Wait are these assholes trying to claim the concept of a dysphoria hoodie was stolen from trans women
Dysphoria Hoodies??? Really? As we know, the concept of wearing a Baggy Article of Clothing to deal with your dysphoria was nonexistent until the first ever trans woman discovered the magic of the hoodie.
Really???
I was wearing those before I knew what being trans was! Shockingly, if you're dysphoric about a part of your body, your first instinct may be to cover it up with easily available gender-neutral clothing... such as, I don't know, a hoodie? But no, those mean transmascs and nonbinaries stole it from women, who would have guessed :(
Guess we gotta add it to the list, along with "cat ear headphones" and "eggs" and "liking anime."
A lot of monogamous people are weirdly obsessed with treating polyamory as uniquely loveless and insincere, as if a huge chunk of monogamous people aren't utterly miserable having even one partner.
Be gay, trans and alive
i do just want people to be aware that, while "assigned sex at birth" has been widely reclaimed and generalized to general populations, it did not start through personal identification or as a positive term. it was coined between doctors to discuss what sex to surgically and socially assign intersex infants, children, and in some cases, adults. one example of a study using this term is here, mostly inspired by john money [its a heavy read if you decide to open it]. i do just want people to be aware of the history of this term before claiming that it is "coined by the intersex community"—it wasnt, it was forced on us by the medical community.
That's not what intersex means. If your reasoning for a character being intersex is "they're a [insert species that has different sex characteristics from humans]", just stop.
If "all of them are intersex" then they aren't intersex. They just have different sex traits/reproductive organization from humans. If thats how they typically look, thats just what being perisex (non-intersex) looks like for that species. Intersex refers to an individual with sex characteristics atypical for their species.
This also goes for third sexes. That's not atypical if it's a commonly observed cluster of traits recognized as "a sex", that means that'd just be another form of being perisex (for that species). Intersex essentially means 'other' or 'neither', the point of the word is that we don't fit into the boxes provided for most of the population, not that we're a rare and magical third box.
Additionally shapeshifters (usually) also come off as bad rep for the same reason. If your character is intersex because they're a shapeshifter, they're not intersex. You don't become intersex, you're born that way. I don't like when characters have their bodies altered later in life and are called intersex for those modifications. And the idea that a character is becoming intersex by transforming their body just reinforces the idea that there is a certain type of way an intersex body looks, and that intersex is something you can 'become' via bodily alterations. We can look like anything. Sometimes our variations are only visible through chromosome or hormone testing. And often we have our bodies changed against our will to make our intersexuality less obvious. If you can become intersex via body alterations, does that mean medical abuse removes our intersexuality?
Yes, you can have a non-human character be intersex‐ if that individual has variant sex characteristics by the standards of their species.
Yes, you can write a species with bigenitalia (both parts)- just don't call them intersex or hermaphrodites (that is a slur). Some better terms are cosexed, monoecious, gonosimulites, dualsex
Yes, you can write shapeshifters as intersex- as long as you understand what intersex means and apply the actual definition of the word to the context of your story.
the fight is still on! don’t give up!
the world is a better place with trans men and transmasc people in it
I wonder if the transfems that hate on trans men and transmascs realize that demonizing masculinity actually harms their masculine transfem sisters, as well as closeted/pre-E transfems as well.
do you actually care about trans men or do you relegate male pregnancy to the status of "gross but funny fanfiction trope" at best and "literal body horror" at worst? do you actually care about trans men or have you accepted without question the ideas that bottom growth is a borderline-torturously painful process and phalloplasty is a dangerous surgery with objectively unsatisfactory results because they confirm your implicit assumptions about the violence and horror of masculinization? do you actually care about trans men or do you think testosterone being a controlled substance is fair because you prioritize fairness in sports more highly than transmasculine lives? do you actually care about trans men or do you distance yourself from us as we transition and make half-joking comments about us being traitors because you view transmasculinity as a shift from ally to enemy? do you actually care about trans men or do you get mad at us when we read transmasculine experiences into female characters because you see it as an act of theft and believe transmasculinity is inherently less valuable than womanhood? do you actually care about trans men or is your first thought when you see a transition timeline about how pretty the "before" picture is? do you actually care about trans men or does your interest in our lives begin and end with how badly you want a boypussy to fuck?
do we exist to you as real people or only in theory? do you read the stories we tell, listen to the music we make? how many of us can you name? when we speak, do you listen? would you fight for us? do you trust us to know ourselves best? are you our friend? do you mourn us when we're gone? do you care for us while we're still here?
trans women, i love you.
you were a woman yesterday. you're a woman today. you're a woman tomorrow. you're a woman forever.
trans women have existed long before those stuffy bigots sitting in a court room have. trans women will continue to exist long after they're dead and rotting in the earth.
Being part of a marginalized group does not give you a free pass to say bigoted things about another marginalized group.
Nix, They/Them, Queer, 20s Sporadically active.Do not gender me.
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