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i haven't showered or brushed my hair in a week and now my hair is so gross that i just want to hack it all off instead of trying to wash it
there should be a 'shit christian tumblrinas say' tumblr like w-e or bullshit-inc
and just reblog vomohiper and softy
and just reblog vomohiper and softy
i’ve been trying to write this post all day. i started it 13 hours ago. i’m still not sure if it’s worth saying or not. but i just keep coming back to the first thing that person said to me in their first post: “now working off the fact that i have never heard or seen you speak of being trans*.” like, at what point am i obliged to talk about being genderqueer? at what point am i obliged to make this a part of my public discourse? and risk being told that it’s not enough, that i’m not genderqueer enough?
then again, i guess i’ve already been accused of that.
there’s a reason i don’t make a big deal out of my gender identity, and the reason is that (like millions of other people) i find talking about it extremely painful and upsetting, in part because i can never separate issues of gender from body image & the fact that i have been fat my whole life. i ordinarily just cannot talk about it at all because it involves a bunch of physiological crap and a lot of body issues and the fact that i was raised by two amazing women who just wanted their daughter/granddaughter to be a happy, beautiful southern belle like all the other little girls around, and instead they ended up with me.
and they gave me years of beautiful handsewn pageant dresses and float-riding (yeah i rode on the fucking floats, until i stopped placing in beauty pageants when i was 7 or 8 or so because i was too chubby, and my mom started feeling bad, and i knew that my weight was why i wasn’t riding on floats anymore, and my mom gave up putting me in beauty pageants and i started doing talent contests and theatre instead).
and they gave me years of going to tea parties with beautiful porcelain dolls in frilly dresses, and a beautiful pink and white bedroom with rose bedecked wallpaper, and years of stage makeup and contest gowns and sequins and eyebrow waxing and the times i had to practice walking with a book on my head, practice walking in high heels, practice walking with my arms tucked gracefully inside—
—oh, haha, the endless number of times i was told to turn my hands in, because they naturally fall at my sides facing straight out, which is apparently weird and abnormal and unfeminine and makes me look like a gorilla, and it wasn’t until i was in college that it hit me like a lightning bolt one day that i didn’t have to constantly struggle to turn my arms in anymore, and it was a total revelation. but i still do, because not doing it still feels wrong, and like i am failing at being a girl—
—and despite all that, all that training and practice and all those lovingly made gorgeous pageant dresses (sorry, mom, i’m really sorry) they got the amorphous blob that is me.
they got the girl who kept wanting to wear the men’s suits and ties and hats she found in her attic. they got the girl with the hormone imbalance and all that implies about my non-normative gender appearance.
they got the girl who kept writing heroines throughout her life with androgynous names like Alex, Sam, Darcy, and every single one of those heroines started out crossdressing, and every single one of them, in all of my stories, eventually morphed from the ugly crossdressing duckling into a beautiful ballgown-wearing swan, and i wanted so, so badly for that girl to be me, but it never, ever was.
and i didn’t know what that meant, what that was saying about me, until years later.
when you’re growing up in the very rural south in the pre-Internet 90’s, you don’t have any kind of community to tell you who you are, unless you are white/conservative/christian/etc. i didn’t know that there were words for people like me. i didn’t know i was a theatre nerd. i didn’t know i was a geek. i didn’t know i was a slasher, or even a fan. i didn’t know i was queer.
i didn’t know that there was a name for this constant feeling of confusion i felt about how to be a girl, only that it was this constant and oppressive thing. One of my most vivid memories is of going shopping with a friend of mine when I was in 8th grade, and she was trying on clothes right and left while I stood around awkwardly, because none of this was for me. And she tried on this gorgeous blue and white floral sundress, and she modeled it for me, and I nearly cried because I wanted to be her so much, and yet she was an alien, she was a gorgeous creature from another planet, and I was marooned on a rock somewhere in space with no idea how to get from where I was, with my weird body and my fantasies about androgyny and wearing only men’s clothes and having only male body parts, to where she was, so happy and pretty and feminine.
