Perception vs. Identity

I know I haven't posted in forever, things have been pretty hectic in my life in the last year but it will be calming down pretty soon. 

So I think there's a lot of debate in social justice spaces surrounding people who are perceived as more privileged or more marginalized than they really are. This manifests in a lot of ways, including race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc, but today I'm going to focus on gender. Let me clarify what I mean.

For myself, I'm nonbinary. I honestly just kind of use gender nonconforming femme sapphic as my gender label but it changes. Basically I'm genderfluid and if you really want to put a label on every single part of that, I would say I'm fluid between female, demigirl, agender, gender apathetic, androgyne, neutrois, unaligned transmasc, demiboy, maverique, just sapphic, and sometimes more than one of the above. My gender is sort of half female, half transmasculine nonbinary, and the way I express it is about what you would expect from that combination. Womanhood often doesn't feel like a useful concept to me because even though I'm perceived as a woman and live as a woman and experience misogyny as a woman, I feel alienated from cishet women especially if they aren't disabled and are naturally thin, because the fact that I am not cishet and am disabled and have not always been thin has deeply informed my sense of gender just as deeply as the fact that I was assigned female at birth and honestly, cishet women really do seem to see gnc wlw as a different gender and they treat us as outsiders to womanhood. Now, I personally don't think that using a bunch of labels for every single variation of nonbinary is necessarily useful, so I don't describe myself the way I just did in every day life. But I do want you to get the picture of what we're working with. 

It's not really possible in a binary society to be perceived as nonbinary, and I don't think it's constructive to try and turn the binary into a trinary. So I'm not perceived as nonbinary, I'm perceived as a woman or as gender ambiguous (despite using he/him pronouns and masculine-coded terms for myself). A slightly off cis woman. Gender ambiguous. None gender, left woman. No gender only sapphic. I don't bind my chest, as even binders that are branded as more comfortable and accessible are not comfortable to me. I currently have shoulder length hair that I'm planning to put in a long undercut soon, but this is the longest I've had it since coming out 7 years ago - and last April, it was buzzed. I reluctantly tolerate she/her pronouns and female-coded terms a lot of the time for safety reasons, and it's something I've mostly numbed myself to. I don't hate living as a woman. I don't hate presenting myself as a woman. I would say that a lot of the time I am cis-assumed and relatively apathetic about it compared to some trans people, and that means I have conditional cis privilege.

Despite this, and despite the fact that my clothing style doesn't set me out much from your average cis woman - I mostly wear t-shirts and hoodies with either leggings or jeggings - the fact that I have had buzzed hair is something I've faced a lot of discrimination for. Until recently I worked at a restaurant with an extremely transphobic management team, enough so that a qualified applicant was rejected specifically for disclosing that they were trans. 

Coming out or going on hormones or being perceived as openly trans at all in that situation was not an option. But I still experienced a lot of discrimination for being perceived (and for some of that time, identifying, though not openly) as a butch lesbian, even though a lot of the managers were bi. I didn't get nearly the hours I asked for, despite having worked there for five years, being one of the only employees to know any ASL (two regular customers were Deaf), and training new hires. I would constantly hear supervisors having conversations about me in which they speculated about my sexuality, and coming from a group of mostly bi people this shouldn't have been threatening but I think you can see why it was. One of these conversations even included two people discussing what they would "do" about my sexuality, meaning that there was a real chance I could have been fired just for being gender nonconforming. I live in an at-will employment state in which even firing someone for being gay was, until recently, completely legal. And it still happens just as much now, but is hidden behind bullshit excuses like "not fitting in with the company culture" or "not being a good fit for this position" because at-will employment policies still leave so much room for discrimination.

It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that one manager, in summer 2020, the only one who had never made an issue of my gender expression or assumed sexuality, left her uniform in a box outside the kitchen door with no comment or warning and I haven't seen her since. It also shouldn't be surprising that a few months later, I found out from her roommate that she even was a she...because she'd started living openly as a trans woman. (I've since checked up on her to see how she's doing - she's great, in a healthy stable relationship with her girlfriend and has a job that is hopefully more accepting of her. She also seems like a really cool person when she's not stifling herself for a shitty job and I hope we can meet again and be friends one day.)

