Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

I need to say something and I need y'all to be calm

if it isn't actively bad or harmful, no representation should be called "too simple" or "too surface level"

I have a whole argument for this about the barbie movie but today I wanna talk about a show called "the babysitters club" on Netflix

(obligatory disclaimer that I watched only two episodes of this show so if it's super problematic I'm sorry) (yes. I know it's based on a book, this is about the show)

this is a silly 8+ show that my 9 year old sister is watching and it manages to tackle so many complex topics in such an easy way. basic premise is these 13 year old girls have a babysitting agency.

in one episode, a girl babysits this transfem kid. the approach is super simple, with the kid saying stuff like "oh no, those are my old boy clothes, these are my girl clothes". they have to go to the doctor and everyone is calling the kid by her dead name and using he/him and this 13 year old snaps at like a group of doctors and they all listen to her. it's pure fantasy and any person versed in trans theory would point out a bunch of mistakes.

but after watching this episode, my little sister started switching to my name instead of my dead name and intercalating he/him pronouns when talking about me.

one of the 13 years old is a diabetic and sometimes her whole personality is taken over by that. but she has this episode where she pushes herself to her limit and passes out and talks about being in a coma for a while because of not recognizing the limits of her disability.

and this allowed my 9 year old sister to understand me better when I say "I really want to play with you but right now my body physically can't do that" (I'm disabled). she has even asked me why I'm pushing myself, why I'm not using my crutches when I complain about pain.

my mom is 50 years old and watching this show with my sister. she said the episode about the diabetic girl helped her understand me and my disability better. she grew up disabled as well, but she was taught to shut up and power through.

yes, silly simple representation can annoy you if you've read thousands of pages about queer liberation or disability radical thought, but sometimes things are not for you.

When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.

But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.

As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.

The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork.  In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.

That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.

#it’s so so important to remember that representation is not one-size-fits-all#what is empowering to one person might be exhausting and oppressive to someone else#some people need stories about having the strength to save themselves#some people need stories about being considered worthy of being saved#some people need inspiration for their independence while others need validation that they don’t have to be able to do everything themselves#before you lash out against something PLEASE stop to consider:#is this inadequate and/or damaging representation?#or is it just something I don’t personally relate to? [X]

It’s been half a decade and I still haven’t found an articulation of the complexity of “representation” as concisely and precisely mindblowing as @hungrylikethewolfie’s here.

I’m just going to leave this here…

im on mobile, can someone make one that adds “jews”

Done

Cowards won’t reblog this version.

This is just gonna keep getting bigger until most minority groups are on it.

I'm very fortunate I don't need this but there's gotta be more fat trans women characters for hundreds of young trans women to latch on to. I love Bridget and all the numerous incredible trans rep we've had recently with all my heart but too many girls are latched onto the idea that they gotta be skinny little anime girls to be happy or loved. No u don't!!!! There are cis women every day who are fat and awesome and gorgeous and look like you and you don't need to idolize the idea of perfect skinny beauty to be happy or comfortable or a "real" woman!!!!

Not hijacking at all, I'm just letting u know that's some real shit you said keep it up!!!! 👊👊👊👊 I agree completely!!!!

[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading, “and women of color!! (specifically fat women of color) i dont wanna sound like im hijacking your post i just intend to add onto it!) but fat trans women of color are in dire need as well! don't forget us!” /End ID]

Everyone needs Sister Claire (title character not pictured) in their life!

I want stories to have characters that like. Realize they're trans and do transition stuff, like name changes and trying new looks, partway through the narrative. I want it to be a major point for their personal arc, but not the be-all end-all of their/the story's existence. Like, imagine we get a full season of a show with a particular cast, right? We get to know them decently well as characters, get kinda settled with them. Then, at some point in the next season, one of the characters realizes he's a girl, and it's a huge step for her personal development, but ultimately the main problem on everyone's minds, our newly cracked egg included, is the dark sorcerer who has bewitched the city council, or whatever else the current major conflict might be. IDK, I just wanna see more trans characters in general, of course, and I also wanna see some of them get to figure shit out bc that's such an interesting space to explore, but I also want some of those arcs to just be part of the tapestry of the lives of people with other things going on in their world. Any kind of person can be trans, and the realization can come at any point in life, and it'd be cool to see that reflected in more stuff.

