Saying that man and woman are the only genders is actually LESS nuanced than saying that earth, water, air, and fire are the only elements.
This is fantastic.
I lied and said I was busy; but not in a way most people understand. I was busy taking deeper breaths. I was busy silencing irrational thoughts. I was busy calming a racing heart. I was busy telling myself I am OK.
Its like the 80’s all over again, a remorseless madwoman runs the UK, a maniacal bastard runs the US, the world’s on the brink of nuclear war and all I want to do is listen to synthpop
star wars, ghostbusters, and mad max all pass the bechdel test now tho
that helps with the deja vu but tragically not the crushing fear of nuclear apocalypse
I’m not even much of a fan of genderbends but goddamn am I even less of a fan of getting ordered around about what I should enjoy and how I should enjoy it and being lectured about how ‘problematic’ it is, when the real problem is that they’ve cast the thing in question in black and white and refuse to admit that there’s anything but their narrow framing.
Changing a character to the ‘opposite’ cis gender is a very different thing than making them trans or nonbinary. Insisting that people only change characters to trans is also really damn invalidating, because it implies that being trans is interchangable with being cis. Whoopsie doodle!
I think the real issue here is that a lot of people want to see more trans headcanons, but for some reason think that using sj words while being bossy and rude is the way to go about it. Dress it up in progressive language all you like; at the end of the day you’re still being bossy and rude to get what you want, regardless of anyone else’s valid feelings.
i get really irritated at kids who scream that genderbends are transphobic because they’re completely missing the context and history. they have no idea. it’s like to them, Cis People made up genderbends specifically to thumb their noses at trans people.
rule 63 was originally a guy thing, sexual objectification thing. it states ‘for every male character, there’s a female version of that character’, and not because the dudes who were into it cared about having more realistically rendered female heroes in their media. it was made popular on 4chan and porn boards and comics+gaming forums because you could reduce a manly male character into a sexy tits-and-ass pinup. there were related kinks of sissification, but mostly it was about getting to jerk it to a sexy female version of a previously unappealing, macho male character.
then women got hold of the rule and started going, okay. let’s look at the female version of this male character. let’s talk about being a woman in a man’s world. let’s talk about rorschach’s misogyny, tony stark’s womanizing, batman’s grimness, the fact there’s one girl ninja to every four or five guy ninjas, let’s talk about that in the hypothetical context of these male heroes being women instead. if there’s a girl version for every male character, what does that mean? what’s her story?
and it became this really amazing lens for female fans to interrogate stories through, to examine the effects of sexism and misogyny and masculinity, to introduce another woman into a story with very few, to identify with fully-rendered heroes of the fan’s own gender. and to interrogate the very nature of gender, which led into the development of genderbends where the character’s gender identity didn’t necessarily match their assigned sex, and from there an increasing interest in, and familiarity with, trans characters, trans people, and trans issues.
so like. people now reducing the issue to ‘cis people are gross and hate trans people’ is pretty ridiculous. it ignores basically twenty years of women questioning, confronting and then dismantling the de-facto heteronormative, exploitative male gaze in order to create the radically progressive fandom atmosphere as we know it today on tumblr.
I’d been trying to put into words my issue with the idea that genderbent versions of characters are somehow automatically, innately transphobic, and I think you pretty well nailed it.
Originally, it was called ‘genderswap’ or ‘genderswitch’, which was rightfully criticized for reinforcing a binary view of gender. Hence why it is now ‘genderbend‘. Things can bend in many directions.
Yeah basically.
Rule 63s can be transphobic and gender essentialist, no question, just as m/m slash can be misogynistic, but it’s not inherent to the genre.
The way I see it, rule 63 and trans/nb headcanons are two subsets of what I call “gender AUs”, and they’re not mutually exclusive. Girl!Sherlock Holmes is an example of one, trans!Holmes is the other, and trans woman Holmes is both. All those would be worthwhile explorations.
Yes! And all sorts have their place because all of them are exploring the experience of an under-represented group (or two) in a different way.
It bothers me to see how many people are saying stuff like “I thought Bill Nye was supposed to be the science guy, he’s buying into this SJW cuck libtard stuff! Science says there are only two genders!” in response to Bill Nye covering gender and sexuality on Bill Nye Saves the World.
…Like, did they even listen to what he said? Have they read any peer-reviewed literature about the subject? Is their understanding of “gender” limited to a middle school understanding of X and Y chromosomes? Bill Nye addressed chromosomes, hormones, genitalia and secondary sex characteristics when talking about how some of us don’t fit into the male/female sex dichotomy, and brought up psychology and neuroscience when talking about gender and its difference from sex, and also sexuality. The actual science of sex, gender and sexuality across the animal kingdom and across human behaviour is far more interesting than “lol nope science says there are only two genders.”
It honestly makes me angry when people say “lol I thought this was about science” whenever a scientist says something about topics like gender, sexuality, climate change or evolution that annoys someone. You can’t just pretend science is on your side when your understanding of science is based on a grade school textbook.
