Rachael Stephen's Blog, page 17
March 30, 2015
Gender and pleasure
So much of the Euro-American understanding of being trans (or anything other than 100% constantly identified with your assigned gender) focuses on discomfort.
Some people take this idea to an extreme and claim you can’t be trans unless you hate your body and want every surgery available to you. As many other writers have said before, that’s not true. It’s perfectly possible to be trans with only mild dysphoria or none at all. It’s perfectly possible to be trans and have a mental map of your body that looks just like the one you already have.
But I’d like to push even harder against the idea that trans=discomfort. I’d like to offer this: sometimes the exploration of one’s gender can be motivated by pleasure rather than discomfort.
Let me give an example. Let’s say there’s a person named Cal. Most people think of Cal as a boy, and Cal’s all right with that. So far as Cal’s concerned, a boy isn’t a bad thing to be. But sometimes, Cal likes to imagine being a girl and being treated as a girl. Those fantasies are always accompanied by feelings of pleasure, satisfaction, anticipation, and warmth. Eventually, having had these thoughts for years, Cal asks people to use ‘she’ pronouns in private and to refer to her as a girl. Cal does this for another year before claiming the label “trans”.
Some people would say a person like Cal can’t be trans because there’s no dysphoria, self-hatred, distress, or even discomfort. There’s just a pleasure-based preference. But why is distress necessary? Why are trans people supposed to be defined solely by our pain and self-hatred?
It’s my opinion that defining trans people solely by discomfort is an aspect of transphobia. The idea behind trans=discomfort is that being anything other than 100% cis is so awful that no one would do it unless the alternative were unlivable. Think about that: defining trans people solely by their experiences of discomfort means believing that being trans is so awful that only misery could drive us to it. And to me, that sounds like the thinking of someone who really hates trans people.
So I’ll come out and say it: sometimes transition or self-exploration of gender is not just about lessening discomfort, but is about improving and deepening the pleasure we take in our lives.
this is really fucking important tbh and should be discussed more
This. You read this ok?
jean-huh-kirschnickerdoodle:coolscar:i havent eaten an apple in days. the doctors are closing in. my...
i havent eaten an apple in days. the doctors are closing in. my barricade wont last much longer. theyre coming. tell my family i love them
and now, the weather
March 28, 2015
Another character that kind of has a fucked up premise
is Wonder Woman.
Imagine you’re raised in this utopian, women only warrior society (this part isn’t fucked up) and you’re taught all about how outside of your society which is magically shielded by super-science/magic
there lies “man’s world.”
Man’s world is just horrible and fucked and violent place you hear stories about and the people who inhabit it and you reach a point growing up where you probably think “okay mom, it’s probably not that bad. Shit I bet men don’t even really exist you’re just fucking with me.”
And then a fucking man shows up on your island. He’s not at all like the ones that you’ve heard about. He’s not some violent monster who wants to ruin everything he touches. He’s a good dude. You decide you want to go see man’s world, you fight for the right to become your peoples champion and ambassador. It’s your job to share with man’s world the wonders of Amazonian society.
You get to man’s world and it’s fucking astounding. There are crazy tall buildings and cars and ice cream and all these different cultures and music and it’s just fucking mind blowing.
And there are lots of men. They’re walking down the street side by side with women. They aren’t murdering them, they aren’t reducing things to cinders. Obviously all the stories your mother told you were horse shit.
But then you start to pull back the curtain. You hear and see men disrespect women on the street. You go to the mall and wonder why all the mannequins are the same size if all the women clearly aren’t. You see all these magazines telling women what’s wrong with them, what they have to do to please men. That’s when you start wondering what’s up with this world.
You find out women are paid less then men, that no woman has ever been the leader of the United States, you see crime statistics, and you find out that this Steve Trevor, who you really thought was a good person, is an agent of a government that has declared the assaults on female soldiers “occupational hazards.”
Then you realize it’s not just the United States, it’s all over “man’s world.”
It hits you that this place is even worse than all the stories you heard.
And the worst part about it is: the gods that you’ve been raised to worship and fear, the gods that you know fucking exist, don’t want to do shit about it.
Imagine what that would do to you?
I wanna read about that Wonder Woman, the Year One Wonder Woman who’s like jesus in the temple flipping shit over. I wanna read about the Wonder Woman who’s so appalled by the conditions of man’s world she marches into the UN and tells everyone off. The Wonder Woman who meets a crying girl on a street corner, finds out that her boyfriend just laid hands on her and then goes and cuts off his hands.
Writers too often fall back on all that mythology shit as if Medusa and hydras and gorgons are the worst monsters that Diana can fight.
The monsters Wonder Woman should be fighting are the ones her mother told her about as a kid
March 27, 2015
homocidol:
i hate when guys say shit like “why would you cut your hair? guys dont like girls with...
i hate when guys say shit like “why would you cut your hair? guys dont like girls with short hair” thats like watching someone else make a sandwich for their self and saying “why are you putting tomatoes in it? i dont like tomatoes”
awinterstar:"And if you know nothing of Athena, know this…her...
"And if you know nothing of Athena, know this…her champions would die a thousand times to save but one mortal life."
Original art by minarho1 (whose deviant art account unfortunately no longer exists)
Mass Effect 2 ⇉ space
Mass Effect 2 ⇉ space
hucklebarn:
make me choose: caroline forbes or buffy summer's...
make me choose: caroline forbes or buffy summer's puns
#i like to think that buffy spent her days thinking of the puns she’d use while slaying #like she’d be doing the dishes and a pun would come to her and she would chuckle and store it in her mind #or xander would say something and she’d think of a pun she could use #and when the potentials started slaying #one of them would try and fail to come up with spontaneous puns #and buffy pulled her aside and said #’you need to work on those before hand #try it #because at the end of the day it was the brightest part of her daily life #other than her friends i guess #because her life is dark and people die and sometimes she must lead and be a warrior and raise her sister #but for some few minutes of the day #she can amuse herself by thinking of puns #and that’s beautiful
rromanoffs:
Before I worked for SHIELD, I, uh… Well, I made a...
Before I worked for SHIELD, I, uh… Well, I made a name for myself. I have a very specific skill set. I didn’t care who I used it for, or on. I got on SHIELD’s radar in a bad way. Agent Barton was sent to kill me. He made a different call.