Summus Proelium is one such!

Maybe it's just everything around me being so deadly serious in a way I don't have the energy to get into nor the power to do anything about online but I feel like swinging a bat at a more local and immediately actionable hornet's nest so here we go-

There are two things in leftist/feminist media critique we NEED to get better about tackling without letting it take us in horrible counterproductive directions.

One: The way breast size is used as visual shorthand for maturity/attitude/sexual openness, and how that plays into the male gaze (which - 101 level reminder to reject what radfems have told you, this is a film critique term that has to do primarily with framing conventions, NOT some kind of mystical Objectification Beam that emanates from men's eyes, okay? okay). Namely, we need to learn to acknowledge that this visual shorthand is a thing and criticize it WITHOUT implying that it's fair or based in reality.

What do I mean by "implying that it's fair or based in reality?" I mean the way that the first thing many people do to humanize a canonically badly objectified female character is not to change up the art style to give her room for her organs, not to put her in a more natural pose in a less idealized setting, not even to frame her in a way that's more inclined to draw the eye to her face rather than her breasts, but to reduce her bust size. To call large breasts "unrealistic". As someone who had...multiple friends who were pretty well-endowed by middle school, I need to tell you - this attitude did NOT help them, it just got them called sluts and "distractions".

We need to be able to criticize it when male characters are allowed to have multiple body types (however idealized they still may be), but women's bodies are only differentiated by bust size, and yes, that IS treated as shorthand for something. We need to be able to discuss how large breasts have long been visual shorthand for maturity and sexuality, and small breasts have long been visual shorthand for innocence. We...may need to tell some non-tit-having character designers that no, breast growth is not inherently linked to sexual activity, nor fertility, nor is it something that just goes on forever like noses and ears. We may even, yes, want to vary up the bust sizes on some existing characters in fanart to ask people to question the way it's treated. We DEFINITELY need to bring back Free The Nipple. But we can't STOP at shrinking characters' breasts and calling it "less objectified", and we also very much cannot, as I've seen asked for, replace that with making the characters fatter and more muscular to say the same - again, please consider what you're implying to real human women with the body types you're calling "objectified" or "not objectified". When you stop there, you're telling the large-breasted woman that she IS just a sexual object. You're telling the fat girl that she CAN'T be a sexual being. You're telling the small-chested woman that she's too much of a baby for anyone to ACTUALLY be attracted to her. That's not what we need to be doing with these critiques! That's the opposite of what we need to be doing with these critiques!

Speaking of "telling the small-chested woman she's too much of a baby for anyone to ACTUALLY be attracted to, that brings me to point two: we need to figure out how to talk about how young aggressive sexual objectification starts WITHOUT implying or getting sucked into some Pizzagate-tier bullshit about the media managing to "normalize pedophilia", like - that's some gateway blood libel shit right there. "Everyone knows that molesting kids is bad and evil, but there's a secret shadowy group of people who not only do it systematically, ritualistically, lurking around every corner, looking to snatch your kids up for their wicked deeds, but they've so infected the media that they're going to manage to convince you that the horrible abuses they want to enact on YOUR poor innocent children are normal, they're so influential that even just LOOKING at their propaganda can turn a well-meaning person into a monster" - I'm not sorry, if your media critique can be paraphrased to that, you're going down a DANGEROUS path and need to go back to square one, especially if you're already starting to get suspicious of certain last names in western media, or aiming it first and foremost at a foreign culture (looking at you, anime critics).

The problem is the stereotype of men as ruthless sex-seekers and women as prizes. The problem is the idea that youth is about training for those roles. The biggest problem is the idea that women are no longer dateable once they hit 26 or so - they should either be married by then and dedicate their lives to being good wives and mothers, or simply disappear from public life as laughable failures, because ultimately that's what women are for in society.

The idea that your only years of value, especially if you're a woman, are from 18-25 is definitely some chud shit, but it's NOT pedophilia, because...get this: 20-somethings aren't children.

