tl;dr let eggs fuck up their gender exploration without screaming at them please

roachpatrol:

gutterowl:

Thing that has me cranky today:  genderbend/genderswap art and fic is transphobic and wrong, and if you like it you are wrong and bad.  Why do you not listen to every trans person in the world telling you how wrong it is?

Like.  Dude.  You do realize that a decent number of the people who make and consume that sort of content end up being trans folk, right?

(Okay, let me preface:  I am a trans woman.  This is absolutely me talking about myself, and me talking about people I have known or seen in person.)

Like, let’s be straightforward.  Genderswap art is a usually rough, imperfect, messed up thing, with a lot of problems.

• Often squarely rooted in binary gender notions.
• Often obsessed with specific physiological features as *defining* gender (i.e. you are a girl if you have boobs and hips and a vagina, etc).
• A good chunk of it does come from real grody sources.  I was a 4chan teen, once upon a decade.  I am aware of the “what if [male character] was a hot chick, so I could fuck them without it being gay” phenomenon.  That’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.

These are all big gross problems, rooted in deep cultural cissexism.  There are wrongheaded ideas here, and ideally people grow out of them.  But:

• There are still eggmode kids who use the fantasy of genderswap to cope with dysphoria.

And I guess that’s what gets my panties in a wad.  Because no one comes into their gender shit clean and pure.  We gotta crawl through a mountain of cissexist cultural shit to get there.  It’s slow, and its messy, and it has messy detritus.  And then some folks go up to kids crawling through the shit mountain and get all huffy like, Wow why are you getting all this shit everywhere, you gross shit-person!

Not.  Helping.

Is genderswap material messed up?  It can be, yeah.  Should we as a culture push towards better and more fluid understanding of gender?  Abso-fucking-lutely.  Do you have a right to dislike it, or take issue with its permutations.  Sure, I certainly do.

But maybe don’t roll up on some kid already disgusted with herself and her body, and tell her that her coping mechanism, the thing that helps her swallow a bit of the disgust, is disgusting and makes her disgusting.  K?

you can have genderswaps when you pry them from my cold dead fucked-up hands