Also, why is it only gender people seem to have a problem with? Yeah, basic school textbooks will talk about XX and XY chromosomes and the male and female reproductive system, but they’ll also talk about how humans have five fingers on each hand and how the eye works when everyone knows some humans are born with six fingers on each hand or born blind. Textbooks will talk about how our body metabolises fats, but nobody would say “lol no sorry science says otherwise” at someone (like one of my secondary school classmates) who had a rare disorder who couldn’t metabolise fats. We accept that sweeping statements about human biology are generalisations. Sure, there are limits – no humans have wings or feathers, that would go against science – but we all accept some level of human diversity outside the basic-level textbooks – diversity that’s described well in the advanced medical textbooks. So why is it people only apply this logic to gender and not other differences in human biology?
I think part of it could be the backlash against postmodern nonsense which suggests everything is opinion and science is no more objective than art, which is a blatantly anti-science attitude. But the idea that sex, gender and sexuality aren’t totally binary isn’t just postmodern gender theory, it’s actual science with empirical evidence to back it up.
He has a bachelor’s degree in science, he is barely qualified, and none if the stuff he said is backed up so 🙂
Bill Nye has a bachelor’s degree, sure. He’s not a scientist. He’s spent a lifetime studying and explaining science, though. To say he’s “barely qualified” is a bit of an insult to him, don’t you think? In any case, it’s irrelevant. Bill Nye isn’t an expert on the neuroscience or psychology of gender, and that’s not his job. He’s a science communicator – his job is to explain the science as best as he can and get people interested so they can look further into it. (Note that nobody calls Bill Nye “barely qualified” when he talks about non-controversial subjects like planetary science or chemistry, even though he isn’t an expert in those fields either.) So let’s see what the actual experts say, shall we?
Neurological basis for transgender identity, showing that certain brain structures that tend to vary in males and females tend to be correlated with someone’s gender identity rather than their biological sex:
Gizewski, E. R.; Krause, E.; Schlamann, M.; Happich, F.; Ladd, M. E.; Forsting, M.; Senf, W. (2009). “Specific cerebral activation due to visual erotic stimuli in male-to-female transsexuals compared with male and female controls: An fMRI study”. Journal of Sexual Medicine. 6: 440–448
Savic, I.; Arver, S. (2011). “Sex dimorphism of the brain in male-to-female transsexuals”. Cerebral Cortex. 21: 2525–2533
Rametti, G.; Carrillo, B.; Gómez-Gil, E.; Junque, C.; Zubiarre-Elorza, L.; Segovia, S.; Gomez, Á; Guillamon, A. (2011). “White matter microstructure in female to male transsexuals before cross-sex hormonal treatment. A diffusion tensor imaging study”. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 45: 199–204.
I’ve limited myself to scientific and medical sites here, but note also that the concept of gender (as opposed to sex) is deeply rooted in cultural ideas and even language as well as biological and psychological ones, so when it comes to gender, looking at culture and society is just as important as looking at science. And there we see that while every culture does link sex with gender and includes “male” and “female” gender categories, a great number of different cultures have had gender categories beyond that. That suggests that gender is linked to sex but by no means the same! You can find out more about that in the video I linked. (And no, I don’t think “attack helicopter” or “galaxy” is a real gender. But that doesn’t mean “non-binary,” “genderfluid” or “agender” isn’t, since those terms can be defined by their relation to being psychologically or culturally male or female. They’re “linked to sex, but not the same” as I described earlier.)
The vast majority of people fall close to one of two ends of the sex or gender spectrum, and there are good biological reasons for that. But it’s also an undisputed fact that various people do not fit exactly into the male or female sex category biologically and many more people don’t fit exactly into the male or female gender category psychologically. Just because these are a small minority of people doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because most of our physical or neurological traits cluster close to one end or another of the spectrum doesn’t mean the spectrum – and anyone in the middle of it – doesn’t exist.
Like I said earlier, any simple science textbook will tell you that humans have five fingers on each hand, but everyone knows that some humans are born with six fingers. When we say humans are one of two sexes and that sex matches a psychological phenomenon called gender, we understand that that applies to the majority of human individuals, the same way we understand that saying humans have five fingers on each hand or two kidneys does. Why is it that we can accept the existence of people whose number of fingers or kidneys or other details of their anatomy doesn’t match the average, yet people who don’t fit into the extreme ends of the sex or gender spectrum have their existence denied?
hey @seams-unusualpdx look: this dress’s edges are RAW. All over the dress!! Unless I’m missing something?? They were cut with a fancy edge and left like that, except for the very bottom hem underneath?
I mean I know fabric was tighter-woven then, and something like this would rarely if ever have been submerged in water and agitated, but still. How did it not fray at all? Was it starched or something?!
pinking fabric tends to keep it from fraying away better than a straight cut, so maybe the scalloping is acting like a super fancy pinking edge? I’m just guessing though. If anyone has a real answer I’m curious too.
How did it not fray at all? Was it starched or something?!
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 