Queer Joy - Tumblr Posts
My school uniform: White socks for girls and black socks for boys
Me, an agender:
Grey socks lol
Before starting testosterone, I was terrified. I heard people (mostly terfs) describing how it destroys perfectly healthy female bodies. How it changes you in a tragic and irreversible way.
Now that I’ve been on T for about 3 months, I’ve never been happier. The first time my voice cracked after starting T I felt an indescribable feeling of euphoria. When the peach fuzz on my face got more noticeable, I looked at myself in the mirror for almost 20 minutes straight.
I’m not saying testosterone is for everyone, but don’t let transphobic rhetoric scare you from making that decision for yourself 🩵
here’s your daily reminder that cringe culture is dead.
read/write fanfic, identify as xenogender, use neopronouns, have a complex gender identity, get completely obsessed with things, stim noticeably, kin characters, watch kid’s shows, draw fan art, wear funky earrings, and enjoy what you do.
(is this post mostly just for reassuring myself? yes, yes it is)
I’m not sure if any other trans people relate to this but even though I’ve been going by Alex for around 3 years now, getting things with my name on it still feels big and important for me. Seeing it in writing reminds me of how far I’ve come in my transition. I just got an autograph (from Mads Mikkelsen ☺️) and that reminded me how comforting it is to have my name associated with important moments in my life. On certificates, souvenirs, birthday cards, etc. I don’t know if that makes sense. I can’t seem to find the right words.
Wanted to share my queer joy playlist and also ask if anyone had any recommendations for songs to add? My general rule for adding songs has been that the song must explicitly celebrate queer experiences (whether through the lyrics and/or video), but depending on the country of origin that bar is lower into the realm of strong subtext. So far I only have English, Korean, and Mandarin songs, and just a single song in both French and Japanese. I am looking to expand into adding songs in other languages so please share the songs that bring you queer joy! 🏳️🌈
Heartstopper literally stopping my heart every episode. Picture me crying like a child every ten minutes. I can’t deal with that. And then the Taylor Swift scene in the last episode ? That killed me.
The show is everything to me. It does feel like a warm hug, a sunny day, a safe space.
I dream and wish for a day where I can find myself in a friend group like that. I long for finding this found family.
I am so glad this show exists like that. I know it sounds cheesy, but the world got a little bit more colorful today.
I haven't seen this circulating here on Tumblr, so I decided to make my own post.
last saturday, in Porto, there was a pride parade going down the street and this old man was standing there, by his front door, waving the portuguese flag. most people on the parade probably thought the same: old person waving the national flag? he's probably protesting against the parade, he's a nationalist of some sort.
then the old man called for that person to come near him. the whole parade stopped. everyone just.. stopped moving. they didn't know what to expect, and most expected the worst. and that person decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and approached the old man. and then... they traded flags, he hugged the person and then he waved the pride flag happily. everyone cheered him.
such a wholesome moment. 🥹❤️🌈
watching heartstopper as a 20 year old who struggled so much with mental health and having unsupportive friends healed my heart in a way that no other show has. for so long i didn’t think i deserved a happy ending but this show changed that and im so so happy that young queer kids get to see other queer kids be happy and getting their happy endings, even if they have a mental illness that sometimes hinders their mind.
we’ve always deserved our happy endings and i’m so glad we are getting them
One of the best things God ever did for me was make me queer.
- my crush on a close friend helped me through my depression
- met my current irl bff through a queer dating app
- so many of my friends are queer its amazing
- larger understanding of relationships outside of cishetamatnormativity that actually strengthened my bond with my former bf into what we have now.
- Fashion! Fashion! Fashion!
- The. Owl. House.
- figuring myself out strengthened my relationship with myself
- talking about queer shit and making queer art makes me so happy
- made me think more critically about my religion and made me closer to God (I know this is far from a universal experience and I love you guys my heart goes out to you)
- look at all the pretty flags and the really cool and fascinating labels and pronouns ect out there and the pure rebellion of it all
- my ace identity may be confusing as fuck but it sure taught me a lot
Every day I thank God for making me queer and that queer people exist.
we desperately need to show that queer joy is a thing. and that being gay is a not just a curse leading exclusively to discrimination
On Speaking My Truth (Whatever The Fuck That Means?)