Knowing her has made me think a lot about the differences in our experience of gendered oppression. Because I'm perceived as mostly cis and can often pass as cis, whereas she very obviously doesn't. Because I'm assigned female at birth and have experienced a lot of harassment and even violence for being perceived as a woman, whereas she never experienced that same level of violence when she was read as male. Because there were a lot of times when I or the other female-read employees were sexually harassed by men while working, and I 100% believe that her stepping in and banning male customers for hitting on us or saying something about our bodies, following a female employee out to her car, trying to track me down and get my personal information by insisting he was my boyfriend, and making sexual comments in a review about my underage coworker, probably saved a few of us from way worse. I didn't witness this happening, but she also made sure that a white cis male employee who had been making racist comments about two South Asian coworkers would be fired.

I talk about her because even though she never openly identified as a feminist and never had political pins on all her stuff and never had a social science background like I did, she clearly was very conscious of the privilege she had living as a cis white man and she did her best to do her part. And the fact that she was conscious of that privilege, even though she was a closeted trans woman, and used that privilege to protect us is something I have respect for. I also think it's good she's not defensive about it and instead acknowledges it rather than try to insist, as I've seen many trans women do, that she's never had male privilege and has always experienced the same misogyny as an AFAB person or that trans men, cis women, and AFAB nonbinary people have always had and always will have privilege over her.

 Because yeah, she experiences misogyny NOW and I'm sure being a trans woman who doesn't fully pass as cis is a really vulnerable and dangerous experience, but two years ago? When everyone who looked at her saw a cis white man who wasn't visibly gender nonconforming in any way?

I'm not gonna lie, if any transfeminine person tried to tell me that I had gendered privilege over them when they were living their life as a man, as if I hadn't been sexualized and period-shamed by grown men before I even hit middle school specifically because I was perceived as female, as if it's not MY body at risk from anti-choice laws and other policies criminalizing female reproductive rights and not theirs, as if growing up perceived as a girl isn't horribly fucking traumatic for so many people, I would laugh in their face. Like I'm not kidding, I think the idea that everyone who's not transfeminine is privileged for that is fucking stupid and ridiculous.

A lot of it comes from trans women being defensive about the fact that a lot of them have experienced male privilege - probably in response of TERFs and other transmisogynists, something I don't blame them for - and about the fact that there are some things about misogyny that they need to take a back seat on and instead uplift the voices of people who ARE affected, even if some of those people are men or cis women. Like anti-abortion policies or lack of access to menstrual products or period stigma or lack of research on medical conditions like endometriosis or denial of access to procedures like hysterectomies - or forced hysterectomies in the case of many disabled people, poor people, and people of color. I'm sorry but if you don't have a functioning uterus your opinion on these things will NEVER be of value because it's never going to be your body that's directly affected. It doesn't matter how you identify, it matters that there are so fucking many life-threatening forms of misogyny intended to target people based solely on the fact that their bodies are perceived as female. The patriarchy doesn't necessarily care how you identify, it cares how you're perceived. I said what I said.

This post, if you haven't already figured it out, is going to be a rambly one, partially because I haven't had enough coffee today for it not to be and partially because I just saw something that pissed me off and I'm both looking for an excuse to rant about it and also just really think it deserves to be talked about. It was this comment on a TikTok channel that I follow, about a very chronically online nonbinary aroace 14-year-old telling an adult lesbian that they were "more queer" because they were aroace and nonbinary rather than gay (just to clarify I have no idea who this child is, I follow the adult lesbian - who is also nonbinary - and the video was about lesbophobia in the trans and nonbinary community). 

Now that would be annoying just by itself and I want to go back in time and smack 17-year-old me upside the head for thinking pretty much exactly like that kid, but the comment on the OP's that just really pissed me off said "you just know they're AFAB." On the video of an AFAB nonbinary person who mentioned nothing about the kid's assigned sex in the first place. Of course.

