Inside the Little Plastic Castle

The Tomboy Survival Guide by IvanCoyote explores growing up a tomboy AFAB and then transitioning. Coyote treasures the support they did get from their family, as well as detailing how strange it feels when everyone around you expects something you simply can't deliver. They spent a lot of time growing up in the Yukon, so there's lots of delicious Northern detail. Coyote's description of their tech-school harassment while studying to be an electrician brought back my experience as a "non-traditional student" in the 1970s. I'm very glad nobody pissed in my toolbox, though.

You are going to need to find your freak family. Your misfit soldiers and their weirdo army. Keep your eyes open. That little boy at school that the bigger kids are picking on. Ask him if he has a secret name he wants you to call him. Tell him yours. Tell him he is beautiful. Tell him you see all the ways that he is strong like you and it has nothing to do with throwing a ball. Tell him you will be there at the other end of the string between you, listening into that tin can if he needs you.

The world will be full of messages telling you to be something other than what you are. Telling you that you are too skinny or too fat or too dark or too hairy. Too poor for pretty. Low fat hide your belly quick loss how to love less and find a man maps to time machines that only ever go backward. The magazines are full of this nonsense.

Save those magazines. They can be very useful. You can duct tape them over your jeans to make shin pads for street hockey and quick, cheap armour for fencing or general swordplay. Touché.

https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/T/Tomboy-Survival-Guide

WisCon ONLINE! reg closes 20 May 2020

The 44th WisCon was scheduled for the Concourse Hotel here in Madison over Memorial Day Weekend. They’ve swerved to an online iteration. Here’s your chance to try out WisCon and see if you like it.

Online memberships range from free (for those of us who don’t have extra money right now) to $55 (for those of us with extra money). Read more details about programming at the registration page.

Testers Wanted for DW Mobile Features

roadrunnertwice has been busy updating our elderly codebase right and left. They’d love to have mobile users, particularly Android, find problems with the latest code push.

Standard Model (of top, bottom, and other things)

fictional_fans is a pan fannish community, and yesterday extrapenguin blew my mind with this excellent prompt, which I honestly wish to nominate for Yuletide:

We've probably all heard about tops and bottoms, but why not expand this into the rest of the quark family so we have six options to play with? A character can be not only top or bottom, but also up, down, strange, or charm. (Some sources even call top and bottom truth and beauty, respectively!)

https://fictional-fans.dreamwidth.org/58681.html

Butches & Studs

are the unicorn chaser, from the NYTimes style magazine, of all places
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/13/t-magazine/butch-stud-lesbian.html

cosmolinguist explores the gender pitfalls of defining a space as welcoming to "women and non-binary" people. Relevant to my interests because my wonderful comics club membership policy is "cis men have staffed the gates into comics for too long, so they're not welcome in clubMX." We've tried to express that in positive terms — here are the folks who are welcome — but given our rejection from traditional comics circles, essentially (hah!), the quoted negative definition above is what unites us.

people are doing an unreasonable thing in order to achieve a reasonable goal. I'm sure any of us could think about times in our lives that cis men were horrible to us, all the way from #EverydaySexism to actual trauma. And especially when it comes to groups for people who are queer/kinky/polyamorous/anything about sexualities and relationships, safety becomes even more important. But keeping all the cis men out isn't the way to do that. I'm not even saying "not all men," I'm saying "not only cis men." Not all predatory, boundary-crossing, consent-lacking behavior comes from them. Keeping them out is not necessary or sufficient for a space to be safe or welcoming.

full post

hellofriendsiminthedark precisely captures why disabling metaphor is harmful

In a world where blindness is inherently understood as a debilitating and limiting condition, "you're blind to the red flags" does mean "you're ignorant of the red flags."

In a world where sight is inherently understood to be one of many modes for gathering information, but is also understood to be neutral in value and not in and of itself individually essential in the grand scheme of gathering information and perceiving a legitimate model of the physical world, "you're blind to the red flags" would mean "you may not be able to see the red flags, but you can still intuit their existence. You can still obtain information about their presence using your other senses and other information around you, for example the ways in which the red flags interact tangibly with things you can perceive. You can still understand what a red flag would signify without having to be able to identify that specific denotation of a red flag. You may sense the effects of the red flag using the senses that actually matter in your experience of the world and thus posit their presence just the same as a metaphorically sighted person would by perceiving them through sight."

full post

Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity by Arlene Stein (Author)

four of four stars

print, ebook

Appreciated this book, aimed at cis folks like me. ( review and long quote )

WisCon offers pronoun-preference stickers for our member name-badges. (Their use is completely optional.) I spent the long WisCon42 weekend in a space where physical appearance was disconnected from gender assumptions. One of the many things I love about the con is we dress exactly as our fancy takes us, from PJs to three-piece suits to tutus to ballgowns to geek fatigues¹.

Protip: Don’t assume gender. Pause when someone raises their hand: many years of gender essentialism are imprinted in the lizard brain. Instead, refer to items displayed on the body², for example “The person in the yellow shirt” or “You, with the flashy fingernails.”

( I share my experience of misgendering someone in hopes of educating other cis people )

We Wear the Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America—Brando Skyhorse and Lisa Page, eds.( 4 of 5 )

Transcendent: the Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction ed. by K.M. Szpara ( 5 of 5 stars )

Trish Trash Roller Girl of Mars, vol 1 by Jessica Abel ( (4 of 5 stars) )