I still really enjoy this. Super cute.

[image1: Text of a TV game show board: “The Most important thing your parents teach you” 

image2: masculine presenting person, comedian Jon Richardson, in a pink collared shirt and blue blazer sits between two people on a game show. person says “Cooking, cleaning, sewing - that’s what I learned from my dad.”

image3: Close up of person, continues to talk: “My mom taught me how to make jokes based on stereotypical perceptions of gender.”]

flirtingwithparadox:

cute

(Source: awesome-, via genderfork)

This looks amazing!!!

Yolo Akili- “Are We The Kind of Boys We Want?”

Powerful video about femininity in gay male culture and about choosing to love ourselves as feminine black men.

via grrlyman

(via projectqueer)

Batman doesn’t care about gender expression. Justice is for everyone… oh batman, you make me laugh so hard.

[image: twogif graphics, 1st: a man who shape shifts into a ‘female’ appearing body in a pink dress, blond hair, and hat saying “you wouldn’t hit a lady, would you” 2nd: Batman, filling the full image saying “The Hammer of Justice is unisex.”]

via mybatmans

When I was a kid, I LOVED Toxie. A big bond between us was that he had a handkerchief and so did I -everyone always made fun of me for using one… they still do actually, but here was a superhero using one! He used his “hanky” whenever he cried, which was usually because he was emotionally moved. I loved that he was sensitive and how he loved his tutu, and that he was also very masculine. The show was only on a short while, but for a long time after I would play his character in games among Captain Planet and Xmen. My friends were grossed out by his ugliness and didn’t get why I would want to be him, but I thought he was handsome and amazing. I remember not being able to put my finger on exactly why I idolized him, but I knew it had something to do with the fact that he was a tough boy who also girly… and cared about the environment… and was an activist… and had a pretty girlfriend. Genderfucked memories. 

um, this is amazing. And shockingly similar to how I looked and acted when I was little.

Video: Riley lectures about gendered marketing

Anonymous asked: Are you biologically male or female?

Welp, in order for me to answer this question we first need to figure out exactly what it means to be biologically male or female. Is it bodily sex characteristics, and if so, then is that primary (genitalia), or secondary (muscle distribution, body hair, etc)? Is it chromosomal make up or hormone levels? What about mental/psychological identities? All of the above are biological elements that impact how we identify a body. We have concepts of what is male and female, but there are also intersex spectrums of sexes and trans* spectrums of sexes that go within, between, and beyond the binary. One may argue that we all start as something, and that is our “biological sex” and everything else is an alteration (which can’t be applied to intersex spectrums but could be applied to trans*). But if sex includes the mind, well, we only have one of those and it never starts or stops anywhere. Is biological sex defined by the body or the brain? I feel one can’t go without the other.

You may be thinking “this is wishy-washy, non-essentialist crap.” I’m not trying to skew reality so it is defined in a way that suits me. Rather, I am pushing against the constructs humans have created to define reality. Biological sex, and identifying bodies, is a cultural practice based off of a learned binary language. We are raised to label certain traits as certain sexes by default; ABC equals female, EFG equals male – this is a cultural construct of sex. Where did we get the idea that there are only two when we know there are not only two? Binary sexed bodies may be the majority, but the majority is not the entirety, and that is where language and labeling fails. If a female has a penis, is her body a female body or a male body? She is a female, so it must be a female body – and since identities are mental, and therefore biological, she must be biologically female, right? If someone identifies as non-binary and their body is culturally labeled to be female, then they take medical steps to obtain more culturally recognized male features via taking testosterone or having is that body a female body or a male body? Is it either one? We have no labeling system to discuss this. Societal constructs about bodies and scientific labeling does have (very practical) uses, but that isn’t all there is. Humans own different kinds of biological bodies. A body could be male, female, both, or neither.

So which am I? Well, I could be anything. Whatever I am, the concept of being either male or female does not apply. For more explanation on this answer, you can visit this post. Thanks for writing!

Anonymous asked: I'm really sorry if this comes off the wrong way, but were you born male or female? I know that you advertise as genderqueer, but I just wanted to know.

In this space of (internet) learning, I’m not offended by your question so don’t worry about it coming off wrong. Actually, I’m asked this frequently, and I like to answer it with another question: What drives us to want to know? Sometimes we ask because we want to find people who are similar to ourselves, but most of the time we ask out of curiosity or confusion. I understand both the confusion and the curiosity; I’m not immune to feeling it either. When I do feel it, I remind myself that my desire to know (outside seeking to connect with other trans* people) is not just a harmless curiosity, but a learned practice of oppression. I don’t shame myself for wondering; humans feel the need to label things because it helps us learn about the world, but our methods of identification/labeling system were designed to ignore difference. We are all taught to categorize people as something society recognizes, and when we run into someone who doesn’t fit, we may feel puzzled, frustrated, or uncomfortable. To alleviate this, we try to squeeze that person into whatever normalized label is closest – that is when this (unintentional) oppression takes place. I think that instead of forcing the world into old ideas, we need to force new ideas into the world. We must pry open our brains to create a new understanding of humanity and learn to be ok with not knowing exactly what someone was, is, or might become.

That was my long answer, but to re-cap in short: Sometimes I think I can do more to promote an understanding about gender variance by not answering questions about my own. This way, instead of explaining me within the boundaries of old ideas, it makes people create a way to explain me with new ones. :) 

Anonymous asked: Any suggested texts on gender as performance? I don't care for the idea/theory/opinion honestly but I want to learn more and read from writers of all view points.

