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This is written at 3am so sorry if it's bad, if anything doesn't make sense feel free to dm me for clarification and I'll answer after I sleep for a few years

I've been second guessing myself about my decision that I'm a binary trans girl for the past year on a regular basis. Having recently experimented with my presentation a bit more and engaged with media that encouraged self-reflection on the topic of identity, I've been thinking a lot about what I really want, how I'm most comfortable being, and how that's different from the person I wish I could be but simply am not (something I'm especially sure other people on the autistic spectrum can relate to). I'm finally pretty confident that I want to do whatever the hell gender is in my own way, even if I still have a significant bias towards femininity as a whole. I just don't feel like I quite belong on either end of the spectrum, and wouldn't want to try and force myself into one. it's not a label I'm going to request that everyone uses for me--feel free to just refer to/treat me as either a girl or non-binary, I'm okay with either (especially the former) and wouldn't say either is inaccurate--but I think that the term demigirl pretty neatly explains my feelings and represents a comfortable kind of in-between. ty a lot to my friends for listening to me ramble about this for countless hours over the months, you know who you are :D

tldr gender is a mess and should be abolished. I still prefer she/her but they/them is alright too! knowing me I'll have changed my mind on this again within the next few months though so look out for another update ig :psywoke:
hope you all have a good night/day!
 
coming out pog

I've formally considered myself team transbian for a while now, but, like... I can get attracted to guys too. This brings the obvious "...biromantic?", but I've never been comfortable with that label. Nothing against bi gang, y'all are fantastic, but thinking of myself as bi felt really not great. I think this discomfort comes from "biromantic" being the logical conclusion of thinking about my romantic identity in terms of gender, when gender is really not the core mechanic for me. The focal point of attraction has never been gender, or even "appearance" generally; it's always been preceded and centered on a sort of connection I am familiar with, one that makes "romantic love" more of a secondary possible modification of that state. I don't mean to oversimplify; gender and looks can play roles too, and not all instances of said connection lead to romantic love. But anyway... I guess demiromantic is a better word than anything else? Neat.
 
Everyone here is very kind and youall have given me the courage to speak about my experiences! Thank you for giving me the courage to.

I guess this is me coming out as bisexual/gay leaning on this site, although it doesn't really seem big to me since I've been out to my family and other anonymous social media (twitter) for 9 months or so.

Where I live it is a very straight, rich community. I want to let people know that I am bisexual, but im worried the lash out will cause negative impacts that I don't want to bear. Since Elementary School, everyone I know has used the term "gay" as an insult. Even when recently when I was hanging out with someone that i consider my very close friends, they called me gay because I played volleyball. I couldn't bring myself to call them out for it, because it would lead to further teasing on the matter and I didn't want them to know that I am lgbtq, because I'm worried they wouldn't accept me for who I am and I don't want to lose friends.

My post has been very all over the place until now, but this leads me to my question. How do i come out to people who in the past have not been so excepting of lgbtq people and others? Im so sick of living in communities where people aren't accepted for who they are.

Reading all the Support in this thread has been really uplifting, and has made me happy. Stay Awesome.


If you would like to talk privately (which is preferred for me) dm me/ friend request me on Discord, Jomatoes#6969
 
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Recently spoke to some very close irl friends about wanting they/them pronouns. They seemed receptive but have continued to use he/him for me during calls, which just has me all kinds of hurt and confused. I've never been someone who presents queer / nb / etc, so I have less of a problem with people I don't know assuming I'm a cis man, but it really do be hitting different when it's your closest friends. I guess half of me is second-guessing myself- did I explain myself properly? Is it really that big of a deal? And the other half just feels disappointed in them for not even making an effort to remember.

