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IMPORTANT SITE REMINDERS ARE LISTED AFTER THIS RANT (so please read all of it in order to find the rules >:3)
On this mega I shall take the opportunity to rant about one of my favorite things: the Webnovel UNJUST DEPTHS!
Do you love transgenders?
Do you love communism?
Do you love queer romance?
Do you love killing fascists in a giant fucking mech?
Would a plotline with all of these things happening in a underwater retro-futuristic gundam setting intrigue you?
Especially if its actually really well written with good characters, rich worldbuilding, and a marxist leninist transfem author?
All of the answers should be: YES I DO ~~or else I WILL BAN YOU~~
Since you obviously love all of those things then Unjust Depths is perfect for YOU yes YOU! It is DESTINY
The Imbrian Ocean is at a time of severe instability. The monarch of the vast Empire that spans its unjust depths (:3) is sick and nearing death, every territory of the ocean now vying to carve their own Destiny out of the chaos. From the Volk fascists 
, Zionists 
(they literally will not die why are they still here oh my god), The 'Anarchists' (social chauvanists) 
in Bosporus, and the monarchs 
of each vast noble domain, each vies for power and prestige no matter who they crush underfoot, but it would be a pretty depressing story without a bright light in the dark.
On the edge of the Empire sits the glorious Union! The (Soviet) Union 
is a socialist federation of three states (and one anarchist mountain 
)that were formerly slave colonies under the Imbrian Empire until they broke away in a fierce liberation war. They have spent the last 20 years since then building themselves up. Whether they be Human 
, Shimmi 
(Catgirls who usually follow a religion closely related to modern Islam), and Kattaran 
(a hybrid humanoid species with characteristics of sea life ranging from sharks to cuttlefish)building socialism side by side.
First lead under the revolutionary leader Dashka Kansal, then the Idealist Ahwalia who lead the country to near ruin in pursuit of building a utopia on pillars of sand, then under the scientific socialist 
leadership of the Grand Marshall of the Union, Bhavani Jayanskar (I love Jayanskar so much shes basically as if Stalin, Lenin, and Zhukov were rolled into the same person but was a black lesbian badass who wore the uniform REALLY WELL)(she aint the main character at all tho shes only in very few scenes i just love her so much). Under Jayanskar, the Union has been growing their economy to both eliminate hunger and give everyone a home 
, but also growing their military capabilities for the inevitable return of the Empire. The Union is alone, but with the people by its side nothing, not even Destiny, can snuff out true freedoms light. 
As war wages between the Empire and Republic (basically underwater USA) once more over the lands between them, the facade begins to finally crack...
And a border conflict between the Empire and Union escalate, and the dreaded reconquest begins.
Amidst this turmoil, lives our main characters (yes there are multiple and all of them are lovely). Each of whom I personally love dearly, and are very well characterized. Many are soldiers of the Union, some are scientists, some are divers (mech pilots), some are lost strands finding new meaning after joining this band of Brigands
All are Communists 
All serve the Union 
All would gladly give their lives to defending socialism 
but even they would have little inkling of the adventure set in store for them as the lands beneath the waves erupt in fire, fury, and revolt
Can these transgender badasses kick fascist ass?
Can they kiss? (oh my god please kiss ISTG THERE IS SO MUCH SHIPPING AHHHH ITS GLORIOUS)
FIND OUT HERE: https://unjustdepths.com/
please do or else I will pout incessantly
just try it pleeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase i need to talk to someone about it after Cromalin went AFK
(I miss her, she was a real one)
REALLY IMPORTANT RULES BELOW, MUST READ
Join our public Matrix server! https://matrix.to/#/#tracha:chapo.chat
As a reminder, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It's for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.
Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.
Can I ask how it helped you frame things?
sure! stop me if i've told you any of this before, but I transitioned over 10 years ago at this point, and I've always struggled with identifying as a woman, and I could never really figure out why. Like it would be patriarchal to take that label for myself or something.
I was talking to a doctor and she asked me how I identified and I stumbled all over myself. Am I a woman? What is a woman? Can I really call myself one if I was socialized male? Prove it? What does it really mean to be trans? Nobody has scanned my brain and looked at the white matter or whatever to see if I'm Really Trans, and I've never gotten a chromosome test, either! To other people, these answers may be easy, but to me, I was unable to really feel genuine inside the mainstream canon about gender.