gender to me has always been very closely tied in to weight, and a bunch of stuff that’s too complex and personal to go into, and I recently read this post and felt like it made so many things make sense for me about how gender identity isn’t recognizably tied to fat, but you aren’t recognized as androgynous either, so you’re just sort of hanging out in this nebulous area no one wants to acknowledge—and that’s exactly how I feel all the time, that’s why I said “amorphous blob.” because that’s my whole life, feeling hopelessly unable to be female and hopelessly unable to be anything else, because try expressing a gender preference when every trip to the store is a goddamn harrowing suspense thriller: will you be able to fit into the largest size of pants the store has in stock that aren’t made of fucking stretch-knit polyester? (You won’t.) will you be able to find anything to fit you at all that isn’t cheaply made or festooned with gaudy patterns or enormous flowers? (You won’t.) If you cross the aisle to the men’s department, will you be able to find things that fit you? (Maybe. They won’t be pants, but they will almost certainly be argyle.) (And I didn’t even get the courage to cross over to the men’s aisle until I was in my late 20’s, so, you know.)
imagine growing up this way, growing up where the start of gender expression, what clothes you wear, was the single biggest and scariest part of your life because of your weight. imagine having to go to three or four stores just to find one nice outfit that fit you, and then imagine trying to find a personal style of expression—fuck gender expression, any expression. imagine not being able to know that you’re not gender-normative because all anyone ever impressed upon you was that you were not weight-normative.
imagine growing up thinking that this was your whole problem: if you’d just lose weight then you’d become this magically pretty polished pageant contestant, you’d have everything figured out and you’d stop wanting to wear men’s suits and kiss other girls and shave your head and erase your breasts, because all these things were just side effects, weren’t they, of not being able to be thin. If you were thin, then you’d be a woman. It’d be magic.
i wanted to be Belle, i wanted to be Ariel, i wanted to be Anne Shirley, i wanted to be Jasmine. I wanted to be the heroine of a Regency romance, I wanted romance and fairy tale dances and ballrooms and evening gowns. and then whenever I looked at myself in the mirror that all came crashing down because that was not me, that was never me, and I have never, never known how to be a girl.
imagine coming to depend on men’s accessories because they were things you could wear, things you didn’t have to worry about whether they fit, and being so relieved for the comfort of ties and fedoras when you were a teenager, because they weren’t jewelry and makeup and they didn’t make you uncomfortable, and they also weren’t controversial.
so ties and hats were, to teenage me, a symbol of “things i could wear even though i was fat,” and it was only when i was older and able to understand myself that i realized that my wearing “ties and hats” wasn’t just about being fat but about struggling to cope with how difficult it was (and is) for me to be cisnormative.
because i didn’t know who i was. i didn’t even know that i could be anything other than a girl who was forever failing at being a girl. i didn’t know that there was a word for people like me, and that word was “genderqueer.” and when i found that word, i was so immediately fucking grateful for it that i cried.
i am so grateful everyday for the concept of genderqueerness, because it’s nebulous and fluid, it’s an amorphous blob like me. it doesn’t erase anyone, it doesn’t enforce a gender binary—it just is.
it’s like—there’s this ridiculous horror novel that i can’t remember the name of but somehow wound up reading twice as a teen. In the climax the soul of our heroine has been displaced by a demon, hey, it happens, so she’s floating around trying to find a new body, and so she flies “into the welcoming mist that was Character X.”
that’s what genderqueerness is like to me. it’s like i spent my whole life displaced from the body i was supposed to be in, and then suddenly there was this WELCOMING MIST OF GENDERQUERNESS that i was able to fly into. and it fits, it’s roomy and comfy and something i can wear.
but i’m still stuck in this weird nebulous position where i feel like such words don’t belong to me. example: i fantasize constantly about having breast removal, but then I’m always like, “but I couldn’t have that surgery, they wouldn’t give it to me, because I’m not transitioning, I just don’t want to have breasts.” because I’m a big fat woman with huge floppy breasts, i look like “earth mother” or more accurately “italian matriarch.” I don’t feel like transitioning or identifying as transgender is for people like me any more than i feel like high heels or ball gowns or girlness is for me.
And part of this is me feeling like gender roles were never written for people of my body type to begin with, and part of this is me wondering if maybe what i’m calling “genderqueer” is really just “refusal to conform to gender roles while still being cisgender”—and then i remember my heroine Alex and how she always dressed like boy!Eponine so no one would know she was a girl, and I remember my heroine Nance and how she refused to wear dresses and how she was based on a real woman who crossdressed at her own wedding, and how i took one look at the real Nance’s picture and thought, yes, i want to write about her.
