Cyan's Tumblrings

How to words on paper?

893 notes

Anonymous asked:

Today I just found out that the woman who's been the most supportive of me in my transition believes that trans women shouldn't be able to compete against cis women in sports. Do you happen to have any good peer reviewed resources on the effects of estrogenizing HRT on someone's athletic abilities. Said woman in question doesn't seem to believe there's been any research done, which I deeply doubt. Thank you so much for your continued advocacy for us transfems.

catboybiologist:

I know you’re turning to me for scientific guidance, but I’m just so fucking done with this issue overall. To quote contrapoints: I have nothing left but rage.

I’ve been on this road before. I could give you some. In most ways, trans women match cis women of their height and weight. But there aren’t a lot. Yeah, its a problem. But fucking NOBODY will even study it because of how hot this issue is right now.

But more importantly: There will never, EVER be a study that meets their standards. There’s always SOME physical metric that has differences between trans women and cis women. It’s become essentially an iteration of the multiple testing problem- if you keep on doing statistical tests, eventually something is going to land.

I don’t fucking want to provide studies. I don’t want to cut myself down. I don’t want my defense of myself to be “oohhh look at me I’m just as weak and pathetic and infantile as cis women”

Is this fucking feminism? Really?

I’m fucking done. Call me the evil hysterical woman, but this entire conversation reeks of misogyny to its fucking core. Organized sports as we know them are made by men, for men, to celebrate male accomplishments and excellence. Cis women can and do equal or excel men in many, MANY physical metrics. But the arbitrary set of rules, the arbitrary set of bouncing balls and scoring systems, are all made to reward the physical abilities of men. We create spin offs and systems of score tracking and variations of the same things over, and over, and over again, to give the fragile little male ego more and more reasons to stroke itself.

Let’s take a look at some whiny as piss men not being able to handle the thought that women could EVER be physically notable.

Olympic target shooting used to be mixed gender. A woman won one year. The next year, it was segregated. Not only was it segregated, but the scoring system changed so that the scores of men and women could never be directly compared again.

Last year, Donald Trump sat on stage with Riley Gaines, the transphobic swimmer who whipped up the vitriol about Lia Thomas, and bragged about how it wasn’t fair she lost her competition because he, Donald Trump, a 78 year old out of shape wax sculpture of a man, was male. And that he could beat Riley. A trained D1 swimmer. And Riley took it, because it advanced her grift.

There’s a now infamous poll that 1 in 8 men think they could beat Serena Williams in a tennis match. Its pretty old at this point, but I’m guessing that number is even higher now.

This entire conversation centers around “trans people crushing the dreams of female athletes” but oh my fucking god, are we not doing that as a society already? This entire fucking “debate” is just an excuse for more and more cis men to sit their, stroking their fucking egos on live television about how big and strong and powerful and fucking WHATEVER men are, and even the trace of maleness in trans women is enough to permanently make them some kind of ubermensch that destroys cis women by every metric imagineable.

I don’t give two shits about saving sports, one way or another. I detested organized sports long before I transitioned. Ya wanna talk natural advantage, and how sports rewards exactly the kind of physical ability that a certain brand of cis man pushes themselves to? I have a very mild ankle deformity that means jogging for long periods of time is painful. My best mile time is over 11 minutes. And yet I don’t see any of the fuckers that are “better” than me out there in the ocean, clinging to the bottom on a single breath for minutes, or up there with me on top of Whitney. Only one of those skills is celebrated.

Fuck me that was a tangent. My point is, I’ve long since realized that sports are a self propagating system for the egos of people with a very particular kind of physical prowess. The only exception to this is when its exploitative of people with that kind of extremely specific physical prowess, and leaves those it exploits in the fucking gutter. I don’t need to start bringing up CTE, I know y'all know exactly what my take would be on that.

but what is sending me over the fucking edge is how I’m supposed to be the crazy one. I’m the delusional tranny for pointing out that we have lost the fucking plot entirely. This is recreation. Its entertainment. And we are using it to punish people. Fuck this.

I’m so sorry OP, but just don’t engage in that game. If you need a calm, measured argument, try attacking the misogyny of it all. The only way to “fix” sports is to create more events that reward and celebrate the physical abilities of cis women: flexibility, extreme long term endurance, and fuck I’m not a sports person nor do I want to waste brainspace on more than that. We need a system for cis women, one that doesn’t tell them “here, have this shittier, less viewed, less supported, less encouraged, less celebrated version of something a man is good at”. Trans people would find some place in that and in theory, there would be nothing to complain about.