The Kind of Manifesto of a Demigirl
Sometime after midnight at a house-party I found myself tipsy in a tree-house with my friends. Naturally, we did what any slightly intoxicated, red-blooded 20-somethings would do when left alone late at night in a secluded location; discuss gender. “My gender is kind of like whatever was happening in Under the Skin but like, less fucked up, if that makes sense,” I said. Apparently it did. Either that or my companions in the tree house were too intoxicated or too polite to point out the obvious incoherence of my utterance.
This was no isolated incident. Often I find myself attempting to articulate my experience of gender through equally elusive expressions.
“I am a girl but in a camp way.”
“I am a girl but like, ironically?”
“I am a girl in the same way Pepsi is Coke.”
“I’m not a girl, I’m just a girl shaped thing.”
“I am what happens when you order ‘woman’ from Spirit Halloween.”
“Being a demigirl is kind of like how sharkboy is at once both shark and boy but can’t be described as boy or shark alone.”
“You know how Loki is a god and transcends the human limits of gender but like sometimes just takes on the form of a milkmaid or something and for all intent and purpose for that period of time they just are a milkmaid but on a much deeper more fundamental level they remain removed from these quaint notions of gender? Yeah, well that’s what my gender feels like.”
Why do I fall back on flowery metaphors, obtuse analogies and comedic comparisons? Why do I gesture desperately at some existential state, unable to point with precision at something exact and apparent? Why can I not speak plainly? Why can I not make my meaning clear?
Have you heard the myth of the veiled statue of Isis? It’s been reimagined by poetic types more than once or twice and whilst it has been retold many times over, in many different ways, the broad strokes are always similar enough. In Sais, a statue of the Goddess Isis is concealed by a veil. “I am all that has been, and is, and shall be; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised,” reads its inscription. Sometimes, however, a hubristic young man animated by intrigue does indeed succeed in lifting the veil. Yet, happiness rarely comes from seeing the truth of the statue so plainly - so directly. Without the veil’s mediation, the young man is driven to madness having gazed upon that which no mortal is made to comprehend, or is overcome with depression, because where is the beauty and allure of life without mystery?
There is much philosophising that can be done with this story and the richness of its allegorical potential cannot be overstated. Still, there is one question that recently I have kept returning to with each retelling. What if the veil is not hiding anything? What if truth, reality, meaning - or whatever other slightly pretentious and very philosophically loaded noun you wish to employ - exists within the veil, not beyond it?
Let me explain. Some people like to look at poetry, allegory and metaphor as follows: these literary flourishes and flights of fancy obscure meaning - they are pretty but imprecise ways of warping what you are really trying to say. They are veils over the statue of Isis. Maybe they are beautiful veils, soft and silky and made of luminous fabric but they are veils nonetheless and it is what is behind them that really counts. Behind the veil is what you actually mean to say, “Truth” with a capital “T”. So when faced with poetry, allegory and metaphor we try to peek behind the poetry, the allegory, the metaphor. Desperately, we seek for what lay beyond all this mere aesthetic fetishism. We read poetry and try to strip it of the poetic, to figuratively unveil the statue. But, what if there is no statue? What if all we get is the veil? What if the veil conceals nothing, but is revealing to us everything - only we are too arrogant, overzealous, unobservant or distracted to see it? What if my vague, my imprecise, my periphrastic, my emotive, my evocative, my ambiguous, my flowery, my fluid expressions are not opaque and improper articulations that have some more definitive, more tangible truth beneath them? What if I was never speaking unclearly?
Here’s the thing, gender is weird as fuck. It’s messy and multifaceted and experiences of gender are nuanced and idiosyncratic and diverse. I have devoted countless hours to reading paper upon paper on gender as identity, gender as social class, gender as concept, gender as social kind, gender as a conferred property, gender as something socially constructed, gender as internal experience of oneself, gender as real, gender as fake, gender as real in some ways but fake in others, gender as fake in real ways but real in fake ways and whilst maybe I now may be better equipped to construct some well-defined and precise, overarching theory of GenderTM that will be useful in an ameliorative analysis, on a more personal level my experience of my own gender has failed to grow less vague. This is not to say I am confused about my gender. In fact, right now I feel as comfortable in my gender as I have ever been. Rather, I am trying to say that there is nothing I can do to make my experience of gender not nebulous. It will never be neat or simple or clean and so, the only language I have to talk about my gender authentically is language that allows for multiplicity and ambiguity and, above all else, feelings and the phenomenal. When my task is to communicate the unclear, would my message not be less clear if I conveyed it with words that are clinical and precise? Would that not be dishonest in its simplicity? Misleading in its neatness? Near negligent in its reductiveness? I want to find words that are rich with emotions and implications and connotations and hope that I can arrange them in such a way that I can evoke the feeling of certain states of embodiment, of existence, of experience as opposed to culling my utterances of any actual meaning, leaving them sterile and dead because I decided to lie to myself and pretend these are things that can be spoken of plainly. I want to speak about my gender more poetically, not less.