Butler’s two texts are Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender (I’m actually fond of Undoing Gender, it is pretty interesting). Also, to name a few, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, Becoming a Visible Man (Jamison Green) and Two Truths and a Lie (Scott Turner Schofield) talk about gender as performance through a trans lens, but you’d have to read into it to see it - the books don’t address it directly. By far one of the most interesting is Nobody Passes by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

“When I came out, I didn’t know anyone gay, queer, or trans* and my only feasible connection to people like me was my campus’ Women’s Studies department…”

This blog is in reference to this Tumblr question.

transtheorist asked: What do you think about "gender as performance"? I find it really questionable. Performance implies an audience which yes there is one but there are many aspects of my gender that are just for me. And how do you perform man or woman, this theory seems to imply there is one, or one main way to perform these genders recognizably. And what if you're a butch woman or a femme boy for instance, how do you perform that and still be recognizes as a man or woman. How does one perform as non-binary?

This is an awesome question, so awesome that I turned it into a blog! 

My short answer (that is just for you!): Before saying anything, I want to put it out there that I have some strong feelings about this topic. To be nice, I feel that gender performance theories are outdated and over-simplified. To be honest, I call bullshit. As a gender variant person, I have never been able to get over my aggression towards gender performance theory. According to its ideas, gender is chosen - meaning I chose to be trans, I chose to be femme, I chose to be genderqueer, and I also can choose to not be these things. I don’t see how any gender variant person can not be insulted by that. I’ll own it: I have baggage. When I was coming out, the closest thing I had to a queer resource was the Women’s Studies department. When I got there, faculty, students, books, films, you name it, they all repeatedly told me that I was just performing, and if I wanted to, I could do it differently. To someone who (up until that point) had no exposure to queer or trans stuff and was feeling confused, isolated, and angry… it was excruciating. I was looking for community support, and all I got was an isolating fight. Don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of love for Women’s Studies (or whatever the depts. are called now days), but part of me will never forgive “Women’s Studies” or gender theory for putting me through that.

“Gender as performance” was one of the women’s empowerment movement’s moves to legitimize gender difference and subversiveness, primarily referencing expression but at the time, gender expression and gender identity were thought to be the same thing, There is no ‘just for me’ part and that is the main problem with the theory. There is no identity element, just a choice of masculine or fememine never even considering the possibility of non-binary. But off paper, how do we choose what traits we want? We figure out what feels right based on our identity and work from that. If our decisions about presentation (or “performance”) are based out of some internal drive to express ourselves, is it really a choice? And if we put on clothes that are not expressive of what we feel we are, does that change who we are? If someone is non-binary and puts on a dress – is that person not expressing their gender identity because their identity is non-binary but a dress is gendered? That dress becomes what the person wearing it wants it to be. It’s all about how we conceptualize it – and that requires a smashing of cultural assignments. In the workshop you were in last month, I went on and on about how gender is the key to societal recognition. If you are a femme boy or butch woman, you can not be recognized by society as anything but “other” without challenging gendered society itself. That, I think, was part of the original argument of gender perfomancists – they didn’t want to be defined by presentation and wanted to challenge gendered society. The problem is that people took it too far, enabling it to delegitimize every form of gender expression and identity. A perfect example of this is found in the Femme community. Femme-phobia comes from gender performance theory; If you are choosing to be feminine (in theory terms, perform femininity) then you are supporting the patriarchy that sexualizes women as beauty objects and selling out. There is no option for someone to like being feminine for the sake of enjoying femininity. This would lead one to believe that femininity is bad and that a woman can not be feminine for her own pleasure. Also, gender performance theories are at the root of second wave feminism’s rampant transphobia – we are imposters because we decided to be trans out of weakness, perversion, or cause we’re just plain evil, cause that’s what a theory for equality should do. It is arguments like these that lead me to believe gender performance theorists were delusional.

How does someone “perform” non-binary? I think a person has to be on a stage to do perform it. You may think of some expressive traits more deliberately than others, but all are defined by a personal element that disallows it to be a performance in how gender performance theory intended. Non-binary in real life is, like any other gender expression that is based on an identity; there is no one way, and no wrong way, to do it.

I ramble much more thoroughly on this here on my blog. But don’t let those theories get you down! Life is much more complicated than any book or paper can ever capsulate. You can do right by your own life by living it for the sake of learning who you are, not who other people think you should be.

“Please, rest assured that if I have chosen to enter a public washroom in spite of my long and arduous history with them, I have taken the time to note which door I am about to walk into, and that I am confident I have chosen the lesser of two evils.”

reminds me of me.

Still has a GID doctor statement requirement, but its a form of progress…

To clarify, this is a policy made for intersex individuals, so I should say “GID-ish” because depending on the person GID is not necessarily placed on all intersex folks.

It’s fitting my gorgeous pin-up girl pal marlameringue directed me to these.

Men-ups” by Clickandclash on Flickr.

[image: series of photographs of men in culturally masculine typed clothing and objects, some with facial hair, or visibly dirty, positioned in recognizable poses associated with early 20th cent. pin up girl poses. Includes a lumber jack, army, weight lifting, carpenter, baseball player, and construction workers.]

(via marlameringue)