I tried creating a more thoughtful comic. I hope everyone can enjoy something thats not my usual silly comics. Consider this separate from all my other Renga arts.
Ananth and I have been doing Johnny Wander for TEN (!!!!!?!) years, and in celebration we’re putting together a collection of our travelogue comics from 2012-2018!
The book will be available as both softcover and limited hardcover editions, and there’ll also be a bunch of cool add-ons, including an enamel pin, postcards, and more! I hope you’ll take a look!
We’re super close to the next goal, which will add a new postcard to the postcard set AND free wallpapers to every backer! Thank you so much for your support! ✈️
@choicespride Day 7: Tell us about your MCs/OCs self-discovery journey!
Jackie started questioning her sexuality when she was 11. She was at a sleepover with some girls and one of them kissed her during truth or dare and sparked some… feelings. Jackie was in the theatre community, so she was not the only one of her friends going through a sexuality crisis. Not long after this happened, Chazz came out to her and she confided in him her own confusion. They leaned on each other throughout middle school and, ironically, while they were both in the closet, a lot of people thought they were dating. Jackie came to terms with her sexuality at age 13 and came out a few months later. Her parents weren’t surprised. They were a little surprised that Chazz was gay because they thought the two were dating.
During her freshman year of high school, one of Jackie’s theatre friends came out as a lesbian and the two started dating, mostly because their friend group thought they would make a cute couple. They dated for about six months before deciding they were better off as friends. During her junior year of high school, Jackie met a girl from another school at a show choir competition and they started dating. They dated for a couple years and went to prom together, but broke up because the girl wanted to be single when she went to college. During her senior year of high school Jackie started questioning her gender and, after a couple years, realized she is a demigirl and started using she/they pronouns.
During college, Jackie didn’t have any serious relationships, only a few casual ones that didn’t last long. She also had quite a few one night stands, just for funsies.
Jackie’s first female celebrity crush was Normani from Fifth Harmony and her current female celebrity crush is still Normani lol but also Megan Thee Stallion.
@choicespride Day 7: Tell us about your MCs/OCs self discovery journey!
Sydney started questioning his sexuality pretty young, around 11/12. For a while he thought he was gay because he hadn’t yet learned the term “bisexual.” He found this term online at the age of 15 and realized that it was more accurate (after some more questioning). He came out at 16, to no one’s surprise, and until then he hadn’t dated anyone.
His first relationship was with a boy during his senior year of high school. They broke up about two months into college when they realized long-distance wasn’t working for them. Sydney took the time as a single man to just have fun and have some hook ups and whatnot (as one does in college, so I’ve heard [I started college during covid, so I wouldn’t know lmao]). He got a girlfriend during his junior year and they dated for about a year and a half, but broke up because they were going in different directions post-graduation.
During his senior year of undergrad, Sydney took a gender studies course to fulfill an outstanding gen ed requirement he had and learned about how gender is a spectrum and not a binary. He started questioning his own gender because of this and realized he is a demiboy and started using he/they pronouns.
During med school, Sydney had a relationship with a guy that ended when said guy cheated and Sydney found out about it. His next relationship was during his intern year when he and Bryce had a casual relationship before Sydney started officially dating Ethan.
Sydney’s first male celebrity crush was Nick Jonas and his current male celebrity crush is Zayn Malik.
Wait what’s a buildings fire evacuation plan if you aren’t supposed to use the elevator to get down
You go down the stairwell/fire escape. Is that weird?
But what if you have a walker or a wheelchair??
in america at least, in this situation, there isnt one. either your loved ones or the firemen can get you out using the emergency fire escapes or stairs, or you die
That’s fucking horrific, thank you
“fun” little story:
last summer my friend who is an amazingly talented artist and i were in this super tall building, and she’s in a wheelchair and i’m pushing her around the room. it’s an art exhibit and some of her art was chosen to be showcased there and so it’s all fine and dandy until suddenly an alarm starts going off
a FIRE ALARM
everyone starts running for the stairs and my friend just looks at me with this forlorn look on her face
“i can’t go down the stairs”
but i’m a stubborn bitch “i’ll carry you”
“what about my chair? it’s too expensive for me to be able to get another one if i can’t get this one back”
“i’ll carry that too”
and i did. we went to the stairs (by then most people from our floor were gone) and i lifted her up in a fireman’s carry over my shoulder and then lifted her chair up and used the ridiculous amount of adrenaline that was coursing through my veins to make it down approximately 20 half-flights of stairs until we met some people exiting lower floors, one of which who kindly took the chair. I changed positions so i was holding my friend bridal-style which was, somehow, easier and the person who took her wheelchair (with her permission to handle it of course) accompanied me to the ground floor and then out the doors
basically there is no real protocol for people who can’t use the stairs in an emergency. it’s up to the people with them, if anyone, to help them or the person to somehow make it down the stairs alone, unassisted
thank fuck that it was just a faulty alarm system, because if i was unable to carry her down those stairs and the building was on fucking fire???? then i don’t know what would have happened to her, but i don’t think it would have been very good.
