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quietwingsinthesky · 1 month

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Hiiiii! So, a few days ago you were talking about the whole thing with Amy, Rory, and River. And when I saw those posts a thought arose in my head and I wish to share it with you.

Since River grew up with Amy and Rory as Mels. And Mels was Amy's best friend do you think that they ever talked about children? Since I know that it can come up when talking with friends, and like... do you think that Amy might've ever expressed whether or not she wanted children?

And if she didn't, that Mels would've had to listen to her mother say that she doesn't want children? The idea is so heartbreaking and sooo interesting.

What do you think about it?

no, no, see, you're so right and this drives me wild.

because, the way i see it, i don't think amy wanted children. she's somewhere on the 'hasn't thought about it' to 'vaguely negative feelings about it happening' range to me, which falls sharply into 'Not Happening Ever Again' post-s6. (specifically, in terms of having a kid herself, even if she could, i really don't think she would. i do love that she and rory end up adopting a kid later, because that does make sense, for amy pond who grew up alone in one universe with her family swallowed by cracks in time before the doctor helped her set it right again, for her to want to make sure another child won't be alone in the world like she was. getting off-track here.)

and that's so. because the first real memory river/mels has of amy is of amy shooting at her. and depending on how well the silence fucked up the rest of her memory, it might be one of the very first memories she has at all. that's how she met her mother, crying for help and getting a bullet instead. her mother tried to kill her, so of course, you have to think. she must have needed to hear that she was wanted, right? even if she was taken away, even if amy shot her, at some point, melody must have been wanted?

river is good at getting people to do what she wants, but she is very, very bad at subtlety. and mels is younger, has less practice, so when she wants to know this, she's just going to ask. blunt and quick, easy enough because amy's used to the way mels will open her mouth and you just have to be ready to roll with what comes out if you want to keep up. it's why they're such good friends (like mother, like daughter.)

they're nine, and mels asks if amy wants kids, and amy wrinkles up her nose and says she won't have time for children, obviously, once her raggedy doctor finally comes back. they're fifteen, and amy and rory dance will they-won't they in a way that makes mels twitchy to watch, and taunting amy about wanting to have rory's babies is a good way to get on her nerves. but amy calls her gross, tells her she's got more life planned than children would leave room for, and besides, imagine her, a mom? it'd be a disaster.

mels does. a lot. she looks at her mother and just sees her best friend instead. she's not even sure what she wishes was there, but. maybe amy's right. and besides. imagine her, a daughter, instead of the ticking time bomb she really is? it'd be a disaster.

they're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and on. mels stands on the outside of a love story that births a universe. and her. how do you compete with that? not that she would know, not yet, she hasn't been there. but it doesn't make her feel any less alienated when amy and rory talk in whispers about a half-remembered world that's bled through to this life, about roman soldiers and boxes and the big bang of belief.

all these memories, they never mention children. on amy's wedding day, she's different, not like someone remembering a dream but someone who lived it. rory stands straighter, won't leave her side, and they're both so much older than they were yesterday. maybe now, right? a wedding's as good a time as any to decide you want kids.

mels not being at amy & rory's wedding is such an obvious lazy way of them trying to explain why they totally didn't just throw this plot twist together at the last minute that i'm not even going to acknowledge it. of course she was at their wedding. she's their best friend. there's too many people around the doctor, and she wasn't ready today of all days, so despite this horrible burning need under her skin to strike, she stays her hand. doesn't let him dance with her because she might just tear his throat out if he gets too close. stays with amy and rory as the maid of honor should. she must have been there for the awkward questions that always gets asked, 'so, any plans for a baby?' 'when am i getting grandkids?' 'oh, you two are going to have gorgeous children together.' standing a few feet from amy in her wedding dress and watching her mother tense and grit her teeth and brush off the questions. watching her look nervously at rory but never ask if he means it when his mom asks him if he'd prefer a son or a daughter, and rory answers 'either one, some day, not anytime soon.'

god i'm just going on and on, aren't i. but really, what's it like to know that amy never changed her mind. the next time she sees them, she's already been born and stolen. i don't like let's kill hitler for. so many reasons. but there is something compelling about how recklessly river lashes out at the world, at the doctor. even her sacrifice at the end is almost suicidal, throwing all her regenerations into this man without knowing if that will even work or if it might kill her to do it. but it makes more sense in the context of someone who has reached the end of a long, long wait for some kind of indication, any kind, that her mother wanted to have her. and finally been told, no. she didn't choose melody.