A not-insignificant part of me is also afraid of being labelled "cis dude trying to be SpeCiaL." Feelings like these are par for the course even after a year, and I think they are important to hold onto in terms of examining my privilege (s) as someone who's lived as a cis man for most of their life and is still very much in those holding patterns. But this whole situation has really made the insecurity and shame over my gender swell to overwhelming levels and it's just a bit tough to handle on top of school and other obligations. I should definitely broach the subject again soon...but the amoutn of emotional stamina I know it is going to take to bring this up with all of them is pretty daunting. Ofc I welcome any advice or thoughts on my mindset regarding this whole sitch...but ultimately I just needed to vent a bit. Thanks for reading!
 
hey everyone,

i hope you are all doing alright and well, and i hope you stay safe in this time. i just want to show you all my support and hope that people accept you for who you are and that the people around you consider to call you by your wished pronouns. some don't even do that to hurt you, as some people don't even realize it yet and do it unintentionally, but i hope they learn that and im pretty sure they do. but other people, which do that with a harmful intention, i hope they once and for all realize that it can be hurtful to the people they call with the inproper pronounse.

i just hope each and everyone of you will find the acceptance and not only the acceptance, the respect you all deserve, and that everyone treats you with the same respect as you treat these people with. respect is a long process and i know not everyone deserves it, but there are for sure people which do care about you all and only wish you the very best! please never feel excluded, here - we all are - a great community, and everyone is included equally.

please everyone stay positive! positivity is a much needed, valuable point of view we need right now, as a lot of things keeping us concerned and worried, but with positivity and the rightful respect which we can give each other the world should be a better place.

just stay positive, and stay safe and healthy! :heart:
 
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Jakee it is quite dehumanising and insulting for me and others to have come out and discussed extremely personal issues about our lives on this thread only to be followed by very low effort posts saying "guys, marill is transgender XD", by forum moderators no less. but sure, go for the cheap gotcha. hope it makes you feel better bud.
 
Chloe said:
Jakee it is quite dehumanising and insulting for me and others to have come out and discussed extremely personal issues about our lives on this thread only to be followed by very low effort posts saying "guys, marill is transgender XD", by forum moderators no less. but sure, go for the cheap gotcha. hope it makes you feel better bud.
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If you can say the same things to others you should really be able to hear it yourself.

If you had an issue with the memes and truly believed they were as hurtful as you do - you should of taken it to the mod directly in pm's rather than complaining about it in the thread, but hey we all make mistakes.. right!

they are lighthearted memes - most of the time created by folks in the community - so really I don't see the harmfulness in them. Squirtle isn't gay? It's a fake character? It's making fun of coming out? I can't and will not defend the marill meme because it's not mine to defend or have an opinion on - but the "low effort" posts are really just nitpicking at this point. I've seen posts with less effort than all of those memes - and like I said the squirtle meme is cute.

They found a meme, they wanted to share with others like them, because it related to them, the meme itself is not throwing any callouts at anyone and I think you're just being hypocritical at this point. I won't call you sensitive because your feelings are valid, and I do respect them. I just think you need to do some prioritization of your morals here.

don't dish what you can't take, bud.
 
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i get where you're coming from, i found the meme to be pretty cute too and i enjoyed it, but her point is that this is marked as a serious thread. it's not a personal attack on any given person for enjoying the memes but it's like, ppl have this thread watched (myself included) because it's marked as a serious thread for lgbtq+ discussion and if that isn't what people want then that's totally fine but it shouldn't be advertised that way. the memes are obviously totally harmless on their own, it's just that they don't rly belong in the Serious Place. i understand the counterargument that there isn't really anywhere else for these posts to go but if they're undermining other important discussion then maybe they should just be saved for discord servers with your friends. the original callout post was worded needlessly harshly though.
 
Sorry for not getting to this earlier, it was irresponsible of me.
Lilburr said:
the original callout post was worded needlessly harshly though.
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It's quite alright. I've been told I can be intimidating to talk to because of my wording patterns, so I suppose Chloe didn't know what else to do. It's something I'm trying to work on.

It was short-sighted to open the floodgates for those kinds of memes; Cong tends to value more high-effort posting and Chloe was here for that, so the criticism is well-grounded. With that said, I've added a "No Meme" rule to the OP. If people want to continue with the memes, the Smogoff meme thread suffices. Pokepride also has a meme channel, for what it's worth.
 
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I was having a discussion about this with some online friends a few days back, thought it might be interesting to post it in here. My mates and I were talking about the word queer and my personal dislike for it, especially the way it's been watered down to mean just about anything by various different communities wanting a piece of activism. A few days later, in a conversation with my girlfriend, she referred to the general LGBT population as "the queers" and I just about felt my skin crawl.

I cannot stand that word whatsoever. The connotations it has are really terrible, and the sort of people I associate self-identification with queer as a label with are not the type I want to be around. It's a very personal decision that I'm aware of, but it's one of the more confusing pieces of "slur reclamation" that I've seen, if only because it's shifted to also include just about any form of nonconformity.

