Hey Now, You’re An All Star

Engaged in some drawpile therapy with @maddlong after we both finished SIGNALIS - I was particularly happy with the sleepy MYNAH. The game is a beautiful and finely crafted survival horror, I can’t recommend it enough.

Minor spoilers maybe? It’s mostly just gags and memery based around in-game lore.

Very Normal drawing of a raspberry girl that I’m definitely not going to infect with mold

I feel like no tags or morning visibility reblogs is being good at this site. Nearly everyone whose username or icon I recognize from viral posts (and the people who have 5 million strangers trying to pick fights with them at all times because they're "popular") have absolutely no tags for anything other than extra nonsense that didn't go in the posts. And occasionally content warnings

tumblr's collective personality sometimes feels like a morality challenge from a saccharine and severely defanged 19th-century fairy tale retelling where the Good Daughter meanders into the woods and says "dopamine go brrr" and the cheerful woodsprites laugh like bells and whisper "posts that have 10K notes To Me" and "investing at 5 notes" and bless her such that pure clout will fall from her lips whene'er she speaks so then the Wicked Daughter storms into the woods with a perfectly curated queue with three guilt-trip calls to action per post and a lengthy diatribe prepared on why likes without reblogs are tantamount to spitting in her hair and the cheerful woodsprites impassively scroll past and then six hours later vaguepost about how much they dislike seeing a specific take that doesn't name any names but sounds suspiciously like her so the Wicked Daughter anonymously hits up their askbox to complain and for this she is cursed to be screenshotted and mocked in untagged anonymity for all eternity and also spit frogs or something

"BUT... SHE'S HUNGRY? DON'T YOU WANT TO FEED HER? YOU DON'T NEED ALL YOUR MEAT, DO YOU?"

I’m planning on redrawing all of them, wish me luck

Life cycle of our Sun, from beginning to end~

my hearing has been aided and holy shit is this how you guys hear all the time

reblog to take a bite out of this styrofoam cup nobody can stop you go ahead and do it

I'm sorry that the terfs made their way onto your blog but it does feel good to see you support trans people. Thank you for that

Always.

I think, charitably, that the discourse going down on that post is an extrapolation and over-focus on one element of the point I was making: that for me, determining with certainty that I was cis was a rather fraught process. I was presented with many alternatives, but underlying their imposition on me was the oddly regressive idea that the things I liked, the principles I valued, the parts of myself I was proud of were not permitted of women. My whole life I got smacked with the background radiation that I couldn't like being strong because women aren't allowed to be stronger than men. I couldn't like being loud and boistrous because women aren't allowed to take up space. I couldn't be a math geek because women aren't smart. It was all deeply regressive misogyny from day one, but I started getting hit with it slathered in a fresh coat of paint - all those assumptions still held to be true, but now there was the out that I could do all those things if I just wasn't a woman.

Concluding that the underlying bioessentialist premise was wrong was very important. Absolutely none of those statements were true, and were only ever maintained by cultural saturation, goalpost-readjustment when they were actively disproven, and the occasional bout of lying with statistics to pretend they weren't just Shit All The Way Down. The core premise that certain things were only permitted of or possible for men was bullshit, and I didn't need to surrender the gender I liked best in order to play in the spaces I wanted to. I could simply exist the way I was already existing. I didn't need anything else.

The misinterpretation is the assumption that this being true of me means this is everybody's relationship with gender. I turned out to be cis, so for me, feeling that holding onto my assigned gender wasn't allowed was distressing - just another invocation of the same bioessentialist bullshit I'd been dealing with since the preschool playground. This is because misgendering is fundamentally denying that a person has the right to express themself the way they want. When aimed at me, it says I'm not performing traditional femininity well enough to deserve my pronouns. The same disrespect is the root of misgendering when aimed at trans people. "Perform your gender to my satisfaction or I will confiscate it."

The problem is, bioessentialism is 100% ingrained into the terf playbook, which is why, for instance, all their shitty talking points about trans athletes eventually boil down to "no woman can ever defeat a man in any contest because we are simply naturally weak and stupid and there is nothing we can do about it" and quite frankly nothing disgusts me more than the defeatist acceptance of the very lie that feminism is dedicated to overcoming. Instead of accepting that the paradigm of bioessentialism is a false dichotomy right from the jump, they embrace and weaponize it against the people whose existence proves the dichotomy is a lie. If gender essentialism is fundamentally false, then it is nobody's fucking business what anybody does with their gender. If the lines don't exist, nobody needs to enforce them. And yet there the terfs go, hunting down people whose lives are none of their business and trying to argue that they represent some great and terrible evil, some downfall of society made flesh, something that makes it totally correct and normal for them to spend so much time thinking about strangers' genitalia. They want this to be a noble crusade so badly they won't even examine what flag they're flying.

I love and support the trans people in my life and will always, always stand on the side of your right to exist, but alongside that, terf rhetoric especially disgusts and infuriates me because it is, at its heart, utter cowardice. The world told them they were weak and stupid and inferior and they fucking believed it. And now they think Fighting The Good Fight For Women means turning around and using the same paradigmatic weapon that hurt them to hurt the people whose existence outside the binary proves the weapon is a lie. They're the same shithead schoolyard bullies who made me believe my entire existence was foundationally wrong for years of my life and I will never, ever side with them or the shitty, cowardly rhetoric that contributed to the loneliest years of my life.

Figure out who you are and do it on purpose. Find the real source of the misery in your life and try fighting that instead of the other crabs in the bucket. Trans rights.