i’m so afraid that someone might read this and reblog this or send me anon asks telling me that i’m not really genderqueer, that i’m just pretending, and that i’m just confused or repressed or something. i was so afraid, during the exchange of reblogs i had with the person last night who told me that i was doing genderqueerness wrong, that they were right and i was somehow completely mistaken about my own gender identity, and i had a mild panic attack over the idea because i’m turning a milestone age this fall, and that milestone age is what most people on tumblr would consider very old, and me, i’m just getting started, and i’m only really just starting to truly get comfortable with telling people that i’m queer and genderqueer and that those are the words that encompass me, not words like bisexual or pansexual but queer, not words like trans* or agender or gender neutrois but genderqueer.
those are my words and it means so much to me sometimes to have been able to have found them out for myself, and know that i can belong to them and they can belong to me. please don’t take them away from me or tell me that i can’t have them, because if i can’t have them, then i’m back to being an amorphous blob. and no one should ever feel that way. even if that person is me with all my faults.
i’m afraid to post this, because if there are two things that i never ever talk about it’s being fat and being genderqueer, and here they both are wrapped up in this incredibly intense post that i am terrified of anyone actually reading.
i guess what i really want to express is that to me, telling people that i’m genderqueer is a limitless description of the infinite variety of gender expression and identification. to me, telling people that i’m “not-quite-cisgendered” is an easy way to describe how all that is genderqueer about me presents itself to other people.
to me, being genderqueer involves everything i’ve said in this post, all that confusion and lack of knowing how to be, constantly wishing i could slip back and forth between gender identities whenever i wanted, constantly wishing that i could find a way, given my size, to explore wearing men’s clothing for real and not just desperately hunting for clothes across the aisle at Target, constantly wishing that i could just erase my gender completely and just be a person, complete ignorance about what i currently am—all that struggle and constant failure to adhere to gender roles, and all of the feelings that go along with these things.
i don’t know about anyone else. i can’t speak to anyone else’s experience. but to me, that’s what i mean when i say that i’m queer, genderqueer, and “not-quite-cisgendered.”
then again, i guess i’ve already been accused of that.
there’s a reason i don’t make a big deal out of my gender identity, and the reason is that (like millions of other people) i find talking about it extremely painful and upsetting, in part because i can never separate issues of gender from body image & the fact that i have been fat my whole life. i ordinarily just cannot talk about it at all because it involves a bunch of physiological crap and a lot of body issues and the fact that i was raised by two amazing women who just wanted their daughter/granddaughter to be a happy, beautiful southern belle like all the other little girls around, and instead they ended up with me.
and they gave me years of beautiful handsewn pageant dresses and float-riding (yeah i rode on the fucking floats, until i stopped placing in beauty pageants when i was 7 or 8 or so because i was too chubby, and my mom started feeling bad, and i knew that my weight was why i wasn’t riding on floats anymore, and my mom gave up putting me in beauty pageants and i started doing talent contests and theatre instead).
and they gave me years of going to tea parties with beautiful porcelain dolls in frilly dresses, and a beautiful pink and white bedroom with rose bedecked wallpaper, and years of stage makeup and contest gowns and sequins and eyebrow waxing and the times i had to practice walking with a book on my head, practice walking in high heels, practice walking with my arms tucked gracefully inside—
—oh, haha, the endless number of times i was told to turn my hands in, because they naturally fall at my sides facing straight out, which is apparently weird and abnormal and unfeminine and makes me look like a gorilla, and it wasn’t until i was in college that it hit me like a lightning bolt one day that i didn’t have to constantly struggle to turn my arms in anymore, and it was a total revelation. but i still do, because not doing it still feels wrong, and like i am failing at being a girl—
—and despite all that, all that training and practice and all those lovingly made gorgeous pageant dresses (sorry, mom, i’m really sorry) they got the amorphous blob that is me.
they got the girl who kept wanting to wear the men’s suits and ties and hats she found in her attic. they got the girl with the hormone imbalance and all that implies about my non-normative gender appearance.
they got the girl who kept writing heroines throughout her life with androgynous names like Alex, Sam, Darcy, and every single one of those heroines started out crossdressing, and every single one of them, in all of my stories, eventually morphed from the ugly crossdressing duckling into a beautiful ballgown-wearing swan, and i wanted so, so badly for that girl to be me, but it never, ever was.
and i didn’t know what that meant, what that was saying about me, until years later.
when you’re growing up in the very rural south in the pre-Internet 90’s, you don’t have any kind of community to tell you who you are, unless you are white/conservative/christian/etc. i didn’t know that there were words for people like me. i didn’t know i was a theatre nerd. i didn’t know i was a geek. i didn’t know i was a slasher, or even a fan. i didn’t know i was queer.
