And Thats Okay Too - Tumblr Posts

You can just Be, cyarese

Quick reminder that you don't need a solid sexuality! You can just be in love! Or not be in love! Or have a gender! Labels are a choice, not a requirement. All you need to do is be someone you like being! If labels help with that, great! But they are not required. You don't owe it to anyone, so don't feel pressured to choose labels if they aren't your thing!

yeah, love is love. Even platonic love and queer platonic partners. Even aesthetic love. Even love without sex. Even familial love. All love is love.

I think this also reaffirms my belief that a lot of y'all would be much happier people if you stopped getting outraged at absolutely every opportunity regardless of intent, and decided to offer more authors (published authors, fanfic authors, anyone who creates fictional content about fictional people!) the benefit of the doubt if it doesn't seem like they had malicious intentions when they fucked up writing a Marginalized Character.

Because even in this very clear case of kinda fucking up the writing of a nonbinary character, I can still choose to be pleased that more published stories are making attempts to include positive nonbinary rep (or neutral rep, tbh, in the sense of 'they're just a character, an attempt was made at least to treat them like the rest of the characters, and they're also nonbinary') than I am annoyed at poor execution.

And do you know what happens when I make this choice?

My life feels a little less grim and a little more bright, because I can recognize positive intention and appreciate that this author cares about and sees nonbinary people as people, instead of focusing on directionless outrage that they fucked up the execution and wrote a stereotype that I don't vibe with.

Learn who your enemies are, and there's a solid chance you'll be a happier person for it.

Just finished a book that had a nonbinary character from a culture of people who all were culturally opposed to binaries in any form, and thus all used gender neutral language.

And okay. Look. Here's the thing.

That character is cisgender in their culture.

Cisgender just means identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth.

If the cultural expectation is that gender is nonbinary regardless of body, then preferring any binary gender, again regardless of what body the character is born with, would make the character trans, but identifying as nonbinary does not.

And I got the very strong sense that the author of the book didn't realize that.