This standard is pervasive. It's everywhere. And because it's treated as such a default, such a constant, such a universal truth, it starts young - look how many book bans are targeting anything that DARES to state or even imply there are other options. We need to criticize that! We need to criticize how much gender standards end up having overly sexual implications even when applied to kids! We need to have serious discussions of how to disentangle the decades of social coding that make it hard to really tell who we need to be criticizing when it comes to things such as, say, prematurely "sexualized" clothing for little girls - i.e., that we have to pause and ask "...but wait, is it really that sexualized, or is it just feminine?"

We need to also have discussions of how this and the Leonardo Dicaprio standard intersect with fatphobia - i.e., is that animated girl "minor-coded", or is she just in the age range that Leo would date and super skinny because even breasts would make her look ~faaaat ewwwww~?

And we need, BADLY, to stop getting distracted from that conversation and letting it drag us to some really ugly and dangerous places instead.

seeing the terms “bad rep” and “good rep” applied to media that was created by and for an in-group makes me want to eat glass

“not sure if this is a good representation of the trans community :/“ right well a trans person made it, and they made it for other trans people, so. perhaps that logic is not applicable here. must we live our entire creative lives under the watchful eye of Cisgender Scrutiny? how can you compare self-expression to willful misrepresentation lmao

What able bodied authors think I, an amputee and a wheelchair user, would want in a scifi setting:

What I actually want:

to cis artists, yr allowed to draw trans characters to be clockable, in fact i encourage it. it's not politically incorrect or offensive to depict trans people as being obviously trans, especially if you're drawing cartoons. its not a stereotype a lot of us just look like that

i mean, i know a lot of trans people disagree, but eventually every ally has gotta bite the bullet & use their judgement to decide what's best for the group they're allied with. literally just give her stubble, it's quick, it's easy and it's free.

coding is neutral, it's just aesthetic, framing is what actually matters. no one's out here calling ms frizzle an antisemetic caricature. its not racist that u can tell the one car in Cars that sells gas is black. when cartoons show a man in a dress & treat the contrast between makeup and body hair as being self evidently funny, that's transphobia. but that doesnt mean its bad to have a big hairy man wear makeup in your illustrated works, thats just normal hot guy behavior

my opinion as always is that there are two important things we'll regularly leave out of the conversation- everybody fixates on the simple look of a character (ie curves on a trans guy), but what is actually important is variety and characterisation. so, you might think "ugh another show about gay people where their arc is the bigotry they face", the issue isn't "depicting what we often really experience is bad", as some people frame it, the issue is the lack generally of variety. when a character wears a dress as a joke, it's framed as a simple aesthetic issue of the show, but it's really the inadequate characterisation to show this is a guy who likes to be dressing in a gender non-comforming way, and whether or not it results in judgement from others- heck, in school guys often did wear dresses as a joke on non-uniform days (I'm not american, it normally is a thing in my country that schools have uniforms), so having a guy wear one as a joke is possible, the world just needs variety in reasons and characters that carry those reasons in the shows, where you can tell the intent isn't to mock trans/gnc folk. going back to op's example, we need trans characters who don't actually pass, but we need variety and characters that work with however they look- guys with curves who aren't being made the simple butt of the joke, but rather are just a guy with curves, and both trans and cis guys like that (I know cis guys with hourglass figures pretty much). like op said, the aesthetics aren't bad, they simply are badly executed a lot of the time. I'm a hairy person in makeup, and it has been a relief meeting people in hospital who actually don't treat that as weird and funny, but just "dude, your eyeshadow is so well blended" and that's it, and it'd be nice if we could see that energy in tv shows more. sorry to ramble btw op.

OP, I'm a trans woman and seeing clockable trans women in media gives me dysphoria

This is not a joke, I'm not exaggerating, I literally turn off what I'm watching

What now?

