The Legend Of Korra: *spent years fighting an uphill battle of misogynoir and queeephobia*

Korra and Asami: *kiss and announce they’re a couple before gay marriage was even legalized in the United States*

Fans: Korrasami is a bad and underdeveloped relationship. Why do people even like it?

hmmm.

Hey all. So for Pride Month, I wanna talk some about butch and femme identities.

Specifically, the false dichotomy that's been made out of them.

If you've spent any time at all around multigender people, you know that manhood and womanhood are not oppositional or mutually exclusive. If you've spent any time at all in healthy general trans spaces, you know that masculinity and femininity aren't, either.

So then why are butch and femme (and futch, when it's remembered), treated as such?

My main identity is butch, because every aspect of my identity is masc in some way. It has to be, for me to feel comfortable and safe in it. When I am a gender in the feminine spectrum, I am masc in presentation, affect, performance, and other similar aspects. When I am masc-gendered, I actually tend to be more femme, though, because the mascness is safely cemented in my gender! When I am an abinary gender, it can vary and that's actually when I tend to be more neutral, but there is still less femininity than masculinity.

I could go into why (double dysphoria over people assuming both the wrong gender and the wrong sex, since I am intersex) but I will leave it other than that parenthetical. But even aside from being a system, on an individual level I am butch AND femme. Queer masculinity is a stronger part of my identity than queer femininity, but that doesn't erase the queer femininity. It doesn't erase the way I am so rarely a masculine man that I basically joke my two binary genders are femboy and butch. It doesn't erase how when my gender approaches one binary, my relationship with genderqueer expression and existence always queers.

To be clear, for some people individually, the two are separate and oppose each other. I'm not saying they have to adjust their understanding of their OWN identity, but just to recognize that theirs is not the "one right way".

I am butch AND femme. Both are important to me. Sometimes they are even contradictory. I'm multigender and intersex and a system and many other things besides. It happens. My identity doesn't have to make sense to everyone. But it is valid and deserves to be treated as such.

(Also, since it's been brought up that degendering or regendering typically masculine things still counts as butch - it absolutely does. Using anything you or anyone else considers masculine and queering it in any way counts as butch. I'm not a prescriptivist.)

me hearing about someone or something being queerphobic in some way and wanting to know what happened: 🤨☕

me when the "queerphobic" stuff in question is just people being supportive of contradictory labels and other identities that most people don't understand, and the drama is just exclus people complaining about harmless stuff again: 😒🫗

How I imagine the tumblr housamo fandom whenever we’re analyzing and discussing the writing and how it ties back to the og myths, stories, and history.

I don't have much to say about Magne other than there was an Attempt, but. That time when Twice and Toga got angry with Overhaul for misgendering her was already indicative of what I'm going to get at in a sec, and obviously it was especially relevant because it was a direct show of respect and support from people who very clearly cared about her (and who called her big sis already as it was!!) (×2 imo because Twice was intentionally written to be the readers' insight into the LOV, and the character with whom they were supposed sympathise with the most at/since the beginning, so it's especially important that the first one who spoke up was him), but the story's progression (especially in recent years) is what most assures me that despite a rather poor execution (definitely not the best, but also certainly not the worst) Horikoshi did mean well with her. "People bound together by the chains of society always laugh at those who aren't" :(

sometimes media serves as an example of what NOT to do. now i say this thinking about a streamer committing too much time to an impossible task when he has more important things to do but genuinely this goes for a lot of media and people need to remember that

not to use the word 'horrendous' again but it is truly horrendous the sheer amount of times i have expressed my undying love and support for mspec monos in the past and yet this entire group of people just did not seem to notice or care when they pretended to be my friend group.

ok ive given up on finding a community within online games I play that wont irk the fuck out of me 24/7 lol i'm just gonna play the MMO’s I enjoy in smaller doses of time, and more than likely mute linkshell / guild chats on an as-needed basis I also noticed that like. the vast bulk (99.99%) of my irritating / unsavory / outright racist & queerphobic interactions with other players were by cis straight men lol gamers continue to be a plague, what else is new tbh

sometimes i’m so forcefully pulled out of my “human rights are one of the most important values of society” bubble it hurts

Guys, if I ever post something offensive, please, feel free to call me out.

Sometimes I don't realize what I say/write/post is stupid or could be offensive. But I'm trying and am still learning.

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Periodic reminder that you are not immune to reactionary radicalization through fandom.

We all know the "jokes" about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they're not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don't understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a "legitimate" position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We've had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn't going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN'T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a "fake" sexuality and "pretending to be oppressed" and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of "pedophilia" in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes "child porn", and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don't Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to "sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn't even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed",

We've seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance "it's us vs. them so anything they don't like is Good",

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I've seen in recent years hasn't come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren't exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they're the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn't resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We've seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don't know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

So, if you see someone trying to convince you that you have the ONLY valid approach to any specific character, or ship, or show, or whatever, that your ship is activism and your fanfics are praxis, and liking something else or liking the same thing differently is Only For Bad People, that is the single biggest red flag that YOU NEED TO RUN, THEY'RE TRYING TO SELL YOU SOMETHING THAT YOU DO NOT WANT

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LET'S GO BITCHES I CAN TALK ABOUT QUEERPHOBIA AND HOW FUCKED UP IT IS FOR MY SOCIOLOGY PROJECT

As a children's librarian, people who harass fans of Harry Potter indiscriminately really worry me.

Here's why.

1. The majority of Harry Potter fans are children.

I've had people call me disgusting and scum and an embarrassment to my disabled community. I've been suicide baited and have received death threats. All of this can be heavy enough stuff for an adult to deal with.

And then I think of how most of my 700+ elementary-aged students are huge Harry Potter fans. Because, you know, Harry Potter is a children's series. And they also have access to the internet and social media like TikTok and YouTube.

Now imagine the stuff that's been said to me being said to a kid. Because Harry Potter's main audience are KIDS.

2. This black-and-white mentality isn't healthy.

Very few things in life are cut-and-dry good vs bad. And if you employ this kind of thinking in one area of your life, odds are you'll apply it to other areas too(more on that in a moment).

And people who go out of their way to harass people who like Harry Potter don't seem to particularly care about any context beyond "If you like Harry Potter in any way whatsoever you're scum".

It hasn't mattered when I've pointed out that I absolutely and unequivocally think Rowling's TERF views are awful and scummy and wrong. It hasn't mattered that I try my best to consume the content only in ways that won't monetarily support her, (which kids typically can't do, btw). It hasn't mattered that it's literally in my job description to keep up with children's media to procure content for my patrons as well as to be able to hold conversations with them.

3. Saying "You're not allowed to read this without being harassed" is no different from saying a book should be banned.

This is ironic, seeing as the people doing the harassing are also often up in arms about queerphobic and racist book bans (as they should be) while demanding book bans of their own.

Because in their all-or-nothing way of thinking, book bans are only bad when the "bad" people do it.

No. Book bans are always bad, no exceptions.

Book bans aren't bad because they're banning the "good" books, they're bad because banning access to different ideas is always bad. Because every book has a lesson to teach us (perhaps not the lesson intended by the author, but a lesson nonetheless).