Like excuse me, what the fuck? As if AFAB trans people are spicy little cis girls too stupid to know what real oppression is, as if none of us have ever experienced real transphobia, as if being AFAB doesn't lead to gendered trauma for fucking everyone regardless of how they're perceived. As if it's being AFAB nonbinary, something people are ACTUALLY oppressed for, that led to this kind of behavior rather than the fact that the kid doesn't experience homophobia because they're aroace. As if it isn't considered more acceptable in many situations to reveal an AFAB trans person's assigned sex under the guise of wokeness rather than an AMAB trans person's, because with us it's just a fact that we're AFAB so it's fine and not really misgendering or outing someone or putting them in danger but if you do it to an AMAB trans person you're a TERF and you're invalidating them.

It is so fucking telling that AMAB trans and nonbinary people are never fucking told "oh of course they're AMAB" like we are by supposed progressives when they say something ignorant - even though some of them are perceived as cis men, some are comfortable living as cis men, some live partially as men, and some aren't perceived as visibly gender nonconforming any more than I am most of the time - shit, some of them are perceived as LESS gender nonconforming than I am, considering that I use pronouns and gendered terms that don't align with my assigned sex, that I'm growing out my body hair, and that I still am sometimes read as androgynous. But okay, you just KNOW that a teenager - a middle school-aged child - who's ignorant about oppression is AFAB. Speculating about a child's genitals in order to be transphobic and misogynistic, when whether or not they were actually AFAB is completely irrelevant, is definitely an appropriate thing for an adult to be doing.

Look, I'm not denying that a lot of AFAB nonbinary and transmasc people are less visibly trans and occasionally are more able to get away with doing things that transfeminine people couldn't (though definitely not nearly to the extent that people think we are). I'm also not denying that part - a TINY part - of why I'm so able to pass as cis and still be able to present more authentically than my transfeminine former manager was is that I'm AFAB and that I don't experience the same hypervisibility as transfeminine people if I, say, wear a button down shirt and a short hair cut (though I 100% do experience hypervisibility for being perceived as a butch lesbian). I know I'm less likely to be murdered than a trans woman. That I'm safer while dating than many trans women. That if I were to go to prison, I would be safer than an incarcerated trans woman.

And I 100% will use that privilege for good if given the chance, like if you're a trans woman and you ever need me to go to the bathroom with you and just happen to ask if you have a tampon when I see cis women staring? I got you, I don't care if you're my best friend or a total stranger or if I even like you as a person (though it obviously depends on WHY I don't like you). You're a trans woman being discriminated against and need me, the closeted transmasc with the social work degree and connections to help you fight back, you come find me. You're on a date or have a sex work appointment with someone new and need an emergency contact who will back you up and help keep you safe in case that person freaks out over learning you're a trans woman? I'm here. You need me to help you go to the cops to report after you've been sexually or physically assaulted? To defend you when people say stupid shit about how you not immediately disclosing that you're trans is somehow violent? To shut down transmisogynists who are acting like you're a threat to cis women in the locker room or on the athletic field? To testify for you and help you get placed into a women's facility if you get in legal trouble for drugs or sex work or defending yourself against a violent crime or being undocumented? To yell at transmisogynist cis wlw and cis feminists who think you're a threat to sapphic and women's spaces but are fine with me as long as I'm quiet about my own gender fluidity and don't expect respect for my own transition? I can do all of that. My ability to pass as cis, the fact that I have a foot in both worlds even if I'm never fully accepted in either, has its uses.

What I won't do, though, is tolerate people who act like me being an AFAB nonbinary person who doesn't always look GNC means that I'm trans lite or haven't experienced any real oppression. I can pass as cis and I have conditional (VERY conditional considering how often I'm assumed to be gay based off appearance) cis privilege especially as a femme, but I'm still nonbinary and still trans and that still plays a major role in my life. I don't have to accept anyone acting like it doesn't or ignoring the fact that I've gone through a lot, both transphobia and misogyny, and don't deserve to be treated like I'm stupid or ignorant or pointing out that a lot of why AFAB trans people are perceived this way is that y'all still view us on some level as women regardless of whether we're okay with that and you think that that means it's okay to speak over us and that we should be quiet and take up less space because living and having been socialized as AMAB sometimes means that you've internalized a LOT of misogyny and a lot of assumptions that your voice deserves to be heard more. 

