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fun fact: any policy on drugs that isn’t harm reduction is going to cause addicts to suffer and die

fun fact: Drug addiction is a public health issue, and approaching it as if it were a law enforcement issue is prejudicial to addicts and will result in their suffering and death

if you just assume addiction is a method of self-medicating, you’ll pretty much never be wrong.

now, not everything people self-medicate for actually has a proper treatment. i’m pretty sure the reason my uncle made sure to be slightly drunk at all times ‘to round the sharp corners off of things’ was sensory processing disorder. i have that too, and i just kind of accept that i’m going to randomly get my brain sandpapered from time to time. there is no medication for that. all you can do is dull your senses. i’ve chosen not to, but i can’t blame him for his decisions. when a ringing phone feels like getting hit upside the head with a frying pan, liver damage sounds like a fair price to pay.

anyway, it seems really self-evident to me that people don’t enjoy living the life of an addict, they do it because the alternative looks worse. people don’t get addicted to substances just for funsies. they start making a habit of taking something because of insomnia, or grief, or headaches, or depression, or seething undirected rage and terror they can’t put a name to – something that they can’t ignore or shrug off. and for whatever reason – lack of access, lack of knowlege, lack of money, or it just plain doesn’t exist – they aren’t able to apply the Approved Correct Remedy. they use what they can get.

addicts aren’t some weird otherfolk who inexplicably just Do Drugs because they’re Bad. addicts are you with a problem you can’t solve.

these facts aren’t fun but they are pretty important

Sometimes I feel a little guilty about not updating Breaking Out all that often, but it’s just really hard.

Like, after what happened in canon, I can’t really watch the show’s Clexa content without feeling really, really sad about it.

And then after how the fandom twisted Clexa, particularly in their handling of Lexa, it’s really hard for me to work through the repulsion and dysphoria and pain and betrayal and exclusion to where I can find those characters’ voices again.

Clanya is just so much easier, because there wasn’t an orchestrated effort to cast Anya or Clarke as a toxic, abusive man in a woman suit through every transmisogynistic and trans fetishistic stigma they could get their hands on.

It’s so much easier for me with them. It’s a lot healthier for me.

It sucks that Lexa’s been defiled for me because I loved her character wholeheartedly. It sucks that Clexa will always, no matter what, have horrible baggage attached to it. It sucks that Jason Rothenburg threw away something beautiful, and it sucks that the fandom poisoned the well so I couldn’t even escape to that.

I want to write more Breaking Out, more Clexa, but it hurts. It hurts. 

So if I never do, at least you’ll know who to blame. And maybe y’all will speak up about transmisogyny and trans fetishization in your fandoms instead of striving to be ‘polite’ and ‘drama-free’

Okay, so trans man here (I imagine I’m coming from a different perspective). Whilst a lot of g!p fics can probably be considered fetishization of trans/intersex bodies, I think it’s unfair to lump them all into the same category. There are plenty of porn without plot fics for cis Clexa, so any fic that includes g!p shouldn’t automatically have to be full of meaningful plot. In fact, there have been some fics where they really delve into intersex Lexa and deconstruct her character around that. (Which I personally enjoyed reading because the whole dysphoria aspect was something I can relate to)

At the end of the day, fic writing is just like any other art: it’s completed because it’s something you had an interest in. Whilst we are all free to critisize someone’s art -be it for misogyny, transfetishization, racism, etc, we can’t call to censor and remove that art because where do we draw the line, and who gets to say where it is drawn?

To be completely honest, as a Trans guy that is still wrapping their mind around not being part of the lesbian community anymore, g!p fic can actually feel somewhat inclusive -particularly when you have no interest in straight ships. To clarify: I completely understand the hurt, and that some people’s fics are distasteful and outright rude, but I don’t feel that can be a blanket statement.

Also, obviously do what you need to do, personally -writing should be a pleasure for yourself, so only do what’s comfortable.

(I will also concede that I’ve only ever been in one other fandom and there seems to be a shit ton more g!p fics in this one. I also agree that given that it is 9/10 Lexa who is intersex, yes, that definitely screams transmisogyny for a good number of them)

I’m going to take this bit by bit here, because I have a lot to say

Yes, you’re coming from a position of not understanding or experiencing transmisogyny, which means you ideally should listen to me and other trans women and let yourself be educated on this subject instead of pretending you can claim to educate me on it.

