chigurheads seething over her position in the powerscale

Why are there like 5 daily chores where if you skip them for 2 days your life becomes a time based psychological thriller after

Trying to start some toxic yuri shit with this mech pilot, but she's well adjusted and happily married. I called her my loyal dog and she filed an HR report fuuuuuuuuck

Honestly I’d be more inclined to play Stardew Valley if it was about a depressed cop trying to solve a murder whilst navigating the politics of a mass strike and the fallout of counter revolution

cis men are doing forcemasc self hypnosis every day

cis men know that it’s possible to be amab and not a man and it’s their biggest fear

it’s crazy how accessible waterboarding is. like, you can do it to yourself whenever you want and you don’t even have to go out and buy anything.

in high school there was one night where my guy friends were all waterboarding each other just to see what it was like and i posted a video of it to tiktok set to the two and a half men theme song. the video did not stay up long

I've been watching this very long, very good retrospective about the Red Dead Redemption series and its predecessors and in it, Noah Caldwell-Gervais touches on a couple specific moments in Red Dead Redemption 2. I already remembered the game having a "man in a dress" gag character named Margaret, which isn't particularly cruel as far as these jokes go, though it made me roll my eyes. But I had fully forgotten that there's a second instance of drag played for laughs centering around an entirely different character as well: a sexist womanizer cross-dressing to escape town (which I admittedly don't remember well enough to say much about). There are other stories in the game (which Caldwell-Gervais goes over as well) that feel a bit dissonant with how intelligently the rest is written, but these stuck out to me in particular.

Though she insists on being referred to as a lady while in-character, Margaret isn't a transgender woman. She's a costume that a misogynistic circus ringleader puts on because he believes only a man is tough enough to be a daring woman animal tamer (even though he has a woman assistant who is more than willing to take up the role). This isn't an inherently transphobic story to tell, and there's a case to be made that it's somewhat rooted in history. I even think there's a world in which it could be told in an entertaining way.

What irks me though, beyond just the fact that the very act of crossdressing is presented as a joke, is that the punchline leads to weak storytelling that conflicts with one of the game's themes and the way it relates to the protagonist, Arthur Morgan. Red Dead Redemption 2 is a story that explores, among other things, the concept of individualism. It's well established at this point that Arthur is a fairly apolitical egalitarian who believes strongly in freedom of the individual. And it's because Arthur truly believes in said freedom that he respects his fellow gang member (and character I love so much that I partially named myself after her) Sadie Adler's choice to ditch her dress and don some jeans and holsters. He's a bit taken aback at first, sure- it's 1899 and he's just seen a woman, by the standards of the time, cross-dressing! But he quickly comes around to her new style and, after they get into a firefight with the local bandit gang, accepts her as just as capable with a gun as any man.

So why is it, then, that a female character crossdressing is an opportunity for the protagonist to grow as a person and demonstrate his values to the audience, and a male character crossdressing is an opportunity for the audience to laugh? Sure, Arthur himself isn't too antagonistic to Margaret, but he addresses her in a chuckling "yeah, sure thing buddy" type of way. And okay, I get it, the character isn't transgender, just a man pretending to be a woman to take a performing role that probably ought to go to his assistant. But isn't it, at the very least, a bit eyebrow-raising that both male characters in the game who cross-dress are also misogynists? At this point, it's fairly widespread pseudo-feminist rhetoric that 'male' crossdressers and transfeminine people in general are regressive mockeries of womanhood. Is that something we really needed more of?

Beyond all that, it just strikes me as wasted potential. If you're going to include depictions of male crossdressing in your story, why not, for at least one of the two instances, explore it with tenderness? Why can't Arthur Morgan meet a man in a dress and respond to it like he did when Sadie cross-dresses? He could even have a stronger, more negative initial reaction than to Sadie- it has, after all, proven more persistently difficult for American society to accept a man in a dress than a woman in jeans. Though it could be more challenging to write gracefully than a shallow, "I don't see gender" way of writing a protagonist, I'd appreciate the effort put into a more realistic and messy approach if it meant seeing Arthur grapple with his cognitive dissonance to accept this unfamiliar mode of self-expression.

Hell, why not explore this cross-dressing character evolving into a transgender one over time? Cross-dressing is one way many transgender people today experiment with gender expression before fully realizing their identity, and in 1899 without modern terminology with which to articulate oneself, 'man who likes to wear dresses' could have been a valuable first step toward womanhood. The existence of trans people in the 1800s is historical fact, and though Red Dead Redemption 2's 'wild west' is much more based on other works of western fiction than the frankly horrific American frontier era, it certainly draws from history to create a believable world. So it all simply leaves me wondering why they decided to include, in a game that came out in 2018, not once but twice, a played out and careless cross-dresser joke, rather than approach the topic with a little grace.

As time goes on there seems to be more and more transgender and non-binary characters in video games, but off the top of my head I can only really think of one trans woman character in a triple-A game: Mindy Blanchard from Dishonored 2. She's awesome, I love her and her incredibly striking voice performed by Betsy Moore, but she's a fairly inconsequential side character who pops up very briefly twice in the game, and she was only confirmed to be transgender in developer commentary. In contrast, The Last Of Us Part 2 has a pretty great transmasculine character, Lev, who takes center stage in the later section of the game. He's hugely important in transforming the antagonist/deuteragonist, Abby, into a kinder person, eventually becoming her reason for living. He's on the run from a bigoted cult, so he gets misgendered and deadnamed by the villains a bit, but Abby fully accepts him right off the bat, and the audience is expected to as well.

But transfeminine people and male cross-dressers, as we are commonly lumped together in public perception, don't get very much representation in fiction in general. When we do, it's historically most often been slanderous, mocking, fetishistic, or violent in some other way. Transfeminine people and male crossdressers are not, of course, inherently the same thing, but there is sometimes overlap and we represent a similar thing in the eyes of society at large: people perceived as males who are breaking established gender norms by presenting the wrong way. To put it bluntly, we are seen as sexual deviants for more or less the same reasons. If we're all essentially seen as the same thing anyway, cross-dresser gags like the ones included in Red Dead Redemption 2 harm transfeminine people as well as men who wear 'women's clothing,' and it should go without saying that we're all deserving of dignity and love. Fiction can do a lot to shape how people think, and these cruel or otherwise disrespectful depictions of us reinforce these false and unjust ideas of us. On its head, positive depictions can introduce people to new modes of thinking, or else just make people feel a bit more seen and understood. I want to see more trans women in videogames, more 'Mindy Blanchards' except more proudly transgender and important to the story, and I want to see more men in dresses too. But most of all, I want them to be treated with respect, if not by all their fellow characters, at least by the story's narrative.

Anyway, as I'm writing this, I'm realizing it's Trans Day Of Visibility today, so that's a pretty fun coincidence. Sneaking it in right at the end for my timezone. I've never really been good at ending essays, and this sort of spiraled into one after starting as just a few thoughts on a video I'm listening to at work. Thanks for reading, I hope it was interesting.

watching yourself being replaced by people better than you

this post is depressing af lets get some alley-oops in here

Can artists STOP dressing up like religious figures just to be provocative? They are disrespecting all christians and yes, I am referring to Chappell Roan singing dressed up as a nun or Joan of Arc.

Stop it. Nuns and Joan d'Arc aren't your LGBT+ icons. They are religious women the first and a beloved saint the second.

fuck you somebody draw Joan d'Arc fucking and sucking a nun with a small cock

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation, the goal of which was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-denial that so many of us once learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

inshallah he will have even a day of respite from the torment