#like. to be clear also: i don't think the fact that amy didn't want kids and really didn't have a choice in giving birth to river #means that she wouldn't love river. i think it would make their relationship Complicated but i do think amy loves her. so much.#that's her daughter but it's also her best friend.#but like. god. to spend your whole childhood hoping you'll hear about some little glimmer of yourself.#a dream. a passing mention. a debate on baby names. anything. and to hear nothing.#and river is. like. she is really really bad at relationships right? we know this.#the person she's closest to is the doctor and she spends most of her life believing *he doesn't even love her*.#we're talking about someone whose base assumption about everyone is that they will try to hurt her at some point so she should always keep #one hand armed.#and her mother. didn't choose to have her. didn't have that choice. that has to fuck her up a little.#(and also serve as proof that river is. so so bad at knowing when she is loved. because maybe amy didn't choose to have her but she named #melody pond after mels her best friend. she has been choosing river every day for the past however many years since mels decided to come #here and be near her mom and dad even if only as kids. but river still can't see it.#and. given the nature of how the ponds disappear from her life. and we never get any closure about them and river.#you have to wonder if she ever did. river song do you know your mother loves you?#having the melody-as-river reveal be so close to the end of the season and then getting rid of amy & rory before they can actually do #anything with the three of them as a messed up little family unit is the show's biggest crime. because i don't know! i don't know if river #knew her parents loved her! i don't know if she *ever* came to terms with how she was born and how they didn't need to choose her then to #choose her now! i don't know if river ever really felt comfortable thinking of them as her parents rather than her friends?#according to the transcripts. river calls amy 'mother' twice. (and 'mummy' once jokingly.) she calls rory 'father' once. and 'dad' in angel #in manhattan. and it just. it drives insane right? it's almost weirdly formal. like the words aren't right but she knows she should say the #and. and. i don't think i'm ever going to get over river song.#i think that's the takeaway here.#ask #doctor who #river song #amy pond #rory williams

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rhube · 25 days

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I have such enduring sadness when I see TERFs respond to trans people by saying shit like, 'What do you MEAN you just ~~feel~~ like a woman??' As though it's a gotcha, because... like... if you don't know what that means you might be AGENDER.

I often feel like there might be a lot more agender folk out there than we tend to see. We're marginalised in both trans and cis spaces, which often try to describe everything in terms of gender. But there is a strong thread in a lot of these discussions of people saying they don't understand gender and don't want to be gendered.

And it should be, like, FANTASTIC! There's a word for that: AGENDER!

And the beauty of this word is that it's fundamentally accepting.

It doesn't SAY that everyone is agender. It just says that YOU'RE not gendered.

It's a beautiful admission that YOU don't get it, and don't want to be a part of it, without trying to restrict how anyone else feels or what they do.

It is the epistemic humility of understanding that just because you don't - you CAN'T - understand something, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

All you need to do is look at someone who feels gendered (cis or trans) and say: I don't understand what it is that you're feeling, but it's clearly important to you - to your health and well-being - so I support it and validate it and celebrate it with you. Please also respect that it doesn't apply to me.

But because being agender isn't something most people know or talk about, these people have mostly only found a home inside TERF spaces. Which means they are existing in a world that should be largely inimicable to them, as the leaders of the movement are gender essentialists, whose end game is to convince them that because There Is No Gender everything is SEX-based.

But that doesn't follow at all from the simple fact of one BEING agender oneself. That's a fact about ME, not about you. And because I am an adult I can conceive of a universe that is not entirely like me.

But the trouble is that because most of the pro-trans and non-binary discourse is reactionary to this TERFist rubbish, it's ALSO aggressive towards agender people.

It's why I speak up every time someone says that gender is a spectrum that everyone falls somewhere on. NO IT'S NOT. Firstly, it accepts the anglo-european, colonialist assumptions of the binary - only two points. But importantly: NOT EVERYONE IS GENDERED. If such a spectrum were in existence, I wouldn't be on it!

When you say this offensive, exclusionary, erasive nonsense you are telling agender people that they don't exist in a world that accepts trans and non-binary people. So they dig their heels in and stay in the enemy camp - a harmful place for them!