I’ve written tens of thousands of words on this subject. I’ve discussed it at length. You’re not saying anything I haven’t addressed before, but I’m a glutton for punishment so I’ll go over it all again.

I’m gonna take it from the top, here

G!P doesn’t explicitly claim to be related to trans (or intersex) people but it cannot be viewed outside of that context in a world where trans and intersex people are also displaced from our bodies and our realities by cis dyadic people, in a world where our body parts are literally objectified and fetishized and removed from our humanity. It doesn’t matter what anyone’s intent is, that’s the reality of it, that’s representation that harms trans and intersex people, and if people fail to realize that, then they’re harming trans and intersex people, categorically. That’s a fact. These are categorically linked to oppression. And yes, other trans/intersex folks can help reproduce this oppression, because they can use these tools, these frameworks just as easily as a cis/dyadic person can. 

Even if there’s one or two works here or there that inexplicably manage to avoid everything harmful about such tropes (I haven’t come across them, but who knows, there’s a first time for everything), even if a select few trans or intersex women (the harmed parties in g!p) don’t see the harm, these are still linked to ideas and systems of power that as a whole feed into our oppression and which actively cause harm. I’ve literally met multiple people who have been raped by partners in signifcant part due to harmful media like this. We cannot pretend that this is harmless activity. When LGBT+ folks by and large escape to fandoms to find representation, fandom becomes a far greater influence on us than it would the average cishet fan. And when trans and intersex women are overwhelmingly, practically always fetishized and consumed through a harmful lens, that’s going to have a significant impact on us.

So yeah, G!P characters are based off of the foundation of trans women due to the hypervisibility of our fetishization (and sometimes based off of the theoretical bodies of a small small section of intersex women, removed from social context and medical realities), and they use fetishized understandings of us (created by cishet dyadic men) as the foundation for the trope. That kind of media reflects all the stigmas and stereotypes we are faced with in real life, and reproduces those stigmas and stereotypes that direct harm against us.

So yeah, not all g!p characters are explicitly trans, but they are always implicitly penis-owning trans women. Every single one of them, whether they’re tagged as trans g!p, intersex g!p, a/b/o, or just flat out g!p.

Also, these fics are almost always written through a cis gaze (the cis person’s idea of what a trans woman and our struggles are, and often centered around a cis savior narrative and that cis character’s feelings…for a good example, see The Danish Girl).

Also, g!p fics get our bodies wrong (they’re often treated as cis dyadic women’s when convenient, and then cis dyadic men’s when convenient, which is really fetishistic and links us to cis men, male violence, and toxic masculinity, the latter of which often gets embodied by the g!p character in question to the point of saturation). They also portray us having sex in ways that most trans women do not have, and for a huge percentage, will not have for numerous very valid reasons. They basically never show us having sex in ways that are more likely to give us pleasure or which truly center us (we’re more often a vehicle to deliver the desires of the author, of the partner(s) involved in the fic), and never write the sex in ways that even consider our true existence. Almost never any anal in which we’re receiving. Never any muffing or rooing. There’s no excuse for the erasure of trans women’s sexuality in favor of a narrow, rigid cis dyadic men’s sexuality.

Basically, it’s absolutely fetishistic since it all follows the same narrow, rigid patterns and standards with some tiny leeway regarding how much toxic masculinity and issues with compulsory heterosexuality are projected and processed through trans women’s bodies.

If you don’t believe me, then please, consider the following:

Why…it’s almost as if there’s a fetish involved by how necessary these things are within the trope. Could it be that there’s unnecessary fetishization on the character’s penis that’s prioritized over everything else? Could it be that the trope requires trans women’s bodies to be different from our reality in order to satisfy the dehumanizing desires and views of the author and readers?

Why yes, I do believe that is the case, and data backs me up on that

Then there’s the growing amount of g!p works using the “daddy” kink (I’ve never come across a ‘daddy kink’ fic where a cis woman was the ‘daddy’ instead of the trans woman…there was a ‘mommy kink’ fic where the cis woman was the mommy and raped, abused, and conditioned the early teenage trans girl she’d fostered, but that’s all I can think of, and it’s clearly heinous). 

