If you're here for the trans tiktoks, I'm using the tag #tiktoks for all tiktoks and #trans experiences for all posts of people sharing trans experiences in any format.
I may not necessarily fully agree with everything every trans person says, me re-blogging or posting something doesn't mean I do, but I try not to share anything bigoted against certain types of trans people or other minorities. If I miss something, feel free to let me know.
Somewhere, far away from Piltover 💕
The Grad Student Shuffle- Christ Fleming
When I was 10, I was asked by another girl in my grade if I was a lesbian, because I wasn't wearing makeup. While this is obviously not good, I wonder if we had been born 20 years later would this same girl have accused me of being a boy crazy pick-me?
I think probably people don't genuinely think either of these things, they just think girls should wear make up and feminine clothing, so if they don't, they call them whatever they think is insulting, and it's not so popular now to call someone a lesbian negatively as it was ten or twenty years ago. I don't think most of them know this is what they're doing, because it sounds very cartoon villain when you put it like that, so they dress it up to make it sound better to themselves and other people.
Sometimes the progressive mask slips and what you can see underneath it often looks like popular mean girls who never grew past high school still trying to invent reasons why the people they picked on for being different were in the wrong somehow.
Sometimes it also comes off like the people writing that stuff think gender roles are innate and so you would only do deliberately do them "wrong" if it was for some kind of external reward.
For example, they sometimes write stuff like this:
And I'm left thinking like... assuming this was all true to begin with, what is so difficult and unobtainable for "actual women" about "acting like a man" (referring to being interested in things like food, sports, video games, computing, etc.)?
Just the fact that this is being treated as abnormal, even impossible, seems suspect. It reveals not only neurosexist bias, but also that the writer doesn't seem to have had a lot of interaction with those types of women growing up (raising the question of "why not?").
But yeah, a lot of it seems like using the language of social justice to enforce conformity, among other things.
love when guys are short and stout. come here little teapot
Im really into this pink posca marker
disco elysium heritage post
I started keeping an animate doll around the house. Every three days it learns to be a real boy, which then allows me to harvest its soul. It then loses all its memories and the cycle repeats. My sister says I'm a monster, but I just think it's a good sustainable source of souls. aita?
Thank you
:)
Fun trans fact:
The "t" in tdick stands for "terrific"
I was browsing The Onion's online store for some reason, and just happened to find perfect matching couples' t-shirts for me and my boyfriend.
you sad little pervert
im happy big & sexually normal
“neopronouns are weird” every time i wake up there’s a 75% chance that everyone’s vocabulary has changed overnight. brother what is a gyatt
There’s this phenomenon in which cis women will start talking about how trans women are “raised with male privilege” and how this supposedly means various things. I was most recently reminded of this by mysocalledqueerlife, who wrote a post about how fraught a topic this can be and how dangerous it is to make assumptions about how trans women felt about being labeled as male. It’s worth a read.
I’ve been meaning to write for a while about how this dialogue can affect autistic women as well (and especially autistic trans women), and this round of conversation seems as good a time as any, so here goes.
In these conversations, the people who are talking about the effects of being “raised with male privilege” often see it as the root of a lot of different behaviors that they describe as “male” and therefore not belonging in women’s spaces. Things like talking a lot more than other people, or taking up physical space, or failing to use enough qualifiers like “I think…” or “I feel that…” before every sentence, or not being sufficiently “attuned” to others’ feelings.
And here I am, a cis woman, who does all of those things. And I know that that makes me unwelcome in some women’s spaces because I have been in those women’s spaces and it was clear that nobody wanted me there.
Like a lot of autistic people, I was a know-it-all as a kid. I talked ALL the time. I explained things to people, with all the authority that a kid can muster. I knew, very acutely, that was not an okay way for a girl to act. I didn’t pick up on “gentle” socialization cues all that much, but it turns out that when you keep talking more than you’re supposed to talk, people repeatedly tell you to shut up.
I got better at it, but I still talk way more than many women, and I’ve benefited from that in academics and my career since it helps me to compete with men.
I take up space sometimes. Not because I haven’t been socialized not to - in fact I’ve been explicitly reminded since childhood to take up as little space as possible - but my body doesn’t cooperate. When I’m trying to sit still, I either have to tuck my legs under me or have them kick out in various directions. My stuff sprawls all over tables and floors because I can’t easily manage it.
