♫ But Now That We’re Done And It’s Over I Bet You Couldn’t Believe When You Realized I’m Harder

pictures from the midnights moonstone blue digital booklet

Taylor at Toronto International Film Festival 2022✨

“Be gay do crime!!” “Eat the rich!!”

And you can’t even boycott the most famous TERF in the UK

♡The sweetest girl in the world♡

Frankly I don’t see the point in fussing over the precise gender identities of historical figures and what they would hypothetically describe themselves as were they alive today. They’re not fictional characters—they’re dead people whose opinions on a continuously evolving topic are largely unknowable, but are part of a shared history nonetheless.

For example, whether a historical figure lived secretly as a man because she was a woman in a society where that was her only option to actually do the things she wanted to do, or because he was just more comfortable that way and wanted to be recognized as a man... how can we know? How can we determine that it was not both? How can we look back through history to a world so different from ours and come to conclusions about things that are often complicated and indistinct in our own time?

I just don’t see what is accomplished by trying to sort and separate trans history from GNC history based on factors we can’t truly be certain of. In an earlier generation, I think I may have lived and presented quite differently based on the choices available to me and the ease with which I may have pursued them. The world changes so much in so many ways and I can barely make sense of myself in my own time—it seems more practical to simply say, “Ah. Relatable. I can see much of myself in the record of your life.” and leave it at that. Our history is cultural, not ancestral, and in a hundred years we may be the source of just as much confusion and consternation even if we believe ourselves clear today.

Wizards! Stop scrolling!! This is your reminder to:

Feed your homunculus

Recast your wards

Drain all your old potions into the sewer system

Send that cursed demon tooth to the Wizard Council, their problem now

Never blink, not even once, blinking is failure

Around here we support slackers, cheaters, underachievers, and, especially, burnouts

I cannot believe cowboy like me exists. I cannot believe she wrote a whole song about telling people what they want to hear for money. I cannot believe she refers to her pursuit of fame and fortune as the work of a bandit. A hustle. I can’t believe she refers to the love she gave to men she had dated in the past as swindling them. I can’t believe she wrote a whole song about a partnership that nobody will ever be able to prove was real or not and if they ever do she’ll be long gone with the money and all we will have left is the story in the songs. I cannot believe she referred to that partnership as a con. I cannot believe

i’ve noticed a lot of people lashing out in response to the posts celebrating and being positive towards men lately and it’s… not great.

in the past few days alone, i’ve seen lot of “wow men are so weak they can’t take ANY criticism or stand posts not praising them” and “in the real world men don’t see women as humans so i don’t care.”

look. i get it. i’m a queer woman who was abused by men. i used to say “all men,” too. but then i got older and met more people and stepped back from my trauma to realize that viewing all men as a single, malevolent group with inherent traits and equal power over women is a broken mentality.

it’s dangerous to say all men have inherent traits and values. that rhetoric reinforces the gender binary, gender norms, and gender essentialism. it prevents all people from being themselves and pursuing life choices while perpetuating the idea that all men are preprogrammed for things like violence. it also allows misogynistic men to absolve themselves with “well, boys will be boys.” posts saying “men can be soft” and the like are fighting this.

oppression is complex. it is not simply “men bad, women good.” race, class, disability, sexuality, etc. all complicate power dynamics. ex: a white woman can exert power over a black man.

certain groups of men—black men, mentally ill men, etc.—are particularly demonized. they are framed as violent and dangerous, which enables their systematic oppression. they deserve to be assured that this is not the case.

a lot of positivity posts are specifically for trans men and trans masc people. they tell them “your gender is not evil. you are not doing a bad thing by transitioning. you do not have to be like X to be a man.”

a lot of these posts are also to let people attracted to men know that their attraction is not a dirty mistake. for years, i felt i had to apologize for being a bisexual woman attracted to men, like it was a flaw.

some of these posts are for younger users here. boys who need to be told they have the power to defy patriarchal values and determine what their gender means and who they are, that they’re not doomed to be misogynistic abusers.