I’m going to be straight with you and tell you that g!p authors who include this ‘kink’ in these fics are just about never trans women, and here’s why: Trans women referring to ourselves with male terminology is a very quick way for society to attack and strip away our womanhood. Others referring to us with those terms is almost always going to feel like (if not almost always actually being) misgendering. It’s a considerable part of our oppression. Like, I’ve known trans women who had kids before transitioning. For nearly all of them, mentioning in therapy or to doctors that even their children called them ‘daddy’ or ‘dad’ was enough to put the brakes on them getting access to HRT, because those aren’t suitable terms to describe “real” women, and since they already had children, how committed could the possibly be to being women? How “real” were they?

Of course, it’s all gatekeeper bullshit, trans women of any stripe should get access anyways, but that sort of language is a veritable minefield for us. Just like cis girls can get away with saying things like “Suck my cock/dick”, when if a trans woman says it, the phrase is suddenly sexually violent and aggressive and “male violence” and a sign that we’re really the sexual predators we’re made out to be, etc. etc., and can (and has) actually put us in real physical or sexual danger.

So yeah…daddy kinks? Even if folks can get past the age-play and incest elements, that’s still not language that can be used for us without invoking violence on us.

So it’s another clear example of authors not understanding us, not taking the time to understand us, and instead just finding reasons to excuse elements of the intersex and trans people’s lives from intersex and trans narratives because they’re difficult to deal with and face, and instead focus on the things that make them aroused. Always their orgasms over our humanity and dignity.

All our unique experiences, all our difficulties, they all get swept away so that the cis author can keep what they want from us, and only what they want. They strip parts of us away and keep what makes them hot, what they need to write the story they want. That erases us. That fetishizes us. That dehumanizes us. Especially for intersex folks, whose fictionalized fantasy version of intersex effectively erases all their variance and their experiences, and props up a media stereotype that does not fit or remotely accurately represent them. Their experiences and traits are stripped away until all that’s left are what the perisex author wants to consume, usually fetishized aspects of them. That’s wrong.

The sad thing is, it’s honestly not hard to write decent trans characters. It’s not even hard to write decent sex scenes with trans-inclusive content. It’s not hard. It’s really not hard to humanize the characters instead of fetishizing them. It’s not hard to become aware of all the harmful norms and elements in these tropes.

When writers are dismissive and say “oh, well, this is just a lady with a dick, she’s not trans or intersex or anything” that doesn’t actually register. Our brains don’t work like that. We connect certain traits with words and ideas and categories, and since most folks reading and creating these works are cis, and cis people are already atrocious at interrogating their own transphobia, transmisogyny and cissexism, let alone recognizing it, it’s dangerous for them to think that they can compartmentalize when they’re proven to be unable to.

Like, maybe all the terrible messages these works send won’t be digested. Maybe only some will. And maybe some won’t completely digest. But after time, and after enough volume of reading these works, like any other media content that negatively targets marginalized people with narrow, fetishistic representation, it will start to stick. it will impact how people think. it will help solidify certain elements of cissexism, certain stigmas, certain stereotypes.

Because when they leave their computer or phone and look out into the real world, the females with penises are, overwhelmingly, trans women. And when they interact with us (and we are relatively rare), that’s when the results of that kind of media rears its head. That’s where it will influence their gut reactions, their instincts, those first initial thoughts about us, those curiosities, the way they look at us, what they focus on when we’re around. They’re be far, far more likely to link us with harmful dehumanizing fetishistic crap they’ve “learned” about us.

The fact is, we’re not commodities. We’re not living sex toys. We’re not walking penises. Folks can try and dress that up as much as they like, but if they don’t understand us, all that window-dressing will probably just end up harming us even more. An entire social demographic cannot be a fetish or kink without dehumanizing us in the process, and that’s what g!p works do.

We’re worthy of being understood. We’re worthy of being heard and respected. And we’re worth far more than fandoms value us for. Sick of watching wlw die on TV? Sick of wlw being fucked/turned straight in media for the sake of propping up heteronormativity? Sick of wlw content catering heavily to the male gaze and being full to the brim with misogyny? Sick of wlw never getting happy endings? Sick of femslash being considered the unwanted stepsister in the fandom meta, compared to het, M/M, and gen? Sick of all the one-dimensional women characters in media?

