still so fucking weird to go from real life, where a cis man being flamboyant/effeminate/camp is judged like 70+% by how he speaks and carries himself, to online queer communities, which often seem to have no concept of male gender non-conformity that doesn’t involve wearing a skirt
i promise you, a man can be fem to the point of being in danger while wearing literally exactly the same thing as a hypermasculine guy. a boring basic black suit. a t shirt and jeans. a UNIFORM. gender conformity is not only about what you wear
None of you have watched that heartbreaking scene in The Birdcage where Albert gives up wearing everything he likes to try and blend in for their son’s conservative prospective in-laws and is so awkward and uncomfortable that no one says much until finally he says, defeated, “I know what you’re thinking - dressed like this, I’m even more obvious, aren’t I?” and it shows.
Here, have your queer heart broken:
This is what I’m talking about. This is still literally how it is in most places in the Midwest if you’re trying to “pass” for straight/cis/whatever.
Funny how this community preaches self expression and diversity until that self expression is a trans man being traditionally masculine or a lesbian “dressing straight.” It’s not diversity if everyone looks the same. It’s not self expression if they’re being forced to “look gay/trans.” Self expression can be in the form of falling into a gender role.
I want to boost everything this person has said and add on.
The reason I call myself a tomboy now, despite it being seen as a childish word and having had someone swear at me over it because ‘tHeRe’S nO suCh thInG as BoY thInGs anD giRL thIngS sHut uP’ is because I couldn’t call myself that or be like that when I was a kid. It was seen as a negative thing and I was already bullied enough. “Looking like a boy” was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.
And I’m not even 26 yet. We aren’t talking 30+ years ago, we are talking 2000s and even 2010s. It’s only since trans people have become more accepted in the past few years that gender nonconformity has too.
And the people who helped me accept my gender nonconformity more than anyone else? Were trans people. They taught me, “there’s nothing wrong with how you feel. You’re still a valid woman no matter what you wear, how you have your hair or what you’re into ❤️”
And don’t even get me started on how people treat gender nonconforming men. JK Rowling has a lot of nerve to be like “uwu boys can wear dresses and only us gendercrits accept that!” when she has, even in recent works, made femininity in men a negative trait, as well as making masculinity in women a negative trait also.
A lot of people still don’t accept gnc people even now. Just last year I had someone tell me they’d never let their daughter “dress like a boy”, and I’m always terrified to walk into a bathroom in case the next JK Rowling is in there, sees my gender expression and pepper sprays me or worse.
“There’s no such thing as boy things and girl things.” I don’t need to be told that and I’m sure 99% of trans people also don’t need to be told that. Tell that to the society that hates us both instead of actively encouraging that hate.
Gonna point out the og tweet thread is now full of terfs saying that life was better for gay people in the fucking 80s, that it was super easy for them to be a tomboy in the 70s and 80s and therefore it must have been that way for everyone, and that it was totally acceptable to be a gnc gay person in the 80s!
They’re rewriting history as we speak to try to argue trans acceptance is making it harder to be gay and gnc for youth than it was to be gay in the 80s. This is a blatant lie.
The fucking 80s??? As in, “aids crisis” 80s?? As in, “the government actively avoided funding research to help gay people” 80s????
Man I knew terfism was brain rot but I didn’t think it was thisbad.
Actually I’m not going to just keep this in the tags
at this point, asking gnc women their pronouns is a microaggression
I’m not joking when I say this, I mean it. Asking a gender non-conforming woman her pronouns is sexist and I say as much when I’m asked. It’s the implicit message it sends: “I see you, and you are female, but you are not feminine enough to fit societal standards and therefore you must not be a woman”.
Automatically using gender neutral or male pronouns for gnc women sends a message. Constantly asking (harassing) a gnc woman for her pronouns sends a message. Liberal parents, teachers, and classmates going out of their way to tell gay, gnc, and/or tomboyish girls its ok to be trans or introducing them to genderism sends a fucking message. That shit is noticed and gets internalized along with all the other misogynistic crap thats spewed at us on a daily basis. Its evil.
Like I get being confused by our appearance from afar and maybe thinking we’re guys but once you’ve gotten close enough to talk to us, I KNOW you know we’re women. But I still got asked so much while my (formerly) less gnc girlfriend never got singled out. It’s already bad enough to be asked in a group, but being asked out of nowhere is awful
The overwhelming majority of people who have asked me my pronouns, or checked in if a certain way of referring to me was ok (i.e. “lesbian”, “woman”, “girl”, etc.) were people who have known me for at least a few months, or who directly knew my partner. The thing is that these people have heard others refer to me as female, by “she”, and so on repeatedly, and yet they feel the need to “check” or they simply just use their personal gender prerogative to override every bit of social information they’ve heard. I think it’s even more offensive when people do it with my partner, who has had to deal with multiple people just assuming I’m a “they”, even though as my partner she would fucking obviously know my preferences and regularly publicly refers to me as her “girlfriend” and by a female name and pronouns.
I can understand, truly, if you aren’t sure about someone’s gender presentation upon meeting someone and you’re having an interaction where offending them might matter. I don’t like compulsory pronoun declarations and I don’t like the precedent it sets when asking someone’s personal relationship to gender as a prerequisite to basic interactions, and gender nonconforming women do get asked in this way more than others with the attending implications of that, but this kind of check-in is less offensive when it is fairly equally applied or used in sparing circumstances.
But when someone asks you after having known you, it’s uniquely crazy-making– like, do you not trust me to manage my own gender business? Do you think all of the information you got from my non-response to being gendered as female needs to be reinterpreted in the face of your feelings about my haircut? Did you not even think to look for social clues before you asked me and got fixated on whether you “should” ask “someone like me” instead? I don’t get it.
I had a coworker ask me my pronouns after he had worked with me 3-4 days a week for months; after I responded in genuine bafflement that he’d ask, he then felt the need to defensively tell me an entire shaggy dog story about his home life over the past week and how he wasn’t going to ask me but then agonized to his girlfriend about it (who had met me a handful of times) who insisted to him repeatedly that he needed to ask. Like, ok, bro, you already made it weird enough by asking, why did you need to double down and tell me that your problem with ~my gender~ is apparently not only a topic of discussion at your home but also your girlfriend has a stance on it as well? (Also, way to be gender progressive and blame a pronouns mistake on your what-a-nag of a female partner. Absolutely spectacular.)
Oh my GOD yall have I told you about my cousin??
This woman asks me about my pronouns every. single. time. we. speak.
I’m not exaggerating at all, either. Every time I see her, every phone call, occasionally via text. What are your pronouns? My answer has never once changed. I have never given a single shit what pronouns she used for me. I have repeatedly told her I find it annoying, invasive, and pointless. It continues.
