This is a man's, a man's world... ♫

Jack Lowden as the FBI Agent Stirling H. Crawford

✪ Capone (2020), dir. by Josh Tank

It's sooooo interesting how in Harrow the Ninth, Harrow is constantly noting all the ways Ianthe is failing at femininity: the awful frilly nightgown, the clothes that don't fit (in the bust, in the hips), her hair, her attempts at flirtatious behavior, the specific way she is sucking up to Augustine etc. And like, this is a weird house for Harrow to be throwing stones from, sure, but I think it makes way more sense after The Unwanted Guest gave more context to soul permeability wrt the status of Naberius Tern, because it is now arguable that Ianthe is essencially being forcemasc'd throughout the entierty of HtN -- we just dont know about it bc Harrow dgaf. And this is doubly interesting to me because when we next see her in Nona the Ninth, she is now Ianthe Naberius, a Tower Prince in masculine dress and leather trousers and boots, and she no longer has any of that sort of gender failure going on.

So I’ve been turning this take around in my head since I read it this morning, and it rearranged my brain.

I want to note though, that it’s not Harrow narrating Ianthe’s awkward second adolescence, but it’s Gideon. Gideon who always saw her as an appendage to her hotter, more performative femme sister. Gideon who is jealous as hell after having witnessed up close Harrow kissing Ianthe with tongue. So some of the disparagement of Ianthe’s gender presentation might be down to Gideon just being a dick about it.

But that doesn’t soften in any way the blow that Ianthe is being forcemasc-ed in a way she was not prepared for, along with everything else she’s going through. She thought of Babs as Colum: a battery. And the Unwanted Guest shows us it’s much more complicated. That by eating Babs, his essence becomes part of her. Ianthe has lived her life as the moon to her twin’s sun, but now she is becoming someone else, something even less like Coronabeth in all kinds of ways including her internal gender compass.

The way she plays dress up in Valancy’s old clothes is just so poignant to me. Ianthe knows she could go to John and ask for well-fitting clothes to be sent to the Mithraeum, but instead she spends her time there trying on an image of long-dead womanhood that just won’t fit. She says it represents the energy she wants to bring forward into her future, but is it really? Or is it just an energy she’s desperately clinging to because she’s scared of losing control over the changes in her identity?

Just want to offer, I think the force-mascing might be even more gradual than this.

Consider that Ianthe is a princess who has a very narrow view of what constitutes as valuable knowledge. Meanwhile, Babs' skillsets included sewing and putting together an outfit. It seems reasonable to assume that this was part of his service to Ianthe and Corona: helping with their look. With fashion easily outsourced to a third party, there is no reason why Ianthe would ever have had to seriously pay attention to her own look. She needs to look decent and not take glam away from Corona; that's it.

So, immediate aftermath of ascending to Lyctorhood, Ianthe can barely dress herself. Makes sense, since she's never had to. She takes Valancy's clothes because she's entitled to them as the new Third House Lyctor, but they don't actually work for her; another indignity. Everything's awkward and nothing fits UNTIL Harrow helps her with The Arm, at which point things finally seem to start working for her.

It's after this we get the dinner party and the styling sequence, where suddenly Ianthe understands clothes. She's styling Harrow and herself, performing admittedly basic alterations to their clothing, and everything fits. At this point, the performance is still fem. She deflects compliments, pointing out that Babs had way more skill, but that majorly downplays what a DIFFERENCE there is already between how she was dressing herself at the start of HtN and how she's managing her look post-bone arm.

On first read/pre-TUG, we figure she's just gotten herself out of her slump and she's more confident she's going to be able to pull the Lyctor thing off despite the initial setback. But that's a really good way to sneak in the start of her transition. And it's something she may not consciously notice; rather than a change in herself, she might perceive it as simply a return to normalcy. With her cav serving her again as he's supposed to, of course her look has come back together. It all fits.

Because if we take the styling as a manifestation of Babs, it's also Babs in a form that reflects their former dynamic: Babs performing a service, still subservient. It's an aspect of what he did for the girls, but it doesn't connote ownership, only presence.

By the time we get to NtN, even Ianthe is starting to admit that she's having a hard time keeping control over everything in the real world. The Prince presentation is potentially a form of her bossing up, but with permeability of the soul in mind, it's probably Babs taking more control. Now he's not styling the girls, so to speak; he's putting together a good outfit for himself. Ianthe is not in control anymore.