I like to be accurate when I'm describing things, and myself, so I was left frustrated with all of the popular queer and progressive descriptors. "Trans women are women" - yes ok, but what is a woman? I'm clearly different from the cis women I meet because of a vastly different life experience. What is a woman? Someone who is not a man? What is a man? A miserable pile of secrets? I have a lot of secrets. Or is it that a man isn't a woman? This kind of circular logic went around and around in my head, and the best answer I has was "A woman is someone who fits the gender role and expectations of women in society" which just seems really unstable as a foundation because society changes, different around the world, and fuck I don't want to just do what society tells me, and I don't want to try and cram myself into womanhood either, I want to be authentically me, instead of mediating my gender for cisheteronormativity.
Then, someone mentioned the Gender Accelerator here. I read it. I was accelerated. Suddenly, I found a foundation with which to understand all of these complicated feelings I'm having. Gender is a class structure, created to divide out reproductive labour. Of course it is! Three, five, etc. gender societies exist because they have unique ways of splitting reproductive labour! Finally, this integrated those questions I had about them for me!
And ... well, even "biological sex" is a construct. This fucking changed me. I'm an enby now. All my books have bright orange covers, I read about ace-spec identities for fun, and I refuse to label my gender except to be like "idk, demigirl maybe lmao." This one document answered all of my confusion about how to label my actions regarding transition and what felt right to me, which is why I recommended it here in this post. Maybe others would have a different experience, or not be able to relate. Maybe some disagree with my perspective, I'd love to hear it if so.
I dont identify at all with any masculine labels, I never did. But I could never really feel like I could claim the mainstream concept of "woman" or "female" either. So, I kinda just wasn't happy for years.
Okay sorry but
cutting in and yapping
Daily reminder 'under patriarchy men are default, women are defined by their relation to men'
This is incredibly based, I'm really glad to hear that this dorky manifesto was so good for you. It did this for me too tbh ✨
no apologies needed
spoiler
yeah, I get into this further in my reply to lilypad below, but this is some worms I picked up from the internet, my mom, etc.
right, yeah, that makes sense. i remember that bit now.
:) in more ways than one! my posting too, it was also... accelerated.
fuck yes
spoiler
Yeag I saw
Uh I'm sorry y'know...
You were pretty much right, it is a nebulous "not a man" thing!
spoiler
i'm glad i'm here, hearing good opinions now :)
Actually, I'm with lilypad on this one, I think I need the reminders that man does have a definition socially and that that's fundamental to the system, even if I don't see it that way.
this is probably a good as any place to say this, i know what it stands for, but every time i read it i get "looking for group" and Safe Partner and I start saying "Looking for grooooooooup!!!" at each other like streamers lol we are dorks.
spoiler
Yeah it's good to keep in mind, it is like, a yin-yang arrangement of man/not man, very dumb. It is helpful to keep in mind.Lol lmao, picturing this is very funny to me. LOOOOOOKING FOR GROOOOOOOOUP
so easy to forget, because i never saw it that way, lol.
hahahahahaha i knew you'd understand
Fr i need this reminder daily, so often i forget this or just dont orient around it in my analyses and understandings when its pretty fundamental to our system
Yeah, it also explains why "woman" has such a weird nebulous non-definition :3
Right!? Doing woman I embrace ambiguity, doing non-woman¹ I reject the gender structure.
¹ for lack of a better term (im underslept and words are hard)
Thank you for writing up your thoughts! Theres some parts here that really make sense and parts that are a little confusing to me.
You said youd love to hear disagreements, and while I dont know if I have any of those, K do have thoughts i guess and ill put them here.
maybe shit opinions? Also super rambly... Talking about language and identity.
I dont understand this bit? Perhaps im misunderstanding and this is where you were at and not where you are at in your thought processes? Cause to my mind, a man removing themselves from that class and placing themselves in another class that is lower on the patriarchal hierarchy is inherrently non- or even antipatriarchal. Cause that system depends on its rigidity and punishes those who transgress, anyone who moves outside their class is engaging in non- or antipatriarchal movement.