I'm sorry but your dysphoria isn't anyone else's problem. if someone else "gives you dysphoria" thats your cross to bear & not on them.

hi :3 the goal of trans liberation is not & will never be getting every trans person to pass. i'm autistic, i had a good ass chance to figure out that i was trans early in life considering my older sibling was trans & i had ample opportunity to learn what that meant, its just that i have a hard time identifying my emotions in the best of circumstances & don't put much stake in how i'm perceived anyways. i take hormones to feel internally in balance with myself, but i didn't voice train, i don't wear women's clothes, i don't feel the need to shave regularly, i haven't been gendered correctly by a stranger yet & that's fine. i no longer feel like i went through the wrong puberty, so to speak, i'm just having a 2nd one now. we'll always exist, representation isn't just for you. we're not just fighting for trans youth, we're fighting for trans adults too.

and like, cis people are allowed to draw what literally exists in reality & always will. like yea they should consult a sensitivity reader but like, if your sensitivity reader tells you to make a character less visibly trans on the basis that its offensive to trans people who want to be invisible then i will veto that sensitivity reader lol

the thing about passing is that for the vast majority of trans women, it’s not something that just *happens.* a cis woman with short hair, no makeup, wearing t shirt and jeans, putting no effort into appearing conventionally “feminine” still gets gendered correctly most of the time. which is as much of a nightmare for trans men as the opposite is for trans women. for a trans woman to pass effortlessly, she almost certainly has to have transitioned early or have one of those perfectly non-clockable body types, which is genetic lottery and super rare. for most trans women, passing at the high end requires expensive surgeries and procedures like laser hair removal/electrolysis, facial reconstructive surgery, hair transplants, and at the low end requires hours of makeup, voice training, posture discipline, outfit coordinating, etc etc etc, and not a lick of it will matter if you’re even in the neighborhood of six feet tall, because most people don’t choose how they gender people they just do it automatically based on silhouette. so if your goal is to pass, you have to build your entire appearance and aura around that abstract ill-defined social instinct.

that’s a lot of money and time for a population that’s chronically impoverished! for someone like me, a 34 year old trans woman who didn’t realize i was trans until 27 and started hrt at 28, the baseline expectation for getting gendered correctly in public just feels impossible. my hair is thinning, i still haven’t been able to afford LHR on my face let alone better clothes or shoes or jewelry or makeup etc etc etc.

so when i see a fictional trans woman who passes perfectly, never gets misgendered, whose gender isn’t a point of contention or conflict, that isn’t good representation to me. that isn’t even representation, as far as i’m concerned that’s just a cis woman that you’re calling trans for brownie points! when the only trans people i see in media are drag queens and cis-passing rich celebrities, i see the binary society imposes on my femininity. if i’m not one, i must be the other. no hate to anyone in either group but that’s just not me! i don’t WANT the surgeries, i don’t WANT to get good at makeup, and i feel like the right of a woman to be respected regardless of how she presents is a cornerstone of real feminism!!

you want to know what’d make me feel less like shit about myself, about my place in the world and society? if there were more clocky trans women in media. not only would i ACTUALLY feel represented, that would also help to normalize the existence of clocky trans women to cis people who only ever see the drag queen / celebrity side of transness. if there were more clocky trans women in media getting aggressively gendered correctly, their pronouns defended and enforced by other characters in the show, that would ACTIVELY make my life better because it would make normies aware that this tension even exists. because i know it’s not intentional nine times out of ten! if we all agree that media plays a huge role in shaping how society sees minority groups, then we should be advocating not for media which only shows the glossy happy perfectly prettily acceptable side, but media which accurately reflects the lived experiences of real trans people in the real world.

also clocky trans women are hot and i like looking at them

#'seeing non-passing trans women gives me dyspho' literally get the fuck over yourself#this is the same argument as 'seeing two kissing men disgusts me' coming from homophobes#stop being transphobic and start working on your internalized transphobia too#also yes this entire post is great because the so-called 'problematic representation' nearly always is a problem only because#you see the trope happen way more commonly to the point of overshadowing other kind of representations#someone getting dysphoria over the masc traits but despite living full time as a girl never admiting they're trans?#LGBT folk getting killed off?#queer coding instead of stating it outright?#this is all the overshadowing issue not an inherent problem with the trope

(via @mlembug)

(btw shoutout to Sister Claire for doing this, Maman is the bestest ever and Oscar is lovely)

90% of ‘representation’ problems could be answered with just more variety. “This rep is BAD because a gay guy being femme is stereotyping”/”no it’s important, femme gays exist and deserve representation” – sounds like we need both kinds. “Queer stories shouldn’t be focused on sex”/”sex is important to the queer experience and should be represented” – sounds like we need both kinds. “Hypercompetent disabled characters like Toph and Daredevil don’t represent me and suggest that disabled characters are only valuable if their disabilities aren’t ‘disabling’ them”/”hypercompetent disabled characters like Toph and Daredevil are empowering” – sounds like we need both kinds.

