If you don’t already know what WARHOUND is you don’t spend a lot of time around a certain kind of gay early 20s transgender women. Basically it’s about what if a woman mech pilot was sexually treated like a dog, and trans is very into that. It is currently spawning an entire transgender post-Empty Spaces microgenre about this.

Anyways people get very upset about WARHOUND, for many reasons: they don’t think women should be treated like dogs; they find the whole thing depressing; they feel like Kallidora Rho is working in a genre and context that she isn’t sufficiently engaged with; they hate women.

I happen to agree with some of their criticisms. I find Rho’s prose lacking; I think WARHOUND isn’t a very context-grounded work; I think that Ancyor isn’t a very interesting mech for a story to which the mech-as-power-fantasy is critical. But the prose is not the point! The worldbuilding or lack thereof is not the point. WARHOUND is not about any of those other things, and analyzing it through those lenses isn’t going to get you anywhere, because WARHOUND is pornography — and the telos of pornography is pure stimulation. Here are WARHOUND’s stimuli: the thrill of skill and power suborned to an eroticized fear of bestial debasement, the supremacy of control over desire, and also lots of getting punched in the stomach.

No wonder trans women love this so much.

The value of WARHOUND, then, is in what it can tell us about the kinds of pornography trans seeks out and creates, and the antecedent transgender neuroses which cause her to do so.

As previously discussed, the upbringing transgender women are forced through, while it does permanently damage her, at least allows her expertise and a defiant joy in testing her own limits through competition. She is aware, however, that this is not an opportunity often afforded to her counterpart non-trans women, and therefore often develops a complex of guilt around it. This complex is part of why trans women are so drawn to WARHOUND: it posits that she can atone for her prowess, which she feels she is somehow unwomanly of her, through debasement and sexual subservience.

Sarthra Thrace performs her unfeminine display of physical prowess as ordered by her Handler, who controls and rewards her, treating her like a dog sexually. The fear of deviation from womanhood is assuaged by her lack of agency — Handler is making her do this, so she doesn’t need to be ashamed of it.

And then this fear of deviation from womanhood is deliberately stoked, and stoked, and assuaged again. WARHOUND is pornography. She is made to betray her allies; to be debased with various bodily fluids; to be sexually available to whomever her Handler wishes. Of course she does not want these things1. But anybody who has studied or been subject to power knows that control is only real insofar as the subject can be made to do things against some part of their own will. The subject is only controlled insofar as she is made to abandon and defile her former principles as a demonstration of the supremacy of that control and of her own abjection.

Desire = Weakness = Animal Nature < Control = Strength = Inhumanity. Yes this is reiterated endlessly but that’s the point. It’s pornography. That single line about the Handler not drinking takes on more and more importance as the story goes on. (I did like Kione Monax developing an eating disorder.)

By being made into a creature that exists to only to fight she flirts with the fear of detransition — of being perceived as an actor rather than an object; a man rather than a woman. We all know dogs are the boy animal. But this, too, WARHOUND answers: It’s fine. It wasn’t really her fault. She is not and never can be a man because she is treated as something fundamentally feminine; ie, subjugated. She is being controlled hard enough to erase her complicity, isn’t she. (isn’t she? well, yes. you shouldn’t blame her, at any rate.)

So what is the side being turned on? You may notice that the entire rebellion is made up of queer women, and that all three protagonists are alienated from it: Sartha is crushed by expectations; Kione is a mercenary2; Leinth is canonically trans.

(Imperials are also shown mostly to be women but Leinth considers it worthy of thought that a female pilot is groping her; we also see a man or two as gerontocrats in SHOWHOUND, though those men are probably gay. We are meant to understand that men are around but not really sexually involved, except as groping hands and phalluses, if Handler deems it appropriate. This is because Kallidora prefers women sexually. Which is quite a reasonable preference.)

Sartha Thrace is in a trans woman’s position: held up as a banner, lauded for her accomplishments, effectively abandoned by those who should be her community. No wonder so many people thrill at the chance to rape and debase her. The Handler is at least honest about her desire to do so: the trans woman is a woman. That’s why she’s subjugated. As a trans woman — as a woman — as a human — she has desires and those desires are a perfect handle for the Handler to judo flip break her spine.

WARHOUND would be completely unrecognizable in a world where transgender women felt accepted.

MECHA INTERLUDE

Mechsploitation’s roots in Armored Core VI’s story trailer are clear, but we can go deeper.

This is obvious to anybody who has watched a Gundam (Evangelion counts) and has a brain, but it still bears saying: a giant robot is a body that conveys a relationship to force. Cyber Newtype Four Murasame’s Psyco Gundam externalizes her mental instability into indiscriminate civilian casualties3; neural damage from Mikazuki Augus’ spinal-port connection to Gundam Barbatos leaves him hemipelagic4, and incapable of civilian life; Eva-01’s Berserk Mode is diagetically Yui but functions thematically as the release of Shinji’s own repressed rage5.

Whether or not Kallidora Rho is familiar with these sources6, they color the informed reader’s perception of Ancyor. Ancyor is a mobile melee fighter consistently referred to in animalistic terms. That’s a very “cool” thing to be. It could be even “cooler” if she fleshed it out more, even if I know Kallidora only intended to paint it impressionistically. Yes, very few people have ever had the opportunity to pilot post-Cold War so I can’t really fault her for not having any practical experience. To her credit she does move further in this direction with Theaboros Archon. Personally I find that pornographic material is much stronger firmly embedded in a context. But that’s just my own sexual preferences, which I will write an article about some other time.

OKAY BACK TO THE SPLOITATION

I’ve been trying to meet this text on its own terms, but I just don’t have the thing that makes me afraid of being a violent monster attacking my former comrades-in-arms.

This probably sounds like I think I’m better than that. Like I think I would never betray my principles. But I’m not so arrogant. If you tortured me enough you could probably get me to say or do anything — although, I must note, if anybody were to resort to torture to force me to commit transphobia, or any other bigotries, they would by doing so have admitted that they lost the true battle, of rhetorics.

I’m fit enough, if only because my older sister is running marathons now and I can do anything she can. I jog sometimes; I walk a lot. I am a performer, and performance demands skill. I’m competitive, if not usually in the same arenas as transgender women are. I do a lot of work to be at least competent at anything I try, and I do it successfully. As a femme I have complicated feelings on womanhood and deviation and appropriation and assimilation.

I think (I hope) a lot of trans women can relate to a lot of that. Or some of you, to some of it. We’re women, trans and cis alike.

I mean, I understand the fear of public humiliation. I understand the fear of rape. I understand the fear of having the girl you love most in the world walk out on you during your anniversary dinner because she saw a flash of black hair. Those things don’t necessarily have to have happened to me for me to fear them, but they are possibilities that I have at least considered. I’m just not afraid of being turned into a violent monster and attacking my previous peers for the same reason I’m not scared of, I don’t know, having a tree grow out of my nose. I haven’t had the life context that would make me aware that that would even be something to be scared of. WARHOUND’s fanbase indicates that many transgender women have.

That scares me.

Also I don’t like it when girls get punched in the stomach. That makes me feel gross.

articles I am considering writing:

why so many cis men seem to follow me + a basic explainer of what I mean when I say Trans Women Are The Women Of Women (these two things are connected)

the definitive Mobile Suit Gundam watch order

how I feel about having somebody else decide to be a married version of me on twitter (probably the second most surprising thing that has happened there, besides somebody drawing me pregnant.)

I also like transgender women, and I’m interested in the complexes and neuroses that transgender women often develop. I feel like longform serial work is uniquely suited to getting into transgender women’s heads because of its ability to portray the awful lengthy grind done to her, as her living her whole life…

Though the following works are not necessarily by or even solely about transgender women, they do all get at facets of what transgender women (and non-transgender women) experience. Transgender women may feel seen by the works on this list; non-transgender women can, I hope, gain some measure of insight into what it must be like to be one of them.

(light spoilers follow)

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere - Lurina

paranoia, guilt, violation, passing.

Utsushikome of Fusai is hiding a sin that makes it impossible for her to kill herself; she lives in the worst possible world for a girl with her particular neuroses. Also this is a mystery novel — specifically a When They Cry.

Su’s particular flavors of jealousy and jaded self-hatred read as extremely transgender, as do the conditions around “assimilation failure” and the resulting “witches”. A few years ago a cis woman I follow posted about her sexual fascination with her transgender wife’s orgasms - all that effort for the tiniest little precious pearl of liquid. That’s what The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere’s yuri is like.

Coquette Dragoon - Ivy May

militarization, alienation, agency and coping mechanisms

A sad little bunny signs up to go to Gundam war. Yes the author has decided to market it as The Ageplay And Pee VN but actually it’s about shame and complicity and how girls react to the realities of power. And those other things I guess. This one is very much a Gundam and comes with Gundam-typical warnings (eating disorders, violent deaths, evil boys). A lot of recent Gundam unfortunately fails to grapple with the sheer difficulty of killing another person, even in a military context, and the resulting consequences —but I have no worry that Coquette Dragoon will treat life and the loss thereof with anything less than the reverence and horror it deserves.

Girls who the world tries to turn into men end up obsessed with their abilities to cause harm. Sweet scared little Xiomara could kill somebody, you know. She could get in her Coquette Dragoon and end a human life. She’d get over it, too, eventually. That’s the really awful thing. Transgender women are put in situations that teach them that not having that power is worse, which is part of why they’re like that.

Unarchived - bb wolfclaw

defiance, other faces, sexuality and need entangled, mommy issues

Three vtubers destroy their careers over each other. One of them is employed; one of them is a former idol; one of them is transgender. This one has just gotten started and I’m very much looking forward to seeing where it goes.

Positioning the trans woman as the one mothering her own mother (the kind of woman situation that readers associate with cis women) is an extremely strong move on the author’s part. Not that Eden’s transness is minimized — just that it’s treated as the cause of problems she has of ≅ equal magnitude to Jun’s and Sierra’s. Transgender women are women, and that means that they have women’s problems, and that’s something that quite a lot of people (many of them transgender women) need to get into their heads.

Misericorde - xeecee

isolation, religious psychosis, libidinal mania, nuns

As an Anchoress, Hedwig was supposed to spend her entire life in her cell — but there’s been a murder and the Abbess has nobody else with a solid alibi. Also a When They Cry.

The relevance to trans women here is Hedwig’s isolation, particularly as a woman isolated from other women. Of course she’s ludicrously horny — if she had internet access she’d be posting about it, but she doesn’t so there’s really only the one way for her to let off steam. Understandable even if I had to take frequent breaks because I’m too empathetic to enjoy cringe comedy, even when it’s very intentional.

WARHOUND and sequels - Kallidora Rho

supremacy of control over desire, weakness and weaponhood, internality, force.

I have a lot to say about the things this one reveals about the transgender psyche. Actually I have so much that I will just write an entire other article about it.

What Happens Next - Max Graves

masculinity, agency, culpability

A weird sad guy raised as a girl suffers the fallout of his best friend’s murder spree.

Max (a longtime associate of mine) is interested in guys who have something wrong with them. Transgender women in What Happens Next exist as a counterpoint — people who were also raised in the wrong gender role but are willing to bite down and face their problems. Vikki in particular is a very good depiction of the ways that living as a transgender woman pushes them to snap, and also a genuinely decent person who isn’t going to be able to fix the current situation. I think that’s a very charitable take on transgender women and I wish more of you held it as aspirational.

O Human Star - Blue Delliquanti

potential, forking paths, legacy, absolution.

Sixteen years after his death, resurrected roboticist Alistair Sterling finds his old partner raising a robot girl who looks suspiciously like he does.

Sulla contends with being made in the image of somebody she has never known and passing as human in a world that isn’t ready for her; Alistair contends with discovering he has something like a daughter. I think, though, that the most important thing here is something I’ve been trying to get across: sometimes people who are not trans women care about you and have interesting things to say about you respectfully. Maybe you’ll listen if somebody who isn’t me demonstrates that.

Halimarriede’s Substack - “Halimarriede”

Some transgender lesbian is writing about being Halimede. Curious about where this one is going.

Transgender women are women, and can do all kinds of things. Pretending to be somebody you aren’t, though, can be dangerous. You’d think they would learn that from the testosterone.

short one today, as work projects and family affairs come to a head at the exact same time. as anticipated. glad I got The Penis Monologues (isn’t that fun to say!) out when I did. Unfortunately now I have to figure out how to get out of attending a funeral.

Context: The Vagina Monologues, V. Specifically This One

Content Warning: The Vagina Monologues-typical frank discussion of body shaming, rape, self-harm, etc.

BECAUSE SHE LIKED TO LOOK AT IT

(the speaker is a transgender woman. There’s a lot of fun staging you could do here but: it is critical that either she should be differentiated from the other women who have performed their monologues or she should not. of course in every work the actor can technically assert final say but in this particular Vagina Monologue — or rather, Penis Monologue — the actress must be as free as possible to color as she will.)

This is how I came to love my penis.

It’s embarrassing because transgender women are supposed to hate every part of ourselves. Women are taught that they’re lower than men; transgender women are taught that we’re lower than women. If you hate your body enough,

if you starve yourself enough

if you cut yourself enough

if you suffer enough

your suffering will atone for the horrible sin of wanting to be a girl.

That suffering doesn’t mean enough to make you a real woman, just a faggot. Every cis woman thinks of herself as a victim, and you’re not going to change that just by having it worse than her. But if you hurt yourself enough some of them might recognize that you are more of a woman than all the other freaks, at least. Enough that somebody might pity you enough to fuck you.

I know loving a penis is like the least feminist thing imaginable. The Vagina Monologues is a deeply personal work compiled from years of interviews with women who were taught to hate their own bodies; The Penis Monologues is a punchline. A woman’s vagina is a locus of desire and repression and disgust and pleasure and freedom; we develop complexes and collect interviews and write plays about it. Nobody needs to tell men to love their penises. Has a man ever had a complicated opinion about his penis? Maybe if it’s small, he wishes it was bigger. Maybe if it’s too big, like, so big it’s inconvenient, he wishes it was smaller. Maybe he has a fetish for having a big or small penis. That’s it, really.

The word vagina is from the, Latin for scabbard; where a weapon is placed.

Did you know what is done to us, cis women? They pick out some girls when we are young, because we have penises like they do, and they turn us into weapons to keep the rest of you in line. Those who do not comply — who dare to show softness, weakness, kindness — get beaten and raped, just like you. You are taught that a part of yourself is filthy; we are taught that the purpose of a penis is force.

In high school my best friend and I were in love. We were making out in the back of my car and her hand went down, down between my legs; grasping softly and then with confusion; desperation. She started crying when she found out I wasn’t hard. She thought I didn’t want her. That there was something wrong with her.

I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t want to hurt her. I couldn’t tell her that I wanted to lie with her in bed and run my hands and tongue along her whole body and tie her up and plunge my face directly into her pussy for hours — as long as she didn’t touch me. That I wanted to be a pair of hands and a mouth for her fingers and nothing else; that I hated my penis because I had seen what evil men did with theirs. I tried, but the words didn’t come.

So I told her I was gay.

“Why didn’t you tell me,” she said. She was the president of the GSA. “It makes sense. You were always so nice… I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pressured you into this.”

We stopped being friends after that.

I know the story. Trans bodies are beautiful: my self-hatred is only the internalized repression and hatred of the patriarchal culture. It isn’t real. I know all of it. People made it all up, and if we could all stop agreeing on it, things would be different. Gender is a construct. But, to quote Imogen Binnie, “Eventually you can’t help but figure out that, while gender is a construct, so is a traffic light, and if you ignore either of them, you get hit by cars.” Not being tangible doesn’t make rules less real.

If we’d grown up in a culture where we were taught women’s facial hair was beautiful, we’d all be applying medical creams under our noses and using moustache pencils. But we didn’t grow up in that culture. I hated my facial hair and I hated my penis even more. I thought it was incredibly ugly. I was one of those trans women who had looked at it and from that moment on showered in the dark. It made me sick. I pitied anyone who had to go down there.

I thought maybe transitioning might make me okay with it; that being seen as a woman and getting the facial hair zapped off would alleviate the pressure of hating myself for having a penis. But that just made the contrast sharper.

Yes, it started working differently. Yes, it got softer, and more delicate, and started smelling like pussy. One of the nice things about performing The Vagina Monologues is I get to come up here on stage and say actually yes, I really do like the smell of pussy. Yes I have heard the Contrapoints bit about the mouthfeel. But that didn’t make having a penis any easier.

Um, Natalie, on the off chance you see this and you want to demonstrate exactly how the mouthfeel changes, in person, here’s my number: ###-###-####.

So. In order to survive, I began to pretend there was nothing there. I imagined myself Barbie-doll smooth. Isn’t that a funny idiom? They’ve been printing underwear on Barbies since before I stole my older sisters’. Anyways I used a lot of wand vibrators and I did a lot of anal, always face down. Always with men.