it’s fucking ridiculous and ableist to the absolute max.
I use a cane. When I did a day-long fire safety training at my northeast American university (UMass Amherst), I asked that exact same question: “what am I supposed to do if the fire alarm goes off and I’m in my lab on the twelfth floor?”
the fire marshal hemmed and hawed for a while and then said to take the elevator- you’re supposed to leave it free for the fire department to use and they want able-bodied people out fast not waiting for elevators. if the fire alarm has just gone off the building probably hasn’t suffered enough structural damage to make using the elevator dangerous, and modern elevator wells are heavily reinforced. many large and high-trafficked buildings on my campus have fire rated elevators that link in with the fire alarm system so they won’t let you off on a floor with a possible fire.
if the elevator isn’t working, wait in the stairwell and call the fire department to let them know where you are. modern stairwells are also heavily reinforced- it might not be pleasant but modern building code usually requires fire-resistant stairwell doors in office and big residential buildings, also to help firefighters get in and out safely. older buildings’ stairwells may or may not be retrofitted with fire-resistant doors but a stairwell is generally the safest place to wait if you can’t get out.
what happened to your friend was horrible, and i’m very glad you were there to help her out, but you can absolutely use the elevator to evacuate if it’s not shut down. those don’t-use-the-elevator rules are for abled people.
This is GOOD TO KNOW. why do they not tell people this??
Okay, firefighter here. If you are not physically able to use the stairs, and the elevator is NOT compromised, use the elevator. But you MUST be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that the elevator is NOT compromised before you get into it, because there is always the chance that once you get into it, you may not exit it. Power could go out. The elevator may actually BE compromised and you just couldn’t tell from where you were until you were in there, and it suddenly shuts down on you. Something else could happen.
Understand that once you enter the elevator, you could POTENTIALLY be taking your life into your hands there.
It is NOT LIKELY, to be perfectly honest. It’s only in a pretty catastrophic scenario - think the Twin Towers, USA, on September 11th - that the elevators will be compromised and out of service. But there is a NOT ZERO PERCENT CHANCE and you need to understand that and accept it.
As for leaving the elevators free for the firefighters, okay, here’s the deal. Unless your nearest fire station is literally right next door? Your first on scene fire truck is NOT likely to be there on scene and needing that elevator before you get to the ground. It takes us TIME to find the address, gear up, and drive to the building. Then we need to hoof it into where the elevators even ARE, so YOU HAVE TIME to use the elevator to get down to the ground floor… BUT ONLY IF THERE’S NOT A RUSH ON THE ELEVATOR! And THAT is WHY we don’t tell people this shit. That’s WHY we tell people to NEVER USE THE ELEVATOR… because every self-entitled asshole will use it because they don’t feel like walking, and then put YOU in danger by delaying the elevator’s arrival to you.
IF, however, the elevator IS compromised, or you just can’t get it to come for you, or whatever, and you either don’t have anyone with you who has the adrenaline fueled BALLS to be able to toss you over their shoulder and hoof it down the stairs with you - because, let’s face it, that is RARE AS FUCK, then HERE IS WHAT YOU DO:
You call 911 and tell the call taker that you are in the building that has a fire alarm going off, and you are not able to evacuate because of a physical disability, and you tell them what floor you are on, and EXACTLY what stairwell you are waiting at. And the very FIRST thing that the firefighters are going to do once they arrive, if it is, indeed, a REAL emergency, and not a false alarm, is come get your ass and bring you down. Whether that means carrying you down the stairs, or whether that means locking out the elevators so that no one else can override them and coming to get you themselves, they WILL come get you FIRST THING if it is a real event. And if it is a false alarm? You will probably be the first person who is not involved with the building to know, because the call-taker is going to stay on the line with you until you are under someone’s care and out of danger, or until the scene has been sorted out as real or false, and you are out of danger that way.