It's also why I am increasingly upset to see 'gender' treated as another word for 'style'. I get the positive idea behind bots that propose random genders - it is poking fun in the seriousness of people who claim to not be able to compute more than two genders. It seeks to make the idea of gender fun and flexible. And if that were all it did, that would be to the good.

But it's not.

I have had young genderqueer people deny my existence to my face when I say that their poll doesn't include me because it assumes everyone is gendered. Because their understanding of 'gender' is 'it's just however you express yourself, so everyone is gendered'. NO IT IS NOT.

LISTEN. You can define your own gender, that's valid. But gender is still a socially constructed set of behaviours. It does not reduce down to 'however you choose to express yourself personally'. This is what distinguishes it from sex - it is a concept understood BY its socially defined aspect as distinct from sex.* And this enables us to understand agender people in a context where gendered people exist. How I express myself is not defined by the restrictions of social constructions of behaviour. I don't want it to be. I cannot identify myself with that. I just like the things I like, and the idea that those should be grouped together under social expectations isn't just foreign, it's harmful to me. You don't get to erase the harm done to me by gender by handwaving it away. And you don't get to deny me a personal sense of style by insisting that to have style is just what it is to be gendered.

Moreover, you know there are cis people who choose to express themselves in gender-nonconforming ways, right? Cis people whose sense of style is separate to their gender. I don't understand what's going on with them any more than I understand how trans people feel gendered, but I don't think I have a right to say 'You're not actually a woman, because your sense of style includes wearing trousers and having short hair, and those are Male Styles of self-expression.'

I get it. We all understand the world in part through our understanding of ourselves. And it's hard to take a step back and let go and say, 'I'm never going to understand what that person's experience is like, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.' It took me a long while to get my head around it.

But hearing that being agender was an option was a huge part of understanding how I could fit into a world where other people had gender and it wasn't a bad thing that needed to be educated away from other people's lives in order for ME to exist as me.

I'm not saying you have to be nice to TERFs just because they might be confused agender people. I'm saying that erasing the existence of agender people from your thinking and discourse is Not Helping.

It's actively harmful to agender people just trying to exist in a world that is dominated by gendered attitudes, and it has the side-effect of making a lot of people who might be agender feel like they're only welcome in the TERF camp. And that's deeply upsetting.

Very few people reblog when I talk about this stuff, which makes me feel like most of y'all probably find it annoying, or think that by asking for inclusion I am somehow attacking you. But I'm not. Allowing that some people may not be gendered and don't want to be gendered is not antithetical to you being gendered - quite the reverse.

Say you are a trans woman who doesn't want to be gendered as male. It sucks when people do that, right? It hurts. It's actively harmful and invalidating to you.

Now imagine you feel that way whenever anyone applies any gendered concepts or expectations to you. That's all it is to be agender.

It feels awful, and it's constantly happening in almost all spaces - cis and trans. But there's no reason it has to be that way.

Just stop projecting the gender you identify with onto other people when you don't know if they are the same gender. That's it. That's all you gotta do. Apply the same respect that you want from others to agender people.

Fini.

*Some of y'all haven't read the people who came up with the sex/gender distinction, and it shows. It's fine to have not read The Second Sex or The Sex Which Is Not One or The Traffic in Women. We all have limited time on planet Earth. But that means you have to be a bit more humble when you try to define away other people's lived existence based on concepts you haven't really researched.

#agender #non-binary

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cristianodaily · 7 years

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that fact that we're women too and have kept our mouths shut about the poor woman whose life was destoryed because of being sexually assaulted by cris...why am i not even surprised. this is disgusting. used to worship the guy but i fucking hate him now and i hate his apologists. you're all aiding rape culture at its finest

So I have got several anons about this, I suppose it’s enough if I only answer this one. Sorry that it took me so long, I just wanted to take the time to answer this properly. It seems like you are already convinced that those claims are true and I won’t try to change your mind, I just wonder how well informed you are about this whole story and the actual evidence. So let’s try to be as objective as possible.

I have seen several people argue that the story itself is made up/that Der Spiegel don’t have the evidence they claim to have and that their only goal is to denounce Cristiano, which to be fair isn’t a too far fetched assumption considering the timing they had for posting the “tax fraud” documents in December (that lead to absolutely nothing) as well as the timing in this case, it definitely puts their credibility in doubt.

