Up The Wolves by The Mountain Goats // Minotauro by Jordi Garriga Mora
demeter protecting persephone sketch
there’s no better feeling than coming home and immediately changing into your adam sandler fit
It’s so strange to me when people try to portray butch4femme as a heteronormative dynamic.
Do they not know a butch will cook her femme a three course meal because butches are caretakers?
A femme will stand in front of her butch at the bar, acrylics bared like a lynx, ready to cut the throat of anyone who criticises her partner’s masculinity or questions their right to space.
A butch will spend quiet nights hunched over a laptop learning how to sew and then hunched over her femme’s favourite dress, fixing it as she sleeps?
A femme will take charge and tell her butch to lie down, go and have that shower, go and get that errand done, because she knows what her baby needs?
There is nothing heteronormative about butches and femmes seeing and validating each other in a way the world refuses to. There’s nothing wrong with butches and femmes slow dancing in the speakeasy they’ve created on the kitchen tiles, the only place that’s ever been created for people like them.
anthy himemiya from revolutionary girl utena as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia! please full screen….i’m begging you….i painted so many leaves
prints available here, and as always, follow me on twitter for more art!
🩷💖💞🤍🎀🤍🩷💞💞💖🤍🎀🤍💌💞🩷💖💌
🩷💖💞🤍🎀🤍🩷💞💞💖🤍🎀🤍💌💞🩷💖💌
i would actually like to hear more of your thoughts on whipping girl, whenever you feel ready enough to talk about it. i've only ever heard positive recommendations for it. i was thinking of reading it. i've read one or two introductory 101 texts on transmisogyny as well as some medium/substack posts, and always looking to read more as a tme person. ty!
thanks for asking! I'm gonna try to be concise because I'm stuck on my phone for the month, but here are my thoughts on whipping girl:
serano is at her strongest in the book in three areas: manifestations of transmisogyny in media (e.g. how trans caricatures pervade movies), the history of medical institutions developing a pathology of transsexuality (like the diagnostics of blanchard et al. or how trans people seeking healthcare were and continue to be forced into acting out prescribed expressions and manufacturing memories), and the construction of her own transition narrative (telling the reader what it was like for her to grow up desiring femininity in a way that confused her, the experience of crossdressing, the effects of hrt for her)
whenever she's just sticking to this, I think she effectively communicates a lot that the unaware reader could benefit from—even many trans women/transfems/tma people who are otherwise in tune with the history of medicalized transsexualism and our popular depictions could probably benefit from her own personal narrative, by nature of how variegated our experiences can be.
unfortunately I think the book fails at its primary—stated—goal, which is to theorize about transmisogyny. in the big picture this is a bifurcated failure:
on one branch of her argument, she remains committed to there being something biologically essential/innate about gender. this manifests thru multiple claims: that we have "innate inclinations" toward masculinity/femininity and "subconscious sex" rather than what I believe, which is that the latter are constructed categories imposed on different matrices of behaviour/expression/desire in different cultural contexts; that there is "definitely a biological component to gender" (close paraphrase) after a discussion of how she believes E and T tend to affect people (thus equivocating gender with dominant hormones!); that we have such a thing as "physical sex" which is the composition of our culturally decided "sex characteristics" (don't ask me how the dividing line is drawn) even as she says we should stop using "biological sex" as a term; that there is "no harm" in agreeing that "sex" is largely bimodal with some exceptions; that social constructionism is necessarily erasure of transsexual experiences in early childhood... altogether she is unwilling to relinquish arguments about the partial "innateness" of femininity/masculinity and gender. this is at tension with her admission on several occasions that these are neither culturally/geographically nor temporally stable concepts! but that doesn't seem to be a line she can follow thru on.
on another, intertwining branch, she engages in what I think is a deep and widespread mistake in the theorizing of transmisogyny: reducing it (mechanistically) to anti-effeminacy. it is her stated thesis at the start that masculinity is universally preferred to femininity. she doesn't offer a definition of either term until one of the final chapters, where she defines them as the behaviours and expressions associated with a particular gender. but I think this reduction just misunderstands transmisogyny. it is even in tension with an observation she makes early on, that trans women are often punished for their perceived masculinity! but again, this is a thought she seems unable or unwilling to follow thru with.
my problem with the thesis is that masculinity and femininity do not float free of gender—it is not possible to speak of their valuation in the abstract. anyone who grew up as a masculine cis girl and never "grew out" of that "phase" can attest to the violence wrought upon expressions of masculinity from women. and this applies doubly so to the subjects of transmisogyny! not only are we punished for any perceived bleed-through of masculinity from our supposed "underlying male selves", those of us who are willingly masculine and thriving as mascs are punished for our failure to conform to the rules of the normative womanhood that is imposed on us (just as we are punished for any willing femininity as "false" and predatory upon cis womanhood—observe that transmisogyny is reactive degendering in every case!).
