Starting to feel pride month ready

Happy Pride 🏳️‍🌈

This is a Jess O'Thomson appreciation post. I get that people are scared and frustrated, but abusing Trans+ advocates online is fucked up. I’ve endured it. Jess endures it. So many people doing this work endure it. It’s quite unhelpful to have that to endure alongside everything else.

Uh

Estro Junkies really does elevate its source material. The webserial took a bit of time to go from meme to something more heartfelt. Likewise, it doubles down on a lot of what the webserial had to say about the intersection of race, gender and sexuality. What I didn’t expect is…

The way Kathy’s arc would get reframed. In the original, she is cringe and annoying and we are meant to laugh at her until it is pointed out that the way we (and the characters) are laughing at her is actually heinous. In the adaptation her neurodivergence is much more directly invoked, and the…

Way she is treated is much more immediately legible as shit. This doesn’t absolve her of her bad behaviors, and that’s a strength of the novel. But it makes her much more immediately real.

The book is genuinely very very good; and while it leaves behind some of the webserial’s humor in ways that do create a few pain points, they ultimately make me feel like reading the webserial will enhance your experience if you read the novel!

Apropos of absolutely nothing youtu.be/yb3T-hIeKpM?...

If a significant chunk of trans women are finding themselves on 4chan, that's not a defense of 4chan, it's an indictment of wider society.

!!!

Oh sick it’s transphobic opinion column month

happy pride month (now with alt text) 🌈🌈🌈

Ah yeah people have started making AI videos of trans women being confronted in bathrooms to be released today lmao

If you're considering watching the FIFA World Cup this June, consider reading a men's sport novel set in a world of cup sizes instead! It's much more homoerotic I promise you

For this Pride month, consider supporting queer art about a normally underrepresented demographic: (mostly) cishet* men!

This is gonna be the worst most transphobic pride month of my life

An autistic woman hiding in a toilet cubicle at work can reportedly leave whenever she wants, alright?

HELL YEAH

When the first gender clinics opened in the UK, it was a prerequisite of accessing care that you admitted to your psychiatrist that you knew you were not really a woman, and could never really be one. If you insisted that you were a woman, you were kicked off the service for being delusional

House of the Underworld is a dense book, maximalist in the way that The Persephone Effect is maximalist. It really wasn't supposed to be, at least at inception, but in the end I feel like everything in it is so necessary.

Oh to be accused of- and having technically committed- deicide and matricide and then begin seducing a 3rd god who's also the one investigating you as you're covered in various gore. Persephone, my love. You're perfect. I'd say dont ever change but uhhhhh... I don't think that's fair to ask of her.

An Estro Junkies/RCBG chapter without at least 3 occurrences of you screaming at the heavens asking why have you been forsaken is considered a dull affair. The average is at least 6 per chapter...

so much fat liberation theory is hopelessly mired in the self-loathing trap of dismissing all attraction to the fat body as fetishistic.

"changing sex shouldn't relegate you to an underclass" is also a broad statement that doesn't need to nail down every dimension of changing sex--social, phenotypic, or otherwise--while being concise about the heart of the issue.

Mfw I read a book about racism and then complain about the racist character not being sufficiently redeemed (it makes me feel sad :( ) and then I'm like, hmm what was this book about again?

Madalithea's story is neither misery porn, nor fluffy happy coming-out eggfic. It's fundamentally a story of considerably epic scope, where the trans woman gets to be really quite flawed, does suffer quite a bit, but suffering isn't the sum of her existence.

It's hard to articulate, but in many many ways you'll almost never find a story like this in tradepub (excepting, maybe, Wrath Goddess Sing?), though of course Madalithea's a character with far humbler beginnings than Achilles.

This was truly such a joy to read, it's sicko, it's lovingly sardonic, and deeply relatable. Small enough in scope to devour in one bite but set in a world big enough to satisfy while leaving you gasping for more

As I read through @ciricegray.itch.io's House of the Underworld (preorder here), it strikes me that this work--a sci-fi epic about a trans lesbian nun navigating capricious Greek gods and her own suicidal ideation--is one of the very few dealing with the themes it does, with this scope.

It's a big novel, intense and indulgent in how deeply it explores its protagonist's arc: she's a priestess who ends up dealing with not just one cult (in which she grew up) but, essentially, three. She's turned into a tool but never an abjected object. Her story's very much about her interiority--

--and she Really Goes Through It, a lot, like any mortal who's drawn the attention of the gods in the myths themselves. It's very hard for her to obtain agency due to circumstances, but she manages to do so, hard-won, and her story's all the more potent for it.

Seconding this. Y'all should definitely preorder.

Estro junkies: goddammit, Nichole

Removing the Laura POV is also incredible, she's such a horrifying force of nature when seen only from outside

"there were moments in Estro Junkies where I felt like I was reading outtakes from Trans/Rad/Fem" I would recommend reading Brown/Trans/Les because there are some themes of EJ you definitely missed that enhance the reading experience a LOT imo

why are you racist

hot take but I don't like making fun of "new trans girl" outfits. clothes should be fun. so what if that girl wants to dress like Ramona Flowers. it's a rad as hell look. so what if she wants to dress like a catgirl in fishnets. the world needs more of that.

Yeah this is why it's vital that we preserve our traditional structures of forming community and passing on wisdom, Susan's Place---

you know the "passing privilege" conversation is a lot more complex for twoc when like, even entirely provably cis women with children are often called men as a form of racist degendering but I guess I won't elaborate further because what's the point

like even when I'm legibly a woman I'm also legibly a racialised and queer and not-quite-fat-but-definitely-not-skinny one these days, so the question of "do I pass" has a more complicated answer than "I totally look like what everyone expects a woman to look like"

and perhaps we'd be better served if these conversations were not impeded by women turning up to self-harm in the form of declarations of their inability to ever be perceived as women, but I guess I'm heartless for saying that

I mean

You know I definitely didn't remember His Dark Materials being so heavily about FGM when I read it as a kid but damn

Seeing some Estro Junkies livereads rn & I just want to say…if you’re not going to mention race at all? Completely glossing over Rashmi (A MAIN POV CHARACTER!) Ru, Tahani, & heck, even Laura’s struggles? Read the damn book over again. This is a book about racism. Internalize that.

if you don’t mention the brown women that are very present and well crafted and HUMANIZED in critically acclaimed book “brown women have to deal with racism” i don’t think you are ready for anything past the cat in the hat, to put it kindly.

Crunchy Nut Cornflakes are the slutty latex nun costume of cereal

Night out with the Bad Wolves AwoooooooOOOOoooooo

The irony about the kind of racism women of colour get from white women is that we're so often treated like explosive raging beasts when we have to be the ones constantly minding our words, tempers, and behaviours to make sure we're not eradicated by White Woman Nuclear Fallout.

Legit question for rural Elysians – How do I kill the 30-50 feral colossi that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?