Regarding womanhood, idk, i see the accelerators view as the one that makes the most sense, as a class under our gender system. And like, for myself, i wander between i guess woman, woman-adjacent, and agender/wtf-is-gender-stop-asking-me-weird-questions.
To me ig, woman is a label that is both applied to me by the outside world and that I apply to myself. Perhaps its cause I really like being femme, and the labour of the woman-class (under our gender system) is labour I do most often. I guess to me its not an issue of being a woman, but rather an issue of performing womanhood coupled with being seen as a woman. To be clear, the performance is not in a "person performing" kind of a way, but rather that the performance makes the person. And by "being seen", i perhaps could say it better as being recognized in/for your labour. Because its rooted in a class system concerned with perpetuating not just individuals but society, womanhood and manhood and any gender cannot exist in a vaccum or without being seen by others. Or I guess, it could be in the sense that one observes onesself? Like, thats what were doing when we apply labels to ourselves, were observing ourselves as we would another, just with the added benefit of knowing our internal states far better than anyone else could. But the performative nature of identity is supee important imo, and to me explains a lot of my thought and feeling about who&how I am.
I guess an issue in what Im saying is that our language isnt suited to describing gender in this way; we speak of being a man/woman/enby/etc., but we should rather (imo) speak of it in a non-stative or otherwise transient way. Idk the verbs to do that without being clunky. Gender fluidity can kind of be used this way, but because of our language its still spoken of in a stative manner, and using it in that way feels wrong, because its misappropriating a stative label to describe a nonstative experience.
reject markov chain interpretations of self, we cannot divide a person infinitely into a series of states, we are not a computer!
This one was primed into me before I read the accellerator. I understood it as "sex is inherrently nonbinary and is a phenotype; its best thought of as a bimodal distribution of traits". None of those traits are inherrently male/female. The missing part for me was that sex arises from gender, not the other way around. The accelerator brought me further into understanding this better. Like, imo we can re-sex ourselves. For a binary example, a penis can be a deeply feminine sexual organ, a vagina can be likewise a deeply masculine sexual organ, depending on how we apply gender to it.
Ok that got real rambly, and idk really how to conclude this, so uhhhh ill close by saying gender is fucky and we should roam free among the hills and plains of it, not be confined to penns and fenced in areas.
damn i fucking live for posts like yours, let me get in there
there's gonna be some brainworms discussion here
So, this was a reference to a moment I enjoyed from Orange Book, but it is honestly something I've felt. This is some Janice Raymond shit that I've internalized from being on the internet most of my life. I am working on this (which is why I'm reading Orange Book and why I enjoyed being accelerated so much), but it's stubborn, and I do have this feeling of "invading women's spaces" in changerooms etc. I simply do not go to women's spaces.
I was in the hospital a few years ago due to gallstones (ow btw), and I was in the ER at first, but eventually they moved me to a surgical ward, and I honestly did not know until I saw it on a form somewhere that this was a capital W Women's space. I felt uncomfortable - I don't belong here, I'm not a "real" woman, do they know I'm trans? Do I pass too well? Was the change in my forms too successful?!
Everyone was very nice. And they all knew. It was meant to be gender affirming, and while I appreciated having my stated gender validated, and everyone was very very kind (I was emotional at a couple of bits because I was scared and they were so reassuring) I felt more at home in the ER where gender wasn't a factor.
Maybe I felt this because of brainworms. Maybe I felt this because I don't really see myself as a capital W Woman. It's hard to tease all of it apart.
Honestly, I'm not sure where I'm going to end up, but I think you're really getting into the direction I'm leaning here:
This 100%. It's hard to say I am "being" anything except me. What is being, anyway? All gender to me feels like a performance, I like acting a certain way, I like dressing a certain way, but that's not a statement of being. My true self is kinda meek, my voice apparently sounds really fem (according to Partner) even when I'm not trying (I never try anymore), my mannerisms are "cute," apparently. But that isn't a statement of being, I just kinda fit the role of "woman" more naturally.
Learning that agender people can still present fem has been a revelation. Maybe that's where I'm leaning, due to all of this.
Yeah, agree.
huh... i'm not sure why that seems so weird to me. maybe this is just a me thing, i have trouble with labels without specific criteria. Autism? I can check off the boxes. ADHD? Literally diagnosed. Gender? I have to decide for myself, and the labels are fuzzy, and I get to just pick whatever.