Then I met C.

C was bisexual. She was short and thin and wore the kinds of things you would expect from somebody trying to make it clear to everybody that she was bisexual. I saw her get they’d once (she was giving she/they, though she wasn’t) and she took it as a compliment. She had a Lapidot charm on her keychain, if that means anything to you. I actually like Lapis a lot but it’s kind of a red flag. C did not like spicy foods or listen to anything but pop. Her favorite Asian cuisine was Japanese. She liked lingerie, especially on boys, and her tastes in BL ran to the shounen. She said what she thought, and apologized for it. She did not have any problems or issues and did not even drink. She wasn’t very funny or articulate or mysterious. She wasn’t mean or unavailable. She wasn’t self-involved or charismatic. She had a car with a bisexual flag sticker on the bumper, and she still took the bus.

I did not particularly like C. Actually I hated her immediately. I was jealous of her birdlike movements and the privileged ambivalence with which she performatively treated her own femininity. I would have missed her altogether if our fingers hadn’t touched when she pressed her number into my hand and ran back to her cheering friends. When we touched something happened. I told myself that it was just the novelty of a cis woman hitting on me but I ended up going to bed with her. That’s when the miracle occurred.

Turned out that C loved penises. She was a connoisseur. She loved the way they felt, the way they tasted, the way they smelled, but most importantly she loved the way they looked. She had to look at them. The first time we had sex, she told me she had to see me.

“I’m right here,” I said.

“No, you,” she said.

“I have to see you.”

“Turn on the light,” I said, thinking she was a weirdo and freaking out in the dark. Sure, a cis man could have killed me, but an allegation from a cis woman could cost me my job.

She turned on the light.

Then she said, “OK, I’m ready, ready to see you.”

“Right here,” I waved, “I’m right here.” I thought she was an idiot, and worse, I thought she was going to treat me like a man.

Then she began to undress me.

“What are you doing C?” I said.

“I need to see you,” she replied.

“No need,” I said. “Just do it.”

“I need to see what you look like,” she said.

“But you’ve seen a penis before,” I said.

“Of course I have,” she said. And then, anticipating my reply: “I have guy friends with benefits, you know. If I wanted a guy right now I would be with a guy right now,” confirming that I had not been her first trans woman, and that at least one of the previous ones had been comfortable enough with her to share her insecurities.

C continued. She would not stop. I wanted to throw up and die.

“This is awfully intimate,” I said. “Can’t you just do it.”

“No,” she said. “It’s who you are. I need to look.”

I held my breath. She looked and looked. She got breathy and her eyes went soft. I felt her eyes crawl upward to my breasts and up to my eyes and down again; out to my thighs and in again. Her gaze pressed through my skin like a new kind of touch.

“You’re so beautiful,” she said. “You’re elegant and deep and innocent and wild.”

“You saw that there?” I said.

It was like she read my palm.

“I saw that,” she said, “and more, much much more.”

She stayed looking for almost an hour as if she were studying a map, observing the moon, staring into my eyes, but it was my penis. In the light I watched her looking at me and she was so genuinely excited, so peaceful and euphoric, I began to get wet and turned on. I began to see myself the way she saw me. I began to feel beautiful and delicious — like a great painting, or a waterfall. C wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t grossed out. I began to swell, began to feel proud. Began to love my penis. And C lost herself there, and I was there with her, in my penis, and we were gone.

||

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

(here’s Because He Liked To Look At It, in case you skipped it at the start)

Compare and contrast the weight of gendered expectations on cis women to the weight of gender dysphoria on trans women, particularly as each affects perceptions of the genitals.

.

Imagine a version of this story where a transgender woman helps a cisgender woman become more comfortable with her vagina. Does that read any differently? Should it?

.

All of the women were asked the following questions: If your penis got dressed what would it wear?

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If your penis could talk, what would it say?

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Imagine having a vagina; or, if you have a vagina, imagine having a penis. How would your answers to the previous questions change?

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Would you opt out of having a period, if you had the option? If you have a penis, imagine that you have a vagina.

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How much does having a penis or vagina really matter on a daily basis? What other things might matter more — or less?

.

How many people are going to misread this post as evidence that I am trans? I am not trans.

.

What would cis women have to give up for solidarity with trans women? What would trans women have to give up for solidarity for cis women? How would our lives change, and how would they stay the same?

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Is there a kind of womanhood not defined by suffering?

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Why can’t we get there? Why can’t we get to where that is and stop hurting each other? I want to go there. I want to go there and live there forever. Please. Why are we holding us back? Do you think we could get there someday?

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Is there any hope for us?

.

Do you ever think about how the worst word in the English language is a euphemism for the standard female genital configuration? I do. I think about it all the time. It explains a lot.

I was watching Lessons In Chemistry1, Starring Brie Larson as a plucky young chemist who is the only reasonable person in the world, because — even though the showrunners are clearly smearing the science in service of Christian moral arcs and don’t understand that Calvin Evans is clearly a gay man2 — anything where an intelligent woman3 who doesn’t need a diagnosis contends with the broken systems of a stupid and evil world is like candy to me.

Helen DeWitt keeps having problems with publishing and I saw the first half on a plane, okay?

Anyways Lessons in Chemistry ends with a very Pink victory: Elizabeth Zott manages to keep her show on air, in defiance of The Patriarchy Man, by scoring a Tampax sponsorship and giving a basic lecture on menstruation4. In the 1960s, when this show takes place, this would have been revolutionary; even in 2026 I teared up.

And yet. I couldn’t help but wonder how a transgender woman would feel, watching that.

Whether you’re a cis woman or a trans woman or even I guess one of the three or so men who read this blog for some reason5, you care about women. And if you care about women, you should already know about how estrogen-primacy affects heart attack symptoms, or how to perform a basic examination for possibly cancerous breast nodules — but did you know they were testing tampon absorbency with saline instead of blood until 2023? Not even saline with simulated clots. Straight saline. As a direct consequence of men and male bodies being considered the norm, female6 reproductive health is woefully understudied.

Trans women are women. They are subject to the social pressures that define women, have estrogen-primary hormonal systems, and conceive of themselves as women. This is as obvious without thought to me as it is for me to walk down the stairs.

And yet I would never ever take a trans woman to a production of The Vagina Monologues. Which is not to say that a transgender woman could not enjoy The Vagina Monologues7, just that I would feel really horrible about having the body part that people associate so definitively with womanhood sitting next to a woman who didn’t. It would be in terrible taste. I wouldn’t give somebody in remission a copy of The Emperor Of All Maladies either.

Clearly we need to be prioritizing research on/awareness of the standard XX reproductive system — and clearly we also need to prioritize the well-being of transgender women. The power of The Vagina Monologues is in the exposure and normalization of those things most women are raised to be ashamed of, and that power is fundamentally alienating to women with different bodies, raised under different paradigms of shame.

What do we do with this contradiction?

Well, we should prioritize the health of the majority. Women need to know how to manage our bodies. Let’s wear pussy hats, and get Tampax sponsorships, and celebrate the vagina as the wonderful if messy source of pleasure it has the potential to be. Maybe a bunch of straight women will come off as kind of lesbian for talking about pussy all the time but you know what, that’s fine. The really important thing is keeping women healthy and informed!

…This isn’t even wrong, but see how easy it is to forget about transgender women? How easy it is for even a devout feminist to abandon those women who need her most? No transgender woman is ever going to object to this, because that would mark her out as separate. She will sit in her room alone and cry and only ever spend time with other trans women.

We could try separating womanhood from the vagina. We could try referring to “birthing bodies” and gender-neutral pregnancy. This would also be nice for some nonbinary people. Unfortunately almost everybody who has ever tried to do this sounds unbearably woke, and not in a fun and clever way that makes people of all kinds feel welcome. I could do it, but most people are worse at writing than me, so it isn’t really a scalable solution.

We could try only talking to cis women about what are mostly cis woman’s issues [transgender men not withstanding. Although sufficient application of exogenous testosterone does stop periods - lucky them], but setting up yet another women’s network that excludes transgender women is not the solution. It wouldn’t even work at scale, because most people aren’t capable of perfectly identifying trans women at a glance. Also this approach would attract TERFs.

We could, of course, do the thing that most women decide to do about it: ie; just buy their daughters The Care And Keeping Of You. Which, well. You could do worse.

We could take BB Wolfclaw’s route and elide the vagina by writing about women, both trans- and cis- gendered, who prefer anal. But I don’t think most of the world is ready for that. People are too busy being upset about vaginas to even begin to comprehend the feminist potentials of anal sex.

We could give all teens (not just girls. boys and nonbinary need to know about this too.) reasonable and comprehensive sex education. But apparently Christians have decided that they want girls to be confused and scared and in pain on their wedding nights, and apparently we as a country have decided that people who believe everything in a book they don’t even read all of are worth listening to for some reason.

Ultimately, I refuse to split the difference. I am unequivocally in favor of public reproductive health initiatives, and I am unequivocally in favor of transgender women, in the same ways as I am unequivocally in favor of the Earth our home remaining breathable and unequivocally in favor of airplane travel continuing to exist.

This second dichotomy does suggest a solution to the first. Just as we use carbon credits to offset the impact of transportation on our environments, I propose the use of transgender credits for offsetting the impact of reproductive health discussion on transgender women.

I realize that this sounds offputtingly libertarian of me, and for that I apologize.

Whenever I, as a cis woman, make some remark normalizing my vagina — and I have done so, and intend to keep doing so — I send a transgender woman I know ten dollars8 in compensation for emotional distress incurred. I refuse to prioritize my cisfeminism over my transfeminism, and I’m putting my money right where I want my mouth to be.

Let me help you make your new website less transphobic. Transphilic, even.

A nonbinary person of my acquaintance has informed me that you are interested in turning Infowars into “the internet’s premier destination for transgender comedy.” If you’re serious about trans comedy, or you know literally anybody who is transgender, you know that no cisgender* person has ever managed to say anything funny about transgender people1.

*While many nonbinary people have certainly said funny things about transgender, definitive answers on whether nonbinary people as a demographic count as transgender have not been and may never be forthcoming. If I get an answer I will be sure to let you know.

With that lone qualification, I believe I am the first cisgender person ever to have said something funny about a transgender person. Consequently it is in your best interest to give me an Infowars byline.

If you don’t understand how this post is funny, you aren’t equipped to run a transgender comedy website.

You might note that there are a great number of very funny transgender women, nonbinary people, and men, to whom you intend to hire. Great! But transgender people say hilarious and cutting things to each other all the time — it’s just that nobody cisgender understands them. If you want to attract transgender comedians, you need to be catering to a trans audience; if you want to cater to a transgender audience, you need the first cisgender person to ever have said something funny2 about transgender people.

Me.

Awaiting your reply,

Halimede.

Here is what they each noticed about each other when they sat down:

The transgender woman didn’t seem to know when to make or not make eye contact. She had a few dice on the table, which would be very useful; the cisgender woman regretted not bringing her own. Hopefully she would be offered some. The transgender woman looked like she spent a lot of time online but in the way where she had clearly spent at least some of it figuring out individual pieces of her look, if not how they were intended to fit together. Shaggy black 80’s hair; high-collar ribbed halter top, to show off her arms; round-rimmed glasses. No makeup. She had pianist’s fingers, with deep-green shimmery nails, which she kept rubbing up against each other nail to nail; and a low and quiet voice, with which she had been chatting about how new cards related to old cards with the man sitting beside her when the cisgender woman sat down for the round. The cisgender woman waited for them to stop talking to each other and when the transgender woman was facing her she gave her a little wave and her name and asked her if she was there often. She was happy to not be playing against a man.

The cisgender woman didn’t seem to know what she was doing. Which was fine; it wasn’t a competitive event. Everybody here was here for the kind of fun that involved looking at and showing off new cards and being delighted by the ways they fit together and chatting and not necessarily for the kind of fun where two people test lies against math until one of them loses, which there would be plenty of time for later. The transgender woman was a little jealous of the way that she filled out her dress, and of her ability to wear boat necklines, and more than a little jealous of the fact that the cisgender woman would be given the correct pronouns no matter what, and of the ways she had been raised etc. Her shoulder-length hair was down and wavy, and she was staring at the transgender woman in a way that the transgender woman understood to be incredibly judgmental. In order to avoid this stare the transgender woman replied to the man sitting next to her, who she otherwise would probably have ignored.

When she had finished talking with him, the transgender woman replied to the cisgender woman with her name and the fact that this was her third time at that particular game store. Then she pulled out her phone and opened a score counter app, not having realized that the cisgender woman had already done the same thing. Ah, said the cisgender woman, we can do it like that, by which she meant that it was fine with her if the two of them used separate phones to track their scores. Oh, said the transgender woman, I didn’t realize you already had your phone out. The cisgender woman picked her phone up because she had just realized that she hadn’t muted her notifications and she did not particularly want to hear from one of her friends, who was still her friend but who had a bad habit of texting her things that she wouldn’t have wanted anybody else to see at moments that other people would see them. The transgender woman said that she was fine with just using hers for both, as she assumed the cisgender woman had indicated by picking up her phone, even though that had not been her intention. The cisgender woman did not want to challenge the transgender woman, so she said that was fine. And so they ended up using the transgender woman’s phone.

Here is how they played:

The cisgender woman had assembled a deck around the accretion of various lasting pieces, each of which improved with the addition of others. Her position improved with the length of the game. She played hesitantly, asking before every action, as she did not want to mess up or make the transgender woman uncomfortable.

The transgender woman had assembled a fiddly and specific deck requiring a lot of game knowledge, particularly in relation to threat assessment, and effects that lasted for only a turn. She was in large part playing against herself. She played quickly, because she had all the time that the cisgender woman was taking on her turn to think of her next moves, and because she was decisive, at least in games.

However, although the transgender woman made no secret of preferring the kind of fun where two people test lies against math until one of them loses, she did not want to beat the cisgender woman. She was in fact mildly annoyed with the cisgender woman’s unsure pace, though she thought she hid that well. She cared quite a lot about the cisgender woman’s feelings, or at least about what she thought of her, and so she made moves that were less than perfect, because she did not want the cisgender woman to feel like she had not had a chance to win. Because of this, and because of the strengths and weaknesses of the decks they had assembled, specifically re: gaining advantage over time, and because of the variance inherent in card games, the cisgender woman won the first of three rounds.

She apologized for this. The transgender woman said what are you apologizing for? You won. This made the cisgender woman a bit uncomfortable, because she was just apologizing because she didn’t want the transgender woman to feel bad.

At this point they had already developed slightly unflattering assumptions about each other.

The transgender woman assumed that the cisgender woman was there with her boyfriend; though the transgender woman herself was exclusively sexually romantically etc interested in women, the presumption that the cisgender woman was straight (which the cisgender woman did, incidentally, happen to be) and, not unrelatedly, better at performing womanhood than she was, put her on the defensive immediately. Actually the cisgender woman’s older brother had introduced her to the game when they were teens together, because a girl he had a crush on was playing it1. She had never been amazing at it but winning had never been the point; and besides if she had won her brother would have hidden it but it would have hurt his teen boy pride. And she had very fond memories of the art, and of feeling like a powerful witch summoning and empowering monsters from her spellbook.

The cisgender woman assumed that the transgender woman was judging her. Which she was. But she assumed, being herself insecure and covering that up by asking exactly when game actions could be performed even when she thought they could be etc, that she was being judged for playing badly. The transgender woman was actually judging her for her lack of confidence. The transgender woman only found zero-sum games fun when both players wanted to be there, and while the cisgender woman wanted to be there, the transgender woman assumed that she did not because of the ways in which she was playing.

The transgender woman won the second game quickly and decisively, because she was a much more experienced player and because of the fact that the cisgender woman drew all her cards in the wrong order. Good game, said the cisgender woman, even though she had lost. I’m sorry it wasn’t, said the transgender woman. What she meant was that she was sorry that the game hadn’t been particularly exciting or technical, and what the cisgender woman understood was that the transgender woman was very committed to honesty when perhaps other virtues might better serve her and those around her.

On the second turn of their third game the cisgender woman played an incredibly powerful card which the transgender woman did not think was allowed. When she expressed surprise, the man sitting next to her informed her that there was a 1 in 55 pack chance of opening one of the ten cards of which this was one, and that 1 in 550 was a statistical inevitability with a large enough data set. Which she knew. Still, though.

This very powerful card did something very powerful that resulted in the cisgender woman winning the third game, for which she apologized again. I wish you wouldn’t apologize so much, said the transgender woman. You won! The cisgender woman could see that she was a little upset still but of course she did not say anything. What could she have said to that? She thanked her for the games and they moved on to play against men.

Neither of them ever went back to that game store again.

