feotakahari

No joke, the realization that I have protruding canine teeth again, after all the pain of braces to make my teeth “normal,” is the most gender-affirming thing I’ve ever experienced. You couldn’t take away my fangs.

Victory: I got an IT worker to go “she—I mean he.” She went back to calling me “she” later.

My gender is still that old Dilbert strip:

“Are you a man or a woman?”

“In accounting, it doesn’t really matter.”

I cannot believe we conceded the term “gender-critical” to people who keep trying to reinforce the concept of gender. It’s like if “anarchist” somehow became the accepted term to describe monarchists.

I’m not going to claim to be particularly attached to Bridget, because honestly, I’ve mostly been exposed to the character from insulting jokes. But I do think there’s a larger issue with the idea of “fixing” crossdressing characters by making them trans instead. It’s like when someone decides Asian (usually Japanese) characters aren’t “of color” and redesigns them as black to “fix” them.

Trying to explain why I don’t like a particular kind of gender bender story. I can’t do this directly, so bear with me.

First off, I don’t think gender is a thing that inherently exists. Penises exist, but people say random shit like “men don’t cry,” and people with penises cry all the time, so penises seem divorced from whatever people talk about when they talk about gender. So I’m not really invested in the idea of gendering people. There’s no way I benefit from knowing whether my coworker is “he” or “she.”

The flipside is that choosing to have a gender is a form of self-expression. If you look at a gender and think “I want to be that,” then you’ve found a place for yourself and a goal to strive towards. It’s like having a Hogwarts house.

There’s a kind of gender bender story that’s like “this person identifies as male, but is a woman inside her heart, and cannot be a man no matter how hard she tries.” And to me, that’s just the magical fantasy flipside of “you will never be a real woman.” If someone forcibly removes your penis, that doesn’t mean you can’t choose to identify as male, so why should a magical spell change that?

Criticizing the Onion, part 2. The joke of one article folks like to pass around is that guys don’t know what pumice stones are. The real joke should be that women think they need to spend money on things like pumice stones in order to be loved.

That “packbond” post gives me a weird kind of positive spite. It makes me want to praise and recommend my coworkers who do good work, even if I’m not personally friends with them, just because it would be against the expectations of the person who made the post. It’s actually quite similar to the feeling I get when people talk about what they expect “men” to do, and I feel compelled to be different from and better than their expectations to prove I’m not a man.

I expected OP to be a TERF. Turns out they’re fundamentally and impressively the opposite. They’re so in on “gender is a social construct” that they don’t identify as a woman, because the social construct of “woman” demands someone who has heterosexual patriarchal sex, and they’re a lesbian. Which actually undermines this argument MORE than when the TERFs make it. If you accept the argument that lesbians aren’t women, and lesbians can love being subby, then there must be more to being subby than the oppression of women.

(They blocked me, of course.)

I hate trying to remember which characters use which gendered pronouns. You’re lucky every single character isn’t “they.”

(A beta reader once asked me why I said “he” for a character who was previously “she.” I told her that all seven major characters in that story used pronouns in a different way, reflecting their different attitudes towards sex and gender. I asked if there was a way to make that clearer. She told me to learn to write in Pinyin.)