t have pins in their head and wax gothic poetry about suffering. They don’t wear dark capes and turn into bats and hypnotize women from their windows to drink their blood.

The men who hurt women look like Frank, or J.P. Monroe, or Trevor, or Channard, or every bumbling aggressive fool Julia seduced home.

They look like Larry and Steve.

Larry let his wife scream “no” and “stop” several times before he responded, regardless of the true reasons she was screaming those words. And when he finally did stop, it was out of anger rather than concern. This is, as far as I’m aware, the most common form of sexual violence a woman can experience - a man they give their trust to suddenly doesn’t respect a “no.”

So, so many times, I have heard men say how badly they felt for Larry, how innocent poor Larry was.

Men live in a fantasy world where it’s more comfortable for them to imagine characters like Larry as good man, a victim of Julia’s callousness who isn’t in Hell not because he never touched the box, but because he is inherently innocent. They live in a fantasy world where it’s odd that Steve abandoned Kirsty the minute something deeply traumatic happened to her (Briggs remarked upon this). Raise your hand if a man has done the same to you when the cards where down.

Steve’s response to Kirsty getting too drunk to stand properly was to “jokingly” tell her to lie down in this sleazeball way that indicated he was insinuating taking advantage of her intoxicated state. Also one of the most common forms of sexual violence a woman can experience.

The men who Julia took home would respond aggressively when she chickened out of sex, either blindly or in an attempt to shame and guilt her into proceeding.

Should we talk about the fact that Kyle is a psychiatrist who shouldn’t be romancing a traumatized patient in his care who’s parent was just fucking brutally murdered? Or does that feel too petty in comparison?

The men who hurt women are more typically their friends, their fathers, their uncles, their boyfriends, their husbands.

What’s so funny about all of this is that Pinhead somehow does better at consent than these men, at least in a manner of speaking. He’s the only man who legitimately listens to Kirsty, and responds to her “no.” No matter what he threatens, he always stops to hear her out, lets her do what she wants, is always talking about her desires and pleasure, and in the end always ends up destroying the men abusing her rather than going through with ever harming her.

Briggs seemed keen on viewing Pinhead as a Satanic figure. Historically, what is the role of women who are in a position to encounter the devil? Usually, they are witches, wanton women who gain magical power through sexual communion with the devil. A framework of propaganda that men have historically used to persecute women.

The men who hurt and oppress women in real life don’t look or act like Satan, but they sure as hell are ready to write narrative after narrative of Satanic figures menacing women while they save the day, and they sure as hell like to blame women for preferring “bad boys” and “assholes” over the “nice guy.”

It’s more comfortable for men to imagine Pinhead as this cool figure of pure evil with no feelings or capacity for mercy, because they can live vicariously through his violence (particularly when they’re writing him doing it to half-naked women, looking at you H3) and yet simultaneously distance their moral identities from him.

It’s more comfortable to compartmentalize what good vs. predatory masculinity looks like in a way that benefits their self-image and the status quo. This is a lie men tell themselves.

It’s safer for men to point to Pinhead and say, “this is what a predator looks like,” while curiously never speaking of the callous, scummy and predatory behavior of every single other man in the films, even to the point of occasionally discussing the perceived tragedy of fucking Frank’s spiral into darkness long before they can feel entirely comfy imagining Pinhead as having a past where he was a good man with sad feelings, or regard his act of self-sacrifice for Kirsty as anything but a moment of weakness that was “bad writing” and therefore should never have happened.

There is an extraordinary irony in a man arguing with Pinhead’s own actor over the nature of his evil, while running a show where a female character’s fuckability is her main characteristic and it’s okay to behave as if she doesn’t even have real feelings.

All this nonsense in the spaces I go to have fun, while we’re dealing with the background radiation of a President who’s sexual abuses are swept under the rug, his masculinity praised regularly and his violence against our people gaslighted. While we’re dealing with the mass-recorded aggressive violence of police - white men in positions of authority whom we are supposed to trust to keep us safe. While men make other men laugh about the violation of girls so they don’t have to deal with the reality of one of the “nice” funny guys being a predator.

Fuck you. I’d rather burn.

#Hellraiser #rape cw #abuse cw

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