Never Forget About Katherine Hepburn's Tboy Swag

I’ve been in debilitating pain lately. I don’t talk a lot about my chronic pain online here. But I think it’s worthy of talking about.

People don’t realize just the effects of chronic pain. What it does to you, and how it affects you. Yes, I’m in pain ALWAYS. And yes, sometimes it’s worse than others. But just because my pain is worse one day, doesn’t mean my pain is gone the next. I want people to realize the extent and life with chronic pain that’s debilitating.

I use my wheelchair everyday now, and most of the time, all day, everyday. My laundry is STACKED cause I haven’t been able to do it. Mountains of clothes in my room. I don’t shower often cause it causes me even more pain and is exhausting, so I have gotten sores. From using my wheelchair so much, I’ve also started to develop mild pressure sores. It sucks!

I’m out of my pain medication currently, just took my last dose, and I’m still suffering. Every day of my life, I’m suffering. And now, more than ever. My pain has continued yk get worse, with no end in sight, and it’s sad. It’s so sad.

I hate being in pain, and I wish more people talked about debilitating pain that’s makes you stuck in bed all day.

what does ‘afab presenting’ even mean. are they showing their pussy or what

Likes to charge reblogs to FUCKING cast

fun thing about herding and/or generally neurotic breeds: they are really good at following rules you have instituted, but they will also make their own Dog Rules they will follow stringently whether or not you like it

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been “I don’t like AI”, “I prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, “I’d rather make my own mistakes”, and “I don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

3x3 Mini paintings, themed Dark and ghost types!

You can find the originals here:

My Shop

Heyyy!!

So I've recently read a lot of your comics about top surgery, and I really resonate with your experience (I haven't had it myself but I'd like to). I've recently been exploring my own gender and realising I might be non binary, but I guess I feel sort of an imposter in that I want to keep my name and pronouns (afab), despite feeling like I never got the memo about what a "woman" is, which I know is fine, but I guess I was wondering how the shift from your agab into realising you were nb felt?

Like, you seem to describe your gender as sort of unknowable and indefinable, and I guess that's sort of how I feel? I just want to be... More me. I guess what I'm really asking is, how would you define/feel about that shift into realising you were nonbinary, do you still feel connected to your agab, how do you reconcile the two?

Sorry for the long ask!

Hi, this is such a good question! I actually DO still feel pretty connected to my agab. I feel like I am a girl but also more than a girl but also not enough of a girl, simultaneously. (Weirdly, I never ever feel like a woman, and definitely not a man, but I do feel like an adult at least some of the time.) Top surgery was 100% the right decision for me; my body feels so much more correct and I am grateful every single day this procedure was accessible to me. (I was on a low dose of T for a year and a half too, and I basically just got biceps and a sliiiightly lower voice out of it. We stan.) I simply don't have strong feelings about how these things do or do not map onto gender identity or other people's perceptions of my gender. I am generally perceived as female, and that's fine! Like, close enough! I often feel somewhere BETWEEN cis and trans, or even between cis and nonbinary, and sometimes I joke that I'm just "nonbinary for insurance purposes." I mostly use she/her pronouns, although won't object to they/them. I like my "feminine" name -- I chose it myself years ago for reasons unrelated to gender and I have no plans to change it again. In terms of gender presentation I'm usually somewhere in the "tomboy femme" zone. Basically, I've been through a medical transition but not a social transition. Which is not very common, or at least I haven't seen much representation of it! (Be the bad trans representation you want to see in the world, i guess??)

Even though the words are often used interchangeably, I feel more alliance to genderqueer as a label than nonbinary, because nonbinary feels too clinical and "third checkbox"y to me, whereas genderqueer feels more expansive and undefinable and dynamic, with space for the ways in which I both am and am not performing girlhood correctly. When pressed to pick a gender word for myself, that one feels the closest. But if I'm filling out a government form or whatever? Yeah sure F is fine.

A lot of where I land with this stuff, though, is just kind of relaxing my grip on language. Top surgery was a relief, it helped me feel present in and connected to my body. Ultimately it doesn't matter much to me how much of that was *gender* dysphoria and how much of it was just... something I wanted, a way to make my body feel more like mine, to align my mental image of myself with the thing I had to stuff into clothes and walk around the city every day. I believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, and in making our lives as easy and comfortable and joyful as we can for ourselves, without needing to have a clean and tidy explanation for our choices. It is very possible to know with reasonable certainty that you want something, that it will be a net positive for your life, without being able to articulate, even to yourself, WHY you want it. It doesn't need to have a bigger meaning than ahh yes, this feels right. At this point in my life, I'm more invested in marveling at the sheer improbability of my own existence than in wedging myself into the taxonomy of known and acceptable gender narratives. I'm just a person, here for the merest twinkle of a moment in cosmic history, making soup and knitting baby hats and admiring bugs and singing off-key and cutting my own hair and doing my gosh darn best to light my tiny patch of night sky with stories so that you (and you, and you) feel less alone on your own journey through the unfurling dark. Gender is just such an inconsequential detail in the narrative of my life, and pretty open to reader interpretation anyway.

Not having to wear bras is pretty great though ngl

i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

Being transgender is more than just "not identifying with your AGAB."

^This definition is very limiting, and has little room for intersex perspectives. In fact, it also doesn't align with many perisex non-binary/genderqueer experiences (Example: Perisex multigender people who fully identify with their assigned gender, while simultaneously aligning with other genders.)

And sure, some intersex people have a consistent assigned gender, depending on their variation, and how it affects their body. But many intersex people have a COMPLICATED experience with how they were assigned and viewed growing up.

Intersex people can be given a coercively assigned gender at birth (CAGAB), which may not align with their future puberty, or how they are viewed socially. [Example: A person born with ambiguous genitalia, who is given unneeded non-consensual surgery to make the genitalia more "binary", and assigns a gender based on that non-consensual procedure.]

Intersex people can be given an assigned gender at birth, but a reassigned gender after birth (RGAB.) [Example: An AMAB intersex person, born with a penis/penis-like genitalia, however later they are discovered to have more "feminine" physically traits, and are reassigned female and raised female because because its "easier" or "more fitting"]

Intersex people can be given a socially imposed gender (SIG) [Example: A person who is "female" in every way, but during puberty is discovered to have hyperandrogenism, and develops a more masculine-associated body because of it - oftentimes, that person will be mistaken as a male by society, or treated as AMAB by those around them.] Some people even experience multiple SIGs at the same time, depending on the scenario [Example: being expected to behave as 'male' by some people, and 'female' by others, depending on how they are dressed or what events they attend.]

Are you going to tell someone who was given a CAGAB the opinion of the doctor who mutilated them is more important than theirs? That a person who was CAMAB, but originally had a vulva, that they cannot identify as transmasculine?

Are you going to tell someone who was AFAB, but RMAB that they can't identify as a trans-woman because of their "original assignment", which is no longer relevant to how they were raised?

Or, on the flip side - are you going to tell someone who was AMAB, but treated as 'female' from their SIG, that they can't identify as transfem, because even though they are AMAB, they weren't "treated as AMAB"?

And what about intersex trans people who were AXAB (assigned X at birth?) What about people who were UAB (unassigned at birth?) Are you going to deny or affirm their transness based on your view of them?

Transgender and cisgender aren't mutually exclusive terms.

Personally, we think transgender should be defined as "people who identify against [eurocentric] historically-imposed expectations of gender."