That night the cisgender woman sat alone in her apartment eating Thai takeout and trying not to think about her recent breakup. Elsewhere the transgender woman nestled in the crook of her transgender girlfriend’s arm. I wish I got along better with cis women, the transgender woman said. I played against one today but she just didn’t get it. Or I didn’t. Or both of those things probably. I wish I had cis girl friends.

Her girlfriend kissed her on the forehead. They’re just weird, she said. We’re better off without them.

Isn’t that kind of awful to say, said the transgender girl. She was trying her best. Or as best as she was capable of, or allowed herself to be capable of.

Maybe, said the transgender girl’s girlfriend. But if you want more magic, you know who will play with you. Get your deck out.

Never ever ask me to write about magic gambling ever again.

With thanks to magic the gathering consultants C. B. and M, without whom I would have had to learn things about magic the gathering

I. Stop it right now.

I know you have your reasons. You might be doing it because you think it’s funny, or for purposes of sexual abnegation, or because you have a sick attachment to the wrongs committed against you. You might be doing it out of fear. You might be doing it out of shame. But I am going to knock any and all of those reasons out from under you, with the rubber mallet of saving you from yourself, because you can’t keep doing this.

1. It is not funny to boy yourself.

When you boy yourself you harm all women, by contributing to the misogynist stereotype that women aren’t funny.

2. There are much better ways to derive sexual abnegation.

“it/its” “he/his” ughhhh you are missing! the! point! You are Human. Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree? We already have a set of pronouns and social role historically denoting objectification, in much more interesting and sexually compelling ways!!!

3. You have to stop regarding yourself as a boy. People do horrible things to girls, anyway.

There are less awful forms of self-harm, like drugs, or Christianity. “Wait,” you are saying. “I thought those things were unhealthy and terrible!” Well they are, but at least when you’re high or worshipping your absent father figure you aren’t denying your true heart. Yes, I guess I would rather you play Magic Gambling than this. Although somebody is going to take that last line out of context and say I endorse it, which I do not. Why do I even bother? Because I’m trying to save you.

4. What you should really be afraid of is withering away without ever having been born.

The only defensible reason to ever call yourself a boy is for safety. But that can’t last. If you are a trans girl you medically need Hormone Replacement Therapy, and if you are on Hormone Replacement Therapy it will become very obvious to everybody around you that you are a girl very soon. Probably it already has.

5. How is being a boy any less shameful?

Boys are on the whole2 weird and gross! They smell bad, insist on self-sufficiency to the point of self-sabotage, and fail to properly appreciate the contexts from which they are inextricable. All the classical “boy” virtues are things girls can do anyways. Yes, being a girl and growing into a woman means developing a complex and multifaceted relationship with shame and society, mediated historically by one’s mother, but you have internality whether you like it or not. Or you wouldn’t be doing this.

Ultimately you should not be boying yourself because you are not a boy. Labels exist to be used appropriately, and I have found trans women are one of the demographics most likely to understand and appreciate this.

II: Why you do it

However. All of these awful reasons are but heads, upon the despicably transphobic hydra that is the Ur-Cause of your “boymoding” yourself:

You think being trans is an imposition.

Transness is not an imposition. Stop treating it like one. If you act like people are doing you some great favor to use your proper name, that’s how they will treat you. We read people’s genders daily! People treat other people as women all the time; it is not much of an ask for them to categorize you in that box with a few salient differences (as all women have!).

How does your transness inconvenience anybody? Does transitioning demand anybody else’s time or money? At least one of your coworkers has a name with a non-intuitive spelling — nobody insists they change it! If it does make them uncomfortable that is 100% on them, for being a bigot. Sure, early-transition mania makes you kind of weird to be around but that’s just normal girl puberty stuff.

“But my transness is an imposition,” I can already hear you saying. “Being a girl is hard and I’m not good at it and I am actively making people around me uncomfortable!”

III: What Happens If You Don’t

Okay fine. Transness makes some people uncomfortable, whether or not it should; that isn’t really disputable. However: all the alternatives to transition: staying as you are; pretending nothing is wrong; killing yourself; will make people even more uncomfortable. Seriously.

Here are some classic ways that people who are repressing womanhood get weird:

They think filling themselves with something bigger — religion, military service, feminism, sex, art — will save them.

They think abstracting all their needs away and living the smallest possible life will absolve them of their desires.

They get really visibly jealous and weird around women. They may lean into misogyny as a means of convincing themselves.

Alternately, they get really creepily nice, like they think that being nice enough will somehow get them something they want — not something sexual, something else.

They project and launder their emotions through girls, real or fictional.

They get self-destructive in attractive ways. Not to me personally. To straight girls, whose emotions they drink as they tip over the edge.

They develop alarming and questionable fetishes.

They get really into tkmiz.

Basically all of this weirds normal people out. They can tell something is wrong, even if they don’t know what — though I do personally find tkmiz’s Klee-esque compositions deeply affecting.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to repressing transes. Every lesbian knows a cis “bisexual” girl who won’t stop talking about how much she loves girls but also she can’t, because she has a boyfriend she has to mother, who she has never shown any indication of actually liking (Actual bisexual girls this is not about you; go on in peace, with my mystified but supportive3 blessing). Even straight people get weirder when they stew on a crush for long enough. Stifled desires will twist and corrode until they express themselves, regardless of how you feel about them; everybody can tell! Transitioning actually makes you much more normal!

IV. It Doesn’t Even Work

And no matter what you do, dressing up as a boy doesn’t even work! You’re going to get called a slur I cannot say no matter what you do — so you may as well become a girl about it. And less weird. Please.

I missed last week due to a personal matter. It would be physically impossible for that personal matter to ever happen again, so I’m not going to discuss or think about it.

Is this because of my obvious April Fool’s joke last year?

I hate this stupid holiday. If you’re not funny there’s no point and if you’re funny people online get mad at you for it.

Anyways I would think I have been very clear, about my stance on guys. And yet no matter how much premium content I accomplish — and that at the highly generous rate of for free, for most of you — always some guy says “What about trans men?”

As such I have reconnected with liaison Maxwell Graves, writer and artist behind webcomic What Happens Next, a story about agency, culpability, and transgender, for the writing this thing that you all want so much, and also an interview afterwards. Here’s what he has to say, on the matter:

in september 2024, halimede (a longtime associate of mine) posted a substack article entitled “a cis girl’s guide to picking up trans girls,” ostensibly in response to gabe dunn’s article “a trans guy’s guide to picking up a trans girl”. unlike dunn’s guide, halimede’s appears to have been fairly well-received, albeit not wholly uncontroversial. for obvious reasons, i think it’s above my pay grade to address any of the substantive criticisms of halimede’s guide. instead, i am here in my capacity as a guest writer and noted transgender man to contribute to a companion piece: a guide to picking up trans men.

the million dollar question is, who actually wants to pick up trans men? when you transition from female to male, you also transition away from being an object of desire. what changes and when is, of course, highly individual. but some things will inevitably be different. a process has occurred. you may find that no one catcalls you anymore, that your appearance is not scrutinized the way it once was, that you can chat with a strange man at a bar and know that he doesn’t expect to fuck you. there are, obviously, a lot of material benefits associated with this change of status. but there are also a few drawbacks.

people, generally speaking, simply do not make romantic and sexual overtures towards men the way they do towards women. gay men are sometimes an exception to this rule, but stopping to explain one’s transition status/genital configuration doesn’t always dovetail well with the casual, nonverbal nature of a lot of gay cruising. overall, the value proposition of dating or even hooking up with a trans man is nebulous to most people. he probably won’t have a dick. he might be very short for a man. he might have kind of a weird-shaped body.

so, in writing a guide to picking up trans men, i kind of have to make the case for why you should bother. i could tell you that trans men are always good feminists and are nicer, more conscientious partners than cis men, which absolutely isn’t true. or i could trot out that corny old line about how a trans man with a strap-on can sling whatever shape and size of dick you want. or i could take the most cynical approach, and tell you that trans men are desperate for attention and they’re probably easy lays.

but to be honest, unlike halimede, i don’t have a chaser’s eye for these things. i don’t actually have a good sales pitch for you. i am not the don draper of the transgender sexual marketplace. but at least i’m not the gabe dunn. luckily for me the fact that you’re reading this guide means you’re already interested. or you follow halimede on substack i guess.

halimede’s actual list of tips only has one bullet point: “1. she is a woman. treat her like one.” the inverse “he is a man. treat him like one” does, in fact, apply. but to hopefully increase your chances of success, i have provided a (short, non-exhaustive) list of

TYPES OF GUY:

1. the neurotic

since transitioning, he no longer knows what role he plays in sex and romance. he may also be worried that hitting on anyone is rapist-coded and will make him The Wrong Kind Of Man. you should expect to make the first move, but do so without being too overtly sexual. this guy downloads grindr once a month and deletes it the second he gets a dick pic.

2. the white knight

if he wants to pay for things, open doors for you, and carry your stuff, then let him. express subdued appreciation- as if it’s the right thing to do, but you were expecting him to do it. don’t get too effusive, and avoid praise of his masculinity that could just as easily be said of a toddler (”so big and strong!”) don’t ask him out first, but drop into conversation at some point that you are in fact into trans guys, or he’ll dither about it forever.

3. the gay bottom

he has already spent hours picking out the right tiny shorts, carefully applying metrosexual eyeliner, and blow-drying his mullet with a diffuser attachment. the least you can do is buy him a drink. he is likely to be fine with sexual forwardness, as long as you don’t make the whole thing about his genitalia.

4. the normal guy

he’s been out and transitioning for a long time, and at this point being trans is a minor part of his life compared to craft beer/working on his car/getting traditional-style tattoos/whatever. he may actually have had phalloplasty. no specialized advice is necessary for dating the normal guy. it just depends on who he is as an individual person to whom transness doesn’t really matter any more. don’t bring up the fact that he’s trans. he doesn’t really want to think about it and neither should you. not that he’s insecure about it or anything. don’t imply that.

people who are nonbinary transmasc and not trans men are outside the scope of this article.2

ON FIRST DATES:

if the decision is in your hands, anywhere you would normally go on a date is fine. halimede’s list of suggested locations still works in this context3. picking something too hypermasculine (axe-throwing bar, military history museum) is too likely to feel bro-y and unromantic, even for the type of trans guy who is into that sort of thing. but don’t bring flowers and don’t try to pay.

ON INTIMACY:

don’t make assumptions about what sex acts trans men like or dislike, or what they will and won’t be dysphoric about. you will have to actually ask. you are likely to be rewarded with detailed and specific information. open inquiry is also the safest approach vis a vis acceptable terminology— i have never actually met anyone who prefers to call it a “front hole”, but you never know.

on a related note, do not refer to trans men as cute, pretty, beautiful, et al, unless they express enthusiasm for those descriptors first. though it seems counterintuitive, “handsome” is also a no-go with anyone you don’t know well. it can easily come off as condescending. you are trying to hit, not get him ready for school picture day.

Sure. Thanks Max. I hope this helps you, readers who insist that I give them some tips on dating transgender men.

I just have a few questions I’d like you to answer. For example:

You keep saying to treat a trans guy you’re interested in dating like a normal guy. But I personally, while I have no desire to date men, have no idea how to treat a normal guy. Basically every guy I know is gay or a himedanshi4. So, for the record, how should a normal guy be treated?

well, the problem is that within the patriarchal schema of gender, “being a man” is less a thing in and of itself and more the conceptual absence of “being a woman”. within this structure men are the only ones who are people and everyone else is some other shit. the default human being is male. how does one aspire to become “a human being”? what is the dating advice you offer in these circumstances? it’s hard to do so without dipping into heteronormative stereotypes. men like to be brought a sandwich while they’re playing a video game. but really, don’t we all want to be brought a sandwich while we’re playing a video game?

Not really. How would I eat it?

For the record: what are your feelings on transgender women?

what can I say about trans women as a trans man that doesn’t make me sound perverted or evil?

What can you say about any woman as a man that doesn’t make you sound perverted or evil? Seems hard. I can’t think of anything. Luckily I’ll never have to.

ok good point. some trans women are nice to me and are my friends. i guess when i hang out with trans women there is this feeling i don’t always get from cis women- that trans women understand i am the opposite gender from them. there’s a social validation in difference.

sometimes cis women are kind of weird to trans men in a particular way. like you’re not allowed to do that [ie; transition away from womanhood]. cis women like to enforce norms.

I like enforcing norms. They just have to be the right ones.

i really prefer being subject to norms, myself.

Oh I like that too. So I guess what I’m asking is: what are the norms around trans men?

well, i like performing masculinity. sometimes masculinity feels stifling.

So like womanhood then.

but conversely a lot of the time it’s also releasing me from obligations i didn’t want to fulfill anyway.

Or not.

so you’ve never wanted to be released from any obligations. your fantasies about beautiful tall women who open doors for you, that doesn’t figure in.

I mean I’m not really a part of those fantasies. Like obviously the door is being opened by a beautiful tall woman but it’s about her. About her opening the door, for me. If anything it’s creating an obligation, to have her do that.

this is on kind of an unrelated note, but that’s something i notice a lot in people who are repressing and will later transition to male. that kind of absence from one’s own fantasies.

I mean I have plenty of other fantasies than I am very much in. A beautiful tall woman could be doing any number of things to me, in any one of these fantasies. She could be spoonfeeding me milk. Or introducing me to her parents, who beg me for their daughter’s forgiveness, though it is not mine to give. Or making love to me tenderly, or otherwise, with her hands so gentle yet firm on my body, or otherwise. Just some examples I made up just now.

i’m not saying it’s exclusive to trans men, obviously. as i said in the roundtable i did with daniel lavery and eli cugini, some people do just like to sit in the cuck chair.

Cuckquean chair. Or chair de femme complaisante.

i didn’t say cuckold. i think the abbreviation is gender neutral.

Well I am not gender-neutral. If anything I think that kind of thing is like, the kind of thing that needs to be marked as a girl thing.

i’m not gender-neutral either.

I don’t see how my sexual preferences, such as they are or are not, are relevant to this.

of course. i mean, this article has no relation to your sexual preferences. this is for the fans.

Who keep asking me to have opinions on men! Why do you think people are constantly asking me how to date transgender men? I’m sorry I don’t really want to dress like a dyke myself but am I not legibly lesbian enough without a butch to hang off the shoulder of! I’m working on that!!!!

straight men are obsessed with trans women in harmful and toxic ways, and there’s a contingent of trans men who want straight men to be erotically obsessed with them. there just isn’t enough for or about trans men. or if that isn’t actually true, then there are a lot of people who feel that way anyway. if you pass you can just assimilate into the cis world, and trans men who do that don’t have the same need for trans community. or you’re in a queer scene among AFAB trans people on a spectrum. they might not be women but they’re not necessarily men. there’s like, the kind of trans guy who goes to a lesbian bar expecting there to be trans guys there. personally i would rather eat glass.

and a lot depends on where you’re transitioning from and what your deal is. for people who could have been perceived as straight women before it’s like, nobody wants me; nobody wants to have sex with me. i was never a butch so i don’t know what that’s like.

but there’s a kind of problem you’re not supposed to admit to because you don’t want to admit that womanhood can be easier in some ways. like i lost out on woman benefits but didn’t get man benefits. maybe i would if i passed, or were not 5’3 with a gay-sounding voice. you can square the circle by not being a man and doing something else. and that’s fine. but it’s not for me. i feel like nobody’s doing it like i’m doing it. but that might be because i’m doing it wrong.

So you would say that these transgender men asking me to write about transgender men want to feel like they think transgender women feel?

i think everyone wants what transgender women have, except that also they don’t.

maybe it’s like those cis guys who complain that (as they imagine it) women can get a bunch of money from doing OnlyFans. and yet they aren’t out there trying to show hole.

i think that part of the reason they aren’t is that they know on some level that they (the kind of cis guy who does that) aren’t really sexually desirable. it’s like a tantrum. look at me. want me.

trans men are still prone to those kind of tantrums sometimes.

i don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to be seen and desired but i think there has to be some acknowledgement of the trade-offs and complications that entails.

Which are of course greater/riskier/worse for women, trans or otherwise, than for men.

yes, absolutely. also, i think among trans men, validation that they’re attractive is validation that their transition was a success. as i talked about extensively earlier, the fear is that you’ll be totally unfuckable. i mean, i’m tremendously insecure about my appearance, even though i’ve been in a relationship for 4 years now. it’s not even always about dating.

But is there any amount of hotness that any guy trans or otherwise could have, that would make people not just want to have sex with him but like actually actively say so?

i think no. and this drives even some cis men to madness.