These are pretty standard operations in the fire service throughout the United States. There may be some minor variations based on specific municipalities, but, for the most part, this is pretty typical: LIFE BEFORE PROPERTY. So, as long as SOMEONE knows where you are - hence why you call 911 - Firefighters will come get you. You are NOT alone, and you have NOT been abandoned. I PROMISE. It’s like, our whole reason for doing the shit we do: to save lives and to break shit. Sometimes, we get lucky enough to do both at the same time.
High rise fires suck ass, and I always hated them. But the very FIRST thing I asked anytime we got one was if we had “any entrapments” - which is what we call anyone who could not self-evacuate for ANY reason. We ain’t leaving you behind. And yes, your friend who doesn’t have the stamina to carry you down can stay with you, too. Because I would never ask that of someone, honestly.
Also, just a little FYI… MOST fire alarms are false alarms. Not to make anyone complacent or anything, but, yeah. Most of them are either system malfunctions, someone accidentally hit a pull station, or someone burned popcorn in a break room. So don’t let a fire alarm freak you out until you need it to - by smelling or seeing smoke or flames.
i have had multiple nightmares about this very thing because NOBODY BOTHERS TO ACTUALLY TELL WHEELCHAIR USERS THIS STUFF
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
Youdo not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibilityto try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderouslyoppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
Andnobodyshould have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Pleasestop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as theactual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actualelementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginaryand you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault. (It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
Iget wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
Apreview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding alltheir shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyonegot them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
I hated - hated fandom back when this LJ shit happened, but I was there. I’m both glad this thread is here, and irritated that it was felt necessary. How many times do we need to learn this lesson?
(alt. title: oh god I am sick of very authoritative how-to guides that somehow manage to be, at the same time, hyper-specific and very vague)
THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED APRIL 2022 TO ADD MINOR LANGUAGE/PHRASING TWEAKS, RESOURCE LINKS, AND A FEW PARAGRAPHS
Ok! So: what this post isn’t:
A how-to guide for writing
A how-to guide for having sex with actual transmasculine people
A comprehensive list of every transmasculine experience or preference
A list of rules for what you’re “allowed” to write
What this is:
Basic information that you might want to be aware of if writing outside of your own experience
That’s it! I’ve divided this into a few subcategories for the sake of organization and readability, which are as follows:
General notes
Dysphoria
Preferences
A note on the fetishization of trans bodies
Transitioning
Language
Final thoughts
Content warnings are as follows:
All sorts of language used to describe transmasc genitalia/chests; discussions of various kinds of sex; mentions of more controversial kinks like pregnancy/breeding kink; discussions of dysphoria; brief mentions of transphobia.
So while most rainbow capitalism is sticking rainbows on things and pretending to be an ally, Budweiser’s UK branch is giving credit to trans activists, and explaining pride flag colors.
Budweiser is an inclusionist
What a weird and true thing to say! And I almost sounds like a joke but honestly I feel this tweet captures 90% of my feelings
And to actually credit Monica Helms and get the white stripe right? Like, if we are going to have companies at pride this is what I’d like to see. Professional looking marketing, credit to activists, research about the groups its marketing, and spreading further awareness.
So while it’s understandable that people are excited to see mainstream recognition, I think it’s important to also know that there is a reason that alcohol companies in particular tend to be “better” about learning about and reaching out to stigmatized or disadvantaged communities that other companies avoid or ignore:
It’s because industries like alcohol and tobacco know that marginalized communities that are subject to minority stress are much more likely to suffer from things like substance abuse and binge drinking - making them prime targets for companies whose #1 goal is selling more alcohol and making more money.
As@godlessacepointed out, advertising by alcohol companies isn’t directly comparable to other types of rainbow capitalism / queerwashed commercialism, because the products they are promoting are directly, actively harmful to the communities they are targeting.
When it comes to things like ace flags at Target, or Subaru advertising cars to lesbians, there is rarely any direct harm to the targeted consumer (other than whatever harms capitalism and commercialism as a whole may have on society). If I buy a Subaru or a polyester flag, I’m not immediately putting my health at risk.
But when it comes to companies advertising things like alcohol and tobacco (and later, vape products) to lesbians and gays - and later to groups like trans people and ace people - the products they want you to adopt are ones that can also be directly harmful to your health.
