Tag: the world may never know

jumpingjacktrash:

rabbitrah:

starprincejimin:

god im reading a text about romance fiction (especially targeted at young adults) for class and one sentence in it literally made my brain explode because ive been thinking about this kind of stuff too, how “Many people wouldn’t fall in love if they’ve never heard about it before.” and like…imagine there was no ideal/overaccentuated image of love and romance painted in postmodern mass media….how would we love? would it be purer? more authentic? what would we do differently? would we fall in love at all if we werent constantly being fed an ideal concept of love as the norm in mass media? like what is a natural process of human feelings and what is just a projection of how we want to love and want to be loved based on what we’ve seen on tv and read in books etc? in this essay i will

w … wh … where’s the rest of the essay, op? 

if it worked like this, queers wouldn’t fall in love, because we grew up being told it was only a filthy lust that could never compare with the clean true love of A Man And A Woman having a church wedding. we love anyway, and we married even when the state didn’t recognize it as marriage.

i’m not pointing this out to scold you. you had an interesting hypothesis, but it turns out there actually was a control group, so the experiment’s been done.

do you know any good readings on the effects of colonialism on modern concepts of gender? i’ve seen you talk a lot about this and i’m interested to read more into it

gothhabiba:

Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System, María Lugones 

Colonial Dependence and Sexual Difference: Reading for Gender in the Writings of Simón Bolívar (1783-1830), Catherine Davies

(you can download those last two articles here if you don’t have access to jstor)

The Coloniality of Gender, Maria Lugones

Romancing the Transgender Native, Evan B. Towle and Lynn M. Morgan

Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body, Siobhan Somerville

Asexuality as a white supremacist dream

The Empire of Sexuality, Joseph Massa

Women and Men, Cloth and Colonization: The Transformation of Production-Distribution Relations among the Baule (Ivory Coast) (Femmes et hommes, pagnes et colonisation: la transformation des relations de production et de distribution chez les Baule de Côte d’Ivoire), Mona Etienne

“Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500-1770, Jennifer L. Morgan

White Sexual Imperialism: A Theory of Asian Feminist Jurisprudence, Sunny Woan

Rethinking Sex-Positivity, Rebecca John

Women of Color Seen As Always Sexually Available, Jaclyn Friedman 

Gender and pleasure

psshaw:

hobbitkaiju:

So much of the Euro-American understanding of being trans (or anything other than 100% constantly identified with your assigned gender) focuses on discomfort. 

Some people take this idea to an extreme and claim you can’t be trans unless you hate your body and want every surgery available to you. As many other writers have said before, that’s not true. It’s perfectly possible to be trans with only mild dysphoria or none at all. It’s perfectly possible to be trans and have a mental map of your body that looks just like the one you already have. 

But I’d like to push even harder against the idea that trans=discomfort. I’d like to offer this: sometimes the exploration of one’s gender can be motivated by pleasure rather than discomfort. 

Let me give an example. Let’s say there’s a person named Cal. Most people think of Cal as a boy, and Cal’s all right with that. So far as Cal’s concerned, a boy isn’t a bad thing to be. But sometimes, Cal likes to imagine being a girl and being treated as a girl. Those fantasies are always accompanied by feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, anticipation, and warmth. Eventually, having had these thoughts for years, Cal asks people to use ‘she’ pronouns in private and to refer to her as a girl. Cal does this for another year before claiming the label “trans”. 

Some people would say a person like Cal can’t be trans because there’s no dysphoria, self-hatred, distress, or even discomfort. There’s just a pleasure-based preference. But why is distress necessary? Why are trans people supposed to be defined solely by our pain and self-hatred?

It’s my opinion that defining trans people solely by discomfort is an aspect of transphobia. The idea behind trans=discomfort is that being anything other than 100% cis is so awful that no one would do it unless the alternative were unlivable. Think about that: defining trans people solely by their experiences of discomfort means believing that being trans is so awful that only misery could drive us to it. And to me, that sounds like the thinking of someone who really hates trans people.

So I’ll come out and say it: sometimes transition or self-exploration of gender is not just about lessening discomfort, but is about improving and deepening the pleasure we take in our lives. 