I look at that clavichord guy and I just. That’s a level/kind of mental illness that I thought was unique to women. Obviously he’s a bad person but he must be feeling so much.

actually i watched an interview with clavicular and was really validated in my masculinity. maybe i should pity him but it just makes me feel smug. that guy from cumtown asks him to name who he thinks the hottest woman is and he’s visibly struggling. i could do that easily. i could name like 8 hot women right now.

Do it. Name eight hot women right now.

no.

Okay. What is it like to be a guy and feel?

for the purposes of this conversation, let’s just say that i don’t.

Sounds unbearable. Or not unbearable, if you aren’t feeling anything. Sounds horrifically lacking in sexual gratification to me. But I suppose it takes all kinds.

i think my dream is to have some kind of horrible problem and refuse help from all of my loved ones. i’m not quite there yet. i still have trouble opening jars sometimes.

Huh. Okay. Don’t you just have a jar opener?

i have a boyfriend.

Lucky you. I mean, in the sense of not being single, and in the sense of having somebody around who can open jars for you. I dream of the day I can throw my jar opener away discreetly. Or at least stash it in the back of a cabinet in case she’s busy without me.

i kind of hate that about being in a relationship sometimes. that my boyfriend wants to do things for me. i wish i were more capable. that’s probably a difficult sentiment for you to relate to.

No I also wouldn’t really want your boyfriend, to do things for me. He seemed nice when we met but as a girl I prefer to be independent except when I don’t. That’s probably a difficult sentiment for you to relate to.

yeah, i’ve literally never felt that before. no idea what you’re talking about. giving up my independence, even voluntarily, is too dangerous a situation for me to want to place myself in.

Well obviously not. That’s a girl thing. And you aren’t that.

We are, after all, very different people.

Why purple? She might not say. She may not know why, or she may know and not want to admit it. But she likes purple because it isn’t pink.1

I here propose the following taxonomy of Purple Girls:

Purple Girls are defined by not being Pink Girls [like oppositional sexism but not evil]. Therefore in order to create an interpretive framework of Purple Girls we must first put together a workable definition of Pink Girls.

I. PINK GIRLS

The Pink Girl is central. She is not necessarily the protagonist but she is part of the social web binding characters together. She typically presents as conventionally feminine; she is often blithe — or employing the appearance of blitheness towards her own ends. Likewise with morality, norms, and culture: she exists within a system, whether she passively accepts her lot or uses that system to her advantage. She is a girl’s girl. She is often blonde, and many people confuse blondeness for Pinkness. She is often femme, and many people confuse femmeness for Pinkness.

Barbie is Pink. Galinda Arduenna Upland is Pink. Madoka Kaname is Pink. Princesses, from Cosette to Daenerys, are Pink. The Pink Girl may lack agency but Pinkness does not mean incompetence or a lack of internality; Elle Woods, Kit Kittredge, and Nancy Drew are archetypically Pink. Plucky girl protagonist-types like Lyra Belaqua, Princess Cimorene, or September Morning Bell (of A Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making, which goes as you would expect given a title like that) are Pink almost by definition — each of those three would much rather wear pants and that can absolutely be a Pink trait, as Pinkness can be associated with sensibility, in both senses. Gideon Nav is Pink, actually. Katniss Everdeen is a Pink Woman’s badly-written idea of what it would be like to have Purple Girl traits; Finnick Odair, sold for his body and fomenting rebellion via social connection, is Pink. Nanny Ogg, the actual strongest Witch on the Disc, is Pink. The threat Makima represents is as Pink as Pink gets. Rosemary Kierstein’s Steerswoman novels are dear to me as precious stories about cartography and science as Pink woman-coded enterprises (although of course men are welcome to participate).

Having many expertises is Pink. Knowing what to reach for and where is Pink; knowing when you’re in over your head and calling a friend with subject matter expertise is Pink. Assessment is Pink; control, over others and the self, is Pink; awareness of the delineations between soft and hard power is Pink. Effective management, delegation, and teaching are all Pink virtues. The Pink Girl grows into a woman who is confident in her womanhood — or at least, a woman annoyed by the way people treat her because of her womanhood, not with womanhood itself. The Pink Girl is defined by her relationship to convention: she is bound by it, manipulates it, or even creates it.

II. PURPLE GIRLS

Purple Girls are defined by not being pink girls. But not usually in like a butch way.23 The Purple Girl is not central to any community; she has a few close friends, if that. If the Pink Girl has a few scrappy friends, she may be part of an evil organization; if the Pink Girl serves authority, the Purple Girl is often a recurring thorn in her side. Rather than cultivating a network she may devote herself to a specific skill or expertise. Girls visibly flouting the rules or morality of their societies are almost always Purple.

Hermione Granger4 is Purple. Elphaba Thropp is Purple. Homura Akemi is Purple. Witches, from Agott Arklaum to Sycorax, are near-universally Purple because magic is definitionally in defiance of the Normal. Likewise, Purple Girls are often associated with physical violence. Motoko Kusanagi, Lisbeth Salander, and Saber (as the perfect emotionless King) are of this type — though even (or especially) in a setting where physical violence is common, the Purple Girl excels at committing it. Harrowhark Nonagesimus is Purple, and wants very badly to be Pink; Ianthe Tridentarius is Purple to Coronabeth’s Pink. Despite her hair color, Hitori Gotoh is Purple; Kita is her Pink Girl. As a bassist, Ryo Yamada is inherently Purple. Hornet is a princess but she’s Purple contextually to Lace (and Pink contextually to Shakra). Jo March is Purple. Baru Cormorant and Taylor Hebert, skilled and isolated control freaks, are extremely Purple. Granny Weatherwax, the begrudging leader the Witches don’t have, is Purple. Every major woman in Chainsaw Man who isn’t Makima is defined by Not Being Makima and is therefore Purple.

Self-destructing beautifully is Purple. Doubling down is Purple; martial arts are Purple; competition is not inherently purple but visibly playing to win often is. Cathartic Female rage is Purple; the Pink solutions are to either shut up about it forever or work puppet strings until the man responsible is dealt with. Purple virtues include independence, patience, subject matter expertise, and the calmer tsundere-nature. The Purple Girl is defined by her relationship to convention: she chafes at it, exists peripherally to it, or even, on rare occasions, escapes it.

III. COMPARISONS

Now obviously every woman has contextually different feelings on every rule norm social more etc. Pink and Purple are interesting tendencies, not hard lines. But it’s a fun framework to play around with. Let’s define some binaries:

Purple Girls tend to be “Not Like The Other Girls”, until one of the Other Girls reaches out and is nice or they find a smaller, better-fitting group and can enjoy being Purple in peace. Pink Girls tend to have a very hard time accepting deviance, especially from themselves, until somebody explains to them the importance of diversity or they manage to figure out a way to connect to individual Purple Girls. This is what middle school is for.

Pink narratives want a Purple Girl to join them and use her abilities for good, validating the power of relationships, or, failing that, for her to be vanquished and social order restored. Purple narratives want a Pink Girl to be vapid, evil, or an accepting friend.

IV. APPLICATIONS OF FRAMEWORK TO TRANS

Transgender women are basically always Purple Girls. This is unintuitive to me, as coming into one’s womanhood reads to me as a fundamentally Pink narrative. But there are a few reasons I think that account for this:

Pinkness is highly socially regulated. If you want the privileges (such as they are) of the gilded cage (It’s better than starving alone in a forest!) you’d better be compressible into the part, and transgender women haven’t been groomed for years for it.

Pink ideas of womanhood often contend with womanhood as objecthood, and transgender women, as women and human beings, aren’t interested in being treated like an object except for sexually sometimes.

The Purple Girl is alone, and trans women are always alone.

as a feminist it is genuinely great that guys can dress up as uma musume at cons. when men can have female athletes as role models, not considering her worse or weaker for her gender, but just aspiring to be like her? then Woke will truly have won. @HalimedeMF

As the world becomes more free and diverse, more kinds of people are forced to grapple with the classic lesbian question1: do I want to kiss this girl or be her?

Obviously this question and the changes on constraints in the answer space over time could reveal some really interesting things about how we percieve gender and attraction. And they will, even, as being a girl becomes less stigmatized by society. But first it’s time for:

THINGS I CAN TELL ABOUT YOU BASED ON YOUR FAVORITE UMAMUSUME

(if you do not have a favorite Umamusume you can just read the descriptions to discover which anime girl bearing the name, legacy, ears, and tail of a racehorse from another world will lodge herself in your heart like a splinter.)

SPECIAL WEEK - You like white rice, the piano, and childhood friend romance. You had vanilla ice cream with real vanilla once and it was okay but you prefer the normal kind.

SILENCE SUZUKA - You like actual horses. You fondly remember your first love. You know big breasts are overrated, and you want to support your lover rather than have them support you. You know what the RAADS-R is.

TOKAI TEIO - You like short shorts.

MARUZENSKY - It’s that Showa era glamour, isn’t it. That or her swimsuit. You love physical sensations, especially softnesses. You like it when a girl has appetites and takes the lead.

FUJI KISEKI - You know what otokoyaku means. You had a thing for your highschool senpai, and you wanted to heal that sadness in her eyes that only you could see. You think Nanako should have gone after Kaoru instead. You admire the lack of shame with which she wears her racing silks but you can’t bring yourself to look at that diamond cutout without blushing.

OGURI CAP - You wish shounen had girl leads. You don’t like wearing skirts. You may have a connective tissue disorder and you definitely have some level of what people on the internet refer to as autism.

GOLD SHIP - You don’t think of yourself as anything special. You do think the manic part of manic pixie dream girl is the most important.

VODKA - You discover you have a crush when you get annoyed with them, though you would never admit it. You believe anything worth doing is worth doing well from the start; adversity just makes you double down and practice harder. You have dyed your hair. You are in, or seeking, a monogamous butchfemme relationship.

DAIWA SCARLET - You think it’s cool when a girl makes sure to always look her best, even though you would never admit it; you’re relatively straightforward, so you’re not sure why this is hard for you to say. You like holding back and showing off your true power. You have considered dying your hair. You are in, or seeking, a monogamous butchfemme relationship.

TAIKI SHUTTLE - You think ‘golden retriever boyfriend’ should be a type of girl instead. You have stereotypically American tastes and you are unashamed of this.

GRASS WONDER - You wake up every day, close your eyes, and envision the faces of the people you want to crush. Last on the list is always your own face, to keep you humble. You get annoyed when people call her naginata a katana or fail to note the differences between netorare and netorase. You chuunibyou.

HISHI AMAZON - Either you are a feminist or you have a thing for ‘ambiguously brown’ racialized girls. Or you’re really intensely into Kamen Rider. Look2.

MEJIRO MCQUEEN - You’re a sports fan or a tea drinker; you think the best girl in a given show is the one who ends up winning. You really really like it when a girl blushes. In like a pervert way.

EL CONDOR PASA - You know that a girl is her truest self when she’s performing. You enjoy Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure.

TM OPERA O - You understand that aura farming is the most important thing in the world, and that death is preferable to corpsing. You have struggled with mental illness and have faked it ‘til you’ve made it.

NARITA BRIAN - You understand that the noble eagle hunts most cruelly, and that it is the right of the strongest to show weakness. You wish your sister’s weird polycule would leave you alone.

SYMBOLI RUDOLF - Your friends say you were abused as a child, but you consider that an insult to your parents. You fixate on your failures, and you drink a lot of coffee, and so many women think they can fix you. They can’t, of course. There’s nothing wrong with you for them to fix.

AIR GROOVE - You think that being not quite as bad as your friend the Rudolf fan makes you okay. You love it when a woman blushes. What you want more than anything is to welcome your wife home after a long day of work (you also work, in this fantasy; you’re not a homebody and you have your own fulfilling career) and worship her feet.

AGNES DIGITAL - You self-describe as a database animal; you haven’t uploaded anything to Ao3 in months and you feel like you’re letting your readers down. You used to gay ship your friends in middle school; you still do but you’ve learned to be quieter about it. You have tried to rhyme homosexuality and intertextuality. You keep mispronouncing people’s names trying to do the snail bit but with Sue and Madarame. You understood that last sentence.

SEIUN SKY - You are a cat person and you don’t mind getting scratched a bit. You like the outdoors; the beach, the mountains, the ocean. If you get tricked, you get tricked, but you like to pout about it a little.

TAMAMO CROSS - You’re a boke looking for your tsukkomi. Nothing is more moe to you than an angry 50 year old Japanese salaryman with an eating disorder and a death drive. You like that she looks like a funny twig normally and ripped like Goku when she works out.

FINE MOTION - You think ‘Karen’ as a term is a bit unfairly applied; you value a white woman with a sense of whimsy who knows what she wants out of life. You think it’s pretty cool that she’s intersex but you don’t want to make a big deal about it.

BIWA HAYAHIDE - You understand the truth of sisters. You don’t understand why anybody would wear contacts over glasses. You believe women can do anything, as long as they create and implement an action plan with sensibly-chosen goals. You find polyamory perfectly sensible, and you would like to spend an hour a week doing a partner’s hair as bonding time.

MAYANO TOP GUN - You have a fondness for military hardware and a lot of feelings about childhood, prodigies, and potential. The adults in your life treated you as too mature in some ways and too childish in others, and now you have a complex about it. You identify with child characters over adults and you never interact with real kids because you feel like you’d be reading too much of your own life story onto them and that wouldn’t be fair to them.

MANHATTAN CAFE - You know what its like to have tummy trouble. You wear glasses. You were the kind of greek mythology middle schooler who got annoyed at Percy Jackson’s inaccuracies and hated Harry Potter before Rowling got terfy; now you read Helen Dewitt, Evelyn Waugh, and Donna Tart.

MIHONO BOURBON - You aren’t always in touch with your own emotions but it hurts you when other people say that. You know Symphogear XV is the best one. Your favorite Gundam is Exia, and you admire Setsuna F. Seiei’s steadfast commitment to doing the right thing.

MEJIRO RYAN - You understand that sufficiently focused jocks circle back around to being nerds. You like sweaty girls with muscles. You have complexes about acting in ways that other people perceive to be feminine, regardless of your gender. You support the token straight girl as an #ally.

HISHI AKEBONO - You think being tall is a character trait.

YUKINO BIJIN - Gosh darn golly. You think “Oh… I’m in the soup” is a normal thing to say. You had vanilla ice cream with real vanilla once and it was really good! You like the mob girl appeal of her original racewear more but the ice skates were a little silly; you’re glad she has nice stompy practical boots.

RICE SHOWER - You find yourself sobbing over how strong she is despite her suffering Nobody understands: they called her a heel but she was really a hero. She prefers bread for breakfast because eating rice reminds her that she can’t live up to her name as a bringer of good fortune. Your feelings for Rice Shower blur the lines between familial and romantic. Once you find another Rice Shower fan you will pair off and devote the rest of your life to drawing and writing about her together, but until then you are fated to be alone… just like Rice Shower until she met Mihono Bourbon…

INES FUJIN - You think her voice should be lower, and you’re right. You respect the grindset even if you wish she wouldn’t take so much 5 hour energy. You’re the type who wants to take your partner on vacation so they can relax.

AGNES TACHYON - You’re drawn to obsessives like a moth to flame; your relationship history is consequently messy. You like purple girls, and yappers, and self-destructive idiots. The movie doesn’t get into this but do you know she just buys nutritionally complete combinations of ingredients and throws them in the blender right? You do? You think that’s hot? You are sick. You are sick in the head.

ADMIRE VEGA - You fell in love with a Catholic girl in middle school. Like Catholic Catholic. She liked the idea of Original Sin but she didn’t like that Adam and Eve did it to everybody forever; she thought she should be damned for her own faults. You have been in love with this girl for ten-plus years.

INARI ONE - You thought Tamamo Cross should be stacked and from Edo.

WINNING TICKET - You have some kind of vocal stim; you like when a girl has so many feelings and wears a dapper little hat. You have been called a mom friend, but that isn’t quite right. You’re more of a dad or coach type.

AIR SHAKUR - You are a femme top seeking a programmer butch bottom. You like them fussy, fatalistic, and microdosing t. You don’t mind sharing with another femme top as long as she also pesters the butch: that means twice the woman games.

EISHIN FLASH - You like everything to be just so. You don’t understand why anybody would wait to get married - or divorced, for that matter. Your ideal date involves mutually planning your ideal date, with logistics and error bars.

CURREN CHAN - The war of all against all is the true nature of the world. Only the social contract stands against it. Humans trade liberty for safety until one rises above the rest to rule as sovereign. And how is that one to be chosen? Cuteness. Cuteness is justice. Through the application of cuteness via modern technology, total world domination can be achieved - humanity’s only hope for peace. #lookatcurren

KAWAKAMI PRINCESS - In your opinion, Precure isn’t Precure without hand to hand combat.

GOLD CITY - You like self-deprecating blondes who keep it real. You would never tell a girl that she was beautiful when she was angry but you have thought it, and felt guilty. You enjoy the filmography of Satoshi Kon.