If I have to pick something, I will pick nothing, at least today, lol.
Yeah, that makes sense to me. I feel like my entire life has been a performance due to masking though, so right now I'm trying to go deeper and figure out what's beneath. The core identity of me, if I'm being real, that's beneath any concept of gender.
YES OMG THIS FR FR. I think this suits me better, "being" hurts my head. I'm "doing" woman at work (but more like "tomboy"), I'm "doing" non-binary femme online, I'm "doing" agender to my parents (this is a compromise for them), and sometimes I "do" ultra-femme at home. I never do anything on the male end anymore, but that's just me.
I was literally just about to say that I don't really like the label "genderfluid" because it's too restrictive, myself.
speak for yourself i'm rewriting myself in Rust
totally, good point!
I Changed My Sex Last Year? (idk this reminded me of another post)
yeah, I won't get into this but I'm struggling with my born-in uh physical attributes at the moment as I plan for bottom surgery. How much is framing? How much is actual dysphoria? What if my particular discomfort is about the incongruity with the role I'm expected to play?
lol, just like me fr fr
agree, i don't want to put whatever's going on in here into a box anymore.
::: spoiler Alright my turn lol
Re: orange book, i havent read it so I cant comment.
So, is it like specifically about womens spaces, or about the perhaps unneccessary gendering of spaces that gives you bad/weird feelings? Perhaps both?
Fwiw i relate to that feeling, but for me its a preemptive thing, like im anticipating judgement and potential violence. I had a huge breakthrough for myself like a month ago when I used the womens bathroom at a big store with tons of people, i was just doing my business and I didnt feel like I belonged but I didnt feel like I didnt belong.
To me, its not just gender thats a performance, but the entirety of identity. Theres a ton of performance that we dont exactly have control over. Like, the mind and self arent seperate from the body, its all one continuous thing, and every aspect of our identity is performance.
To me, part of coming out, and breaking down my general performances, all of that wasnt supposed to result in not performing anything, but rather to get rid of the explicit and intentional performances that make me unhappy, that bring me sadness and pain, the ones that I do for others and not for myself.
Even when Im alone, because Im self aware, I perform and am observed by myself, and it makes me happy/sad/etc. because of the way the identity performance is engrained into self-ness. Im both the observer and the observed. This is inherrent in our self awareness, without it we would be just impulse machines responding to stimuli (imo).
Ok i really like this "doing" way you talk about it. Like, as stereotypical and ironically used as it is, the whole "its giving x" thing, when coupled with the usage of "doing" youve put forth here, really captures the idea of identity to me. Theres what one does, i.e. how one performs, intentionally or not. And then theres how that is recieved and interpreted by other parties, the "what its giving" aspect of it. These coupled together show the way identity exists in between observer and performer.
I cant tell if this is supposed to be tongue in cheek? But if not, like, theres the aspect of changing our phenotype, yes, but im trying to get at that we can change our sex just by re-gendering our physical traits, and seeing them as feminine/masculine/etc. But also theres like the whole aspect of society at large not seeing that, and enforcing both implicitly and explicitly that such a re-gendering is wrong/unacceptable to our gender system.
Thats not to invalidate physical dysphoria. Like, I know that my anatomy is wrong for me, theres a fundamental impedance mismatch between my mind and my genitals (and some other things). That we can re-gender our sexual traits doesnt make them physically congruent, just socially/relationally congruent.
Time for an anti-box manifesto
spoiler
Orange Book is very good so far. When I'm proper done with it I'll be putting together a list of quotes that I liked into a post here. Maria's inner monologue is me fr fr. Ash was right - it really is quasi-theory, disguised as narrative.I thought it was the former pre-accel, but now I think it's actually both. I stress out a lot if I have to use a bathroom in a public place, I will just hold it until it's painful, especially if other people are in there. Now that I'm more conscious that neither label really applies to me, I just want non-gendered bathrooms lol.