All those issues above? Combine them all together and you still don’t get the percentage of media content trans people have to deal with that’s damaging and dehumanizing and misrepresentative and cruel and violent to us. Nothing with us without us, and non-trans women writing stories about our bodies, without centering us and our narratives? And instead centering their fetishes and fantasies? That’s literally objectification and fetshization and dehumanizing. Tossing in some content aside from the smut doesn’t mean we’re being humanized by the story, contrary to popular belief

We have next to nothing out there for us. And when we see cis or NB writers (who aren’t aligned with us) writing works that could…with time and effort and empathy…be positive trans representation? But aren’t, because they’re too caught up in their fetish and entitlement to put us ahead of their orgasms and fantasies?

It’s like being kicked in the teeth when you’re already down and out, by folks who should by all rights know better. It makes fandoms a hostile space, each mounting transphobic/transmisogynistic story pushing us further and further to the margins, loudly declaring a blunt disregard for us outside of the use of our bodies to sate lustful fetishistic desires.

And if folks can’t manage to stop fetishizing us, which is not difficult to manage…then I’d hope that they stop. Even if I know they won’t, because our humanity and dignity and safety are nothing compared to the orgasms they desire from us.

There really, really aren’t, but okay. There are fics exploring a fantasy intersex condition with no basis in reality, but yeah, that’s not intersex rep, it’s not tasteful, it’s not respectful, and out of the three fics you might be referring to, each of them is neck-deep in transmisogyny and aggressive fetishistic bullshit, so I wouldn’t be throwing praise their way. But the fact that you are just shows how detached you are from the reality of fetishization trans and intersex women face, so at least you might be aware of that now.

Like, I’ve challenged the fandom to show me a respectful, even minimally fetishistic fic. Not even completely free of fetishization, but, like, minimal levels. There’s nothing. 

I’ve read hundreds in the 100 fandom alone in an attempt to find some instance of a minimally harmful fic to point at as an example for others to follow in reducing the harm they cause, and so far I’m drawing a blank. All the big name ones … This War of Needs, My Bones Have Found a Place, Leaving Home, the Badlands series, Her Alphas her mates, It’s Okay to be Different, Unplanned, Number 25, Movie Night, Welcome to Trigeda Industries, Ad Gladium, Fading Bright Eyes Dark, etc. etc. etc.

None of them are respectful. All of them are deeply fetishistic, cissexist, transmisogynistic, dangerously misrepresentative, etc.

I’d like folks who write g!p stories to write respectful fics (g!p term aside) including trans women’s bodies, but thus far, I have yet to come across one in this fandom. Just the presence of non-smut content doesn’t make a fic respectful. The presence of content other than smut doesn’t make it respectful, especially when it’s a pregnancy arc.

And if anyone thinks that tropes like g!p add intersex rep, they’re kidding themselves.

If there were 99x more fictional works featuring characters with CAH, AIS, Klinefelter’s Syndrome, Turner Syndrome, etc. , then maybe that argument could be considered, but that’s not reality.

Virtually no writer writing g!p stories including sex actually cares about intersex people enough to write actual intersex rep. They want the fictional fantasy that’s been peddled in porn/erotica instead, and they largely don’t care that it’s harmful, fetishistic, and unrepresentative rather than anything helpful.

Trans women face a world where far less than 1% of our sexual media content is respectful, positive, and representative of us.

But for intersex folks, there’s virtually nothing (or maybe literally nothing) accurate and positive out there that casts them as lovable, desirable, etc., so it’s an even bleaker situation.

So it’d be nice if folks would stop ejaculating on trans and intersex women’s backs while they pretend to care and be allies. Couldn’t be further from the truth

Where do we draw the line? At content that encourages harm against a marginalized group of people. Who draws that line? The marginalized people in question.