I wish it wasn't mainstreamed so much. It's a word that's still used in a harmful way to this day.

On a happier note, my nan and uncle have apparently dropped off a bunch of sequins and ornaments that we've had in the family for years at our house and said I could use them to "make an outfit for Pride." It's the first time they've gone ahead and acknowledged & supported me being different. I have barely any sewing experience, but those are getting used somehow.
 
Exeggutor said:
I was having a discussion about this with some online friends a few days back, thought it might be interesting to post it in here. My mates and I were talking about the word queer and my personal dislike for it, especially the way it's been watered down to mean just about anything by various different communities wanting a piece of activism. A few days later, in a conversation with my girlfriend, she referred to the general LGBT population as "the queers" and I just about felt my skin crawl.

I cannot stand that word whatsoever. The connotations it has are really terrible, and the sort of people I associate self-identification with queer as a label with are not the type I want to be around. It's a very personal decision that I'm aware of, but it's one of the more confusing pieces of "slur reclamation" that I've seen, if only because it's shifted to also include just about any form of nonconformity.

I wish it wasn't mainstreamed so much. It's a word that's still used in a harmful way to this day.
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re: "identifying" as q: Thinking about it w relation to queer theorists, "queer" is something you act or feel and not necessarily something you can "be" (something conceived in opposition to identity politics from what i can tell). But it's also become political shorthand for a wide breadth of non-comforming behaviors / people. In that sense I don't think I'd ever call myself queer, but I feel comfortable thinking about lgbtq groups that are marginalized and targeted by social policies / violence as queer. I'd like to think that the latter is hopefully not an extension of said violence, and of course if someone didn't want to be referred to in that way it would just make sense to respect their wishes there.

For me, the use of queer pejoratively (and I guess...non pejoratively? now that its been 'reclaimed') seems similar to the use of gay--if anything I've seen many, many more people use gay pejoratively than queer(I recognize how anecdotal that is and I'm just including it to provide context for my own opinion on the matter). Queer started as describing "non-normalcy" generally (the example I hear thrown about is an old northern english saying 'theres nowt so queer as folk') and became more specifically about gnc / non heterosexual men and women in the late 19th / 20th century. The core connotation is demonizing deviancy or non-normalcy... The 'evil' of existing outside sex / gender norms is taken for granted and not really baked into the etymology itself. That feels like something appropriate to reclaim to me, since the norm is constructed, and existing outside the binaries set up for us by society is ultimately neutral.

Outside of personal usage / identifiers, there is definitely the risk of alienating and fragmenting community spaces (a relatively benign example would be a community event called BBQueer held by the local lgbtq org at my school was pretty contested), which generally feels like a net loss. There's a fundamental tension in the label of queer resisting definition (which I think a lot of people encourage for better or worse), and its supposed political / material value as some kind of descriptor-especially when so much queer theory has yet to trickle down into mainstream discourse or policy in any meaningful way. But ultimately that's something that we just have to be vigilant about in the ways it's being used (you mentioned 'wanting a piece of activism' which feels all too real), similar to other forms of pinkwashing and gay labels. The problem is absorption or being made 'trendy' in such a way that it allows people to ignore the liberation of marginalized lgbtq ppl, and I think there are ways to use queer that avoid those pitfalls.

If the question is why use queer when it runs the risk of alienating people and ultimately is used very similarly to gay / lgbtq / etc...part of the attraction of the term for me is its definitive non-normativity. That is to say, since it by definition implies nonconformity, it has a certain level of resistance to mainstreaming. That's definitely very idealistic since it has already been mainstreamed in many ways lol, but for me that gives it a level of political power that feels useful, even if it's fraught.

This is a tough topic and I'm glad you're opening the floor for it. I've seen the conflict hinted at in a variety of lgbtq places but never really explicitly addressed. Writing this very rambly post (that really doesn't come up w any answers) made me reexamine a lot about how/why I use the word in my day-to-day--I know you weren't exactly asking to have a drawn-out discussion about this but I think it's a good conversation to be having itt. The term being too amorphous / too trendy are definitely huge things to grapple w, and I'd love to hear more abt your / other ppls thoughts on the issue.
 
