i’d rather have rainbow capitalism then living in constant fear of discovery. the woman in the pride flag disney t-shirt might be missing the nuance, but at least i know i can be myself. a street full of rainbow flags makes me more comfortable holding a mans hand. look. corporations aren’t your friend. they will sell to whoever will buy. but kids seeing gay everything every year is only ever a good thing, and a massive improvement in history

On the morning of the knife fight I was scheduled to lose, I washed myself in the ritual soap and dressed in soft, loose fitting clothes as was the custom. I would not break my fast until after the deed was done.

My second ferried me to the entry point at the North, where I declared my secret name to the gatekeeper and several acolytes in quick succession. They prepared me for the inner sanctum, infusing my veins with salt water and drawing intricate sigils on my chest. I bid farewell to my second, who would keep vigil outside. I remember very little after this, but when I awoke, I felt a great weight had been lifted from my chest.

---

Anyway, the top surgery yesterday went great!

Me, with two nonbinary kids in the car, answering the phone: Hey, what's up?

My partner, trying his best but not used to using nonbinary pronouns: Hey, I'm on my way home. Have you dropped off the...thems...yet?

Me: I have not dropped off the thems yet, no. We're on our way, though.

The thems: uproarious laughter

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

screaming into the void is fun

ID in alt text

I saw a tiktok that has been bothering me since

Now the context doesn't really matter but she was saying basically that when you first come out there is a stage where you are all happy and excited about your identity and dressing in rainbows and joyful

And then basically said that everyone does (or should) grow out of that stage and end up in the angry, cynical, pissed off activism stage

Essentially saying that taking joy and excitement in your sexuality/gender is "cringy" and "immature"

Now she wasn't being awful and was saying people should leave those who are excited and happy alone and let them be but it's still bothered me

Because you can be both

You can be excited and take joy in your sexuality and gender while also being filled with rage about injustice

I don't know. Maybe this is because I am knocking on the door of 40 but to me taking joy in your gender identity and sexuality is a radical form of defiance

Our stories were tragedies

Our identities were shameful

Picking up a rainbow flag and saying our existence is beautiful and magical and lovely and something to take joy in was an act of rebellion and reclaimation

To say that people experiencing joy in themselves is some how "cringy" or less important or useful than people being angry is...misguided to me

The rage at injustice is important but I also think the celebration of a part of yourself you have been told to hate is just as important

And they just aren't mutually exclusive

Self love can be a "fuck you" to people who want you to hate yourself

@queerliblib I just got you added to my Libby app, and I am *delighted* and a little emotional at just how many audiobooks you have.

I'm visually impaired, and can't read text by itself for very long. So audio is the main way I read books now, and I'm finding books I've wanted to read but my Indiana state library card only had the text versions (if they had the books at all.)

searching for the most "perfect" and "unproblematic" kind of representation will fuck with your ability to enjoy the media you consume. Characters are going to fuck up and act like humans. They might engage with problematic tropes and behaviours. sometimes it will be toxic and sometimes it will be soft and thats not a bad thing. you will disagree with actions and choices because thats how media works.

you dont have to love every queer character and story BUT acting like only one specific niche of representation is "acceptable" and good? fuck that. And as i said in that other post. STOP ACTING LIKE ONE MOVIE OR SHOW WILL DISMANTLE THE FIGHT FOR QUEER RIGHTS.

Your pronouns are not a burden!! Your preferred name is not a burden!! The people who truly care about you should care that what they refer to you as makes you comfortable and happy! If they refuse to use it, it’s on them, not you!! Don’t live your life afraid of being yourself because you don’t want to be a burden to others!!

Lesbian Heart Cat Plush

Etsy Shop: RainbowToysPattern

happy trans day of visibility to jesus, the inventor of the top surgery scar. he is back and he is alive and he wants us to marvel at his new body with him

Beautiful cisgender woman!

to the animorphs

you couldn't tell us who you were or where you lived. you had to be careful, really careful. so did i. so did we, all of us queer kids growing up in the shadow of the AIDS crisis. like you, we were children at war with an enemy that invaded our loved ones from within. like you, we kept secrets to protect ourselves, never knowing what might happen if the truth should fall into the hands of the enemies who might be anyone - anywhere - anytime. a child who keeps secrets to survive becomes a soldier in their soul. we acquired new shapes to disguise our true forms, shifted flesh and molded bone to afford ourselves power and protection: some of us chose the dull camouflage of forest insects, others the fangs and claws of beasts too terrifying to get close to. some of us grew wings that could carry us up and away, riding the thermals to escape the pain of our bodies down below. but of course there was a danger in that. what happens when you spend too long in morph? well, you get stuck there, as Tobias discovered all those years ago. you get trapped in one shape and run the risk of forgetting what you used to be. every queer child chooses their own way to fight the war to survive. like Jake, some of us become leaders. like Rachel, some of us become fighters. like Marco, strategists. like Cassie, pacifists. like Ax, orphans. and like you, we won our war, or so they tell us now. hooray for gay marriage! faggots and trannies can get jobs and have babies and pay taxes just like everybody else. but who did we leave behind? what did we lose on the way here? one war just leads right to the next. dear Animorphs, I loved you because you never pretended that winning a battle doesn't come with a price. and still you believed in the beauty and mystery hidden deep within the bodies of all that changes and all that lives. i too still believe. that transformation is possible. that what we do here matters. that in the midst of all this monstrosity and sacrifice and terror and loss, there is still something worth fighting for.

