gender

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Split Second

Change happens very slowly. You can feel it weighing down on you overtime.

It squeezes you until you can’t take deep breaths anymore. It’s a white entity that gets heavier and heavier until you feel suffocated and start seeing flashing lights. It’s a gloomy creature that rests on your neck and crushes your vocal chords, until your voice crackles and then disappears.

When you least expect it, your eyes lose their shimmer and are replaced by glass with no reflection.

Change happens slowly. But I saw someone change before me in a matter of seconds. Continue reading →

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Everyone Else Wants a Dick in My Mouth (In which society takes one glance at my body and assume they know my whole life)

A few months ago when eating lunch with friends, one of my friends offhandedly commented that ‘men must love [me]’. I realized that she was referring to my ability to fit a large amount of food in my mouth, and assuming that I would use this ability to give great blowjobs (something I have no interest in doing). This got me thinking.

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On the ‘trans race’ argument people use to try to invalidate transgender identities

Before  anything I’m going to start of by pointing out that I’m trans but I’m white. So my space in talking about this will come largely from the fact that I’ve had many people including my father try to invalidate transgender identities by saying “well if trans race identities aren’t a thing then I’m sorry transgender identities can’t be either.” So this is mostly coming from a place of defending my own identity but also calling out racism. But since I don’t actually experience racism or understand all of the complexities of this topic I invite this to be a discussion and something people can add to via comments.

So often I hear this argument that tries to invalidate transgender people, and a large response in retort to this attitude is “well you just can’t compare them because they’re different things.” I totally agree with this and it is in fact the reason. Unfortunately, for some, it’s not enough to understand. So in order to justify my identity and also keep people from muddling race and gender, I’ve thought about it a lot and decided to share my reasoning so far in explaining why we can’t simply equate the two. Continue reading →

A pass on passing
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A pass on passing

I am a nonbinary trans woman. Within the first year of being out as transgender I was constantly plagued with people asking “When are you going to go on hormones?”, a question which has & still does annoy me to this day.

The dialogue that every trans person must, or should, inherently want to seek medicalized transition, is a deeply flawed & even toxic viewpoint to hold.

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Things We’re All Too Young to Know

I read a lot of fanfiction. (Like, a lot.) I even write some. For those who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, it can seem a strange and alien landscape. Some authors and actors welcome it, others revile it, but most would rather not know what their characters get up to in their readers’ and viewers’ heads. There’s even fanfiction written about real people—even if they’re in an alternate universe where magic works and the boys in that one band are firefighters or werewolves instead.

One fanfic trope that fascinates me and is particularly relevant to this class is that of mpreg, or male pregnancy. Continue reading →

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He or She isn’t for everyone

Pronouns. Pronouns are things that we learned about in grade school and for most people, something they haven’t thought about since (unless we get into learning other languages but that brings up something else entirely). Pronouns are almost always read off the body, which is funny because they actually have nothing to do with bodies. Pronouns are related to gender, so within the gender binary, it makes sense that he/him/his or she/her/hers are the only pronouns people know, and are almost always the pronouns that people read off of others’ bodies. I’m gonna let you in on a little thing called “there are more than two genders” (it’s shocking, I know. I’ll let you think about that for a minute).

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Fictional Reality: the Danger of Matter over Mind

I think at this point in my life, I can safely say that I owe most of my coping mechanisms to the vast amounts of fantasy fiction that I’ve read. Cartesian dualism has been an integral part of the way in which I built my world, and up until this point has been the only way in which I know how to reconcile what happens inside of my head and what happens in the outside world.

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My Baby Obsession

It has been an hour and a half since our class discussion on the film about the pregnant man. I have a hundred different emotions swirling about inside me and I have spent the last ninety minutes trying and failing to be productive while these emotions cloud my brain. I’m not sure what I’m feeling, exactly. It’s a mixture of anxiety and fear, doubt and disappointment, and maybe a little bit of hope. Is that even the right word? I don’t know.

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Avoid Leaked Nudes Like the Plauge

Roughly two weekends ago, popular social networking service Reddit served as a hub to host leaked nude photographs and videos of various female celebrities including Jennifer Lawrence, Victoria Justice, Kate Upton, and Jessica Brown Findlay. Unsurprisingly, the content spread like wildfire and has since been redistributed on other social networking and image hosting sites.

Apparently, the racy content was originally procured by an individual — a gentleman and a scholar, surely — who hacked each woman’s iCloud account. Taking this into consideration, netizens are slightly more sympathetic to the victims than if, say, the pictures and videos were leaked by a scorned lover or accidentally uploaded by the women themselves to one of their personal social media accounts.

However, that is not to say that victim blaming isn’t alive and well. Continue reading →