SAKURA BAKUSHIN O - You get annoyed when people call tsundere the defining archetype of the 2000s. Obviously the defining archetype of the 2000s is girls with foreheads. All these people who like armpits are bandwagoning fad-chasers; you know what the real charm point is.

SEEKING THE PEARL - Your favorite im@s character was… Helen for some reason? And you were really hoping she’d get voiced? Huh?

SWEEP TOSHO - You raised that girl in Kinzo’s hidden mansion or you enjoyed Louise no Tsukaima. Either way you need to repent for your sins.

SHINKO WINDY - Nobody cares about this horse. You don’t exist.

SUPER CREEK - We both know what’s going on here.

SMART FALCON - You like it when a closet case tries her hardest. You might be a bit of a sadist, actually. That, or an idol fan.

ZENNO ROB ROY - You love Pippi Longstocking and Heidi and everything by Frances Hogdson Burnett — and of course you love World Masterpiece Theater adaptations. You want to live in Japanese occidentalist Europe, as depicted in The Count of Cagliostro and Professor Layton games. You watched all of Read or Die for Yomiko, even if it wasn’t very good.

TOSEN JORDAN -

“Tosen Jordan… I was put on this earth to love you. Bring me your most depressed gyaru for my pasta extruder”. - max schwartz

NAKAYAMA FESTA - You watched Kakegurui for the gambling. You read Saki for the mahjong. FKMT has you hooked. You just wish he was capable of writing women.

NARITA TAISHIN - You love cats. You have a temperament politely described as “artistic.” Your lack of self-worth leads you towards codependency. Having two girlfriends wouldn’t fix you but it sure would help.

NISHINO FLOWER - And what exactly do you like about Itou Hachi, hm.

HARU URARA - You are a studious popculture scholar of all eras. A sharp critic of that reflection in the mirror we hold up to our society. You seek truth in the vivid mosaic made of our most shameless obsessions. OK FINE, YOU LOVE THIS ONE PARTICULAR LITTLE PINK HORSE UNIRONICALLY, IS THAT SUCH A CRIME. She is so spunky. <3

BAMBOO MEMORY - I’m surprised you exist.

BIKO PEGASUS - You own at least one Rider belt. You got into Umamusume through Nutrition Warrior Carrotman - Radoron Attacks! Unhealthy Food is Changing the World?! If somebody called the villain Lardron you would have no idea who they were talking about.

MARVELOUS SUNDAY - You wish Gold Ship was shorter and into ancient ruins instead of marine biology, or you just really like her character song. You think that the SD versions of Umamusume who appear on the loading screens are how they should actually look all the time.

MACHIKANE FUKUKITARU - Are you okay. Do you want a hug. I’m so sorry.

MR C. B. - You like outdoor cats, road trips, and Yuko from xxxHolic, and you get sad every time you walk by a fishtank. You probably have sensory issues with a lot of clothing. You think people can’t tell how lonely you are and you’d freely admit that.

MEISHO DOTO - You can’t look away from a girl and you don’t know whether you want to kiss her or be her. She is everything you aren’t; she has everything you want. You’ve never been comfortable with your body and looking at hers makes you want to die and she keeps showing it off like she knows exactly what she’s doing to you. If she ever found out you would kill yourself. Or you think her little :3 mouth is cute.

MEJIRO DOBER - You prefer Rei over Asuka. You would be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder if you weren’t too anxious to go in about it. You might not be a creative type yourself but you love what creative types produce. You find the insecure tsunderes of the 2010s much preferable to the grating tsunderes of the 2000s.

NICE NATURE - You have former gifted child syndrome. You were never at the top of the class, but you had a solid position - so what happened? Where did everything go so wrong?

KING HALO - You know the truest beauty blooms amid adversity; dirt, blood, sweat, tears, and single motherhood are the mark of a first-rate Umamusume. Either you or your significant other has suffered from child abuse. You know that the cuckquean is actually the most important part of the scene.

MACHIKANE TANNHAUSER - You are Chinese.

IKUNO DICTUS - You are a feminist. You think of yourself as a bit flaky but everybody around you thinks of you as extremely dependable because you always let them know if you’re going to be late to an appointment. You have no idea this is the case.

MEJIRO PALMER - My god do you yearn. Your smile is slightly pained and your eyes are dead. She would understand. You would sit on a bench with her and you would both lean on each other and stare at the clouds together, and neither of you would need to say anything. Golf is a sport best played alone.

DAITAKU HELIOS - You might not understand that Twin Turbo is a different character but you have the skibidi rizz spirit, and that’s what really matters. WEI! BET! WOOOOOOOO!!!!!

TWIN TURBO - You might not understand that Daitaku Helios is a different character but you have the skibidi rizz spirit, and that’s what really matters. Turbo Boost! SPREE!

SATONO DIAMOND - You say you like her outfit, and it is cute, but you really like that meme of her with the long tongue. You really like childhood friend romance. It gets you every time.

KITASAN BLACK - You like short shorts and +80 Specialty Priority. You’re going to love Katsuragi Ace.

SAKURA CHIYONO O - You like moeblobs and you like them traumatized and gay. Yuno Hidamarisketch, Suletta Mercury, Wakaba Mutsumi. You’re a fan of Studio SHAFT and you think that age-gap is normal for gay people. That’s how gay culture gets passed down, historically. So it’s fine that Maruzensky is doing that.

SIRIUS SYMBOLI - You want a woman who hangs out in seedy bars playing pool to bend you over the table and slide her cue on your body. You might not be lesbian but you are definitely in favor of them. You like jerks who are not-so-secretly actually good people, especially if they are pretending to be French. I can’t blame you for this one.

MEJIRO ARDAN - You preferred Season 2 Mcqueen to game Mcqueen, and you were right.

YAENO MUTEKI - You know martial arts are the coolest thing in the world, and you don’t particularly care for character arcs. Unless they result in somebody learning a secret technique, of course.

TSURUMARU TSUYOSHI - You like short shorts and chronically ill girls.

MEJIRO BRIGHT - You like fluffy girls and characters nobody else cares about.

SAKURA LAUREL - You quietly have very good taste. Yes, I’m reading Star Blossom. Yes I know she is so cute with Tsubaki. Yes uh-huh I also hope it gets animated. Yes Snow In Hazard needs to get added ASAP.

NARITA TOP ROAD - You have objectively flawless taste. You are so right that more people need to watch the Umamusume: Road To The Top ONAs, free right now on Youtube! All four episodes! Yes I love how she’s in love with Admire Vega! You can watch them right now! Free on Youtube! Right now! Featuring everybody’s favorite Class Representative, Narita Top Road! That’s right! Wait… what? You only like her because you think NTR is a joke? Get out of my sight and never speak to me again.

YAMANIN ZEPHYR - This one is from the stage play Sprinter Story I think? I haven’t watched that……… Sorry….

FURIOSO - Who is this? Legitimately who is this? I have never seen a single piece of meta writing or fan art that so much as features this Umamusume in the background, and I’ve been pretty deep. Where did she come from? This can’t be a real Umamusume. I’ve heard of all the others: Espoir City, North Flight, Hokko Tarumae (whose entire personality is where she’s from). But who is this? Is gametora lying to me? I think that’s enough. 77 is enough Umas Musume for now. would you believe that that’s like, maybe halfway? I’m going to bed

Ben Appel, as a man yourself, you seem exclusively interested in the welfare of men. Therefore I craft my response to you in those same terms.

You’re right: gender non-conformity doesn’t disqualify one from being male! Men can love men, and even like men; they can wear dresses and makeup and sit down to urinate in a civilized manner; they can prioritize care and communication; they can move with grace and elegance; they can read fiction; they can have internality. We are both, presumably, in favor of this. Other men often get very upset about men who act these ways but they shouldn’t. Men can and should be allowed to do all these things.

And if you want more gay boys to be allowed to do these things, you should assist in social transition up through adolescence — until the patient hits Tanner Stage 2, when WPATH Guidelines recommend medical intervention. This will maximize the number of gay boys in the world.

Look, if you have talked to any trans people ever you know how gay they are! Have you ever met a trans guy who wasn’t into men?1 Do you know how much most trans guys love being effeminate gay boys and making more effeminate gay boys and devoting themselves entirely to the worship of effeminacy, gayness, and boyishness? These vapid little fluffy-haired twinks are out here dying of tuberculosis and getting sodomized in ruffled silk shirts! The less visibly gay ones still become cartoonists, or ecologists, or board game players, or psychologists, or stagehands. Is that not gay enough for you, Ben Appel?

You say that “According to a 2019 report in The Times of London, staffers at Britain’s foremost gender-identity clinic joked darkly that, as a result of the facility’s work, ‘there would be no gay people left.’” The actual news story here should be that staffers at 'Terf Island’s foremost gender identity clinic, who you’d think would be decent about gender treatment, don’t consider their patients as their true genders2. Much like you.

Ben Appel, you say you are concerned about gay boys getting to be boys — but you spare not a single sentence for the single most marginalized demographic of gay boys around. Either you are transphobic or you are stupid. Does it matter which?

How, you ask, are adults supposed to respond in the moment to an AMAB child who demands long dresses and dolls, and who insists that they are really a girl? What do we tell such a child when they come home from school crying about how different they feel from their peers?

My suggestion is to tell that child the truth: some kids who like dolls and dresses grow up to be men; some grow up to be women; some grow up to be neither — and you will love and support that child no matter what. It’s like choosing a job, or where to live as an adult, or who to get married to: play helps them approach possible futures, and deciding on which is a problem for when they get older.

We trust children when they tell us they’re hungry or thirsty or sleepy; while they may not always realize it themselves, when they do, it is our duty as adults to meet their needs. Sometimes that means making sure they go to bed on time, and sometimes that means giving them dolls and dresses and wells to stare longingly into — and bikes and building blocks and toys that launch child-safe projectiles, so they can decide what they like for themselves.

Distinguishing proto-gay children from proto-trans children means informing them about the world around them and listening to them when they tell us what they want. Some effeminate children-perceived-as-boys will grow up to be gay men; some will grow up to be women; some will grow up to be neither, or even straight. All of these groups are best served by love, care, and respect for who they are. Feminine children, regardless of eventual or assigned gender, should be allowed to be themselves. That means letting them wear dresses and play with Barbies, but it also means letting them interact with a wide range of gay and transgender adults so they can know what kind of people they can grow up to be.

You already agree with me: children need to be allowed to grow up safely and healthily, so that they can make their own choices about what kinds of people to be. It’s just that the only children you seem to care about are the children who aren’t getting screwed over by puberty, when the ones whom puberty harms are the ones who need our help the most. I wish you were advocating for that instead of concern-trolling over transgender kids.

Transgender women are women. The women of women even. Perhaps the most fruitful theoretical application 1 of transgender women is as a mirror: the exploration of assumptions around transgender women leaves the explorer well-positioned to explore assumptions around women as a whole. Mostly my Substack is for investigating transgender women, and various bits of esoteric fanfiction but this particular article is for everybody else.

Sorry transgender women. You can read it too. But it probably just says things you already know, and have experienced. If nothing else it may provide you with some insight into how people raised as women often think, which I believe you may find valuable.

Anyways I was working through some differences in gendered socializations for a previous article when I ran into one of these assumptions held by most of the queer community2. I thought this particular difference would be worth explicating because it is a fundamental mismatch between the queer community at large and transgender women.

Being raised as a woman leads one to assume by default that visibility = safety.

If you were raised as a girl and live in a city, you know that a subway car full of people is much safer than a subway car with only one or two other occupants. If a man tries to grab you on the train and you shriek, you can rely on the public at large to help you out — or you know that assailants are cowards, and won’t try to take advantage of you if there are others around. If you suddenly collapse on a sidewalk, you know that the passersby are likely to help you up or ask you if you’re okay. Nights and alleyways are unsafe not just because they mean you can see less but because they mean that you can be seen less. When you see a woman in a leadership position, you feel safer in that organization — if she could do it, so could you.

When a whisper network accrues enough social capital aimed at an abuser, its members go public, relying on visibility as a means of punishment. Conversely, if you’re treated as a girl and you deviate from your assigned role, by, say, cutting your hair short, or dating girls, or not actually being a girl at all, social condemnation typically comes in the form of pretending you didn’t do any of that. “That isn’t the real you.” “That doesn’t matter.” Your visibility is punitively lowered.

This is the ancient compact of womanhood: as long as you are seen to be pretty and pleasant and compliant, you are regarded as a precious and valuable thing, and precious and valuable things are to be protected3.

For the modern woman, who understands that she must depend on herself, and that her ambition must sometimes come before her security, visibility is a demonstration of power and a necessary precondition for solidarity with her peers. Feminism requires that women connect to each other and prioritize their needs over those of men. Obviously there are exceptions: celebrity brings stalkers and public scrutiny. But for the most part women understand visibility to be a kind of shield — if not a perfect one, still better than nothing.

Queer visibility operates under these same assumptions, with the twist of solidarity. Visibility is enough of a shield that we can make a bargain, with the world and each other: we trade our some of our safety for freedom of expression. If the lesbians and the gays and the bi people and the trans people and everybody else who doesn’t quite fit into sexually normative categories all agree to stick our necks out for each other, bigots will have a harder time with all of us. When we make ourselves visible, we can show those of us who aren’t — who are living straight lives, who are hiding in the closet — that there are other ways to live. Every celebrity, co-worker, teacher, and friend who comes out demonstrates to the straight majority that queer people are their neighbors, not their enemies.

And likewise, bigots like to pretend that queer people don’t exist. Gay people are told that our sexualities are something we will repent from or grow out of; bisexuals struggle with bisexual invisibility; transgender men and nonbinary people are denied their rightful genders by (often deliberate) lack of recognition.

When they tell us we don’t exist, the correct response is to take the high ground. It should come as no surprise that queer people as a whole, as a demographic obsessed with performance, have a correspondingly excellent PR campaign. At this point, most audiences know homophobia is low-class — or they know that enough other audiences think so that the perception still affects them, which is almost as good.

Here’s the thing, though. When we make that bargain, of safety for freedom, we are declaring some amount of safety ‘worth giving up’ for our free expression. And for most of us, it is. Being closeted is corrosive to the soul in ways you can only appreciate if you’ve ever had to live inauthentically, as corny as that term sounds.

There is, however, one group under the umbrella on which Conservative parties worldwide have chosen to focus their efforts; one group set apart by the fact that this basic equation, visibility = safety, does not work for them.

I’m talking, as I so often do, about transgender women.

“Visibly gay” among lesbians4 is unambiguously a compliment; if you call a transgender woman visibly trans she will take it as an insult. The very appearance of transness is something she is trying to escape. Complicated internal discourses circulate through communities of transgender women on the matter, but it largely boils down to the fact that transgender women imagine that if they were not visibly trans their lives would be much easier.

They aren’t wrong.

One of the reasons that the safety-for-freedom trade so many gays make is a good one is that visibility works in our favor. Bigots respond differently based on how they see us. Look at Shrier’s execrable Irreversible Damage — or don’t, because you will gain nothing of value from doing so: the rhetoric employed against transgender men echoes that employed against lesbians. AFAB deviants are considered wayward children who need to be re-educated into walking wombs. Personally I would rather die. The correct response to Shrier and her ilk’s patronizing dreck is to coolly assert our independence and personhood, because they need a majority to actively do anything to us and they aren’t going to get it.

But the rhetoric employed against trans women is much more vicious. Only the youngest transfeminine adolescents are called “misguided” — against adult transgender women they do not bother with even Shrier’s facade of civility. Trans women get cut off from their lifelines, starved of resources, and killed.

We take for granted that visibility allows a sympathetic public to take action on our behalf — but trans women are not guaranteed that sympathetic public. Visibility without soft social power just makes transgender women into targets. Parades and protests and Pride raise visibility, and make it easier for gays of all kinds to come out — but for transgender women who are out, visibility can be an active hazard. This emphasis on visibility can alienate transgender women, who are often deeply insecure about their appearances in ways that take medical intervention to alleviate. As many women are! But they will judge themselves more harshly about it in a community with such an emphasis on the usage of appearance to declare ourselves.

in a righteous world, "trans investigation" would be a delight and honor. she could be discovered and recognized and given a little treat, for existing so beautifully. chasing like birdwatching. just another beautiful truth potential that transphobia has destroyed....

https://x.com/HalimedeMF/status/1890409858676969969

I’m not saying that visibility is an unambiguous negative for transgender women; as the most marginalized and most closeted group under the queer umbrella, they have a lot to gain from visibility, particularly as transition at younger ages becomes viable. What I am saying is that it is easy for more privileged demographics to forget that visibility is a double-edged sword for transgender women and we need to be relieving more of its downsides for her.