Most of the Problems of Bad Representation TM aren’t problems at all, except when they’re the only Representation available. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with gay or disfigured or mentally ill villains… except when it’s a pattern across media, and there’s no variety. There’s nothing wrong with stories where the character  who happens to get killed off is the minority and all the cishet white abled people make it through and live happily ever after… except when it’s a pattern, and it’s always the minorities getting killed off, rather than teh frequency you’d expect in a random distribution. There’s nothing wrong with a walking stereotype (people who are walking stereotypes do exist!), except when the stereotype is the only kind of character we’re given.

Expecting anything with a diverse cast to act as a PSA that fully explored the nuances of every race, sexuality, gender or subculture it includes and decrying it as ‘problematic’ if it doesn’t meet (your idea of) Perfect Representation is shooting ourselves in the foot. 1 piece of Perfect Representation is so, so much less valuable than 100 pieces of kinda fucked up representation that are fucked up in different ways.

Artist: I’m not sure my take on this is as good as this other take.

Audience: Holy shit, two takes!

something that's easy to miss when we talk about problematic tropes about marginalized characters is that a LOT of them are fundamentally really just side effects of the fact that the story is so rarely ABOUT those characters. women get shoved in refrigerators to motivate male characters because the writer never cared about the woman as a character in her own right in the first place, just about her effect on the man, and this is just where it's becoming really obvious. characters of color get to be wise mentors or quirky sidekicks because the writer liked the idea of a diverse cast in theory but wasn't willing to write a non-white lead and those are the good-guy roles that are left. if you want to do better the answer is usually not to go down a checklist of problematic tropes and make sure you're not doing any of them, it's to treat marginalized characters as fully realized people with agency and narrative focus in the first place, and if you're doing that right a lot of this will follow naturally.

I will add to this that a LOT of tropes about marginalised characters are literally only “problematic” if they’re combined with tokenism.

My go-to example here is Avatar: The Last Airbender and how Katara is a girly feminine girl, the team mom, often The Responsible One, and the designated love interest. That’s a lot of problematic tropes about female characters.

The reason she still comes off as fleshed out and human is that the story has other female characters who are very different from her, so her own traits are allowed to be just traits, not something out of a caricature. And the end result is great. Katara’s arc and grappling with the way losing her parents to war forced her to grow up so quickly and become the Team Parent, even as there should have still been someone to parent her, was fantastic, and it wouldn’t have been possible if she hadn’t had those stereotypical girly traits to begin with.

If you’re having trouble writing a marginalised character who doesn’t feel like they’re too much of a stereotype, just add more characters to your story with that same identity.

something that’s easy to miss when we talk about problematic tropes about marginalized characters is that a LOT of them are fundamentally really just side effects of the fact that the story is so rarely ABOUT those characters. women get shoved in refrigerators to motivate male characters because the writer never cared about the woman as a character in her own right in the first place, just about her effect on the man, and this is just where it’s becoming really obvious. characters of color get to be wise mentors or quirky sidekicks because the writer liked the idea of a diverse cast in theory but wasn’t willing to write a non-white lead and those are the good-guy roles that are left. if you want to do better the answer is usually not to go down a checklist of problematic tropes and make sure you’re not doing any of them, it’s to treat marginalized characters as fully realized people with agency and narrative focus in the first place, and if you’re doing that right a lot of this will follow naturally.

We need to clear something up: nonbinary or agender aliens and robots aren’t problematic. Neither are ace or aro ones. These are normal traits that you’d expect of robots and would not be surprising in aliens.

