No Lack of Loquaciousness

transqueery:

Today my son drew himself as a boy for the first time in his life.  He’s five and a half years old.  For that many years, when he has drawn himself, he has drawn himself as a girl.

In the mediums of crayon, colored pencil and marker, our son is a beautiful girl with long red hair, a big puffy ball gown the color of cotton candy and a tiara with a gigantic heart-shaped stone front and center.  Sometimes he’s a sassy girl in a jean skirt, black leather jacket and knee-high boots.  Sometimes he’s a girl going to school in a hot-pink t-shirt dress and purple high top sneakers with turquoise socks peaking out.

It took his dad and me a while to get used to seeing our son’s self-portraits.  For a long time there was the urge to correct him, to remind him that he is a boy and his renderings weren’t accurate.  We fought that urge until it wasn’t there anymore.  Feelings of uneasiness popped up in us here and there when it was time for arts and crafts, especially when there were other people around.  I’ve had to remind myself that you never tell an artist that his or her art is bad or wrong — art can’t be those two things (especially when you are five).

Being acutely aware that children who continually, over an extended period of time draw themselves as the opposite sex are more likely to be transgender, we have always wondered if and when the day would come when our boy would draw himself as a boy looking like a boy.  We imagined that if it ever happened we would feel a sense of relief and happiness.  Then, it happened and we were nothing but sad.

C.J. has just started kindergarten and at his school every kindergartner is matched up with a “Kinderbuddy,” an older student at the school who will see C.J. on a regular basis throughout the year to read to him, play with him and mentor him.  Hopefully they will have a mutually beneficial and special relationship.

Because the school tries to match up Kinderbuddies based on sex/gender, C.J.’s Kinderbuddy is a boy.  Because C.J.’s sex and gender aren’t in total alignment, that process for matching up Kinderbuddies isn’t exactly ideal.

On their first day of meeting, the Kinderbuddies had to sit together and draw a picture of themselves together.  That’s when it happened; C.J. drew himself as a boy next to his boy Kinderbuddy.

“Mommy, I got a Kinderbuddy today.  And, he’s so cool!  He’s a teenager!” C.J. said after school.  By “teenager” he meant “sixth grader.”

He showed us the picture that they had drawn together.  We didn’t recognize our son.  We looked at each other in shock.

“Hey, Buddy…how come you drew yourself as a boy?” C.J.’s Dad asked casually.

“Oh, that’s because I didn’t want my Kinderbuddy to know that I like girl stuff,” C.J. said matter-of-factly.

Our hearts sank.  We had always thought that things would feel more right, more normal, on the day that C.J. finally drew himself as a boy, but things didn’t.  Things felt sad because our son had to do it out of self-preservation.  He did it to adapt and conform.  He did it to hide his true self.  It felt like he had lost some of his innocence.

Diane Ehrensaft, an expert on raising gender nonconforming children, once wrote:

“Gender creative children are blessed with the ability to hold on to the concept — that we all had one time in our lives — that we were free to be anything we wanted – boy, girl, maybe both.”

With that drawing, it felt like our son was losing his grip on the concept that he is free to be anything he wants to be.  Was he losing his grip?  Or, was he tightening his grip on the concept and exercising control over when it could be on display and when it couldn’t?

C.J. didn’t want to hang his Kinderbuddy drawing on the fridge or his bedroom door for all to see like he usually wants to do with his art.  He wanted to throw it away.

“Why?” I asked.

“Cause that’s not really me,” he said as he sat in the sun at our dining room table, drawing himself with a side ponytail, purple shirt with a pink heart on it and an orange skirt.

(via fillingthespaces)

fancybidet:

redefiningbodyimage:

a-mead-gal:

Let’s talk about weightlifting.

This is a typical GIS hit for “woman lifting weights.” Most of them are very thin, very lean, with no visible distinct musculature going on. (Unsurprisingly, stock-photo wise, they’re almost all exclusively white and long-haired and feminine, although I did see a few POC and an older woman in the hits which was INCREDIBLY refreshing!) They all tend to be lifting small weights.

Now, let’s see what happens if we google female weightlifters, i.e., people who lift frequently enough to identify that way whether by hobby or career or whatever. (I’ve done this a few times, and the results are a bit skewed at the moment, given the proximity in timing to the Olympics, so suddenly lots more Olympic women are showing up—which is great! Just FYI.) The photo below is pretty standard for what you get usually—a very lean woman, with heavier looking weights, with visible muscles, a six-pack, etc.

Googling female bodybuilding yields similar results, only the women are much much bigger, much much leaner, with far more defined musculature. (This is what most people will think of in a knee-jerk reaction to the term female weightlifter, and is what many mean when they say they don’t want to “get bulky” by lifting weights. Guess what? Getting built like that, much like getting supermodel skinny, is based hugely on genetics and hugely on a ton of work an dieting and super careful eating and working out and supplements and often steroids. It’s not magic and it doesn’t just happen by lifting weights.)