Oh congrats! But I feel this a bit too, hearing horror stories about how things are in certain places is definitely a factor. No one has actually given me trouble, but since I can't take Safe Partner in with me, I just hold it till I get home. Non-gendered bathrooms would be perfect.
damn, i'm gonna have to think on this one. Loads of autistic people I've heard stories from have said that once they started unmasking and unmasking, digging further and further, that they really just saw nothing at the bottom, and it prompted an existential crisis. This sounds similar to me - if you strip all the doing from yourself, perhaps there really is nothing else?
oh, even more relevant! yes, i think this is the Answer for unmasking as well.
me fr fr!!! damn, well put.
wow, well put! absolutely. and I like the separation between "performance" and "interpretation," I think that's a key factor.
for instance, I could be uptalking, and really what I'm giving off is uncertainty, but how it might be interpreted as is feminine.
oh sorry, i'm quoting a post Ash made a couple days who (in which I asked the exact same question you did about it lol), it's about this post https://hexbear.net/post/2451070 .
absolutely!! this is new to me but I love this, and actually what I was getting at with the comment, well put though.
blech, this is less awesome
I hear you, in my head i'm 3 inches shorts and 2 band sizes smaller, maybe this is why I am so clumsy. dysphoria is weird. and my anatomy is just like "oh that's not what's in my head... what an annoyance"
spoiler
Ok imma have to read this, quasi-theory disguised as narrative sounds right up my alley ^^
Ugh seriously, nongendered bathrooms with a mirror sink and toilet, is that too much to ask!?
Perfect example of what I was getting at!
Ah gotcha i was just misunderstanding ^^
Ugh this is so real. Havent felt comfy in my height since I started really growing... My mental map of my body is just different than how my body is.
spoiler
i like it, my plan tonight is to get through a bunch of it ALSO NO WORK TOMORROW WOOOOO
100%
oof, that's a long time. did you ever resolve it?
i agree, it really is everywhere. its kinda eh, i used to feel affirmed by gendered language, not sure anymore. just get me out of this binary lol
this is it, but it's not even just gender. its like a part of my expects me to have more of the shape and height of my mom, it's not even like sadness, just ... well, surprising, when i see myself in the mirror. dysphoric, lol
Eh kind of? I slip in and out of resolution, but the idea of identity being performance really helpedr resolve everything for me. Cause I was ripping out every performance, only to find another performance underneath, and sometimes one I thought I had excised already. So it was this horrible black hole of lack-of-self that I couldnt escape.
This one is so weird for me, cause on the one hand I want the binary to be gone, but im also like, idek how to describe my gender but its like adjacent to binary woman, and im comfy, or comfy enough, in binary womanhood. So I feel affirmed by gendered language and kind of love it, but also hate that it exists, all at the same time
I feel that first part, for sure.
Hmm, thinking about it more, I'm not sure I'm here yet. Maybe check in in a week, lol.
Nice, I mean I can only really speak for myself, honestly, but if you are happy with gendered language, I don't think there's anything wrong with just enjoying it, if you can. I don't have a real theoretical basis for that, just think you should enjoy the things you like.
So, i probably could have phrased my statement better, and like yes i agree with you, but also within the broader context of society, the way language shapes us and our thoughts, i really do think the world would be better with a neutral-by-default language custom. Like, we dont have to abolish gendered language ig, just, we shouldnt apply it by default. Idk, my initial statement was a little dramatic i guess, and those feelings are fuelled by my not wanting to be in that box of womanhood. Like, I want to be in the area of womanhood, but not have walls around it, and the way gendered language is used in modern english often feels like walls. Idk how to describe it its not a well thought out thing, sorry.
Ill try to remember lol
I think I follow for the most part, actually?
I think you're saying here that the binary is reinforced by our speech,
and that it feels constricting.
Yeah, I was doing a work thing yesterday for localization and I noticed that Google Translate now has "masculine" and "feminine" options for nouns. I'm at least glad English doesn't have that, but I kind of agree with a neutral-first language.
Maybe this is a bit of an aside, but when I've appreciated gendered language in the past, there's definitely been an element that was me enjoying it because people saw me as the gender I identified as. I've never told anyone my pronouns before this site. What was I feeling? Was I enjoying the feeling of passing privilege? That's kind of a scary thought... I'm still trying to figure this out too, might be time for me to sleep on it. Have a good night!