i didn’t know that there was a name for this constant feeling of confusion i felt about how to be a girl, only that it was this constant and oppressive thing. One of my most vivid memories is of going shopping with a friend of mine when I was in 8th grade, and she was trying on clothes right and left while I stood around awkwardly, because none of this was for me. And she tried on this gorgeous blue and white floral sundress, and she modeled it for me, and I nearly cried because I wanted to be her so much, and yet she was an alien, she was a gorgeous creature from another planet, and I was marooned on a rock somewhere in space with no idea how to get from where I was, with my weird body and my fantasies about androgyny and wearing only men’s clothes and having only male body parts, to where she was, so happy and pretty and feminine.
gender to me has always been very closely tied in to weight, and a bunch of stuff that’s too complex and personal to go into, and I recently read this post and felt like it made so many things make sense for me about how gender identity isn’t recognizably tied to fat, but you aren’t recognized as androgynous either, so you’re just sort of hanging out in this nebulous area no one wants to acknowledge—and that’s exactly how I feel all the time, that’s why I said “amorphous blob.” because that’s my whole life, feeling hopelessly unable to be female and hopelessly unable to be anything else, because try expressing a gender preference when every trip to the store is a goddamn harrowing suspense thriller: will you be able to fit into the largest size of pants the store has in stock that aren’t made of fucking stretch-knit polyester? (You won’t.) will you be able to find anything to fit you at all that isn’t cheaply made or festooned with gaudy patterns or enormous flowers? (You won’t.) If you cross the aisle to the men’s department, will you be able to find things that fit you? (Maybe. They won’t be pants, but they will almost certainly be argyle.) (And I didn’t even get the courage to cross over to the men’s aisle until I was in my late 20’s, so, you know.)
imagine growing up this way, growing up where the start of gender expression, what clothes you wear, was the single biggest and scariest part of your life because of your weight. imagine having to go to three or four stores just to find one nice outfit that fit you, and then imagine trying to find a personal style of expression—fuck gender expression, any expression. imagine not being able to know that you’re not gender-normative because all anyone ever impressed upon you was that you were not weight-normative.
imagine growing up thinking that this was your whole problem: if you’d just lose weight then you’d become this magically pretty polished pageant contestant, you’d have everything figured out and you’d stop wanting to wear men’s suits and kiss other girls and shave your head and erase your breasts, because all these things were just side effects, weren’t they, of not being able to be thin. If you were thin, then you’d be a woman. It’d be magic.
i wanted to be Belle, i wanted to be Ariel, i wanted to be Anne Shirley, i wanted to be Jasmine. I wanted to be the heroine of a Regency romance, I wanted romance and fairy tale dances and ballrooms and evening gowns. and then whenever I looked at myself in the mirror that all came crashing down because that was not me, that was never me, and I have never, never known how to be a girl.
imagine coming to depend on men’s accessories because they were things you could wear, things you didn’t have to worry about whether they fit, and being so relieved for the comfort of ties and fedoras when you were a teenager, because they weren’t jewelry and makeup and they didn’t make you uncomfortable, and they also weren’t controversial.
so ties and hats were, to teenage me, a symbol of “things i could wear even though i was fat,” and it was only when i was older and able to understand myself that i realized that my wearing “ties and hats” wasn’t just about being fat but about struggling to cope with how difficult it was (and is) for me to be cisnormative.
because i didn’t know who i was. i didn’t even know that i could be anything other than a girl who was forever failing at being a girl. i didn’t know that there was a word for people like me, and that word was “genderqueer.” and when i found that word, i was so immediately fucking grateful for it that i cried.
i am so grateful everyday for the concept of genderqueerness, because it’s nebulous and fluid, it’s an amorphous blob like me. it doesn’t erase anyone, it doesn’t enforce a gender binary—it just is.
it’s like—there’s this ridiculous horror novel that i can’t remember the name of but somehow wound up reading twice as a teen. In the climax the soul of our heroine has been displaced by a demon, hey, it happens, so she’s floating around trying to find a new body, and so she flies “into the welcoming mist that was Character X.”
that’s what genderqueerness is like to me. it’s like i spent my whole life displaced from the body i was supposed to be in, and then suddenly there was this WELCOMING MIST OF GENDERQUERNESS that i was able to fly into. and it fits, it’s roomy and comfy and something i can wear.
but i’m still stuck in this weird nebulous position where i feel like such words don’t belong to me. example: i fantasize constantly about having breast removal, but then I’m always like, “but I couldn’t have that surgery, they wouldn’t give it to me, because I’m not transitioning, I just don’t want to have breasts.” because I’m a big fat woman with huge floppy breasts, i look like “earth mother” or more accurately “italian matriarch.” I don’t feel like transitioning or identifying as transgender is for people like me any more than i feel like high heels or ball gowns or girlness is for me.