If Ao3 required people to opt into certain content, things might be a tiny bit different, but it’s an opt-out service without the tools to easily and effectively opt-out. And people can always write what they want, but when they share it, they take responsibility for it and the harm it causes, because that’s how this works. If they want to share among friends, and those interested in it, they can. But putting their harmful works on blast, on a public archive site where people can stumble upon those works, where their visible presence can harm and exclude? Yeah. That’s their responsibility. 

There’s no censorship, just demands for responsibility and openness. No one’s saying folks can’t write what they will, or share it how they like. We’re saying they’re hurting people, they’re hurting us, and it’s pushing us out of fandom. People can’t claim to support us, care for us, love us, and be our allies if they’re reproducing harm against us, refusing to listen to us, and refusing to stop harming us.

Like, me and other trans women have literally asked big name authors who write g!p to stop hurting us, to learn how to write about us in ways that don’t direct harm against us, that don’t exclude us from the community, that don’t render us male in the audience’s eyes. The answers have largely been “I’m willing to support you, but I won’t stop writing g!p fics the way I write them”, which is nowhere near support, it’s harm. It’s refusing to accept responsibility.

I’ve even made posts about how g!p writers can reduce their transmisogyny and cissexism. Because I know people will never stop exploiting us and hurting us when they can use us for orgasms, but maybe we can get them to hurt us less. it wouldn’t be a win, but it’d be something.

It’s really depressing to ask your oppressors to stop beating you so badly because you can’t take it full force, but alas, that’s where we are.

To be completely honest, you sound like you see g!p characters as having a closer proximity to manhood than cis woman characters. Which isn’t inclusive at all. 

In fact, there’s kind of a serious issue specific to how trans men and afab NB folks often view g!p works that’s very different from how cis women do.

Like, to pull a quote from a trans dude on a g!p fic:

For me personally, as a 30 year old trans man, I like to see myself as gp Lexa. It’s like I’m getting to experience my fantasy through fanfic. And I’m not afraid to admit that I have always had penis envy. Having a big dick and testicles was always a dream of mine. So if I can at least fantasize about it by pretending to be GP Lexa then I will. You know what I mean? Probably not.

Like, do you get how fucking troubling it is that trans women’s bodies are used as fetish fuel by that dude because he can’t get past his own cissexism, and that he imagines himself as a woman with a penis…the genitals to satisfy his dysphoria, and the woman’s body to claim entitlement to wlw relationships and women’s bodies? 

it’s a fantasy for trans men and afab NB folks. But these stories, and the messages they send, have real material impact on trans women. So I don’t give a fuck how any afab trans/nb person might feel included by g!p works, or might feel them useful to alleviate dysphoria. They can find another way that doesn’t direct harm against us and doesn’t exclude us from women’s spaces and fandom spaces that we need much, much more than they do.  They can find another way, or just admit that they don’t care at all about trans women.

It really doesn’t sound like you do. This isn’t just about things being distasteful or rude. Like, holy fucking shit. Trans women have been raped and sexually assaulted and sexually abused because of this shit. 

And it’s been made explicitly clear in fandom that fics are used as a source of sex-ed, as a source for education. Meaning that when writers promote inaccurate ideas about us, and violently misrepresent us, and attach tremendously harmful stigmas and associations to us and our bodies?

That comes back to bite us in the ass hardcore. Especially when there’s no visible sources offering any other ‘truth’, given 99.9+% of trans and intersex sexual media is unrepresentative. 

If you have education in media literacy, you’ll understand that media representation is important because exposing people to real, positive people of marginalized groups helps combat stereotypes, misinformation stigmas, etc. It’s why sexism in media is less potent in regards to representation than racism in a lot of ways because everyone is exposed to women in their daily lives, so it’s harder to reduce women to stereotypes and to hold stigmatized views. Absolutely possible and common, but less so than how racism shapes and molds people’s views on racial/ethnic groups, when a lot of areas have very homogenized racial populations. 

It’s a lot easier for a white guy in a town of 99% white people to stereotype black and brown people, and hold the harmful views that the media communicates. There’s way less exposure, less personal contact with positive representation to break down those views. In an urban environment like Brooklyn? Not as easy for folks to hold those views.