AFAB people deserve to talk about all of this without being called transmisogynist and I am so fucking sick of any of us who try being immediately shouted down by wokesters who think we're personally fucking slaughtering poor innocent trans women by saying that baeddel theory is fucking stupid or that a lot of how we're seen in the trans community is informed by misogyny and transphobia - even if trans women are the ones mistreating us or even just using the words female socialization at all. You know what? I fucking WAS socialized as a female and it fundamentally changed who I am as a person and I have a hard goddamn time believing the inverse wouldn't be true of someone socialized as male, even if they are a woman or living as one now.

But at the same time, a lot of AFAB nonbinary people don't have the same hypervisibility or experience of transmisogyny as transfeminine people do. So a trans woman pointing out things like how I wouldn't experience the same violence as her while in prison, or how I'm conditionally more accepted than her in women's and sapphic spaces, or how my body isn't automatically perceived as a threat and hers is, 100% has the right to do that and that is a time when I should take a back seat and shut up and listen. 

I guess to conclude I just wish trans women and AFAB nonbinary people could coexist more easily and listen to each other's perspectives without one group getting defensive over how the perception of identity does lead to an experience of privilege, or thinking that pointing that out is somehow an attack on us as people and saying we're less trans or less women.

Being Trans Isn't an Excuse to Guilt People into Sex

 CW: rape, genitalia, discussions of predatory behavior, sexual coercion, manipulative behavior, disrespect for sexual boundaries

The topic of genital preferences is something that has been ongoing in the trans community for a long time, and for some reason it has entered the cesspool that is TikTok discourse. Now, I would post this on my actual channel, but I have a lot to say. I also have a slight speech impediment, and between those two things I feel like this would turn into like a fifteen-video series where wokesters harass me in the comment sections of my videos, call me a transphobe, and worse. And I like having a platform here where I am not censored and can bluntly discuss things like sex and genitalia.

So all of that said, what I've seen people saying is that having a genital preference is transphobic. My stance is that it's not, and that I will view anyone who says it is as a potential rapist. Now that might seem extreme but I want to discuss why I feel that way.

First, not all trans women have penises and not all trans men have vaginas. Bottom surgery is a thing! So having a genital preference is really not excluding someone for being trans, it's excluding someone for having a body type that you're not attracted to. Which is totally fine and not transphobic - and yes, I do also think this about fat people. I really don't care if you would fuck someone or not, I care if you treat them with respect and dignity regardless of whether you find them attractive.

Second, breaking down people's genital preferences is not an issue of human rights for the trans community. Housing, healthcare, religious, and employment discrimination, physical safety, freedom from abuse, and bodily agency are. Immigrant rights, criminal justice reforms, decriminalization of sex work, and drug decriminalization are. 

Trans kids being able to go to school and play on the sports team of their gender, and be called by their correct name and pronouns, without being bullied by classmates or teachers or outed is. Access to public bathrooms and changing rooms is. Keeping trans women out of men's prisons is. Competent and safe healthcare is. 

Those are all matters of treating people with dignity and respect, and they're integral to our rights and safety. But someone having sex with you? That's not something we need to be safe. That's not a human right. You're not owed sex. No one is. I really don't care if anyone wants sex with me, I care that I'm protected from discrimination and able to live authentically and with dignity.

Third, and related to the first point, someone having respect for you is not the same thing as them consenting to sex. You can respect all trans women, including ones with penises, as fellow women and not necessarily want to have sex with them. Same for trans men. You can respect the sexuality of lesbians and straight men who have sex with women with penises, and gay men and straight women who have sex with men with vaginas, without wanting to have sex with someone who has a penis or a vagina yourself. You can also welcome all trans women into women's spaces and communities and all trans men into men's spaces and communities, and defend them as valid men and women, without ever having sex with them.