And part of this is me feeling like gender roles were never written for people of my body type to begin with, and part of this is me wondering if maybe what i’m calling “genderqueer” is really just “refusal to conform to gender roles while still being cisgender”—and then i remember my heroine Alex and how she always dressed like boy!Eponine so no one would know she was a girl, and I remember my heroine Nance and how she refused to wear dresses and how she was based on a real woman who crossdressed at her own wedding, and how i took one look at the real Nance’s picture and thought, yes, i want to write about her.
i’m so afraid that someone might read this and reblog this or send me anon asks telling me that i’m not really genderqueer, that i’m just pretending, and that i’m just confused or repressed or something. i was so afraid, during the exchange of reblogs i had with the person last night who told me that i was doing genderqueerness wrong, that they were right and i was somehow completely mistaken about my own gender identity, and i had a mild panic attack over the idea because i’m turning a milestone age this fall, and that milestone age is what most people on tumblr would consider very old, and me, i’m just getting started, and i’m only really just starting to truly get comfortable with telling people that i’m queer and genderqueer and that those are the words that encompass me, not words like bisexual or pansexual but queer, not words like trans* or agender or gender neutrois but genderqueer.
those are my words and it means so much to me sometimes to have been able to have found them out for myself, and know that i can belong to them and they can belong to me. please don’t take them away from me or tell me that i can’t have them, because if i can’t have them, then i’m back to being an amorphous blob. and no one should ever feel that way. even if that person is me with all my faults.
i’m afraid to post this, because if there are two things that i never ever talk about it’s being fat and being genderqueer, and here they both are wrapped up in this incredibly intense post that i am terrified of anyone actually reading.
i guess what i really want to express is that to me, telling people that i’m genderqueer is a limitless description of the infinite variety of gender expression and identification. to me, telling people that i’m “not-quite-cisgendered” is an easy way to describe how all that is genderqueer about me presents itself to other people.
to me, being genderqueer involves everything i’ve said in this post, all that confusion and lack of knowing how to be, constantly wishing i could slip back and forth between gender identities whenever i wanted, constantly wishing that i could find a way, given my size, to explore wearing men’s clothing for real and not just desperately hunting for clothes across the aisle at Target, constantly wishing that i could just erase my gender completely and just be a person, complete ignorance about what i currently am—all that struggle and constant failure to adhere to gender roles, and all of the feelings that go along with these things.
i don’t know about anyone else. i can’t speak to anyone else’s experience. but to me, that’s what i mean when i say that i’m queer, genderqueer, and “not-quite-cisgendered.”
tbh i don't understand how any woman can be xtian
or a member of any judeo-christian religion
or a member of any judeo-christian religion
yes i've had the odd complaint
but on the whole i've been a saint
to those poor unfortunate souls
but on the whole i've been a saint
to those poor unfortunate souls
http://friendlyangryfeminist.tumblr.com/post/60022696824/friendlyangryfeminist-sailorr-mars
lol did torokun1 do it?
lol did torokun1 do it?
"You know what, Steve? I am done with this! I’m done with your paranoid insistence that I shouldn’t risk my life in the library with anybody but you, I’m done with pretending your scones are delicious - they’re terrible, Steve, learn to bake - I’m done with listening to your anti-government tirades and I am done with you!”
nona can u post more deets on the philippines pre-spanish contact?
wait isn't subby like some kind of shitty atheist
how can she still be with a ~feminist roman catholic or w/e
how can she still be with a ~feminist roman catholic or w/e
…and it’s not like I can knock on their door and explain that I’m a night-owl mystic with a serious inclination towards seventh-sense empathy, so could they please not show each other they love them at night?
yesterday i drank way too much and couldn't climb up onto my bed but i woke up on the floor with my comforter and pillow down there with me and a bottle of water, a bottle of gatorade, a bag of pretzels and a box of triscuits next to me with the lights off and my door propped open just a little bit so people could check on me
i love my floor so effing much i can't get over how sweet that was
i love my floor so effing much i can't get over how sweet that was
softy and subby's relationship always seemed unequal
wait it's a lesbian couple called softy and subby
lqlql
the only thing that could make that better was if they were both dudes that went by those names
lqlql
the only thing that could make that better was if they were both dudes that went by those names
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