on both branches serano makes only perfunctory remarks about the intersections with race, class, and colonialism. "sex" as such was made to only be accessible to the "civilized", most of all the white european! for a racialized person and particularly a Black person navigating gender the waters are just not the same; the signifiers of sex neither available in the same way, nor granted the same medical legitimacy. what is the "physical sex" of someone who is de-sexed altogether? how can gender have a "biologically innate" component when its expressions between the bourgeoisie and the working class are at total odds with one another? this all goes for the masculine/feminine distinctions as well. what sense is there in the claim that we have innately masculine/feminine inclinations when globally (and transmisogyny has been made global!) what is feminine and masculine can be very nearly mirrored? nor is "masculinity is always considered superior to femininity" innocent of obviating race. transmisogynoir adds yet further degendering thru the coercive masculinization of someone as a Black woman—masculinization as punishment, again!
and as a final point, the account fails to be materialist. there is no attempt to place transmisogyny in its role as an instrument of political economy or, as jules gill-peterson might say, as a tool of statecraft. it is just a psychological response to the way the world is, as far as serano has anything to say about it. but how did the world become that way, and why?? serano's solution, the abolition of what she calls gender entitlement, is naive to the fact that gender entitlement is necessary to the maintenance of the capitalist state, which is structured thru patriarchy and built on colonialism. it is not possible to reskin this into something innocuous!
this is why I cannot recommend whipping girl as a work about transmisogyny except at the most shallow level. it could be a helpful critical read, but imo, it is just wrong about transmisogyny.
this is particularly timely with contemporary discussions of transmisogyny taking place on tumblr at the minute. whipping girl’s occasional positioning as *the text* on transmisogyny does a serious disservice to the ways in which its scope is fundamentally limited, which are explained very well here.
I think this is a very good analysis of whipping girl’s issues. I would note that many of these issues directly arise from the main accomplishment of the book: that this was one of the first popular pieces to argue that discrimination against trans women was related to misogyny. The anti-materialist, psychoanalytic and white issues of Serrano’s piece are absolutely crippling and are also widespread in work like *Gender Trouble*, which essentially founded the body of work which she is largely speaking to.
Gill-Peterson has a fantastic discussion of these transfeminist theory hangups in the intro of her 2024 book. Gill-Peterson has largely reconfigured her trans theory via engagement with social scientific and historical work which is largely ignored in feminist/queer/gender theory, most notably contemporary ethnographic work with trans people. This detachment also takes notable form in the way Gill-Peterson’s book intentionally skips the alienation of trans women from queer women+trans spaces, a hallmark of transfeminist work from Stryker to Serano to a lot of extra-academic work I see on this site, and instead focuses on the continued marginalization and exclusion of trans women within gay mens’ spaces and the massive push to distance gay mens’ communities from trans women in the 70s and 80s (‘gay’ used to apply to both groups, distinctions were different)
Stryker’s noted in a interview on the trans porn issue in TSQ that a long-standing goal of her work in TSQ has been to talk more about sex work, pornography, and trans womens’ relationships with men. The massive backlash against that trans porn issue, and against two trans women (jules gill-peterson and a doctoral student), both of whom were some of the only historians/social scientists trying to engage with trans sex work, which has historically and contemporarily been a primary source of income for trans women, is frankly just depressing.
When we are discussing sources on transmisogyny, it is important to keep in mind the disciplinary structures they’re coming from and speaking to. Gill-Peterson is based in a history department. This is not a coincidence. Different disciplines have different affordances and limitations for study, and feminist/queer/trans theory (so co-located because they are almost always cohosted inside single departments) comes with assumptions which may not allow for effective studies of trans womens’ experiences beyond the Serrano argument, which is that trans womens’ experiences can be studied entirely through misogyny and can therefore be folded into existing white feminist epistemes.
half a year of unrelenting genocide in Gaza, please don’t stop caring. they are so tired, they cannot be the only ones participating in their own liberation. we have to keep caring
WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They don't love you like I love you
whipping girl so easily and effortlessly disproves the existence of "transandrophobia" or any kind of "special just for transmascs" transphobia through its literal first chapter in the span of like 3 sentences and it drives me fucking crazy nuts bananas to see that because literally if any of you stupid motherfuckers read NOT EVEN 30 PAGES OF A SINGLE BOOK you would understand why the entire concept start to finish is stupid and ignorant at best and actively antagonistically transmisogynistic at worst.
this is literally chapter 1 like its so simply and easily disproven if you spend literally 3 seconds thinking about it
My kinda first decent charcoal study on Allen. Be nice I don't know how to do shit with charcoal
WIP
More angles of the Snoopy I made.
This post is EVERYTHING
Not only that, OP has a raffish air about him… like he’d steal your very heart if you weren’t careful
Get the fuck out of my wet room bitch like who asked
accurate post game sleeping arrangement
[textless ver below the cut]
Shadowheart 🖤
When all this is over, will you stay with me? For good?