Gay men are often quietly sympathetic to transgender women here, as they experience a lesser version of this same hatred as a result of conservative revulsion for a perceived abandonment of their manhood — but gay men, as men, have kinds of social power and money that let them get past or at least mitigate the haters. Gay men are also rarely as interested in broader queer community in the same ways as gay women. Which makes sense, as they are men after all.

If we want transgender women to protest with us (as many do! Their bravery is to their credit); to feel fully safe and included; to share our lives and joys and sorrows? We must keep them safe enough that they can choose to trade off that safety for freedom. We must change the culture so that visibility means safety for them as well — only then can transgender women develop her visibility to her fullest potential.

no sarongs, no burkinis, and no little skirts. I stand for trans visibility

https://x.com/HalimedeMF/status/1539673143639433220

STAR TREK: CIVIL HANDS

FADE IN:

Medbay, to the rhythmic medical BEEPING of a monitoring device. A human girl of twenty or so lies in a biobed underneath a thin blanket. On the crown of her head and extending down over her eyes is a complex device of visibly jury-rigged technology, which begins to HUM.

The girl thrashes in the throes of a nightmare, her face in distress. The HUM intensifies. She HOWLS like an animal in pain and then SCREAMS like a human. The device splits in half; both halves fall aside to reveal her terrified eyes. She squints at the sudden brightness and tries to raise her hand in front of her face — but discovers that her hands are tied with medical restraints to the sides of the biobed.

GIRL

(with growing intensity)

Fuck fuck Fuck FUCk FUCK! (this last she nearly spits) Hell!

COMPUTERIZED VOICE

(inhuman in tone)

Doctor el-Fadil to ICB 4.

The girl goes still at the sound of the voice. The soft WOOSH of a door sliding open. She begins to buck at her restraints with renewed vigor, to no avail.

Through the door swishes Doctor Alexandra el-Fadil, in a strapless top decidedly not Starfleet Uniform standard. She holds up her hands as though to defuse anger.

ALEXANDRA

(To the girl)

One second. Please. (to the computer) 500mL 0.9 saline with one shot Raktajino. No, make that two.

She picks up her cup from the replicator and fumbles for two white pills, which she drops into the unholy concoction, causing it to fizz. When she has gulped it down she lets out a loud Ah of satisfaction before turning to the girl in the biobed.

ALEXANDRA

(As though to a small child)

It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.

GIRL

(Guarded)

I don’t know that.

ALEXANDRA shrugs.

I suppose you don’t. But it’s true. If I was going to hurt you, I would have done it while you were unconscious.

GIRL

(Guarded, but also mildly annoyed)

Why would you care if I was awake or not to hurt me?

ALEXANDRA has a response ready.

Well, it’d be a lot easier if you were asleep.

GIRL

So what, you’d only want to hurt me when I was asleep? That doesn’t make any sense.

ALEXANDRA makes a show of taking a second to think about this.

She looks up at the ceiling; gives a little frown.

(Affably) Well, if I only hurt you while you were asleep, then you’d want to stay up as long as possible, right? Did you know it’s possible to die of sleep deprivation? (She pulls up a chair; sits on it backwards, with her chin on the backrest). Historical human societies often used it as torture. Very effective. At least as far as torture goes, that is; torture in general mostly just makes people tell you whatever they think you want to hear to get it to stop.

The GIRL swallows.

(hesitantly, trying to put on a brave face)

What do you want to hear? Can you skip the torture please?

ALEXANDRA smiles whole-heartedly.

Oh, I like you. But no. It’s important that you feel a little pain because that means your nerves are linking up properly. It took me days to get all this tissue just right. A normal doctor would have taken weeks. You’re very lucky, you know.

GIRL

(sarcastically)

To get tortured?

ALEXANDRA, puttering about with vials and tricorder.

To be alive. What did they do to you down there?

ALEXANDRA, after it becomes apparent the GIRL is not responding.

Well, you don’t have to tell me. When we beamed you up, though, the scar tissue and lacerations on what was left of you were consistent with —

GIRL

(interrupting)

Can you let me out?

ALEXANDRA

Alright, alright. Sorry about that. Don’t attack me, okay?

The girl does not agree, but Alexandra takes her silence as assent. Presumably she is confident she can handle any attack that might come. She makes her way to the bedside and undoes the girl’s restraints: first her left side, then her right. When the girl’s final wrist is freed, she sits suddenly up; we see her bare back, slender and smooth, from behind.

ALEXANDRA

Huh.

GIRL

(peering suspiciously at her) What do you mean, huh?

ALEXANDRA

Your range of motion seems fine. And your musculature. I just thought you’d be a little more modest, is all. Coming from a colony that… regressive.

GIRL

Modest?

ALEXANDRA waves at the girl’s uncovered chest. The girl looks down and makes a strangled noise.

ALEXANDRA

Relax. I’m a doctor; it’s nothing I haven’t seen before. I literally put you back together.

The GIRL pulls the blanket tightly around herself.

ALEXANDRA

I’m not going to hit on you, if that’s what you’re worried about.

GIRL

(Confused)

Hit on me?

ALEXANDRA

Oh you do have a lot to learn. What Non-Interference sect were they, on Chanforan Synd? Catholic? Protestant? Neoprotestant? Neo-Genesis Evangelical? (to herself) No, they never would have abandoned their biotech. (to the girl) Humans end up outside the Federation sometimes. Usually it’s ideological: they want to practice some kind of cult that breaks Federation regulations or start up an entirely new system of government. The Federation puts their planets down on a list and leaves them alone. But basically all of those have medical tricorders or they die. Poor things. Well, the ones that don’t kind of do it to themselves.

GIRL

We’re good people, and damn you if you say otherwise. But I-I don’t understand… This isn’t my body. What did you do to me?

ALEXANDRA

If they had medical tricorders, they’d scan you at birth and give you your childhood vaccines and check if there were any illnesses you were predisposed towards. And that scan would have caught… this. Due to a genetic anomaly you ended up with a male body that you never should have had. So I fixed that.

GIRL

(speechless)

I.

ALEXANDRA

I can change you back, if you want. It wouldn’t be difficult.

GIRL

(with a vehemency surprising herself)

NO. Well. Maybe a little bit. That’s complicated.

ALEXANDRA

(A little smug)

I didn’t think so. You know, there hasn’t been a case like yours recorded in hundreds of years. Usually we catch this very early and the child grows up without ever knowing something went wrong. Actually, I know a fellow who was once in a similar case. Alok Sahar; maybe you’ll meet him someday. The literature says exposure to others in your situation may help but of course we don’t have any. Would you like to talk to a Trill?

GIRL

A Trill?

ALEXANDRA

The Trill carry their memories in external symbionts, which they pass down between hosts. Sometimes an insufficiently prepared host experiences a bout of this gender dysphoria but that usually clears itself up pretty quickly.

GIRL

(shocked)

Like aliens?

ALEXANDRA

Well that’s not very polite. They’re a different species, yes.

GIRL

Then you’re the Federation. I am in Hell. This is, a temptation. No, torture. You’re going to make bread out of my blood, and cut out my heart, and usury me. That’s why you’re not wearing your uniform: you want me to trust you. And once I trust you, you’re going to make me forsake everything I’ve ever believed in.

ALEXANDRA

Your stereotypes are severely out of date, and offensive to a completely different group of people. I’m not wearing my uniform because I wanted to be there when you woke up, so I could see my work and help you get used to things without you getting upset. More upset, I mean.

GIRL

I can’t trust you.

ALEXANDRA

(gritting her teeth)

Here is the truth: you were almost dead when we beamed you up, and the people you’re trying to defend are the ones who did that to you. You trusted them, right? Do you have any idea what the readings on your pathology scans looked like? Any of the parasites that were infesting you? Forget your gender incongruence syndrome, you had cancer! (at this the girl looks confused) Do you even know what cancer is? For most of human history, that was a death sentence. (pause. Alexandra is really affected by the fact that humanity has managed to beat cancer; she considers it a point of pride for her species — insofar as she considers herself human).

(more quietly) I’m not asking you to trust me. I understand you’ve been through a lot. I can put you back, if you want; back on your home planet, where they very nearly killed you. But I have not tried to kill you at all, and I have given you decades of life, and I would appreciate if you would listen and try not to be prejudiced against the many kinds of people here on this ship. If you want.

The GIRL nods, her eyes downcast.

ALEXANDRA

Besides, we’re not Federation. Not exactly. Well, it depends on who you ask. Sloan would say we’re the most Federation of all, but I disagree. I picked you up because I thought you deserved better, and if you agree with me, that everyone deserves better, that the galaxy deserves better — well, someday maybe you’ll be able to do the work I do. Welcome to the Themis, miss — Sorry. What was your name, again?

GIRL

I never told you my name.

ALEXANDRA

Well, you can’t blame me for trying. That suspicion will serve you well. Still, I have to call you something. You don’t have to name yourself right away, you know—

GIRL

Amity.

ALEXANDRA

Then Amity it is. I’ll get you registered. Welcome to the Themis, Amity. And welcome to Section 31.

NOTES

Alexandra was presumably cloned without consent from Doctor Julian Bashir of Deep Space Nine, who Luther Sloan attempted to recruit for off-the-books Federation Intelligence unit Section 31 (DS9 6x18, Inquisition). Section 31 was responsible for various crimes committed during the Federation-Dominion War, including the use of tailored species-targeting bioweapons and the circumvention of the Federation ban on the use of genetic augmentations put in place in the wake of the Eugenics Wars. Section 31 often sought out individuals with non-Federation backgrounds for recruitment, with the reasoning that those who had seen the alternatives to Federation rule would understand the morally challenging lengths they went to in the Federation’s defense.

I was very upset in middle school about the death of Gul Dukat’s daughter Ziyal, and thought she should have gotten to live and join Section 31. That’s where the seed of this idea was born. That, and Sahar being a girl’s name. Transgender is a natural fit for spy fiction.

… I guess I inadvertently wrote forcefem here. But Star Trek isn’t Star Trek without some kind of fetishy episode.

Other characters would include: a Ja’naii interested in gender who doesn’t really understand that it’s more than a performance; a Betazoid who isn’t a woman, a Vulcan who is really just sick of all this gender stuff and wishes all the other Vulcans wouldn’t do something so patently illogical.

Many Souls areas do. Lost Izalith’s hypersaturated orange lava sears the eyes; Vendrick’s McMansion and Aldia’s Hallway sear the brain. Each of Miyazaki’s beloved poison swamps revulses uniquely1, but Caelid evokes particularly vivid sense-impressions: thick wet windless air; sour emetic material on the back of your tongue, still more bearable than the reek char and blood and nauseate-sweet notes of scarlet rot, which seems to writhe at every bit of unsealed skin; the crunch-squish-slip of boots breaking through lichen-coral crust; the omnipresent heat of omnipresent decomposition. Yuck.

Yharnam hurts to look at in a very different way.

Iosefka’s Clinic, where you awaken, is cluttered and claustrophobic. You bumble around the frustratingly solid operating tables and ascend to a door expecting, perhaps, a Majula or Limgrave: a peaceful hub area; a beautiful vista full of promise.

What you get is attacked. Central Yharnam assaults the eyes with horrific amounts of detail. Every wall has a frame, and every frame has molding and trim around its uneven stone bricks; every door has multiple moldings and trims on trims and oh! Such pediments! and so does every stone railing (those also have little sculpture guys). The short columns underneath each railing have their own capitals and stylobates and so forth. The floor provides no relief; that’s cracked and sprouting or carved as assiduously as everything else. Every bit of ironwork has spikes and curlicues; lamps are carried by macabre little carved grotesques2 windows are just space for more surrounding flourishes — and stick an ironwork cage on there too, just in case there wasn’t enough to look at!; candles are everywhere, each demanding attention; pillars are everywhere, and between each is an archway and in each archway are three little subdividing archways, each notched and noduled like the rooftops of Notre Dame. It’s an entire city made out of fractal cathedrals and full of so so many reaching statues (some carved, some petrified corpses) and guys who love to hide behind them and set you on fire, so you’d better look at all of them.

Here is a stone lamp near the Hypogean Gaol, stolen from Reddit. One stone lamp. This isn’t even an important piece of stonework it’s all just like that. I feel like Freud, horrified by Rome.

The enemies, too, are hyperdetailed. Crows scream and jump and peck with their hideous unpreened feathers; Yharnamites and Hunters often have two weapons to look out for; beast hair looks like bad aliasing; the various knights and guys and such are covered in distractingly decryptable symbolisms.

Yharnam drips and shines with thick sticky blood. You heal with it; you wade through rivers of it; you seek it and eat it and knead it into your weapons, with which you shoot and beat and rip it out of your enemies before they can shoot and beat and rip it out of you. Over the course of your journey it cakes itself on absolutely everything: hard stone folds and wet wiggly aliens and the shaggy matted hair of the beasts.

The Hunter’s Dream, where you can upgrade your weapons and gesture at the Doll, is your only respite from this visual assault for at least half the game3. I found myself wandering its gently looping paths just to get away from the sensory overload. The alleyways of Yharnam proper, by contrast, are cramped and hostile; individual buildings have fences scarcely a foot away from them just to make it very clear that nobody should ever loiter; railings have spiny nodes meaning nobody could ever sit on them; interacting with most of the red lanterns that indicate doors you can talk at gets you told to screw off, foreigner.

It’s all the more cramped for how fast and fluidly you move. The Hunter’s elegant sidestep, which in an open field would render her practically untouchable, often leaves her trapped against a wall. Even ground that looks clear at first is often riddled with gravestones, statues, or corpses. Every fence and bench and tree in Yharnam feels precisely and perversely placed to get in your way. No Chosen Undead or Tarnished ever slid smoothly through anywhere; Yharnam’s choke points are practically made for their style of methodical killing. But the Hunter’s very ease tempts you to take fights you shouldn’t, just because you think you can get away.

And if you’re good, you can. That’s the real nasty part — that it works just often enough that you get confident, and then cocky. Souls combat is turn-based: dodge then hit then dodge then hit. Sekiro combat builds to a fair and honest climax: block block block slash block block block posture break Deathblow. Combat in Bloodborne centers on the Visceral Attack: flit into danger and sucker punch them right in the arteries. The positive reinforcement is sweet and immediate: a few seconds to catch your breath as your target slouches, weakened, ripe for hemorrhage. Get dirty with it: slash an opponent and rally a little health back. Cheat a little. You can do it, if you’re careful. Rallying means you get health back whenever you hit an enemy, so trading should always be profitable, right? Just one more swing — just a little more stamina — finish off this one beast, and save a few precious vials —

If you win, you come out ahead4. If you lose, well, you can always buy back in at the low low price of a few more vials of blood, and if you win this next time it won’t matter.

You get refillable flasks and the Guidance of Grace in Souls games because somebody (Marika, at least until Godfrey’s return, and Miquella, until he doesn’t; Gwyndolin and Frampt; Kuro) wants you to be there; Bloodborne keeps you grubbing for blood like a greedy little leech. It’s Disco Elysium’s addiction mechanic: The Substance is great and it always helps you and isn’t it nice of those poor downtrodden women to give it to you so gratefully?

This game, more than any of the rest of the modern5 Fromsoft oeuvre, feels hostile and gross. Demon’s Souls loves physical punchlines and absurd systems that hurt the player. Dark Souls yanks you back and forth between hopelessness and accomplishment; Dark Souls 3 holds you to higher standards and scoffs just a little when you inevitably fail to meet them. Sekiro is instructive; Elden Ring is so so delighted to show you a new kind of guy with a new kind of grab attack that kills you in a new horrifying way. I felt like Bloodborne wanted me to be disgusted with it, and to revel in a sick fascination. Sawing through beasts brings me back to the tension-and-looseness of highschool labs, where for the first time I shut down the parts of my brain that cared about the violation of dead flesh, let my hands take over, and got praised for my scalpel work.

If you like that in your video games you should play Bloodborne. I do, even if I had to be Stockholm Syndromed into it.

Saw Spear +10/10. I will play this one again.

miscellanea:

wow! the first Fromsoft game to have a reasonable and coherent weapon upgrade system! and you can get infinite slabs with enough Insight! Chunks are a little scarce though for the number of trick weapons I wanted to try out.

I wish there were more clothes…

Lady Maria of the Astral Clock Tower please liberate me from my wild curiosity

yes theres a lot of stuff about womanhood and birth and menses and such in this one. no I don’t really want to talk about that, except to point out “made men by the blood”. it seems pretty self-explanatory thematically, if not in detail.

Favorite areas: Yharnam collectively, the Nightmare Frontier in contrast. That little street with all the red lamps where Arianna lives in the Cathedral Ward. The banquet table room in Castle Cainhurst. The circle of couches on Byrgenwerth’s second floor.