But in contrast to those argumentations I personally believe that Der Spiegel wouldn’t make up an entire story based on nothing. But there are several questions you have to ask: How legitimate are those documents they have? their only source is FootballLeaks. Why does Der Spiegel refuse to publish more of said documents? If you have them and want people to believe you, you show your evidence, right? One of those documents that are provided as proof for Cristiano being the man behind “Mr. D” and “Topher” is this one. A signature from Cristiano under an official document… but only signed as “Cristiano Ronaldo” and not “Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro” a bit weird, to say the least. If you are German and read the whole article Der Spiegel’s intentions become pretty clear, but we shall not talk about journalistic integrity here. As you can see there are several questions to be asked that put the story and it’s evidence itself in doubt but as I mentioned before I would like to believe that Der Spiegel didn’t make up an entire story. Even though they are not what they once were, I personally read this newspaper regulary. I do understand why people choose to believe otherwise though.

So let’s talk about the, in my opinion, more important part: the Settlement Agreement itself, which the story mostly revolves around. One point that I want to make very clear and that a lot of people apparently don’t get is the following: let’s assume that this SA is legitimate and Cristiano is involved. A Settlement Agreement is no proof for rape. The only thing it proves is that there was an out of court agreement, money for silence. And that’s the part where things get sketchy and ugly, where it’s word against word. For me the actual important question that I have asked myself for the past 3 weeks and that I’d advice everyone else to ask themselves too after really looking into the entire story: Why was this SA set up? And, simply put, you have two answers: 1.Susan K.’s claims are true, Cristiano wanted the easy way out, paid some money and it’s like the night never happened. 2.Susan K. was out to make some money, Cristiano who just moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid didn’t want any bad PR about untrue allegations and decided to pay the money, which were peanuts to him. Both is possible, it wouldn’t be the first time that a powerful man uses his position to sweep a crime under the rug just like it wouldn’t be the first time that a woman uses a one night stand to make some money.

Now, what you choose to believe in, whether it’s Der Spiegel’s evidence being false, or Cristiano being falsely accused or Cristiano raping that woman, that’s entirely down to your judgement. I won’t tell anyone what to believe here. What in fact is pissing me off is your entitlement. Acting like he was proven guilty when there is hardly any evidence whatsoever. This is a very serious and sensitive topic that can cause a lot of harm for both parties involved. I will not walk around saying that these allegations are 100% not true, because I can’t possibly know. Same goes for you. Don’t come into my inbox acting like there was substantial evidence. There isn’t. If you come to the conclusion that Der Spiegel is trustworthy and that the SA was signed because Cristiano is in fact guilty, good for you, but don’t act like it’s a fact when it clearly is not.

At last some more words about my opinion because I was asked about it. I have spent the last 3 weeks reading this article over and over again. I talked to several people about it, some who like Cristiano, some who aren’t his biggest fans. I presented them the case as detailed as possible and I personally went into these discussions with the mindset that those allegations could very well be true. Not because I necessarily believed in them, but because I wanted to see it from that point of view, I did not want to be that person that blindly follows someone. I asked my friends/family over and over again “but do you think it is possible? have you considered it? what about ________ (insert evidence here)” I kept pushing because I wanted to take the possibility of him being guilty into consideration. That’s a big reason for why I haven’t been around here much, tbh at times I couldn’t even look at his face.

Now some time has passed, I thought and talked about it a lot and I personally came to the conclusion that I have to trust the person that I have supported for 13 years now. I do not claim that I know Cristiano, because I don’t but I’d like to think that I have a good idea of the person that he is, always has been. And that’s the person I choose to believe in. I’m a very rational and fact based person, it would be ridiculous for me to do otherwise at this point considering that Der Spiegel’s story itself is questionable and, as I said before, even if it is proven that the SA and other documents are credible it does not prove that Susan K.’s claims are true. I’d very much welcome it if Cristiano would speak up about it because there will always be a “what if?” in the back of my mind and, frankly, it’s killing me. That being said if there’s ever actual proof of those allegations being true I’d drop him in a heartbeat and never look back.

#asks #rape tw #long post #sorry for flooding your dashboards #i was considering putting it under a cut but then thought fuck it

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