For those not as familiar with the relationship between alcohol/tobacco, advertising, and LGBTQ Communities, here’s some initial recommended reading that I was gathering for another post:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/business/media/absolut-heralds-its-marketing-to-gay-consumers.html more on the history of how Absolut vodka marketed to LGBT communities - it’s a little pandering to Absolut but I think it still demonstrates how reaching out to LGBT (and ace) communities - and even hosting community events and fundraisers - is all about a clever brand strategy, not out of the goodness of their hearts.
https://www.autostraddle.com/sober-in-the-city-surviving-pride-without-liquor-236902/ - notes on how the entanglement of alcohol and Pride can be triggering and risky for alcoholics trying to stay sober. While not mentioned in this article, I think it’s worth mentioning that alcohol companies are often major sponsors at Pride (in order to profit, of course) with such an extensive presence that it’s often easier and sometimes cheaper to find booths selling alcohol that it is to find water.
these unusual birds are red factor african greys. the typical plumage for an african grey is a full-bodied grey with the only red being on the tail. these birds have only been recorded in captivity, and are the result of extensive breeding for their color mutation.
My brain refuses to read this as real color and will only see a red layer photoshopped over regular birds. But I just looked it up and it appears to be real so??
they’re definitely photoshopped (the red color comes off the body in some places) but honestly the fact there’s a whole website dedicated to breeding these fake birds is killing me
ok apparently red factor african greys DO exist but they don’t look like these and these pictures are photoshopped
these are real ones and honestly that makes this even funnier
Red factor greys come in a lot of varieties, given that it is a colour mutation and not a seperate species. Though most often it is only a small part of the bird that gets coloured, sometimes there is extremely high red factor because of selective breeding or just mutation.
A lot of the time it just affects chest and bellies, but sometime appears more on the back and the wings.
Fully red african greys still have texture and pattern to their plumage, which is often where the white boarder effect comes from. African grey feathers, as you’ll note on the birds above, have a small light grey/white ring around the edge of many of their their grey feathers and it becomes much more noticable against the red.
Some of the photos on the original site seem more genuine, but it looks like a breeder who is photoshopping their birds to be more red than they are to try to enhance business. Which… I mean seriously? Bad form.*
It’s particularly noticeable on their chick pictures, where they look far too uniform and a few places the red cutting to fleshy tone doesn’t look natural, is way too even and has a single pin feather bisected to be both grey and red. And a few others where they accidentally also coloured the bird’s beak and feet
It is a complete shame that one of the first sites to come up when you search for information on red factor african greys is a site that has photoshopped images and makes people think this mutation isn’t real. Because bird genetics and colour mutations are fascinating and I hate that an unscrupulous tactic almost stopped people from learning more about this neat occurrence!
*Typically big mutations like this come with side effects as well, like having a few random red feathers may be just a natural thing but selectively breeding for the mutation above all else can be damaging to the species in general and I wouldn’t recommend it at all personally. So it’s all bad form, but like… if you are breeding for this mutation then photoshopping your birds is even worse because it gives a false impression of what these wondrous things are.
favourite colour: green, black, yellow and blue!!! but mostly green
three favourite foods: sukiyaki hotpot, beef pepper lunch and sushi
song stuck in my head: yes i’m changing – tame impala
last song i listened to: 你還要我怎樣 – joker xue
last thing i googled:spicy tonkotsu ramen calories
time:10.59 am
dream trip: spending a week in tokyo to visit akihabara, shinjuku and shibuya… and eat so much + shop my life away on anime stuff and clothes. hnnngggg
anything I really want: for my wishes to come true
three favorite foods: I will literally eat anything, I love food and I can’t choose a fav, let alone three!
song stuck in my head: la di die by Nessa Barret (ft. jxdn) I heard it once and now it’s in my head and it won’t stop
last song i listened to: Afterglow by Taylor Swift. I’m a swifty, what can I say?
last thing i googled: How to spell tomorrow
dream trip: I’d love travel the world! There’s so many places I’d love to travel to, I can’t choose
anything i really want: spring break, spring break, spring break, spring break, spring break, spring break, spring break, spring break, spring break, spring br-
Thanks so much for the tag, little sis! This seems really cool! <3
Relationship status: Married to the most amazing man in the world (Sry Nagito, but I’m forever loyal to my husband!)
favorite color: Purple!