I feel it is those of us who identify with labels that linger in the liminal - the labels that pull on the loose threads of the assumed coupling of assigned sex and gender identity - that are derrided for the inability to offer satisfactory articulations of our own identities, as if this is an easy task, as if the language we have at our disposal was made with us in mind. I wonder if those who scoff at our poetry, our allegories, our metaphors have wondered if we find it so hard to find the right words because we are the ones most attuned to the ways gender is embodied. We have been paying painful attention to every detail of its experience, and so, do not know how to speak about it without leaving something out, or getting something lost in translation because we have become intimately acquainted with all its aspects. Or rather, we have become intimately acquainted enough to know that we will never truly know all its aspects. When it comes to my own gender, perhaps I am at my most Socratic.
This is all also to say nothing of the struggle of trying to articulate queer experiences in a straight tongue. Indeed, the language I have at my disposal is in no small way shaped by cisnormativity. What do I do when I am dislocated from my own mother tongue? Do I reimagine the meanings of words? But then I run the risk of people lamenting I am appropriating that which ought to be left alone, stealing something that is not mine to take - I am destabilising something sacred and that is scary. So then, do I invent new words? Sure, but I will be scorned for my invention. Maybe I will be told I am fabricating something out of thin air, not giving shape to something that has always existed. Maybe I will be told that we have gotten on perfectly fine thus far without my new fangled vocabulary and therefore I am being unduly difficult. I will wonder who this mystical “we” who has gotten along perfectly fine is, and if they are aware they are not the only “we” in existence. In the face of this insufficiency, I choose artistry. I choose to use language playfully, comically, creatively and beautifully because my experience of gender is playful, comical, creative and beautiful. If my rhetoric is condemned to always be imperfect, then at the very least let it be alive.
So then, let’s have it. Let me try my hand at speaking my truth, whatever the fuck that means.
I was a girl - I think? I think I was a girl for a long time, though I’m not sure. I am sure I’m not anymore though.
I don’t know what happened. I grew up, maybe. I learnt more about myself and the world. I cultivated a capacity to see the ways in which external social systems had become internalised and started to feel the outside world creeping into my body, crawling under my skin. I stomached the fact my body had always been acting as a host to alien parasites and felt that I had settled where I was, that I had found a way to make “woman” a workably homey space to occupy. I sighed, “it would do, I suppose”. I accepted the title of “woman” as if I was an item of clothing I had found in an opt shop and, with a shrug, resigned myself to purchasing in spite of its imperfect fit because it was cheap and there and one must temper their expectations when shopping second hand.
Little by little, the life inside and outside of my head became fuller, more colourful. I saw beauty I didn’t have the words to speak about because no one had told me that such beauty existed, let alone was permissible. The epicurean in me itched. I scratched at my skin. I didn’t know how to let myself be happy. Self-determination and sin seemed synonymous. The curse of being in the closest is sometimes you don’t even let yourself see you are trapped within one, instead you shrink down all life’s possibilities to what can fit in that finite, dark space and pretend that, that absence of existence contains the entirety of the universe’s potential. But I learnt to ask better questions of myself from the armchair and I learnt how to leave it. I looked at my reflection taking backwards steps. Almost absent mindedly, mostly accidentally, I started to pick at the knots entangling the interwoven strands of my selfhood until I felt them come loose and realised I could reweave them as I pleased.
The more I reflected on my womanhood, the more I felt dislocated from it. It was as if the clearer I could see it, the more it became an object of study, something outside of myself to be looked at and examined, prodded at and played with, as opposed to a necessary part of my subject. It was as if the ability to see it severed it from me in some important sense, that speculation and observation necessarily involved division or dislocation. An umbilical cord was cut. I had grown out of something, I don’t know exactly what. I only know that Eden cannot be reentered. I only know that one cannot step into the same river twice. I only know that if I believed in souls I would say mine was not that of a woman, but rather that it was quite beyond gender. I would want to say that my soul exists in a space where the language of gender cannot stick.