Circling back to Ianthe's gender failure at the start of HtN: I think there is a very serious thing throughout the entire series in that we have no idea really who Ianthe is. As already noted above, she was in Corona's shadow, and we're now learning that since she ascended, she has been tinged, if not at times overtaken, by Babs' influence. We have never, ever seen a genuinely independent version of Ianthe and we probably never will. It's very possible that the gender failure of it all is part of her, that Ianthe is way more trans than originally perceived, but we're just never going to know because we're always going to attribute any self-expression on her part to Corona's or Bab's influence (which I think is the point, and the tragedy, and it's delicious and I hate it)

i need to look like a man so i can dress like a woman

this got seven notes in like seven seconds its a hit with the faggots in my phone

gender non-conforming people we are all holding hands in this chilis tonight

I'm tearing up, the interviewer is at the very least terf-adjacent and Judith Butler with intellectual rigor and radical compassion just gently breaks her down into her component parts and leaves her in a neat little stack on the curb

here's that interview I was reminded of

Butler saying look, just because I prefer to engage in this quiet and measured way, don't mistake me for one of those people who thinks BLM is too angry, this is just how I am as a person, loud activists are also valid

The 2024 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 11th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th June 2024.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Malachite and rhodochrosite.

transgenderism poll

*i cant fix poll text. by Yourself i mean you as a kid

paired with their often intimate and violent subject matter, i find the incidental way tamsyn muir frames women and their bodies throughout the locked tomb series to be refreshing bordering on radical

consider harrowhark; in the first book we see her as gideon sees her. she's a hideous ghoul with a flat ass and no tits, she's a delicate sopping wet beauty with a sharp face and angel bow lips, she's a triumphant and awe inspiring master necromancer screaming and fighting drenched in her own blood. the shape and condition of her body is allowed to take on meaning contextually based entirely on the situation and how gideon feels about their relationship in any given moment

she then spends the second book hobbling around with a sword twice her size, ripping apart her body to use as a weapon and passing out in her own vomit, struggling to eat and sleep – she and puts herself through absolute hell and never once thinks anything of it, and we're made to mourn this not as the desecration of a beautiful woman but as a manifestation of a human being's despair and self loathing, and we see this specifically contrasted against the care gideon tries to take when inhabiting her body during the last act

it's jarring, in nona, when we're suddenly made aware that her body could be perceived or valued as a commodity, when pyrrha is assumed to be nona's pimp. it feels strange and horrifying when we learn alecto's form was modeled for a doll, learn that she was given a woman's body as a display of ownership, an alternative to being consumed, and as we're processing this we watch gideon, paul, and ianthe, immediately setting aside their conflict in a desperate scramble to preserve harrow's body for no reason other than because it is harrow's and they love her

feminist fiction often focuses on women's relationship to a body which is valued more than the person within it – and that is a worthy experience to explore – but as a transsexual butch(ish) dyke, i have never really had the privilege of seeing my body as a precious commodity, never felt like it couldn't or shouldn't be a sight of violence and disgust, and as a result the locked tomb books have made me feel seen in a way that few other works of fiction have?

we as an audience are not made aware of how attractive any character would be outside of the context of our lesbian POV characters' perspectives, their relationship to patriarchal beauty standards is an utterly irrelevant detail we're never told and only occasionally glimpse through implication. the women in the locked tomb books are simply free to exist, to have experiences and feelings, to love and hate and grieve and suffer and die like anybody else, and to have those experiences reflected in their physical vessels

it's a perspective that's so fundamental and obvious that to praise muir for it for it feels almost patronizing, but i also think it's a huge part of what's made the series so resonant for so many queer women and i feel that that's worthy of highlighting and celebrating

scone butch... The person for all your pastry and lesbian needs

Yeah I'm AFAB, but what's much more important to understanding my Gender is that I was Assigned Older Sister At My Sibling's Birth

This tag is 10000000% correct

One advantage of not really having a strong sense of gender identity is that you’re very [shrug emoji] about how people gender you. Sometimes people call me by she/her pronouns and sometimes they go with he/him pronouns and on the internet people often default to they/them, and neither option is entirely right but also, fuck if I know what would be right, and I don’t particularly care. Therefore I’m perfectly happy to outsource my gender identity to the people around me who actually need to figure out which box to put me in. I don’t need to talk about myself in third person, so really my pronouns sound like a you problem.

My pronouns are I/me and the rest is for someone else to deal with because I have better things to do.

Very fond of macrolabels, like “queer”, that provide zero extra information. Is it genderqueer? Is it romantic/sexual orientation queer? Is it queer as in “none of your fucking business what’s in my pants and what I do with it and with whom”?

This is actually probably the first time I’ve ever read something that accurately describes my relationship with gender--ie, ‘my gender is me and my pronouns are a you problem’--so thank you for that!

#you cannot gender me in a way that matters

Why are you lgbtq+? wrong answers only GO

i;m like if you made a girl but had to make a lot of substitutions in the recipe

this reddit post is so good.

a trans guy who is also a butch who dates both men and women-- I aspire to be like this. oh, to play 5d chess with gender.

also if you wanna combat the "women in the past only crossdressed because of misogyny!" you have GOTTA read chapter 11 in Transgender Warriors where leslie feinberg does such a good job constructing an argument against this kind of radfem reductionism