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brightobject said:
re: "identifying" as q: Thinking about it w relation to queer theorists, "queer" is something you act or feel and not necessarily something you can "be" (something conceived in opposition to identity politics from what i can tell). But it's also become political shorthand for a wide breadth of non-comforming behaviors / people. In that sense I don't think I'd ever call myself queer, but I feel comfortable thinking about lgbtq groups that are marginalized and targeted by social policies / violence as queer. I'd like to think that the latter is hopefully not an extension of said violence, and of course if someone didn't want to be referred to in that way it would just make sense to respect their wishes there.

For me, the use of queer pejoratively (and I guess...non pejoratively? now that its been 'reclaimed') seems similar to the use of gay--if anything I've seen many, many more people use gay pejoratively than queer(I recognize how anecdotal that is and I'm just including it to provide context for my own opinion on the matter). Queer started as describing "non-normalcy" generally (the example I hear thrown about is an old northern english saying 'theres nowt so queer as folk') and became more specifically about gnc / non heterosexual men and women in the late 19th / 20th century. The core connotation is demonizing deviancy or non-normalcy... The 'evil' of existing outside sex / gender norms is taken for granted and not really baked into the etymology itself. That feels like something appropriate to reclaim to me, since the norm is constructed, and existing outside the binaries set up for us by society is ultimately neutral.

Outside of personal usage / identifiers, there is definitely the risk of alienating and fragmenting community spaces (a relatively benign example would be a community event called BBQueer held by the local lgbtq org at my school was pretty contested), which generally feels like a net loss. There's a fundamental tension in the label of queer resisting definition (which I think a lot of people encourage for better or worse), and its supposed political / material value as some kind of descriptor-especially when so much queer theory has yet to trickle down into mainstream discourse or policy in any meaningful way. But ultimately that's something that we just have to be vigilant about in the ways it's being used (you mentioned 'wanting a piece of activism' which feels all too real), similar to other forms of pinkwashing and gay labels. The problem is absorption or being made 'trendy' in such a way that it allows people to ignore the liberation of marginalized lgbtq ppl, and I think there are ways to use queer that avoid those pitfalls.

If the question is why use queer when it runs the risk of alienating people and ultimately is used very similarly to gay / lgbtq / etc...part of the attraction of the term for me is its definitive non-normativity. That is to say, since it by definition implies nonconformity, it has a certain level of resistance to mainstreaming. That's definitely very idealistic since it has already been mainstreamed in many ways lol, but for me that gives it a level of political power that feels useful, even if it's fraught.

This is a tough topic and I'm glad you're opening the floor for it. I've seen the conflict hinted at in a variety of lgbtq places but never really explicitly addressed. Writing this very rambly post (that really doesn't come up w any answers) made me reexamine a lot about how/why I use the word in my day-to-day--I know you weren't exactly asking to have a drawn-out discussion about this but I think it's a good conversation to be having itt. The term being too amorphous / too trendy are definitely huge things to grapple w, and I'd love to hear more abt your / other ppls thoughts on the issue.
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Thanks for giving such a detailed response! I know we don't talk too often, but you're always really insightful.

I'm going to say from the getgo that I have little interest in engaging with queer theory now and probably never will. I don't come at these things with some sort of academic mindset, I'm stupid as fuck, all of these are just feelings.

brightobject said:
That is to say, since it by definition implies nonconformity, it has a certain level of resistance to mainstreaming.
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The lack of definition is something that really bothers me. I had a talk with a few older, millenial LGBT people that I speak with pretty regularly, and I was really baffled by the insistence of some of them that, for example, kink is inherently queer, by virtue of its deviation from the norms of sexuality. Existing as an implication of nonconformity means that queer is all-inclusive in the best and worst ways.

It's also a word I associate with obfuscated identities - I don't believe anyone should feel pressure to label themselves as they want, or to reject labels, but an umbrella term like queer also removes the nuance and difference between different LGBT people. It attempts to make a larger universal "queer" culture or experience that doesn't really exist. Generally, I've found myself unable to relate to the sort of person who self-describes as queer, because it speaks to an experience wrt their gender and/or sexuality that does not align with mine in the slightest.

It's also a term I associate with a particular type of LGBT person - young, liberal, American, very online. None of those are bad things, but it's also people from that crowd that tend to refuse to recognise or downplay people's objections to having it used as an umbrella term.