Favorite fights: Lady Maria, Gehrman, Blood-Starved Beast, Ludwig. Mergo’s Wet Nurse stands out as a Dark Souls fight. Micolash was not fun exactly but I couldn’t not smile at him.

Favorite NPCs: Eileen! Djura, the guy who thinks you should just leave beasts alone. and of course the Doll.

Unfortunately most of the rhetoric around the particular sexual magnetism transgender women often possess is horrifically toxic and dehumanizing — for instance, the idea that she is (and pardon my use of this transphobic term) the “best of both worlds.” We should not be surprised by this: both because one comes to expect bigotry flung at undeserving trans targets and because she is a woman, and the rhetoric around women’s sexuality is noxious.

When a man treats a transgender woman as having a mix of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits, he is reinforcing the division of traits by gender and defining her as in-between his perceptions of man and woman — when she is no more in-between than any other woman! It’s a familiar patriarchal double-bind: a woman must be passive, but not too passive; sexual but not too sexual; agentic but not too agentic, lest she have the status of her womanhood revoked. Her situation here is distinguished only by the magnitude of her marginalization. As always: transgender women are women.

And yet transgender women, are not just women. A transgender woman is not in any part a man, and yet she is not a central example of the category we define as woman: she is typically lonelier, for one, and has been raised under the false presumption that she must be forcibly made into a man, and of course her anatomy is of a non-standard configuration for the role in many respects, although thankfully hormonal treatment changes certain specificities of this.

Her body is a woman’s body, and a tantalizing one — but the physical is best left to individualized examination, ideally in person. What I’m interested in interrogating here are the social factors that result in her particular sensual appeal.

That’s right. It’s time to talk about how gendered socialization, makes transgender women more sexually attractive.

TO BE CLEAR (lest you misunderstand and I be pilloried): gendered socializations are highly complex and microculturally specific processes, each with their upsides and downsides. The goal of male socialization is to produce a man, and so it has definitionally failed in the cases of transgender women.

It may be more instructive to note that transgender women are forced to undergo the processes which are intended to produce men, which of course results in them internalizing certain norms and customs. Though they are not and cannot be successfully made to be men, women regardless of transness often appropriate masculine customs for our own reasons: pants, while a historically masculine garment, are far more practical for everyday wear than dresses or skirts. While this appropriation of norms is to our benefit, rather than the coercive adoption demanded of transgender women, I think it’s important to make the comparison to emphasize her womanhood. Womanhood often feels like wading through toxic waste; hers is no different, though of course the waste is more toxic, and she suffers more for it.

Some of the male-associated norms transgender women internalize, like opening doors for those walking behind them, are just good common courtesy; some of those norms, like being worse at lying, are neutral in value; and some of those norms, like refusing to let anybody see her cry, are deeply harmful. And many, if not all of these, have the potential to make a woman sexy.

The only scene anybody wanted to talk about in Challengers (2024) was Tashi making her two boys kiss. Sure. I think straight women’s sexuality should be more visible, even if I find it baffling personally. But as a post-fujoshi, the scene that really grabbed me was those two boys chasing each other around the tennis court freely and without judgement. It’s an expression of love, guileless and rough: run as fast as you can! Come and catch me and hold me fast forever!

This freedom to move and run and play is coded masculine; girls are supposed to stay quietly indoors, or perform specific floor routines. Would it cause her gender dysphoria if I said so? Perhaps, and so I would not bring it up. But when I see a transgender woman jump down a few stairs or lope across a parking lot rather than take a sidewalk or slip through a fence, with thoughtless perfect ease, what I see is a girl who has been allowed to be in tune with her body in ways that so many of the rest of us have been denied. Of course I’m attracted to that easy physicality. How could I not be? It should have been my birthright too. Society calls it masculine but I think there’s a beautiful feminine expression to the grace, power, and economy of movement she displays — and if she didn’t know that on some level, I don’t think she would smile as she did it.

Asking women out is also something that transgender women are more likely to do, because they are told from a young age that they should be the ones to do that. As a woman, I support transgender women being held to the standards we hold all women to, so I wish she could live in a world where she was the one asked out. But as a lesbian I support lesbianism and that means that I am in favor of whatever gets girls to be asking each other out and not doing the whole lesbian sheep syndrome dance until nothing happens. I love the dance so much but it should do something1. When a woman wants me and is willing to show it? I think that’s hot. That makes her hotter to me.

Honor as a social technology concerns the permissibility of violence, and develops most strongly in cultures where individuals can’t rely on a third party to ensure justice is served. Transgender women can rely on very few, and so consequently they tend to make it clear that they are capable of exacting retribution as a means of deterrence. She may do this by working out, or wearing leather, or owning guns, or having a piercing glare. All of these are extremely hot when a woman does them. She can be shaped by her upbringing without threatening her womanhood; she needn’t even be butch to admit that. I wouldn’t mind if she was though. Transgender butches……….

I’ve touched lightly on this before, but male socializations allow the development of specialized expertises in ways that female socializations push against. The transgender woman understands from very early on that she must make herself useful in some way; if she does not, she will be considered unmanly and disciplined accordingly. She is not a normal boy2 and so she cannot take the normal boy’s route of hardening and cruelty. Also she is very often prone to aneurotypicality. And so she begins, to touch the computer…

And eventually she becomes very very good at it. Or at mathematics, or snake raising, or sculpture, or at making very loud music, or blacksmithing, or in certain regrettable cases magic gathering. In a better world, she would have been raised as the girl she so obviously was and allowed to pursue her skills to the fullest. In this one, she is only given one of those two opportunities. She might prefer the other — but unfortunately that is not a choice that any of us get to make. It does make her sexy though.

Men and women alike are taught that female vulnerability is sexy! Girls — trans and otherwise — are conditioned from a very young age to understand womanhood as a marker of desirability rather than agency in desiring. While the transgender woman might not have been the direct object of this inculcation, she is hyperaware that the role she so desperately longs to fill is deeply associated with sexual objectification and a lack of sexual internality. All this to qualify: female vulnerability is sexy, and trans women are vulnerable. She shouldn’t be taken advantage of — she deserves love and gentlenesses. But if you pretend that just because she is traumatized she does not have certain needs, that does neither you nor her, any favors. If anything, sexuality often ends up as a release valve for the tremendous amounts of stress that living in the world places on her.

I melt whenever I think of a trans girl taking care of a bird with a broken wing or leading a lost child back to their parent. Is having been coercively socialized in cruel ways essential to this? No. Anyone can be kind. But female socialization compels those who undergo it to act as though we care, and to place the needs of others above our own. When a transgender girl goes above and beyond to help others at cost to herself — when she saves a girl from an awful family situation and holds her as she cries; when she picks you up a little treat or drink to cheer you up when you need it most; when she manages to have compassion for herself, as difficult as that often is for her? She demonstrates a fierce defiance of all those who have tried to crush her into something other than who she is.

And yes, I find the unsulliable purity of her girlish heart deeply erotically compelling. That’s chiaroscuro, or as we call it now, gap moe.

I think it’s also worth saying that I find transgender women sexual because they are, well, quite sexual. Being a woman is understood to be a fundamentally sexual positionality3 — even among cisgendered heterosexual women, “feel like a woman” is a synonym for arousal. When she transitions, and becomes fully and truly herself, no longer having to hide means she is freer to express her desires; when her hormones remake her in her own image and her emotions run freely she is, naturally, a beautiful and sensual creature. Puberty just does that to people. Now obviously I would not partake, until she has spent two years accustoming to herself. But it is also true that transgender women are worse at lying, probably because they had to do it for so long, and used up their abilities to do so. There’s a lot of pent up desire there, and it makes itself known in how she presents herself: how she walks, how she speaks, how she folds up so nicely.

And I in my turn am drawn to reciprocate.

My supporters and haters alike, agree on very few things. But they all understand that only a woman could post like this.

In person, however, things don’t always work out. Once every two months or so I get they’d — and you know what? I hate it! Yes, I understand that nobody means any harm by it and that it’s just something that happens in sufficiently woke circles but it makes me feel like I’ve failed a test. I am gender non-conforming in a few specific ways1 (who isn’t!) but I am a girl and I want to be understood as such and I would like to think I’m doing a good enough job at it to not be questioned.

I understand that that pronoun circles are a good way for nonbinary people to feel seen2, and whenever I’m in one I grit my teeth and politely answer with my actual pronouns unless there’s a trans woman in the group, in which case I give a little lecture on how using they is not neutral but degendering, and that there are people who need that non-neutrality. I’m willing to bite that bullet because it’s important that nonbinary people become more legible. But something in me really really does not like getting they’d.

Asserting that should be enough on its own, but I want to talk about why I’m not nonbinary.

To be clear, I think being nonbinary is fine! I have nothing against nonbinary people. The two conventional cardinal genders work just fine for most people but categorization systems should accurately reflect their data points; having another cluster specifically defined by not being men or women seems like a good idea because some people are neither men nor women, and describing them as such just doesn’t give very good results. There should be a place for the placeless. Even if it isn’t going to capture them all because there is always going to be somebody with a boutique gender designed specifically to upend all metrics, it’s going to fit more people better and therefore be a good system. Nonbinary people deserve to be socially legible — to not be asked about their pronouns unless they want to be; to get to have names that declare them as nonbinary, and to be treated as such, once they decide what that means; to have different things3 expected of them than society asks of men and women.

But I am not one of those people.

I am not always happy with my gender, which is often a sign of being nonbinary, but in my case that does not mean that my gender isn’t mine.

There are many reasons one might be unhappy with the expectations that come with womanhood: one is expected to date and marry men, raise children, accept lower wages and prestige for one’s work, defer and assert and present oneself in specific contextual ways that often feel ridiculous/objectifying/pointless etc. And it’s certainly true that I have mixed to negative feelings about all those things, and that existing as a woman who deviates from those expectations exacts a very real cost on me.

But that doesn’t make me not a woman. I am my mother’s daughter as she was her mother’s daughter — I stand at the end of an unbroken chain of women sculpted and sculpting in turn. Certainly some of them lacked artistic vision; certainly some of them lacked basic human decency. I am not just their work but I am not completely my own person either and it seems ridiculous to pretend otherwise.

I mean I could transition. I could be perceived as a man and take on the social roles and expectations of a man. I wouldn’t be bad at it! What is expected of men seems pretty clearly easier than what is expected of women. I could get myself perceived as nonbinary if I wanted, as much as anybody can. But I don’t want that either.

Changing yourself means making a choice and following through. But not changing yourself also means making a choice and following through. It seems to me like I am constantly choosing to be a woman for reasons beyond not wanting to be a man or nonbinary, no matter how stressful and exhausting it can be.

Look, what I really want to say is that I have an internal sense of myself as a woman. It’s kind of unpleasant to try and justify this but it does seem to be immutably there.

So what is it like to have a sense-of-being-a-woman rather than having been born and raised as somebody grown to be one and passively accepting that descriptive label?

This internal sense manifests positively in that I like being seen doing womanhood correctly and competently and find women fundamentally more interesting than non-women. I suppose, theoretically, I could be a non-woman who likes being seen doing womanhood correctly and finds women more interesting than non-women (such people do exist; we call them himedanshi and they deserve our pity.)

My internal sense manifests more sharply as a negative. If I were to say, dress up as a male character for Halloween for an entire night and on into the morning (I haven’t done this but I have done similar), a weird gross feeling would start building up and I would be compelled to act more traditionally feminine afterwards to dispel it. Probably this is something like what transgender women refer to as gender dysphoria. Being not-perceived-to-be-a-girl makes me deeply uneasy on a fundamental level.

Honestly I’m really uncomfortable with that. It seems such a nonsensical thing to demand, especially when I have to go out of my way to have it not be the case. I don’t mean to be Not Like The Other Girls here but most women who feel this way seem to lack any internality and never push at the edges of their gender, and consequently I find them tolerable at best (at worst they are bigots). It feels regressive and shameful4, but ultimately I can’t not believe that there is some kind of mysterious set factor that causes this that I don’t have control over. Or at least that being a woman is important enough to me that I wouldn’t take fifteen percent more in my lifetime earnings to be a man instead (not withstanding differences in jobs chosen by gendered alignment). Which works out to quite a bit of money.

“Dios mio!” (you cross yourself.) “A GENDER ESSENTIALIST!”

I don’t think women or anybody else should be constrained by social role. I do however believe that gender isn’t something that can be changed, only revealed.

There do seem to be people out there who just kind of happen to get gendered growing up and end up in a category they don’t really mind, but who probably would have been fine in a different one — but if gender were just a matter of being who and what you were told to be in every case, I would be straight and no transgender woman would ever become herself.

Gender expression is clearly highly constructed5. Men with long hair are, contextually:

• Degenerate hippies

• Filially pious

• Rebelling under repressive policy

• Wealthy and powerful

• Masterless drifters

• Under religious vows

• Filthy barbarians

• In good and honorable social standing

Nevertheless in a society where women were expected to be bald, I would be bald. I’m glad I’m not, of course. But if I was, I’d be glad to not have to grow my hair out.

“But Halimede,” you say, “Didn’t Judith Butler bring you the good news? Gender is performative! Anybody can do anything!” Wrong. First off, ‘performative’ refers to speech acts that define social realities, such as “I now pronounce you married” or “Knight to e4”. While it’s true that gender has to be constantly upkept, that doesn’t mean it’s weak or ignorable — if anything it means the opposite. Just because anybody can do anything doesn’t mean they will! Even people who would be fine regardless of what box they would be sorted into stay in their boxes!

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that both Nature and Nurture are extremely powerful and more relevant than most people expect, and that people should take transgender women more seriously6, and that for some women, stupid as it seems, womanhood7 is something very important8.

being vulnerable on the internet never backfired on anybody. anyways. next up I’m interested in the relationship transgender women seem to have with dolls and how it differs from non-trans.

So you are an author and you want to write a transgender woman.

The most important thing I can tell you is that you should take your draft to a transgender woman and compensate her at fair market rate for a diversity read. Listen to her and take her advice, unless it’s bad.

But before you do that, here are some questions you should be able to answer:

CONTEXTS: How does this transgender woman fit into the world around her?

Transgender women, or people who would be transgender women in a modern social context, are historically either exoticized as sacred (as with the Galli of Cybele) or, more typically, relegated to marginalized roles - as forcibly third-gendered scapegoats and sex workers, etc1. What does this transgender woman’s society perceive her role to be, and how does it push her towards fulfilling that role? What portions of her society push her in what directions? In what ways does she deviate from her role-as-ideal? How does this perception of what she should be affect her?

How does this transgender woman, as a marginalized person, make her living? What costs does she pay for her transgender womanhood (in coin, or blood, or safety)?

How does her transgender womanhood affect her social interactions and class? How is she racially categorized, and how do the stereotypes associated with that racial categorization intersect with her transgender womanhood to determine her gendered expression?

How does she interact with people on an individual level? Transgender women typically seek out and befriend other transgender women on the basis of shared experiences and finding them safer to be around, but may find themselves isolated in male-dominated fields. Are her friends, family, and lovers transgender women as well? What does that say about her? How does she interact with other transgendered women? How does she interact with cisgender women? How does she interact with people who aren’t women at all?

INTERNALITIES: What might it feel like to be a transgender woman?

Any transgender woman will tell you that her transgender womanhood informs but does not strictly define everything about her — though sometimes it feels like a prison. Yet the line between influence and definition is not nearly so clean-cut as many would like to pretend. For the most part, transgender women, like people of any other gendered positionality, do the things they are told to do, want the things they are made to want, and live the way they are told to live. The consequent commonalities between them are obvious to anybody willing to look.

Consider for a moment yourself what it would be like to be a girl being raised to be a man, with very little say in the matter.

What would that do to your emotions? Your patterns of sexual attraction? Your relationship to your body? Your sense of self? How would you react to the psychic pressures of being made to fit that particular mold, especially as a child?

How would you come to understand yourself? How would your presentation and attitudes and likes and dislikes and strengths and weaknesses be different?

And keeping that in mind: how would you be the same?

Can you really know that?

REALITIES: What are the pressures applied to transgender women, and how do they affect your character?

While it’s true that you should write a transgender woman as a person first, rather than as a set of identity tags, it’s also true that being raised by parents aiming her towards manhood tends to shape a transgender woman in certain ways. Creating a transgender woman character should ideally take these pressures and realities into account.

Being raised to be a man means being taught that depending on others is a weakness. Obviously agentic transgender women exist — but they carry out one supreme act of agency and they hate it. Individual transgender women are more likely to prioritize results over the smooth functioning of a group and ask questions when she, or another woman needs clarification — though of course the possibility that she retreats completely into her shell exists. They have often been freer to express competitiveness than cisgender women; this may present its own issues.

Transgender women are women, and have women’s problems. There are two major related double-binds leveled against all women: “Be feminine, but not too feminine,” and “Be desirable/sexually available, but not too desirable/sexually available.” Transgender women often grapple with these problems later in life, but that doesn’t make them any more prepared to solve them; your transgender woman character may still be figuring her answers out, or changing them as she goes.