Jesus fucking christ, if I see one more male news pundit start talking about trans women in sports I’m going to straight up devolve into a misandrist.

Filed under Transphobia

42,686 notes

doubleca5t:

tonights-episode:

lexiiii-vt:

purseownervolatile:

valeriehalla:

I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.

I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:

  1. the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
  2. the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.

Keep reading

I have so many questions… How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn’t wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?

Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??

Like this, mostly.

image
image

The boobs thing is arguably even funnier

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(via roach-works)

Filed under Comics

5,318 notes

derinthescarletpescatarian:

rookthebird:

fozmeadows:

letmeshifttotheowlhousebro:

real question,

why do proshippers love rape so much? do you guys want to rape someone irl?

why do you guys love pedophilia/grooming so much? have you ever had thoughts about doing those actions or irl minors?

why do you guys love incest so much? is this just a way for you to vent your frustration cause your sibling(s) /step sibling(s) rejected you for your literal illegal behavior?

why do you guys love all these crimes so much? why do you love it when someone calls sexual and predatory abuse attractive as if it hasn’t traumatized billions of people word wide?

this is like a genuine question I’m being deadass

Proshippers do not “love” these things. Rather, we’re committed to defending the right of people to write about them - even in ways we might personally find disgusting or upsetting - because we understand that engaging with something in fiction is not predicated on defending or desiring it in real life. Even if someone is aroused by something in fiction, it doesn’t logically follow that they’re aroused by the same thing in real life, because context - the question of how, when, why and with whom - is foundational to both desire and consent. Meaning: it is possible - and, indeed, extremely normal - to enjoy something only as a fantasy: to be compelled, aroused by or interested in it only because it’s fictional, in much the same way that we might be compelled, aroused by or interested in all manner of ideas or activities only under specific conditions.

For instance: I enjoy cake! But if someone handed me a piece of filthy, rotting cake they found on the floor, I would not want to eat it, because the context of the cake matters to my willingness to consume it. Similarly, I enjoy murder mysteries! But if someone in my life was brutally killed by an unknown assailant, I would be devastated, not entertained. And this latter example is particularly important, because our consumption of fiction is at all times informed by our awareness of the fact that the characters don’t exist. No matter what befalls them on page, stage or screen, no real person has been harmed, which allows us to react to the content differently than if we were seeing the same events unfold in person, or in a live recording.

Now: it’s true that, just as fiction is influenced by reality, so too can reality be influenced by fiction, both on the individual level and at scale. Fictional characters might not exist, but their stories still meaningfully impact real human beings, both positively and negatively. But this impact doesn’t work on anything even vaguely resembling a universal, one-to-one basis, such that X story is guaranteed to cause Y effect, or that X topic is only ever explored for Y reason - and this is just as true for dark, unsettling and taboo topics as for anything else.

Which is why it’s important to understand that, particularly when it comes to sex and desire, human beings are complex. At the most basic level of arousal, our bodies and brains are frequently in conflict. From teenagers dealing with unwanted erections to seniors mourning their loss of libido, none of us has perfect control over when and how we get turned on - and this extends to situations involving rape and assault. It is common, for instance, for rape victims to experience some level of arousal in response to their assault, because our bodies and minds do not exist in a state of perfect sync. Many victims experience deep shame as a result of this, thinking that, because they got hard or wet or came, they must’ve secretly wanted it - a trauma that’s intensified if their assailant makes the same claim. Victims, too, can have complex relationships to their assailants, particularly if they were abused by family members or as children; can sometimes take years or decades to understand that they were harmed at all.

Regardless of whether we’ve been victimised ourselves, are proximal to someone else’s trauma or are simply impacted by living in a world where such things can happen, fiction is the safest possible way to explore these ideas. But precisely because people are so different - precisely because our reactions to the same event or idea can vary so wildly - these stories will not always look the same. What disgusts or triggers one person might be healing to another, and that’s not determined by how eroticized the content is or isn’t. Sexual trauma responses can encompass opposite extremes: where one rape victim might be utterly repulsed by rape content and need to avoid it for their healing, another victim will feel compelled to seek or create it in order to achieve the same ends, and neither of them is wrong.