I'm really glad to have a discussion going to be honest! It's nice to hear your thoughts, it'll be nice to hear what other people think too if anyone shares.
 
Exeggutor said:
Thanks for giving such a detailed response! I know we don't talk too often, but you're always really insightful.
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<3 likewise

And re:engaging w theory, thats fine. If the theory is going to be effective it should be applicable without having studied it for five billion years. I'm certainly not super familiar w a lot of queer theory myself by any means, but my general thoughts on it are if it has no use in helping real ppl parse and deal w their stuff its just academic circlejerking

The lack of definition is something that really bothers me. I had a talk with a few older, millenial LGBT people that I speak with pretty regularly, and I was really baffled by the insistence of some of them that, for example, kink is inherently queer, by virtue of its deviation from the norms of sexuality. Existing as an implication of nonconformity means that queer is all-inclusive in the best and worst ways.

It's also a word I associate with obfuscated identities - I don't believe anyone should feel pressure to label themselves as they want, or to reject labels, but an umbrella term like queer also removes the nuance and difference between different LGBT people. It attempts to make a larger universal "queer" culture or experience that doesn't really exist. Generally, I've found myself unable to relate to the sort of person who self-describes as queer, because it speaks to an experience wrt their gender and/or sexuality that does not align with mine in the slightest.
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I think label-chasing is generally a huge problem but not something i rly attribute to the queer label. If anything it feels like it helps to have a larger umbrella to use while younger ppl are still experimenting and making mistakes...i feel like its a product of the social media era + the hypervisibility of lgbtq communities w how deeply their aesthetics have been co opted and overly classified. From what I have learned about the idea of queerness, it exists in opposition to binaries, including the queer / non-queer binary (i.e....you have to prove yourself or express yourself in a certain way to "claim" queerness). It feels more about recognizing the different and nuanced experiences of all people in the way we butt up against the norms that society (i guess focused around sexuality and gender expression, but since those things are so intertwined with like everything else...). Just like the label of LGBT (and frankly most labels), I feel like their primary use is practical / political in terms of creating some kind of space through which to advocate for one's humanity in the face of incredibly punitive cis/heteronormative laws (which exist everywhere lol). In the sense that all LGBT ppl (hopefully) want laws to be loosened in terms of their slavish obedience to those norms, i think there is a real solidarity there. Or we should aim for one at the very least.

It's also a term I associate with a particular type of LGBT person - young, liberal, American, very online. None of those are bad things, but it's also people from that crowd that tend to refuse to recognise or downplay people's objections to having it used as an umbrella term.
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lol...well u read me dead on haha (except the liberal part ig). Is queer something thats not used as much in the uk / outside of the us?

I guess my general impression of the modern lgbt / whatever movement is that its incredibly fragmented and slowed down by lots of this kind of infighting over labels. I'm not sure where this should stop or start--language obviously has weight and power but ultimately we should still be focusing on material rather than superficial changes. There's probably some point where we can recognize that certain semantic threats are much more dire and significant than others and agree to disagree on the rest. I hope this doesn't come across as me being dismissive lol--i want to keep this conversation going but it's more of a desire to learn rather than trying to get an epic win for queerness. I think what we both want is communities where there is mutual recognition and respect for people's preferences in terms of language and labels...up to a point ofc
 
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How hard is it to like...... just not go to the hot take presses without knowing the history of a thing. Queer, as an umbrella term, quite literally was the most common term for non cis non hetero people in the early 1900s. It was co-opted and used insultingly (much like it’s successor ‘gay’ was) but it’s origins were in self-identification and community.

If you want to talk about the shitty impulse of people to try and smuggle in shitty politics like “kink is queer” great have a blast but it’s not because they use a certain word it’s because they don’t know shit about what they’re talking about. It’s not queer for Janet Susans to find getting spanked by her husband arousing. Queerness is very specifically about non conformity relative to heterosexuality and cis normativity.

I mean I really do think there’s a rich bed of criticism to be levied towards the people who try to make every facet of their personality into a marginalized minority and the hyper shitty extensions that come from that kind of approach to politics, as well as how often they attempt to co-opt existing words to fit that world view. But you’re misdiagnosing that problem as having to do with the word they’re co-opting.
 