Note the leanness. See the tendons? See the very visible delineations between muscles, the curves where muscles go places, in all three photos? What’s missing?

There’s a secret in the weightlifting fitspo communities. Once you move into weightlifting, the focus blissfully falls away from “Eat less! Do hours of cardio!” to “Eat more! Lift more!” For women’s resources, with the exception of great sites like Nia Shanks’s etc., the underlying message remains: lift weights to get slimmer and more toned. Lift weights to show off your perky butt. Lift weights to build muscle which burns more calories which makes you slimmer. Lift weights to eat more without getting fat. You have to eat more, but you need to eat more a certain way, or you’ll just put on body fat. Lean mass, no fat. Fat fat fat fat fat.

The body fat obsession. The obsession exists very much in men’s weightlifting culture as well, just differently—“Eat tons and bulk as much as you can to make huge muscle gains and to gain weight” alternates with “Try carbo backloading or protein binges or intermittent fasting to get cut.” “Gain tons of lean mass while reducing body fat! Gain weight while getting more cut! Stay toned!”

Toned. Cut. I hate those words. They’re the thigh gap of weightlifting, the collarbones, the ribcages, the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” of people who have broken out of the standard body mindset shell long enough to challenge and free themselves in some ways, only to get trapped in others.

I did. I totally did. I fell down the rabbithole. Because I fucking love weightlifting, because I’m short and thick and chubby and it makes me feel strong and sexy and powerful and my body yearns for it and loves doing it. Even while I was increasing what I ate because to build muscle, to lift heavier and heavier things, you *have* to eat more, you have to have a caloric surplus—you cannot build muscle out of nothing, building means creating, means you have to something there to make it out of—even while I was doing that, even when for the first time in my life I stopped caring about what the scale said, even when the numbers creeped up, even when I am at my all-time highest weight *and feeling healthier and more energetic than I ever have*—I found myself trying to cut weight.

I found myself embracing the muscles and the gain and the food, I found my metabolism and body rejoicing in the protein and the exercise, and I found myself hating the bits of fat I found. My stomach. My hips. Looking up diets, looking up weird eating patterns to cut fat, cut fat, fat fat fat fat fat. There’s that word again. Not cut, not toned.

Cut. Toned. You know who isn’t cut or toned, but still lifts really fucking heavy weights? REALLY fucking heavy weights that the rest of us dream of?

So fuck you, fitspo. Fuck you cut, fuck you toned, fuck you crazy diets and crazy exercises to burn fat. As long as I eat what my body needs to do what I want it to do, I just don’t care.

I fucking love this and totally want to take up weightlifting as part of my ~obese lifestyle~ cause pretty much fuck fitspo.

I’m sad we can’t afford a gym membership anymore because I LOVE LIFTING WEIGHTS.

I love feeling strong and powerful.

I loved putting my pasty sweaty fat face in the mirror and lifting weights in front of the gym bros.

boyprincessdiaries:

• a man can be femme if he damn well wants, regardless of his dsab
• a woman can be butch if she damn well wants, regardless of her dsab
• nonbinary folks can be as butch or femme as they damn well want, regardless of their dsab

Any person can:

• be butch
• be femme
• be androgynous
• genderfuck
• participate in drag
• present in ways that are deemed “acceptable” for their gender by cissexist fucks
• present in ways that are deemed “unacceptable” for their gender by cissexist fucks
• define the words that are appropriate for their own body (some clits are six inches long, some cocks are just a couple centimeters long if that - deal with it)
• change any part of their own body however the fuck they want as often as they want (minus culturally appropriative shit or outright oppressive shit - appropriative body mods and racist tattoos aren’t okay no matter who you are)
• have whatever fucking gender(s) they want (or no gender at all)
• define their gender and presentation in whatever way they want
• consensually fuck people with whatever gender(s) they want as long (or not fuck anyone at all)
• define their sexuality (or lack thereof) however the fuck they want, even if there are occasionally or frequently exceptions to their identified preference
• have an identity that is as fluid or static as they like
• disclose or withhold their gender or sexual identity and history as they see fit
• disclose or withhold information about their body and its history as they see fit as long (as long as withholding that information isn’t a direct physical harm to others)
• decide for themselves whether or not their gender and sexuality is inherent or “born that way”
• do any or all of these things at any time, for any reason, regardless of dsab

Why is this so fucking hard? I’m done with binarist, homophobic Trans 101 bullshit that completely misses the mark and just reinforces cissexism.

Fuck your identity policing, fuck your binaries, fuck your bullshit anatomy diagrams trying to tell me the cis-correct words for my own fucking body.

I define my own reality. I define my own body. I define my own identity. Fuck any motherfucker who tries getting in my way of that ever again.