Same deal with trans women, except there’s virtually no positive, representative media about us, especially within sexual contexts. Even the 20-25% of trans women who are both able to and comfortable using their original genitals are largely unable to find representation in media that features how they have sex due to a huge variety of other issues regarding trans fetishization, transmisogyny, cissexism, transparent comp het/toxic masculinity/heteronormativity/misogyny baggage, etc.. 

So friendly reminder that if you’re not a trans woman, and you’re writing smut featuring trans women with penises that focuses purely/primarily on that penis, and you don’t write at least 90x more trans-inclusive smut that doesn’t resemble the hypersaturated trans fetishistic template? 

Then you have no business writing about us, and no business pretending you care about trans women past your orgasms you get off our backs.

Like, trans women writing stuff that resembles fetishistic tripe, I get that, I understand the need to process that due to internalized transmisogyny and all, or due to its proximity to their lived experience.

But if you’re not us, then it’s not people’s place to write that shit. There’s zero need at all for anyone who isn’t a trans woman to write that stuff, because there’s enough of those works to go around for the next two hundred years, there’s zero need for more of that “representation” when 99.9+% of our sexual media content is exactly that form and less than 30% of us can realistically even potentially be represented by that in a physical sense, leaving over 70%+ of us without any representation, and that under 30% largely unrepresented as well due to the other harmful content involved. The 0.06% (probably less, honestly) of our sexual media content that’s actually representative would need a huge infusion to get to anywhere near a reasonable share in order to combat stereotypes and misinformation and stigmas and rampant fetishization, so there’s no need for more fetishistic crap. None at all.

So just…friendly reminder, if you claim to be an ally of trans women, then stop writing that shit, and start caring about the fact that the overwhelming majority of us cannot find any media representation for ourselves in sexual contexts, especially not without harmful baggage tied on.

Think about what message that sends to us about under what conditions we can be deemed lovable and desirable and date-worthy and fuckable. Consider the fact that a lot of trans women, despite massive dysphoria, despite all the self-hatred and disgust it’ll induce, won’t resist sex acts we don’t want to engage in if our partners push hard enough, if only because it’s the only way so many of us are shown even an illusion of desire, love, affection, intimacy, etc. from partners.

Think about what this type of media tells our abusers. Think about what it tells us.

We deserve better. We need better.

There’s no ‘agree to disagree’ position that can be taken here. There’s no subjectivity. There is clear cause and effect, and maybe not everyone who reads and creates trans fetishistic media will translate that across to directly harming us, but enough do. More, more than enough do (and those that indirectly harm us? that impact is worth fighting against as well). And more than enough trans women are made vulnerable because of that media, are conditioned to be more vulnerable to abuse. Maybe not every trans woman, but enough, more than enough.

And it needs to end. We need more content that shows that we can be loved and desired and worthy of being dated and fucked that don’t involve our hypothetical penises at all. That don’t involve toxic masculinity or any of that stereotypical shit people tack onto us. That actually center us and our experiences and our pleasure.

Because right now, we’re only lovable under very specific conditions in the media, very restrictive, fetishistic conditions. And that needs to change.

Judging by your icon, if that other fandom was Glee, then I have bad news. The 100 is more saturated with g!p works, but Glee has more in volume. 

And yeah, Lexa is the one with the g!p the overwhelming majority of the time, for a few reasons.

This is largely due to her combat experience, social power, and leaner body positioning her closer to maleness than Clarke is (sexist, cissexist bullshit, but still). However, due to the deep cissexism of the fandom, it’s also certainly due to Clarke being bisexual and Lexa being a lesbian…if Clarke has a penis, people have a harder time believing Lexa would be interested in her/attracted to her (I could pull quotes from folks in the fandom on this, but this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone paying attention), whereas if Lexa has one, the idea is that Clarke wouldn’t mind either way since she’s bi (all of which combines to a lesbophobic, biphobic, cissexist mess)…the underlying reasoning being that g!p Lexa is not an actual woman, but more of a man that just appears to be a woman and uses she/her pronouns. Transmisogynistic and cissexist, but it’s the logic of a lot of the g!p readership. Some position g!p characters between womanhood and manhood. Some consider it F/M in reality but entertain the F/F labeling because the canon couple is. Some think g!p characters are less female than cis woman characters. I could keep going. Yeah, there’s rarely views that aren’t transmisogynistic or cissexist when gauging the writers and readers of g!p.