three favorite foods: I eat a lot of junk, ik!I have to say grilled chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, and chocolate babka cake
song stuck in my head: I can’t decide by the scissor sisters (gives me major Junko vibes, I might add :0)
last song i listened to: I’m actually currently listening to this now, idk if it counts, but Whispers in the Dark by Skillet
last thing i googled: Amazon Don’t ask what I was looking for
dream trip: There are so many places I have yet to visit that I really wanna go to! I have to say number one is probably Israel, since my little brothers didn’t get a proper b’nai miztvah and they were supposed to go there last year but never did :(
Time: 10:04 am
anything i really want: My SO is coming back next week but I want him N O W!!!
dude seeing these Mega high quality images of the surface of mars that we now have has me fucked up. Like. Mars is a place. mars is a real actual place where one could hypothetically stand. It is a physical place in the universe. ITS JUST OUT THERE LOOKING LIKE UH IDK A REGULAR OLD DESERT WITH LOTS OF ROCKS BUT ITS A WHOLE OTHER PLANET?
LIKE THIS JUST LOOKS LIKE IT COULD BE A PERSON’S BACKYARD. LIKE YEA A LITTLE DUSTY MAYBE THERE WAS A SANDSTORM BUT THAT’S COOL I’M JUST GONNA WALK DOWN TO THE STORE P S Y C H YOU’RE ON MARS BICH!
i hate to be rude and intrude on this post but we have decent pictures of the surface Venus too!
So it’s not quite snowing on Churyumov–Gerasimenko, unfortunately; the white specks are artifacts of cosmic rays impinging on the CCDs in the camera, as well as a rotating starfield in the background (since the comet is spinning). A few specks could be dust. But, holy shit, that’s the surface of a comet. That’s a spot you could in theory cling to for dear life sit down on. The Cliffs of Comet 76pare a place.
If that isn’t the neatest shit I don’t know what is.
where is that renaissance painting with those two fellers and a giant fucking random skull on the floor that looks like it was accidentally stretched out in photoshop
THANK YOU
somebody please explain
Someone once told me it’s like that because it was designed to be hung in a stairwell so the skull pops out as you walk past.
…I guess it works but you have to be at a pretty sharp angle
There was a whole trend at one point where artists would include something in their paintings (usually a skull, for whatever reason) that’s super distorted in just the right way so that it looks normal if you hold the painting up to a convex/concave mirror. I have absolutely no idea why. But I think that’s what’s going on here.
In case anyone’s curious, here’s what it looks like when you walk past it irl:
It does have a 3D effect to it! It’s pretty neat, guess it would be even more impressive to people from the 14th century.
honestly, people just looking at the skull are missing the real deal here
You can read any implied text you see in this thing, even the book, that’s how detailed it is. Look at the painting on those letters!
jesus christ you’re just showing off now, Hans!
HANS OH MY GOD
anyway, the skull apparently had some meaning about the transcendence of death, you can only see it clearly when you can’t see the world clearly and vice versa, but man, I’m all about the detail in this guy’s shit
I feel like an absolute bastard. (cw gender stuff, names, pronouns, family drama)
As a way to update my parents about Janelle Monae saying in an interview that their pronoun is “free-ass muthafucka” (because gender goals x infinity!!!), I casually led into it by mentioning that my new therapist wanted to know my preferred name/nickname and pronouns—all as a means of getting to my stupid punchline, “they/them seems so much easier now, doesn’t it!” ha ha ha I thought we were cool, I’ve been making pronoun jokes since I came out to them last September because I know it’s weird for them to go from having a daughter to having an adult child / offspring / neither daughter nor son. I get it. And I’ve really tried to be cool about them continuing to Female me while also trying to gradually/gently push them with things like… my Kirk haircut, sharing trivia or articles about NB stuff with them (e.g. the Janelle Monae news), etc. Anyway, I didn’t think any of that would come up again, but I’m clearly an idiot because I’ve spent 32 and a half years with one parent who Never Forgets Anything and Never Lets Any Little Detail Go Unnoticed.
Six hours later, my mother asks me what my answers had been when my therapist asked me to pin them down more concretely than “either way, whatever you prefer.” ((Aside: apparently therapists want to know the Real You? and having other people decide who the Real Me is… is not what they mean by that??)) I knew I was trapped but I never want to lie to my mom, right? So I told her honestly that my therapist will be referring to me as “they/them” and “Jim” (aka Not my legal name/what my family calls me, as well as a name which traditionally is given to people who are the “opposite” of my agab). (I also reminded her that my previous therapist knew me as Jim, too, hoping that might soften the blow.) Again: I get it. I knew before I said it that it was going to hurt her because I’m choosing to have certain people call me by a name that’s not the one she and dad gave me when I was born. I understand that it’s hard for them. I understand why it’s hard for them.