How femininely does your transgender woman present herself? How does she feel about presenting that femininely? In what circumstances does her presentation change, and how does she feel about that change? What is her relationship to her sexuality like? To shame?

While a transgendered women will likely come to understand that she was not raised in ideal ways (and after all, who is?) she is hesitant to abandon entirely the circumstances which created her, and so she picks and chooses the pieces of her upbringing to carry on. Which pieces has your transgender woman character chosen to discard? How ambivalent is she about the pieces she has chosen to keep? Does she consider herself honorable, value forthrightness and competitiveness, or consider the ability to commit violence if necessary part of her self-image? What cycles will her choices perpetuate, and what continuities will they destroy?

Various fraught social realities create social complexes as they perpetuate themselves through women as a class. These social complexes lead to ‘natural’ associations between certain thematic approaches/conflicts and transgender womanhood or womanhoods. A transgender female protagonist may make a useful device for authors wishing to investigate:

• The relationships of traditional societal systems (family in particular) to the individual, particularly regarding assimilationism and the maintenance/disruption of norms

• Moral purity and innocence and the expectations surrounding them, especially of the loss thereof, slanting the Bildungsroman towards independence

• Roles and expectations; both of others and of the self. Subjection and subjectivity; objection and objectivity; the abject, which is defined against.

• The destruction of futurity, or the creation thereof

• The destruction of a hideous and evil world by those who have suffered, or the creation thereof

• Dynamics of power and control; power relations and fantasies of weakness and empowerment both

• Reactivities towards the unchangeable, or that which is perceived to be unchangeable. Fatalism, nihilism, existentialism, absurdism.

• Emotional textures; “painterly” character work

Of course, your transgender woman protagonist does not strictly need to interface with any of these thematic considerations — but it is likely that at least one of them has impacted her life in some way or another. Which? How? And how has she dealt with them?

Finally, but not least important: Why is this character transgender? What does it mean for your story that she has had these experiences and has come to exist as herself in this way?

Now go read the other panel of this diptych.

Discussion Questions, to be completed after finishing both articles.

1. Why do you think these articles were so similar, or perhaps, so different?

2. What might the juxtaposition of these two articles be intended to suggest?

3. What about men? Transgender men specifically? Why don’t you as a lesbian write about them? People keep asking me this so I thought I might as well ask you.

4. Did you feel more strongly about one article than the other? What might that suggest about the world? What might that suggest about you?

So you are an author and you want to write a cisgender1 woman.

The most important thing I can tell you is that you should take your draft to a cisgender woman and compensate her at fair market rate for a diversity read. Listen to her and take her advice, unless it’s bad.

But before you do that, here are some questions you should be able to answer:

CONTEXTS: How does this cisgender woman fit into the world around her?

Cisgender women, or people who would be cisgender women in a modern social context, are historically either exoticized as sacred (as with the Vestal Virgins or Delphic Oracle) or, more typically, relegated to marginalized roles - as homemakers, thread-spinners, wives and sex workers, etc. What does this cisgender woman’s society perceive her role to be, and how does it push her towards fulfilling that role? What portions of her society push her in what directions? In what ways does she deviate from her role-as-ideal? How does this perception of what she should be affect her?

How does this cisgendered woman, as a marginalized person, make her living? What costs does she pay for her cisgendered womanhood (in coin, or blood, or safety)?

How does her cisgendered womanhood affect her social interactions and class? How is she racially categorized, and how do the stereotypes associated with that racial categorization intersect with her cisgender womanhood to determine her gendered expression?

How does she interact with people on an individual level? Cisgender women typically seek out and befriend other cisgender women on the basis of shared experiences and finding them safer to be around, but may find themselves isolated in male-dominated fields. Are her friends, family, and lovers cisgender women as well? What does that say about her? How does she interact with other cisgendered women? How does she interact with transgender women? How does she interact with people who aren’t women at all?

INTERNALITIES: What might it feel like to be a cisgender woman?

Any cisgender woman (myself included) will tell you that her cisgender womanhood informs but does not strictly define everything about her — though sometimes it feels like a prison. Yet the line between influence and definition is not nearly so clean-cut as many would like to pretend. For the most part, cisgendered women, like people of any other gender positionality, do the things they are told to do, want the things they are made to want, and live the way they are told to live. The consequent commonalities between them are obvious to anybody willing to look.

Consider for a moment yourself what it would be like to be a girl being raised to be a woman, with very little say in the matter.

What would that do to your emotions? Your patterns of sexual attraction? Your relationship to your body? Your sense of self? How would you react to the psychic pressures of being made to fit that particular mold, especially as a child?

How would you come to understand yourself? How would your presentation and attitudes and likes and dislikes and strengths and weaknesses be different?

And keeping that in mind: how would you be the same?

Can you really know that?

REALITIES: What are the pressures applied to cisgender women, and how do they affect your character?

While it’s true that you should write a cisgendered woman as a person first, rather than as a set of identity tags, it’s also true that being raised as a woman tends to shape a cisgendered woman in certain ways. Creating a cisgendered woman character should ideally take these pressures and realities into account.

Being raised to be a woman means being taught to defer and value consensus. This doesn’t mean that agentic cisgendered women don’t exist, but it does mean that an individual cisgendered woman is more likely to prioritize the smooth functioning of a group over her own personal needs, act like she understands something that she wants clarification on in order to move a conversation along, and may find it more difficult to object in public.

Cisgendered women are also often taught to prioritize composure and social cohesion over results. Women’s tennis famously demands more technical precision than men’s tennis, as cisgender women are taught to deprioritize strength in favor of skill — and female players who are perceived as defying this standard2 suffer the undeserved consequences.

Cisgender women are women, and have women’s problems. There are two major related double-binds leveled against all women: “Be feminine, but not too feminine,” and “Be desirable/sexually available, but not too desirable/sexually available.” It is basically impossible for your adult cisgender woman character to not have arrived at some kind of solution to these problems (not necessarily consciously) without some external factor3 as justification.

How femininely does your cisgender woman present herself? How does she feel about presenting that femininely? In what circumstances does her presentation change, and how does she feel about that change? What is her relationship to her sexuality like? To shame?

While a cisgendered women will likely come to understand that she was not raised in ideal ways (and after all, who is?) she is hesitant to abandon entirely the circumstances which created her, and so she picks and chooses the pieces of her upbringing to carry on. Which pieces has your cisgender woman character chosen to discard? How ambivalent is she about the pieces she has chosen to keep? Does she consider herself caring, value cleanliness and composure, or consider raising children to be part of her self-image? What cycles will her choices perpetuate, and what continuities will they destroy?

Various fraught social realities create social complexes as they perpetuate themselves through women as a class. These social complexes lead to ‘natural’ associations between certain thematic approaches/conflicts and cisgendered womanhood or womanhoods. A cisgender female protagonist may make a useful device for authors wishing to investigate:

• The relationships of traditional societal systems (family in particular) to the individual, particularly regarding assimilationism and the maintenance/disruption of norms

• Moral purity and innocence and the expectations surrounding them, especially of the loss thereof, slanting the Bildungsroman towards independence

• Roles and expectations; both of others and of the self. Subjection and subjectivity; objection and objectivity; the abject, which is defined against.

• Futurity, and the destruction thereof

• The potential for a better world to be made by those who have suffered, or the destruction thereof

• Dynamics of power and control; power relations and fantasies of empowerment and weakness both

• Reactivities towards the unchangeable, or that which is perceived to be unchangeable. Fatalism, nihilism, existentialism, absurdism.

• Emotional textures; “painterly” character work

Of course, your cisgender woman protagonist does not strictly need to interface with any of these thematic considerations — but it is likely that at least one of them has impacted her life in some way or another. Which? How? And how has she dealt with them?

Finally, but not least important: Why is this character cisgender? What does it mean for your story that she has had these experiences and has come to exist as herself in this way?

Now go read the other wing of this butterfly, here.

Discussion Questions, to be completed after finishing both articles.

1. Why do you think these articles were so similar, or perhaps, so different?

2. What might the juxtaposition of these two articles be intended to suggest?

3. What about men? Transgender men specifically? Why don’t you as a lesbian write about them? People keep asking me this so I thought I might as well ask you.

4. Did you feel more strongly about one article than the other? What might that suggest about the world? What might that suggest about you?

Reticella, the lace-precursor from which Punto in Aria and the Venetian Line Lace both derive, requires a structural cloth grid and is therefore more properly termed a kind of embroidery. While Punto in Aria, as the first true lace, is distinguished by its lack of grid, the Venetian Line Lace seems to have been constructed in and through a grid made up of itself.

While the name “Linea de Venise” seems to imply a correspondence to 17th-century raised needle lace Point de Venise, the existence of pins recovered from the wreckage of the 1751 fire and immediately sold at market suggests that the Venetian Line Lace was, at least in part, woven with bobbins.

Sources indicate that the Venetian Line Lace was only ever produced by one highly-secretive workshop in the lace district of Burano, at the exclusive command of the Doge. Multiple record corroborate that the lace would have been constructed in multiple portions, each subcontracted out to individual workshops and convents, before being woven together by a master over a period of years. The process of apprenticeship was arduous even by the period’s standards, and it was said that a master might only produce a single work in her lifetime. Still, the money and fame associated with the Venetian Line Lace meant there were never any shortage of young women applying for the position.

Attempts to deduce and steal the patterning of the miraculous lace were commonplace; in light of this, and the fabulous price which a complete work of Venetian Line Lace commanded, instructions for false portions were deliberately distributed. The reconstruction of the lace from the hundreds of alleged submodules known would be near-impossible; for a time it was said that “Un’espressione idiomatica intraducibile non può essere espressa in nessuna lingua diversa da quella in cui ha avuto origine.” — “Venetian Line Lace is as easy and cheap as a virgin nun,” in keeping with the popular perception at the time of the convent as a house of ill repute.

Sadly, no specimens of the lace itself survive, although a patterning thread coded with colors purported to correspond to a design of the Venetian Winged Lion in flight is preserved in the archives of the British Museum, and a long-disputed set of scraps held by 19th-century American steel baron J. T. Massichine’s estate has recently been opened with limited permissions for academic access. Analysis of the stress points in those scraps has been inconclusive, but remains ongoing; a team at Wellesley College is currently seeking funding for the deployment of algorithms developed for protein-folding.

Boys become himedanshi, because of their internality.

In contrast to the fujoshi, who seeks to displace the sexual positionality enforced on her onto a boy, the himedanshi seeks to erase himself entirely — though his own desires inevitably emerge, cathected into a girl of great importance to him.

This is not the normal male response to lesbians, fictional or otherwise! The typical male responses to lesbians are “Wait, you like girls? You still like guys though, right?” (Die.), “So you’re not interested in me?” (Die.) and “That’s hot. I want to have sex with both of them at the same time” (Die.) Occasionally you get a guy, often gay or one of the ones treated like a girl from birth for some reason1, who will be decent about the whole thing. If the lesbians he hangs out with are trans, he is termed a grungler. If the lesbians he hangs out with are not, he is a punchline from season 1 of The L Word.

But the himedanshi aren’t that either.

What are they like, then? Well, the classic himedanshi stereotype is of a quietly neurotic ‘herbivore’, prickly when pushed and self-abnegating to the point of passive suicidality, who considers pairings between girls to be the only pure thing in a rotten world.

This, to be clear, is the image that himedanshi have created of themselves, because nobody else talks about them. While American fujoshiism is largely sexually liberatory, himedanshi the world over follow the classic fujoshi rule: “I want to be a wall.”

In fact, some Japanese himedanshi on twitter find “himedanshi” an insufficiently pejorative description — both by analogy with fujoshi (“rotten girl”) and as its literal meaning “princess boy”. Nevertheless I have chosen to here use himedanshi, rather than more neutral terms like yurijin or yuri danshi, because of something those Japanese otaku missed: “princess” in english, when applied to a boy, effectively means “f——t2”. I think that’s pejorative enough.

Here’s an interview with Iori Miyazawa (Otherside Picnic) on this particular approach to yuri.

Leaving aside that this man talking about the profundity and expansiveness of yuri sat down and wrote the most “will they won’t they” two girls going to school and having feelings about each other imaginable3, I think this should give you a kind of idea of the knots these people tie themselves in.

Notice Miyazawa speaks only in the most oblique terms about what he wants. Himedanshi really really do not want to talk about why it is that two girls kissing and holding hands makes them so happy. They will say “well, I like girls and there are two girls.” They may, if probed, reveal misogyny or cite sexual appeal; they will depict themselves as deranged and obsessive etc. The important thing here is that they are deeply uncomfortable with their comparatively benign desires.

Here is yuri luminary Erika Friedman, baffled and horrified by the way himedanshi choose to write about themselves. And she’s right! It is weird and offputting, and she correctly identifies that Reiji might actually be a girl and need to transition.

But no, himedanshi aren’t all actually girls. Many of them turn out to have been, and many of those girls keep many of their attitudes they picked up during this time in their lives, but some of them are just guys who are like that for some reason.

I think I can explain something Friedman is missing here — one of the things that drives himedanshi so mad. She herself has (relatably) been mildly exasperated with yuri made for the male gaze. Sure, men are absolutely capable of producing good yuri, but men have also produced a tremendous amount of terrible dreck that fails to understand that women are human. Yuri requires that, at minimum, that men be decentered; the himedanshi understand this and become attached to their ‘lack of a place’.

Consider first the CGDCT himedanshi, who like light and frothy moe shows with girls who are entirely unlike them. Moe shows traditionally have at least one girl (Tomoyo, Kagamin, Mai Minakami) with homosexual inclinations, and many himedanshi consequently end up focusing on fluff. Purity here is something they understand as an existence completely independent from themselves. The girls are playing out their relationships on the other side of a screen; disconnected entirely from the viewer.

However, if the nascent himedanshi really latches onto one of these gay anime girls, what he wants more than anything else is to see her fall in love and experience horrible heartwrenching pain.

(three illustrations, from the canon. For those familiar, this ought to suffice:)

• Tomoyo x Sakura (Cardcaptor Sakura) -> Homura x Madoka (Puella Magi Madoka Magica)

• Yuno x Miyako (Hidamari Sketch) -> Chito x Yuuri (Girls Last Tour)

• Renko x Maribel (ZUN’s Music Collection) -> Sorawo x Toriko (Otherside Picnic)

The himedanshi projects onto girls who he feels share his traits: Homura has a teenage boy’s sense of what is cool; Chiito is a closed-off and prickly reader; Sorawo really only cares about her special interests and has terrible social anxiety. And of course all three of them are in deep emotional pain and incapable of talking about their emotions, just as the himedanshi believes himself to be.

And yet there is no yuri paddle. The himedanshi is not the fujoshi: he does not seek to offload his own trauma, but to redeem himself. He fixates on purity: the girl who he projects onto can and will suffer horribly, but her heart is unquestionably pure because she soldiers on for love4.

Fortunately for verisimilitude, falling in love and experiencing horrible heartwrenching pain is exactly what it feels like to be a teenage lesbian, and so a lot of the work that this kind of himedanshi produce strikes home.

Once the himedanshi has indulged sufficiently in this lonesome heartwrenching pain, he longs for social acceptance. He may return to the fluff from whence he came or pivot towards characters like Bocchi or Suletta, who are gay and stressed but also loved in return; he may move onto pairings like Farcille, which lack an easy projection point character; or, if he self-defines as a cuckold hard enough, he may decide to devote himself entirely to the yaya archetype5. Maybe he gets really into Maki Bloom Into You or Onimai or transitions and becomes more normal. That’s his own business. Whatever.

Anyways. Despite all this weirdness I still have more in common with the himedanshi than I do any normal men. Like me, they have something in their brains that makes them think of women and their opinions as more important than men and theirs. Probably this is related to whatever biological factor it is that makes people lesbians, or even transgender. I just wish they weren’t so weird about it.

Next up: Weight of Weeaboo Womanhood III: what does this have to do with transgender women? BL and forcefem as coping mechanisms; “traps”.

APPENDIX I: For those puzzled about why people like that drunk girl from Bocchi The Rock so much.

Many people find public performance difficult. You can practice a set or routine or solo for weeks and fail in front of a crowd, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Busking is even harder than that. You’re breaking the rule of polite non-interference in public to specifically get people’s attention and also you’re asking them to give you money for it. Being able to do something like that is basically about as much narrative power as you need to confess your feelings or shoot a goku laser. The reason that trans (and himedanshi) love her so much is that her existence sets a lower bound on Bocchi’s future. Her predations hold the appeal of pure craft, unbounded by morality.

Naturally this is of tremendous interest to the himedanshi, who are all bottoms.