This is sort of why there are instances where I’ve read about Lexa saying things like how she’s “Clarkesexual” and very little explicit mentions of g!p Lexa being a lesbian (men can’t be lesbians, after all, but they can be ‘attracted to women’, which IS a phrase commonly used to describe Lexa’s sexuality in these fics), and why there was so much internal monologue of Clarke comparing Lexa to past boyfriends rather than past girlfriends on a sexual level, and asserting that the penis made her special and different from women, etc.

For all the noise this fandom made about how popular a male Lexa would have been in canon, and how thankful they are that Lexa’s a woman, they sure are quick to infuse Lexa with as much maleness and male-coded traits as possible in fanworks in order to get off. >_>

From going through these fics, I’ve gotten a pretty good sense of how common issues with compulsory heterosexuality and toxic masculinity are in the fandom. Understandable, with a lot of young members and folks who are getting their first taste of living out their sexuality. And there’s a lot of trans men and afab NB folks projecting their baggage onto trans women’s bodies, too in their processing of cissexism, internalized transphobia, heteronormativity, toxic masculinity, etc. There’s often a lot of unprocessed baggage, and I get that it needs processing, but trans women are not here to be people’s vessels and bear the burden of that damage.

We do not deserve to be hurt just because other people are confused. They can find another way.

We live in a world where trans women’s voices are already silenced, where we experience violence for speaking up and declaring our womanhood and realness. We live in a world that already conditions people to believe that we aren’t real (in how we know ourselves to be, at least), that we aren’t valid, and these works spread a lot of the same ideas used to invalidate and oppress us. of course it isn’t okay to me that people choose their fantasies over the wellbeing of trans women.

Like, I can’t go on sites like FFnet or Ao3 and find new stories anymore. I can’t, because i’ll always run into g!p fics, a/b/o, etc., and any time I see those, I’m reminded of just how much fandom hates trans women, how much they fetishize and dehumanize us, how they use us and throw us away, how they don’t listen when we tell them that they’re hurting us. There are roundabout ways to get past those fics, but I shouldn’t have to put in that effort to drape the curtains over the masses in the fandom that are gleefully happy to harm me, not when they absolutely exist. not to mention those fics are almost always on rec-lists, so good luck traversing fandom safely in social media, anyways.

Fandom is a hostile, violent place for trans women to exist in. Fics that celebrate transmisogyny only make it that much harder for us to feel welcome and accepted, to create our own content on a platform that should be accessible for us where all others aren’t. Fandom should be where we can create the trans representation that the rest of media refuses to make, where we can feel safe and supported.

But it’s not. And g!p, a/b/o, etc., they chase us away. And after that, there’s not much of anywhere to go, but that’s generally how it is for trans women. There’s next to no spaces in this world that are actually accepting and non-hostile towards us. There’s next to no spaces where people will have our backs if we speak up about harm done to us. It’s why even engaging in LGBT communities is literally shown to be bad for our health and a factor in increasing risk of suicide for us (whereas, it’s helpful for trans men and afab nb folks).

It’d be nice for fandoms to even just try. Try to listen. Try to change. But it doesn’t happen. When g!p and a/b/o started taking root in The 100 fandom, trans women like myself and other trans folks spoke up and warned about the harm it can cause, and how hostile the fandom could be after it had seemed fairly accepting up to then? 

The response was g!p and a/b/o fics being even more wildly celebrated and supported, and us being laughed off and roundly dismissed. And the big names making that push were: a cissexist trans dude; a trans masc nb person; a cis woman who has a trans man partner who is her exception, and who is open about fetishizing trans women to avoid processing her baggage. And now The 100 fandom is arguably the most saturated femslash-centered fandom when it comes to a/b/o and g!p.

And Lexa has been effectively ruined for me because I can hardly think of her and not think about all the ways she’s been weaponized against me and other trans women.

And so I blame those g!p-writing authors, their stories, and their readership, for making fandom a harmful, dangerous, hostile space for trans women. I can absolutely fairly lay that blame on them.

So yeah, another 5900 words on why g!p is absolutely harmful and people should stop writing and reading it if they care about trans women and intersex women.