But I was not disengaged from my femininity, only distanced from it - apart from it whilst still partaking in it, but partaking in it consciously, creatively, constructively. My femininity at once felt more and less authentic. Less authentic because there was nothing organic about it, it was not flowing out of me unthinkingly. I watched myself. More authentic though because I had an agency I did not have before. My gender expression was not simply something instinctual or absorbed from the world around me. My gender expression was not mindless. It had become artful. Each morning I opened up my makeup bag and painted my face like a portrait. I was an artwork and artist, and more than anything I wanted that to be known and I fashioned myself in such a way to make the artifice apparent. Now, I am never womanly without a wink or masculine without a smirk. And no, I do not want to discuss dysphoria - only the euphoria that comes with defying classification.
My dress is drag. I strive for cartoonish caricature. On the days I decide to adorn myself in that which is deemed girly, I do it with the intention of bending the category of “Girl” until it breaks. I want to be so outlandishly femme that I cease to be feminine. I want to exist in the uncanny valley of the dolls, to be something girl adjacent - a woman only if you are squinting. I want it all to be theatrical, overblown and played for the people in the back row. I am not so much a girl as I am a thespian. I want to be camp, to commit to artifice with the most earnest sincerity. I have learnt to adorn myself in the finery of a dollybird and adore all the aspects of girlhood that are deemed the most tacky, the most trite, the most trivial, the most cheap, the most silly and insignificant. And sometimes, I am not girlish at all.
Anxiously, I set the imposter syndrome aside and let myself ask to be called “they,” and I take on “they” as if it is a family name because “they” is decidedly queer - and I know I come from queerness and belonged to queerness. I am only at home with the outsiders. See me as the sexually deviant gender trash I am and leave me or love me in all my perversion because assimilation is a suffocation I will not suffer. The queer are my kin, my kin is the queer. I want to be identified with my gens. Ascribe me to the correct clan and do not call me a girl, it makes my skin itch and sometimes, a strange dissonance arises, and I giggle to myself as if I have gotten away with a trick I never intended to pull. My gender is queer, I cannot tell it to you straight but I have made myself clear.
i am a visionary
Its June, yall know what that means?
ITS THE FIRST DAY OF PRIDE MONTH!!!
Remember to be EXTRA QUEER to piss off the Right-Wingers, Terfs, and all other kinds of anti-queer asswipes!
HAPPY PRIDE!
mercury stardust and jory are currently doing a tiktok livestream for 30 hours to raise $1,000,000 for trans healthcare if you can go watch and/or donate!
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcJSSwg/
They’re currently at $765,000 and if they hit $1,000,000 by 10pm CT (1.5 hours from now) they will raise the goal to $2,000,000. Anything above the $1,000,000 will go specifically towards gender affirming surgeries.
LINK TO DONATE RIGHT HERE
They help so many in the trans community, 36% of the people they help are disabled!!
I sent in $25 earlier this month and $25 today.
Even if you can’t donate, go watch the lives and give it views and interaction!
just in the time it took me to type this up they have raised like $15,000
This is a huge form of mutual aid
this is HUGE for trans liberation and for trans joy!
go watch, go donate, go support
more than anything, i hope you know
Idk man it’s so easy to get bogged down in all the bullshit online but when my then-6 year old cousin found out I was trans he said “ok” then corrected my grandma when she misgendered me. I was once the third between a gay man and a lesbian. Two lesbians once invited me back to their place when I presented as a man. I met an AMAB nb butch who looked strikingly to outsiders like a cis man and it was one of the more sapphic experiences I’ve had. I nervously wore a boydyke shirt to pride and got 3 different cis-looking femme folks tell me they loved my shirt. I once told a trans group at a protest that any pronouns were fine for me and one person said “wow, I’m impressed and intimidated by people like that. I don’t know that I could be that chill with pronouns.” I once told a GNC friend I wished I could wear a type of “opposite” gender clothing after I had already transitioned and so it would be associated with my AGAB and he said “You could just do it.” I’ve had cishet men fight cops for me before. The first time I had a doctor ask me if my name was different than what was on my forms I had to try not to cry. Last week, a phone call with a doctor’s office where I am generally cis passing asked unprompted if my name listed is what I want to be called. It touched me then too. I told a lesbian friend once I felt like my attraction to men AND women both felt gay. She said “makes sense.” And we moved on. I go by different pronouns in different circles. I’ve had gay women love my facial hair. I’ve had gay men like my tits. It’s all out there, I promise. It can be hard to find it but I promise there is community like you and community who likes you. And it’s more messy and beautiful than tumblr discourse makes it out to be.
my gayboy friends lovingly call me "their dyke". my qpp called me beautiful for my intersex traits. my beloved transmasc friend got strong on t and he carried me up the sand dunes on the beach because my mobility aids wouldn't work climbing sand like that. the queens at the bar cheered me on when i got up on stage and i was scared in front of the crowd. we're here to love each other in our own little ways. there is so much beauty here
In which my uncle is the best de facto parent of a queer kid ever
It’s Pride, and also the first anniversary of my uncle’s death, so I want to type up a story about him. (NB: my aunt, his wife, is equally cool, but she’d want this story to be about him too.) So here goes.