I lacked the module, as a kid, that apparently makes people selectively adopt mannerisms and behaviors from same-gender models. Despite feeling pretty confident that I was a girl, I picked up speech and behavior patterns from male friends or role models nearly as often as I picked them up from female friends or role models. When I’m talking under something other than my real name on the Internet, people often assume that I’m a man. I’ve heard this happens to other autistic women on the internet too.
I spent seventh through tenth grade in an all-girls’ school. It’s in women’s spaces like these that my failure to conform to various gendered expectations becomes most noticeable. Autistic people often have difficulty making friends, but I’ve (almost) never been as friendless as I was in that space.
I actually had a long period of questioning my gender identity specifically because of that experience of not-belonging in women’s spaces. I never wanted to be anything other than a woman, mind you. But this meme that only boys talk too much, only boys take up space, etc. actually was enough to make me worry that I wasn’t really a woman.
I have friends who are autistic trans women. They do all the same stuff that I do. They do this because they are autistic. It may also be true that, back when they were kids, adults didn’t tell them to shut up as much as they told me to because those adults viewed my friends as boys. But having grown up with one of these friends, I know for a fact that she was told to shut up a lot, just like I was. And that, for a variety of reasons (the fact that she was sexually abused, the fact that her parents had different personalities than mine, and the fact that she was labeled as disabled and subjected to personal-space-invading “therapies” at a younger age than I was), she was socialized to feel like she owned her body a lot less than I was.
If messaging about how only boys talk too much / take up space / talk in certain ways was enough to make me worry that I wasn’t supposed to be a woman even though I’m cis, think about what those messages can do to autistic trans women. Just think about it.
So: when you label these patterns of behavior as inherently “male” and then accuse trans women of exhibiting them in order to exclude them from women’s spaces, you are also excluding many disabled women and especially disabled trans women.
Don’t get me wrong - I get that it’s annoying to talk over people or to use a blunt tone of voice when people are talking about sensitive topics. I get why you’d want me or anyone else in the space to stop doing it. In fact, you should absolutely tell people to stop talking over other people or stepping on people’s toes. You can even tell people who persistently act this way, to the extent that others can’t participate, that they should leave. That’s part of making a safe space!
But you don’t get to make assumptions about why any given person is acting like that, and you don’t get to say that anyone who acts this way is somehow less of a woman. Heck, nondisabled cis women act like this all the time when they’re talking to people who are less privileged than they are (e.g., white women talking over women of color, nondisabled women talking over women with disabiltiies, etc.), and these are often the same women who try to argue that trans women “act privileged” and therefore shouldn’t be in women’s spaces.
Don’t be that person. Just… seriously, don’t.
Ooh. Yes this makes excellent point.
Sorry about the rant I'm just SO sick of this "we have to be on all the time never look away if you aren't upset about politics and traumatizing yourself watching people die on Twitter you're wrong and complicit and evil" like I know things are fucked and we need to stay angry but we can do that while also taking a minute to crack open a cold one with the boys or have gay sex or get tipsy at the line dance, we HAVE to have joy to remember why the fuck we're refusing to give up in the first place. Fight like hell for your loved ones and then also go home with them to smoke weed and drink sweet tea and make biscuits covered in honey and butter please, please don't deprive yourself of joy, you're allowed to be happy BEFORE the work is done. You're allowed to be happy.
The lady I used to live with was adamant that there be a party at any opportunity. They weren't always big, but if there was an occasion in the slightest, there was something done to celebrate it. Sometimes she literally would just say, "this deserves a Diet Coke!" And she would pass me a can from her stash in the closet.
It's important context that she had a very hard life into adulthood. Very poor family. Abusive father. Mentally ill mother. She often had to miss school as a teenager because she had to go find her mother, who would wander off for days into the woods. She also made sure her other siblings were fed, clothed, and at school while she herself was missing out on them.
I once asked her why she did so much celebrating.
She told me that people can choose to celebrate the small stuff if they want to, or not, but life was hard enough and the celebrations, no matter how small, made the other hard things easier. "If two people lead hard lives, and one of them celebrates and the other doesn't, which do you think will survive longer? Get more done? Make it farther?"
Your despondence and self-flagellation doesn't help anyone. Your passion and drive do. So you need to do things that ignite your passions and keep them ignited. Recognize that there is pain and awful suffering in the world. Do what you can to change that. Then do what you need to do to make sure you can keep doing it.