I’m bringing this up because I’ve seen some really weird criticisms lately that take the stance that if you make a robot that has no gender or sexuality, that’s somehow… bad? That a single sex alien race, or a trisexed alien race, or a hermaphroditic alien race, is somehow inherently insulting to trans people? And this take is fucking baffling to me! These are exactly the traits you would expect in robots and aliens! (This applies to robots that seem to act autistic, too; many common autism traits also happen to be traits that you might expect in artificial intelligences.)

I can see the logic. At some point, we noticed all the stories with human cis men and human cis women who were almost entirely heterosexual, and some robot who doesn’t have a gender and explains this to someone at some point, and some people went “woo, agender representation!” and then everyone had to be like “that’s not agender representation, it’s a robot.” Which is correct; the robot happens to be agender, but if none of the humans are then having all the robots be agender isn’t agender representation. So some people started thinking that the robot was the problem. The robot isn’t the problem. The robot is fine. The problem is the humans. The robot’s existence isn’t some insult to the agender community, or the nonbinary community, or the ace or aro or autistic communities, depending on what traits it was given. It’s not representation, but it’s not an insult.

“Oh, but making all the robots asexual is saying that being asexual makes someone a robot!” No. It doesn’t. Making none of the humans asexual and making them all confused by it and having them treat it like some big division is what says that. “Making aliens that don’t have genders gives the impression that genderless people – ” NO. IT DOESN’T. Making all the humans cis people who treat the absence of gender as a weird alien thing is what does that.

The aliens and the robots are fine. They’re not the problem. The lack of diversity among human characters is the problem.

90% of ‘representation’ problems could be answered with just more variety. “This rep is BAD because a gay guy being femme is stereotyping”/”no it’s important, femme gays exist and deserve representation” – sounds like we need both kinds. “Queer stories shouldn’t be focused on sex”/”sex is important to the queer experience and should be represented” – sounds like we need both kinds. “Hypercompetent disabled characters like Toph and Daredevil don’t represent me and suggest that disabled characters are only valuable if their disabilities aren’t ‘disabling’ them”/”hypercompetent disabled characters like Toph and Daredevil are empowering” – sounds like we need both kinds.

Most of the Problems of Bad Representation TM aren’t problems at all, except when they’re the only Representation available. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with gay or disfigured or mentally ill villains… except when it’s a pattern across media, and there’s no variety. There’s nothing wrong with stories where the character  who happens to get killed off is the minority and all the cishet white abled people make it through and live happily ever after… except when it’s a pattern, and it’s always the minorities getting killed off, rather than teh frequency you’d expect in a random distribution. There’s nothing wrong with a walking stereotype (people who are walking stereotypes do exist!), except when the stereotype is the only kind of character we’re given.

Expecting anything with a diverse cast to act as a PSA that fully explored the nuances of every race, sexuality, gender or subculture it includes and decrying it as ‘problematic’ if it doesn’t meet (your idea of) Perfect Representation is shooting ourselves in the foot. 1 piece of Perfect Representation is so, so much less valuable than 100 pieces of kinda fucked up representation that are fucked up in different ways.

this is p much my stance on all "major franchise has gay/trans/disabled/[insert marginalized group here] rep!" discourse

I really wish people would understand that there are other forms of queer rep besides two same gendered people kissing.

A queer character is queer rep regardless of their romance or a lack thereof even. Ace and aro people exist. Trans people exist. Bi people exist. Queer characters are rep by existing, not just by who they interact with. If a character is nonbinary, they are queer rep whether they kiss someone or not. A bi character in a relationship with someone a different gender is still queer rep because they are still bi. Queer characters can even just be friends with one another. They can be single! And still be queer because that’s who they are not who they do!

This whole trend of deciding if art is valid representation based on romance and ships is reductive and dismissive of identities existing within individuals. And of the communities that we all need.

Just please, stop reducing entire identities down to relationships. Its all good and fun to enjoy your ships, but you have to remember the community is bigger than just romances.

my advice to cis writers who want to write trans characters: stop right now. do not do any research. think of the coolest way to fuck around with gender, something that is compelling to you and not like a deep personal tragedy or whatever. go with that.

trans writers should also do this