(And this makes no never mind, but… it’s hard for me, too. But I know, that’s beside the point.)
After a long, very uncomfortable silence, she said, “Is it okay if I keep saying she/her?” So I counted to five in my head and said it’s fine, because I honestly never expected her or my dad to be fully understanding of any of this. But now (and not for the first time) I’m very much wishing I’d just never come out to them at all, because at least that way I wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up when they responded by claiming that my being NB was fine and claiming that they would be totally supportive/accepting of it. My expectations were low before they knew because I assumed they would be honest with me about how it made them feel, which I assumed would be along the lines of “betrayed,” “inconvenienced,” “confused,” “disappointed,” “skeptical,” “disrespected,” and/or “we failed our child.“ It seems that when they were so chill about it up front, I forgot to keep expecting those reactions in delayed forms, and I guess I let myself believe that they would actually make the effort to shift some of their thinking about me, maybe even start using they/them for me, etc.
Turns out they were enthusiastic to declare their support (which I greatly appreciate, don’t get me wrong) but putting that support into practice has proven to be harder than I think they realized. “Too much has changed too fast” is what I’ve been told now… even though I’m not transitioning to male, I’m not doing HRT or having surgeries, I’m still dressing the same on a daily basis (just changing my “fancy” wardrobe), and the only thing that’s physically different is that I’ve stopped shaving my legs (which neither of them has even noticed because I only wear long pants).
Anyway she just happened to ask me all this as she was on her way to bed. So there was another awkward silence before she said goodnight, and if 32 years’ experience has enabled me to read any of her moods correctly, then she started crying as soon as I was out of earshot. (I would have confirmed and/or tried to get her to talk to me about it but I’m running, like, a spoon deficit at this point.)
So is my lack of much visible change the problem, then? Is this breaking my mom’s heart because I’m not different enough from my “old” self? Would this be easier in some way if I was transitioning and she could, idk, genuinely mourn the daughter she no longer has? And despite losing a daughter at least she would have a “replacement” kid whose gender still Made Sense to someone entrenched in the gender binary for almost seven decades? Or would it just make things worse?
Should I have simply lied and said I’m going by my legal name with my therapist, because how will my mom ever know that anyway? Has this name thing crushed her so bad because not much else has changed about me otherwise, so she didn’t see it coming? Or am I genuinely the asshole for expecting her to be more supportive/validating too soon, and I just need to be more patient?
((Tangent: she witnessed a really bad impostor-syndrome meltdown of mine a few months ago. I was trying to figure out what to wear to a church function and eventually got so frustrated—and convinced that I’m not really NB, just a pathetic ugly female who hates herself/her body—that I told her to pick out a damn dress for me and take me to a wig shop so I could try and undo everything I’ve done to try and hate my biologically female body a little bit less. And she responded by telling me to wear the pants/button-down/sweater aka “masc-ish” outfit I’d started with. So… is it only if I’m in crisis/panic mode that she can get on board with my being NB? Did my meltdown help her put her own misgivings about this aside? Or was she only okay with my being NB before it included having new people in my life call me by a different name??))
I keep trying to pinpoint what I’ve done wrong, and every time I re-do the math I still can only come up with, “…I was born.” But that wasn’t even my fault. I just feel incredibly selfish for trying to get them to see me the way I see myself. I keep thinking that if I don’t feel female, that’s my problem and I should have kept it to my damn self. If my identity is, in fact, Jim + they/them + non-binary, fine, but I feel like I should have known better than to reveal—to the people who named me and raised me—that I don’t really feel, and never really have felt, like I actually am the person we all assumed I was for 31 years because there didn’t seem to be an alternative.
And this is precisely why I started things off with my new therapist by trying to make her decide whether to call me she or they, Jim or my real name. More than anything—more than being sane, healthy, or alive—Iwantnotto be a burden on others.
But that’s all I ever seem to be able to do without fail.
![just some guy [roman emperor]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/28f862f099f92c490c07ae55d433028a/80be8d88e5930750-19/s30x30u_c1/b3d6e0352256e446a3c9211c8c67df6a7013f8ae.jpg){kind=small}