"to the animorphs" - Kai Cheng Thom, Falling Back in Love With Being Human

Light spoilers for the Barbie movie, but mostly a reflection about myself and gender. (You also don’t need to have watched the movie to read this.)

Something that really resonated with me was the part of the movie where it was said that in the context of the gender roles of our patriarchal society, in order to be attractive to men, women act like they are more vulnerable, less intelligent, and generally helpless, insecure and in need of men’s assistance. The Barbies eventually weaponize this, but it is still a statement about something that projected me back in my high school years.

Back then I had no idea I was queer or anything (it was the mid 00s, we were fed a steady diet of Bush era conservatorism, islamophobia and fascistoid ideas on the corruption of the west and whatnot - the future queer-friendly climate was baaaarely a germinating seed thanks to cultural milestones like Brokeback Mountain, but damn it was a different world, really) but I was perfectly, acutely aware that I did not perform femininity in the way the girls around me did.

I had no knowledge of the concept of performing femininity or anything of that sort, but I remember being very perceptive about the difference in which I related to the “opposite sex” and in which my female friends did (not all of them, of course, but in retrospect they likely were not all heterosexual).

I knew that I couldn’t act like them even if tried, but also that I wasn’t actually interested in trying. Part of me was saddened by it, kind of regretted it, because I believed that I would never be attractive to boys unless I acted like the other girls. (Turns out I didn’t actually care, but back then I just assumed it was something that one just cared about, and blamed my “shyness” for my unwillingness to try going out with boys. Turns out that if someone wants to bang guys, they go and do it. Wild, right?)

But another part of me just couldn’t... summon the willingness to try. I didn’t want to act like I was insecure of my own intelligence and abilities compared to boys’. I didn’t want to act like I didn’t know my own value. I didn’t want to act like I thought I was stupid, and that I needed (wanted) a boy’s support and assistance.

I saw boys as competition, not as objects of desire, not as something to attract. I wanted to show that I was just as smart as the smartest boys. Heck, I wanted to show I was smarter. Later I learnt I was trans and asexual, which explains why I saw myself as a peer to the boys, not as a potential girlfriend for them.

(The biggest regret I have about my adolescence was that I didn’t realize that I should have tried to hang out with the boys more than the girls, but back then we self-segregated based on sex a lot, kind of crazy to think about now.)

This post doesn’t really have a moral, except maybe that it’s so incredibly fundamental for kids to know about the facets of gender and sexuality. I was smart, I understood things that I was not given the tools to conceptualize but I still managed to understand some of them, but I still lacked fundamental tools to understand the whole picture.

But also that gender non conformity just... happens. I didn’t have the conceptual tools to understand any of it, but I was gender non conforming and I fundamentally knew it, even if I didn’t have the words for it. You don’t catch gender non conformity from the outside; you have it, and from the outside you learn to understand what it means and how to navigate the world the way you are.

I’ve felt suddenly very close to my teenage self thanks to that scene in Barbie. She was a girl, she didn’t have the tools to be anything but that. But she was a girl in a way that didn’t conform to what being a girl was supposed to be according to the gender roles of the world she was in.

As a child, I was absolutely a girl. I played with Barbies with other girls. I wore dresses and skirts and read books with girl protagonists and watched movies and shows with girl protagonists. You can see the clues of my future gender and sexuality in my childhood, but only if you know what you’re looking for. I was indeed a girl. But I didn’t grow into a woman, I grew into something else, and teenage me - the age when you are in between childhood and adulthood, the age I was supposed to go from girl to woman but didn’t - was in between those. Still a girl, but without the germs of womanhood.

I wore a pink Barbie shirt to the movie theater (literally a Barbie shirt, with a print of several Barbie dolls on it). It felt like a homage to girl me. It was also campy enough to feel right for my current me, of course. But mostly it felt like something that had to do with my past girl self. The entire movie felt like something that had to do with my past girl self and how that intersect with current me. I’m not a woman, but I was a girl, and the movie said something about my past girl self, but also to current me, the one who knows they’re asexual and trans. It’s hard to put into words, but the fact that the movie said something about non-conformity to stereotypical gender roles and to heteronormativity (including allonormativity) through the lense of girlhood femininity... it felt like something that wrapped together past me and current me.

We’re not two different mes. It’s still me. We are one person. I am one person. I am that girl and this transmasculine person. I am me. (And I am Kenough. We are all Kenough even without what society says we must have to be complete.)

not to be mean or anything but i think we as queers may have fallen off a bit when we changed our messaging to "trans men are men trans women are women we're just like you, we can be quiet and docile about our genders if you want" as opposed to "it's my choice what i do with my body; fuck off"

why are we trying to assimilate ourselves into a system that is rotten from the roots. patriarchy doesn't fucking work. "trans men are our oppressors because they're men" throw yourself into the sun

hormones should be available over the counter at every single pharmacy in the country. being trans fucking rocks actually. why should i have to be gentle and silent about that shit when it's cool as fuck. anti-trans politicians should be getting shit thrown at them when they harp on about how much of a threat we are

we gotta go back to being loud as fuck. being counterculture as shit is inherent to being queer when the culture you live in insists on tamping down queerness

friendly reminder you do not have to do the full 100 yards for your transition

my entire medical transition consisted of taking T until my voice dropped to a level I was comfortable with

it's okay if you only want to take hormones for a certain amount of time

it's okay if you only get top or bottom surgery

it's also okay if you get neither

for me transitioning was/is way more about the social aspect of things than it ever was to do with me myself because overall I'm pretty content with the way I am and there's literally nothing wrong with that