I skipped town when I was 16. Nothing interesting about that part; just standard queer kid in a conservative place in the 1990s stuff. I’d just gotten my driver’s license (this took a while; I’m good at other things), it was the beginning of summer break, and my parents had recently bought a new car and were planning to fix up their old one to sell. In the meantime, the old car (whom I’d named Harold Godwinson because one of his headlights kept exploding) was sitting all by himself in a corner of the driveway, and I thought he might be down for a little adventure. So, one night, I threw some stuff in my backpack (documents, journals, a few changes of clothes, my $235 in babysitting cash) and snuck out after everyone else in the house had gone to sleep.
Harold Godwinson and I hit the highway. The thing about him was that he started shaking violently at speeds over 57 mph, but in fairness so did I – I’d driven on the interstate in driver’s ed, but, like, twice, and for 5 minutes at a time instead of several consecutive hours – so we made a good pair. We were lucky enough (seriously: I cannot stress enough how lucky we were in this) to have a destination in mind, and we reached it just as the sun was coming up.
My uncle was in the kitchen making breakfast for my aunt, who’s not a morning person, and he did not look surprised at all to see me coming up the path with my luggage. He met me at the door and said, “Well, hey there babygirl, we were just thinking you might want to come and stay with us for a while, and I’m so glad you read our minds.” I ate my aunt’s breakfast and then faceplanted in the attic bedroom while he called my parents to tell them where I was and that I’d be staying. (I could hear the yelling even through the adrenaline crash; I think that’s the only time I ever heard my uncle yell and, believe me, I did a LOT of dumb shit in front of him over the years.)
The next week my uncle and I went out to run an errand. I’d thought we were just going to the hardware store – we were forever putting up shelves together – but instead we drove 45 minutes to the state’s only “alternative” (plausible-deniability term for “gay and lesbian”) bookstore. He walked me inside, poked his head into every room while I watched, confused, from the entrance hall, and then came back over. “Okay, babygirl. Here’s a twenty, you should, uhhhhhh, buy yourself some, uhhhhhh, alternative books. Back in one hour, I gotta go to the grocery.” At this point he looked around and realized that the cashier (who, I was about to learn, was permanently cosplaying Mo from Dykes to Watch Out For) and a nice middle-aged lesbian couple were trying very hard not to stare at him. He bowed slightly toward them, said “Ladies,” and then backed out the door in what might have been the most awkward little shuffle ever.
“Your dad is really sweet,” said the cashier. I didn’t bother correcting her.
You can only hate the boogie man from a distance.
This is exactly why people are afraid of pride. It’s not the children or religion or “family values”. If you’ve never met a queer person it’s so much easier to agree they’re the monsters from the story books.
You have no one to reference. You can’t go “yeah my neighbor joes trans. He would never force surgery on someone. That’s ridiculous and only is said by people who’ve never met a trans person”. If you see us Hugging in the street your horror stories colapse.
Your a person who cries with joy too.
You have a queer loved one too.
Maybe that queer loved one shares a body with you. Maybe they just share a timeline with you.
It’s so hard to insist a death sentence if you have to look them in the eyes. If you have no proof of the “hurt they caused by existing”
This is the beauty queer people always could be and have been. It just only survived in private before.
I have almost a sense of nostalgia for happy pride. That one day we’ll be in the story books for good reasons too.
I haven't seen this circulating here on Tumblr, so I decided to make my own post.
last saturday, in Porto, there was a pride parade going down the street and this old man was standing there, by his front door, waving the portuguese flag. most people on the parade probably thought the same: old person waving the national flag? he's probably protesting against the parade, he's a nationalist of some sort.
then the old man called for that person to come near him. the whole parade stopped. everyone just.. stopped moving. they didn't know what to expect, and most expected the worst. and that person decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and approached the old man. and then... they traded flags, he hugged the person and then he waved the pride flag happily. everyone cheered him.
such a wholesome moment. 🥹❤️🌈