You sleep well, hope the gender theory faerie visits and quells any unrest with deeper understanding ^^
I think this is part of what happens for me, its confirmation that they see me as a woman, which simultaneously makes me happy and unhappy, because im a woman but also not; im a woman but im also woman adjacent, and it feels like that confirmation is affirming my woman-ness while also negating/minimizing/ignoring/suppressing my adjacent-to-womanness.
To put it another way, i do woman, and i do woman adjacent, and i do agender/wtf-is-gender-go-away. And theres no way to wrap all of those up in a single pronoun, in a single gendered verb conjugation, in a single word inflection. Inherrently one will be elevated above the others, or the others will be negated.
Hmmm i have thinking and reflecting to do I think...
I mean, i cant tell you what you were feeling, but theres a difference between passing privilidge and respect+acceptance of who you are/what you perform. Idk, its late and im kinda exhausted, i think thisll have to wait until tomorrow.
well put! I follow that. Makes sense.
100%!! I feel you about "trying to wrap it up into a single pronoun or word inflection"
same, I feel like I'm shifting every day that I think about this now, enby feels right to me right now, but I've thought about pronouns, I think I'll keep she/her for the time being. To cis people, it'll always be she/her. To people that get it? I'm not sure.
Haha, sorry, those were meant to be rhetorical. But yeah, I like this distinction too. Good point.
Omg 100% this, like theres such a huge difference in how Im comfortable with people referring to me between people who have considered gender and have a similar viewpoint as me, and those who dont. Its not even a cis/trans divide, its just like what framework do you understand gender through i guess? But even for the people that do, idk what words to use to describe myself. Like, they/them is fine but not right, if that makes sense. Idk, if there was something that reflected the absurdity and arbitrarity of gender within our culture, that would be great, but also I move around (we talked about this further up i think?) a bit so not all the time, and i love being femme (id present hyperfemme all the time if it wasnt so much work tbh) idk its just confusing.
I've had a very similar thought in the past couple of days, if not exact.
Yeah it is. I think there's kind of a push/pull with society, as we need to live inside this binary in some fashion. I wonder how much of an effect this has on us.
More non-gendered spaces would be rad. Only time I ended up in an explicitly women's space (outside of small childhood), was when I had accidentally gotten on the bus in highschool when it was women's turn to change. I didn't even notice the mistake... subconscious brain didn't think changing outerwear needed to be gendered nor did I notice that everyone else on the bus were girls. By the time someone pointed out I was there, it was too late to leave, so I just got an opaque bag over my head until they were done. I felt bad being there, but not because I thought I was out of place (even though I had no clue I was trans at the time), but because of the assumption that others would perceive me as a threat, which I thought fair given how a lot of guys sexually objectify girls.
damn yes, no matter how much rationalization as I can do about this, if I'm being honest, it still hurts deep down to be perceived as scary, a threat, etc. just because of a thing I had no control over.
quoted spoilered stuff, therefore I spoiler it
One thing that stood out to me from r/agender was that people there overwelmingly identified as ace if I'm not mistaken. I always wondered if that was a side-effect of r/agender being associated with the aro/ace-subreddits moreso than trans subreddits (partly just because of AAA(A...) battery jokes) or if there was an actually connection between between being ace and agender. Given how much autism overlaps with both of those groups further compounds the issue.
I didn't like the idea that sexual orientation and gender were somehow linked mostly because how transphobes/homophobes tend to say really stupid things relating the two. But like, it makes sense that if you are aroace (assuming you don't plan to have children), you might feel more alienated from the whole reproductive labor system and therefore gender as a whole? Being aro and/or ace is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for being agender, but perhaps it pushes people quite a bit that way?
I think yes and no, but in general I get what youre saying and agree. Im not aroace so yk take what I say with massive amounts of salt, but anyone who isnt a cishet man/woman falls into the delinquent class of our patriarchal binary gender system (as per the accelerator, and it makes sense to me). Other orientations can have varying degrees of assimilation allowed them by this class system, but being a nonreproducing aroace person really does kind of alienate you entirely from direct reproductive labour. Thats not to say it alienates you entirely from reproductive or perpetuative labour tho, at least, i dont think?
Agreed. There's a lot more to it than that and QPRs exist. People still have to survive even if they don't have children. And lots of people help with things like childcare even if its not their offspring.
Perfectly stated ^^