(via shobogan)

bism-ishazz:

being trans is a phase

in the same way being a painter is a phase

you start doodling in the margins of your writing and then you realize you need a bigger canvas

that doesn’t mean you aren’t a writer anymore

it does mean developing new expressive techniques and aesthetic sensibilities

and maybe you’ll find that painting is the only modality for you, and that you’ll be a painter for the rest of your life

but it’s more likely that you’ll primarily identify as a cubist/impressionist/whateverthefuck artist (one who happens to use paint)

or a sculptor whose style is very informed by the years they spent painting

or maybe youll go right back to writing and never think about painting again

who cares if it’s a phase?

(via tough-titty-deactivated20121030)

dualitier:

cadaverousculottes:

brace yourselves!! im gonna talk about some STUFF. im gonna write a huge-ass post about rule 63 because i have been seein some discussion about it but i want more! need more discussion. BEAR WITH ME. then tell me wat u think.

so ok: it seems like what RULE 63 colloquially refers to, 99.9% of the time, is basically taking either a boy character or a girl character and swapping them to the “opposite”* gender. yeah??

*opposite??!! hmmmmm that doesnt sound right, lets come back to that later

i will demonstrate with this homestuck character:

thats the general idea right?? you might refer to it as “genderswapping” or “genderbending” or a word with gender in it, because the idea is that karkat is a boy, but on this bizarro flipside mirrorverse hes a girl.

BUT WAIT A MINUTE!!

thats not quite right! if all we did was swap out karkats gender, it would look something like this:

actually, the redesign process referred to as RULE 63 swaps out A LOT OF THINGS. things that are assumed to go hand in hand with gender, such as: sex, assigned sex at birth, pronouns, presentation, name, sexual orientation, etc. etc. etc.

thusly, “gender___” doesn’t describe the process very well at all!! there’s a lot more that typically goes on here.

(side note: the above is is [thankfully] not how everyone would rule63 a character, im just using it as an example of how i see it done 99.9% of the time)

pretty much THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF RULE 63, as it is employed in most cases, relies on some age-old widely-upheld highly-problematic tropes/assumptions/stereotypes, such as that:

• theres only really the two genders (man vs. woman)
• they exist as opposites like night and day
• DITTO for pronoun sets (he vs. she), presentations (masculine vs. feminine), etc.
• certain characteristics (clothes, body parts, names, whatever) are necessarily gendered… for example: a skirt indicates ladyhood; a mustache indicates dudeliness; etc.

none of those things are true, but the idea of genderbendswitchswaps and many of its applications are based upon them.

so what are u sayin cadaverousculottes? nobody can ever draw a cute girl karkat with a skirt because its too binarist???

no way thats not what im saying at all!! by all means play upon these established stereotypes in your character redesigns all up and down the road. pls interpret Girl Karkat any way that makes you happy, especially if its cute or funny or even empowering.

but at the same time maybe consider mixing it up a little! like i dont know change sollux’s gender to “androgyne” and make up a fashion sense to match. or several fashion senses. or draw what you think uranianUmbra looks like and then draw what you think she would look like if she was neutrois (or if she wasnt, whos to say she isnt??). or draw boy kanaya but keep the skirt. or take your “____ is ____ and was assigned ____ at birth” headcanon and turn it flipways. or write several different sexes and genders and pronoun sets and styles of dress and demeanor and body types and names of homestuck characters on the sides of several different dice and roll them and draw what that gives you.

or maybe dont do any of these things. its up to you rly. no one persons karkette design is better or more canon than anyone elses. (none of them are canon as it turns out….) just remember that these FEATURES COMMONLY ASSOCIATED WITH GENDER dont always “line up” or “match” the way they’re “supposed to” in real life and they dont have to in your rule 63 designs either :)

ANYWAY if anyone actually read all that pls let me know if i have faltered in my logic somewhere, or what ur thoughts are. thx!!!

help this is a really good post im going to start crying

(via shobogan)

youarenotyou:

iragray:

thecuntmentality:

[snipped]

Thank you, Taylor, and nice job. The only thing is that technically gender is a social construction as it comes from our consciousness if that makes sense? Gender is really heavily influenced by time and space. Normative gender identities change, as you know, as do marginalized gender identities. This doesn’t mitigate their importance or their validity in any way. Furthermore, something being a social construction does not mean it’s bad and/or fake (not that you said that, I’m just saying it). There’s a lot of talk like that in social justice circles (eg “Gender needs to be gotten rid of with all other social constructions”). A social construction can be anything that comes out of a culture but is usually only considered to be a social construction if the majority of those in the culture abide by it. So, in the context gender, while identities like man and woman are indeed very personal, intangible, and inexplicable, one cannot deny their roots in a social construction. There is also the possibility that non-binary gender identities will too become a part of said social construction. 

yes

(via youarenotyou-deactivated2012022)