Valk put it better than I could have about the "misdiagnosis" of queerness as the disease. To be honest though I'm uncertain what the solution to that problem of such co-opting is, especially when it's happening on such a large scale...bleh. Guess calling it out when it happens is the first and most important step.

Anyway, I took her criticism to heart and ended up doing some digging on the history / usage of queer to check my perception of the word (thanks libgen), figured some cliff notes on the topic* would be nice to share itt. Always cool to learn more abt this kind of history and the existence of these subcultures in the early 1900s* and beyond has been largely made invisible.

This all gets generally very tricky since the modern categorization of ppl into a heterosexual / homosexual binary, et al. (or even the modern conception of sexuality as a category) is a pretty recent invention, so the chronology and history become obtuse very quickly. Honestly, doing research into this made me aware of just how young a lot of these binaries are. The often blurry lines between endonym and exonym (labels created and used internally by a group, and labels used for a group by outsiders) don't help matters, either.

Anyway in the late 1800s/early 1900s, queer / fairy / f*g / etc were used relatively interchangeably by the larger public in referring to the 'gay community' (notable pejorative examples can be found in a lot of the material surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde). Internally, however, each of these words also denoted specific social subcategories. 'Queer' specifically meant men who assumed the (accepted) sexual or cultural roles of women. Men who retained masculine behaviors were not considered "homosexual" if they pursued "queers" or "fairies" (is it just me or is this shit kind of ahead of its time). Sexuality was defined more by gender performance than it was physical sex until the mid-late 1930s / 40s / 50s. The separate decades having to do w the various neighborhood cultures (Euro-American, middle-class, African-American, etc) in NYC adopting the idea of compulsory heterosexuality at different moments in history.

By the 1910s and 1920s, queer's usage shifted as the sexual regime changed (though different people still used it differently). Queer men (whose classification had already started shifted to being based on homosexual preference versus gender presentation) largely considered themselves interested in "normal" men and rejected the effeminate presentation of the "fairy." (definitely feels regressive but perhaps thats just me). Ultimately though, the takeaway for me is how the word seemed more focused on practical concerns, creating more specific classifications to navigate social interactions effectively and subtly.

In the 30s and 40s, "queerness" became a rallying cry for a set of really vicious press campaigns against homosexuality, mostly revolving around the threat to children posed by "queer" people. During this transitory period (s) queerness often became a site of internal violence against "queer" people as the "gay" community sought to establish itself in some kind of normalized space. So the older models of 'queerness' more fundamentally intertwined with gender nonconformity basically got cannibalized as part of the cultural backlash to the blooming gay culture in urban sites during Prohibition - definitely where a lot of transphobia associated with the gay community today can be traced back to.

The difference between queer et al. and gay is actually the opposite of what it might be considered to be now: earlier terms denoted different types of homosexual men - effeminate (in the case of queer), conventionally masculine, etc. The "gay" label brought together, deemphasized their differences through the emphasis on the presumed similarity of character demonstrated through their choice of sexual partner. Sometime around this time is where the idea of "trade" men who willingly had sex with other men while maintaining otherwise conventional lifestyles became a marker of being "closeted" and not "truly gay."Actually wild (like the rest of this book-very excited to keep reading!).

...I couldn't find anything specifically about terminology used amongst lesbians at the time. I found a decent number of sources about the lesbian subcultures in NYC during the 20s and 30s, but nothing specifically outlining their parlance...please someone help me out here!

*Mostly jumping off of the introductory chapters of George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. this post is so heavily indebted to the one book (and is very much an imperfect paraphrasing of its content), so if there's other conflicting info / divergent, obscure histories out there I really wanna see it.

To pull this back into the present though: Again, very cool to learn abt the history of the word in this period / just queer history in general. I'm definitely gonna read up some more on the pre- and post- war eras since it's obviously where a lot of our modern conceptions of gender and sexuality started to take concrete shape. There had always been a gap in my knowledge here before the 70s...so this is only the start! I still think my feelings on the word queer are very much positive. It's been used in a lot of different ways in the past century or so (contrary to my expectations it has very much been used by authorities and the mainstream media as a derogatory term to create real harm-I've mostly associated more pathologic terms with the former, perhaps naively) but the core idea of nonconformity feels like it has kept it coming back.