I have, for instance, known victims to write their own assaults into fiction. Sometimes these accounts are eroticized as a way of regaining control over a situation in which they had none. Perhaps the writer wants to accurately depict the confusion they felt at being aroused while being assaulted; or, conversely, perhaps their lack of arousal at the time increased the level of physical pain they experienced, and they want to write something which shows that, even if they had been aroused, it would still have been rape. Or on yet a third hand, perhaps they weren’t sure if a given experience was rape or not, and want to try and make sense of it. Perhaps they want to try and imagine their assailant’s perspective, to better comprehend what happened to them and why. This might mean a complicated, nuanced depiction that sways between awareness of the crime and minimization of it; it might also involve painting them as a flat-out villain, or as someone who believed they were acting only out of love. All of these things are possible! But no matter how much some or all of these portrayals might disgust you, the casual reader, you will not be able to tell, just by looking, who has “really” been assaulted, and who is exploring these topics for other reasons.

Because of course, not all people who write about abuse have experienced it themselves; nor should this be a requirement. Sometimes, we write about dark things, not to achieve catharsis in relation to a personal experience, but to conquer our fear of it happening to us, or perhaps even just to get an adrenaline rush - as is, for instance, extremely common with fans of horror content. Our brains produce a variety of fun chemicals in response to various stimuli, and we don’t generally get to choose which ones we find the most engaging. Some people are horror junkies from childhood, seeking out scary stories from the moment they’re old enough to ask for them, while others remain terrified of something as mild as cartoon comedy horror well into old age. There’s no morality associated with this; it just is - and that all comes back, once again, to the fact that we understand fiction as a separate thing to reality. No matter how horrific the thing depicted, our enjoyment (of whatever kind) is predicated on knowing that no actual human beings being harmed, even if the bad in the story - an axe murder, a war, a rape - is something that really does happen.

And returning again to matters of sex, regardless of whether they rise to the level of a kink or fetish, all sexual proclivities are ultimately products of native inclination, life experience, trauma, and/or the overlap of all three, while a specific fantasy might be either literal, metaphoric or a mix of both. A literal fantasy, for instance, might be: what if my hot boss fucked me over his desk at work, because he’s hot and I want to sleep with him. A metaphoric version of the same fantasy might be: what if I was so insanely desirable that my boss fucked me despite his being married and straight and me being a man.

To take another example, and one which has been studied extensively by psychologists, literary historians and academics alike, rape fantasies are commonplace, not because the vast majority of people are rape apologists, but because, at the level of metaphor, they allow the possibility of sex without having to take ownership of one’s own desires, which is of particular value if, say, you’ve been taught that wanting sex makes you slutty and wrong and gross; which is, in turn, why so many old Harlequin and Mills & Boon romances feature encounters that we’d now class as non-consensual between the hero and heroine. It wasn’t because the writers didn’t understand rape: it was because they were writing in a time where women were taught that wanting sex made them harlots, such that it was difficult for them to fantasize without shame. The hero knowing what the heroine “really” wanted and giving it to her despite her protests was a loophole.

I could go on, but the key point is this: given that nobody on Earth can perfectly control their own arousal, it is imperative to acknowledge that being turned on by something doesn’t mean wanting it in real life, because the alternative is forcing yourself to choose between sexual shame and justifying it in real life. And neither of those things has ever led anywhere good.

i’m a horror writer and no one’s EVER asked me if i want to put parasitic wasps in someone’s eyeballs irl. what do I have to do to get podcasters to bring the same energy to the interview as people who don’t like Game of Thrones bring to the blog post?

Look out TTOU readers, I must looove prison labour and non-consensual human experimentation. Clearly I’m a huge fan of murder. Stay away from me or I might drug and kill you, or sell your organs.

Filed under fandom discourse

25,598 notes

crypticarchivist:

16woodsequ:

northern-punk-lad:

image

So JKR is anti asexual now to

Anti-asexual discourse has always been a canary in the mine when it comes to anti-LGBTQ stances. First it’s trans people, than ace people, then gender non-conforming people, then bi people… it will just keep going until it’s every queer person.

I looked up the tweet to confirm it was real (because even now it was shocking), and she doubles down (as she always does) in follow up tweets.

It’s always felt like the way TERFs hate Asexuals is related to the fact that we kinda fuck with their narrative by existing.

They can’t spread transphobia on the back of gender essentialism that says people with penises are animals with no impulse control, if simultaneously it’s generally understood that some people (which includes some people with penises) just don’t have that sexual impulse.

If asexuality is real then a lot of Radfem rhetoric starts falling apart.

Filed under Asexuality Acephobia