“Think about that: defining trans people solely by their experiences of discomfort means believing that being trans is so awful that only misery could drive us to it.”

despite likely having no gender in particular and also probabpy having the sexual orientation equivalent of “not applicable” i find myself desperately wanting to talk about gender and sexuality all the time

aerialsquid:

yardsards:

One thing that a lot of transmasc people struggle with before they fully realize they’re trans is the question of “do I hate being treated like a woman because women are treated like shit, or do I hate being treated like a woman because I’m not a woman?”

and one method (though not entirely foolproof) to figuring that out is asking “would I be upset if another girl was treated like this?”

like, I’d be just as mad if some dude said “you can’t do math because you’re a girl” to a female classmate as I would if he said it to me

however, I never got uncomfortable at waiters calling my female friends “m’am”, I was only uncomfortable when they called *me* that

and obviously everyone’s feelings are different and there’s tons of variables at play, but if you find that there’s a lot of the second scenario going on with you, there’s a good chance you’re not entirely cis

Where was this post 18 god damn months ago.

gothshoujo:

gothshoujo:

i feel like ppl think being nb means ur agender… like no it literally means u dont fit well into the binary of man or woman. it doesnt mean ur entirely disconnected from gender…. u can be fem alligned or masc alligned and ur still nb…. even if ur primally fem aligned and afab or vica versa w being amab… and being afab but transmasc etc is also fine…. and switching between all of these? also fine… nb is a gigantic umbrella term for literally any kind of noncis and nontrans person so ofc there can be nb wlw and mlm like…. hello…. stop policing ppls identities

anyone can rb this btw!

Hey Roach! I’ve been following ur gender adventures for a while now, (and I just went tru ur tag again just now) but! I was wondering if u have any advice on how to Come To Terms With the rest of men-kind? Like I’ve been IDing as a lesbian for a long time now! But I think I might be a boy, a straight boy! But I have a problem, I sorta hate straight boys?(As like a class of people, but even on an individual level there are not many I put up with)in Theory I know there are cool str8guys But where?

jumpingjacktrash:

roachpatrol:

yeah the general quality and attributes of straight boys is why it took me to my late twenties to be able to actually conceptualize myself as a man without feeling INTENSE DISMAY. i mean, if a class of people abuses you all your life, you’re gonna feel pretty damn weird about joining their ranks! 

i’ve found that even though i identify AS a man, i’m still way more likely to identify WITH female characters— especially ones like mulan and furiosa, who negotiate with their own femininity in order to survive and thrive in male roles. the male characters i identify with right off the bat are invariably damaged, frustrated, weak men, like steve rogers or miles vorkosigan: men born into the stifling cages of broken bodies, who work themselves raw to achieve what their peers take without thinking.

when i started transitioning, i felt a lot of rage and a lot of regret. i didn’t WANT to be trans. i didn’t want to be a half-thing, a not-quite man. i wanted a cis man’s body, a cis man’s life, and in abandoning being a cis woman, i felt like i was acknowledging that i was never going to be a whole, harmonious creature ever again. the entire rest of my life would be spent in transit, straining towards something i could not, by definition, actually reach. 

but the thing is, growing into a trans identity has been cool. not being cis is alright, being something fluid and transitory, something contextual, is satisfying in and of itself. snakes shed their skin and come out beautiful. hermit crabs swap their shells. flowers turn into fruit which turns into seeds and every step of that process nourishes the world. being something that is eternally and intentionally shaping themself is really cool actually. 

so, yeah, you’re a straight guy. you’re under no obligation to be a straight guy the way anyone else is doing it: as a point of fact, you kind of can’t. but the courage and compassion you learned as a lesbian will carry onwards into your new identity, and you will make it for yourself, out of things that you like, and ways that feel right. being trans is scary and uncomfortable in a lot of ways, but in that way, specifically, you are free, and it is wonderful. 

also i mean no one argues that Mr Rogers isn’t a man#steve irwin? bob ross? bill nye?#cowards say that kindness isn’t manly#cowards live in cages they built themselves#you’re under no obligation to stick your hand through those bars