Re: kink...it feels very similar to the word queer in that it basically just describes something that is "off" (and seems to have originally been used as a noun for a 'sexual deviant' similarly to queer). So how is kink not inherently divergent from the idea of 'vanilla' heterosexuality? I feel like if the argument is a political one, it makes little sense to try to claim something like kink is 100% conforming...isn't the problem/ difference more along the lines of a lack of societal punishment / persecution (depending on one's interpretation of kink)? Or is kink another word that's been co-opted and totally washed out to include every kind of 'erotic' behavior? I admit I've not seen the word used too often so I'd love to see its meanings / differences in function crystallized.
 
This is the culmination of over 4 years of hard work and exploration of oneself, and I couldn't be happier.

When I was a little kid, I never really fit in with boys; instead, I went to play with the girls. I always tried to fit in with the girls instead, and for moments, I forgot all of the gendered norms, and I was able to be my true self. Ever since then, I have tried to do anything to go back to those days, but without me ever knowing. I've pretended to be a girl online, and I looked at other women and thought, "I wish I was that person." I acted much more feminine, adopted a higher pitch voice and tried to grow my hair out, all for a goal I didn't even know I was aiming for. The main thing that kept me down was the radical transphobia present in my surroundings, which had placed a deep inner transphobia in me. Whenever I had considered that option, I thought to myself, "No, I can't be trans, I don't want to be trans" and I let myself suffer for longer. I also have extreme anxiety which prevents me from speaking my real feelings and instead just using a coping mechanism like humor or even breaking down. Life was like a giant egg, where my feelings and thoughts were contained in that egg, bound outside of the rest of the world, and I didn't have the strength to hatch.

But, like all eggs, it finally cracked open.
 
I'm not sure where to begin this, but I'll try and make this coherent.

It's been a while since I've posted here. A year in fact, since I came out. With Covid hitting, It's hard to say whether a year has flown past or dragged on. Regardless, I don't think I'm quite the same person who first sat down to write a post that would still disguise some of my true feelings. I felt trapped, and not just by my gender identity but the results of bottling in emotions for years. I had to act a certain way, talk a certain way, because letting people see the inside of me was much scarier than hurting people. Even after I came out, I felt I was always going to be who I was before, no matter if I had changed or not. I would always be seen like that, and expected to act accordingly. So I kept doing terrible shit, even if I wanted to stop. It was an excuse for not wanting to be better as much as possible. It took a lot to want it, to want to be someone who people could respect and like. And I thought that would be it, once I found that motivation, but equal parts of me felt like a fraud, and still do. I've gotten opportunities to start over that some have never gotten, and I've barely done anything with them.

I came out to my mom in July, and my cousin in November, with varying results. My cousin is supportive and I love her for that, but based on the results with my mom it may be a bit before I ever tell my dad, especially considering some of the comments he's made and continues to make. I never thought growing out hair or doing benign stuff like shaving my legs could be a source of so much derision. I wish I could be that person who stands up to injustice or just stands up in general, but that has never been me. It hurts more than anything to be spat at and told I don't care about anyone or anything. I'm scared at how much I've internalized it. I thought as time passed I would grow to like how I look a bit more, but if anything I'm angry at how little progress I've made. When I first posted here, I was still lying to myself. I wanted to believe I didn't have dysphoria because I was so used to invalidating everything I felt. Yet no matter how much I want to not have to deal with hating almost everything about me, it's a reality.

It's undoubtedly been a year of highs and lows. My depression has gotten even worse and my anxiety affects me seemingly constantly. There are some days where I can barely do anything but lay in bed and think about who I am. I have a severe lack of motivation and it often boils into school and work. On the other hand, I've been able to be express myself far better online, and through that I've met people who I cherish with all my soul, even if I don't think I deserve to know them. I've had brushes with dark places on multiple occasions, and I fell in love. I've been harassed on here for simply being myself, and also fully fell in love with music. I think the most accurate way to describe this year would be an experience. There's been tears, laughter, frowns, smiles, bigots, friends. I've done so much wrong and I guess this has been my year of trying to not only live with that, but make things right. I can't say I'm fully there. I still doubt myself, both in character and gender. But it's perspective from others that helps me sort what is true and what I want to put on myself. Above all though, I'm Kate, I'm bi and trans, and you bet your ass I'm not going anywhere. Thank you
 
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