Fourth, I'm not sure exactly where this came from, but there's this quote that says something like "all women are forced to live under an arbitrary and unfair system that divides us into two categories: fuckable and worthless. The solution to this is not to expand the definition of fuckable."

I agree, and I think that applies to most marginalized groups. We shouldn't be focused on whether cis people want to date or fuck us, but on whether we are being treated with respect and equity.

Fifth, if you equate someone not wanting to have sex with you to not having respect for you, that's literally attempting to guilt people into sex. That's toying with people's emotions and manipulating them until they have sex with you. That's using emotional coercion and manipulation and breaking down someone's barriers to make them feel like they don't have a right to say no.

It's rape. It's rape in the same way it's rape when a Nice Guy whines about how haaaard his life is at every woman who listens for half a second because no one will fuck him because he's not a Chad, and then he proceeds to beg and cry for sex twenty times until she gives in to shut him up. 

No means no, and if someone says no they meant it the first time. Stop chasing people who have expressed clearly that  your body just isn't their type! Stop pressuring sexual assault survivors who associate their trauma with a certain type of genitalia into retraumatizing themselves because you want to fuck them! Stop acting like a fucking predator and making the rest of us look bad!

People are allowed to have preferences about what kind of body they're attracted to - just like someone might prefer muscular people or short people or people with facial hair, they can also prefer penis or vaginas. Just like someone who prefers, say, a short muscular man with a beard isn't obligated to overcome that preference to date a tall skinny man who are clean-shaven just because those men might be hurt by being excluded, someone who prefers women with vaginas isn't obligated to date a woman with a penis.

It's not transphobic of them to reject this hypothetical woman based on her penis. There are trans women with vaginas, and the only inherent difference between a trans and cis woman is assigned sex at birth. So, again, the trans woman isn't being rejected based on her being trans, she's being rejected because of her penis. And that's not an excuse for anyone to be violent toward her, but it's also not transphobic. She just has a body that some people aren't into and that's FINE. They don't have to be!

Is it definitely a matter of class privilege if she can even afford a bottom surgery in the first place? Yes. Is the prevalence of genital preferences affected by cis-centric beauty standards, and is being seen as widely desirable by cis people frequently a form of privilege associated with proximity to cisness? Yes and yes. But you know what else is a matter of privilege and also something that often defines attraction and boundaries around relationships?

• Fitness. It's absolutely an indicator of class privilege and abled privilege if you have a home with a fully functional kitchen where you can store and cook fresh healthy foods, if you don't live in a food desert, if you can afford a gym membership, if you have the extra time to exercise and cook vegetables and go to the store, if you grew up with access to information about nutrition, if you can pay someone to watch your kids while you take time for yourself, if you can afford exercise equipment, if you have space at home to exercise, if you don't work a physically exhausting job that leaves you too tired to exercise and with arthritis that makes it almost impossible for you to run (which is what happened to me), if you're mentally healthy enough to consistently take care of yourself with no issues, if you're not physically disabled in a way that prevents you from exercising, if you have the food security necessary to pick and choose what you eat, if you have access to a well-maintained pool year-round, if you don't have a substance use disorder.

Also, white people are often more likely to attain a certain standard of physical fitness because on average, we have more generational wealth and access to resources than some other racial groups such as black and indigenous people, so physical fitness is also related to white privilege. And the body type most commonly considered fit in America, lean and muscular, is more commonly associated with white people and is based on Eurocentric standards of health and beauty. Like, a lot of Pacific Islanders have a stocky build, and black and Latina women are really commonly stereotyped as being curvy. In Fiji, big women were considered the most beautiful for centuries until the island was exposed to western television and, therefore, western fatphobia.

• Body weight. If you're thin or midsize, which a lot of people are when they can prioritize physical fitness (so this is also  related to class, race, and disability status, not only thin privilege), you experience less discrimination and less judgment for what you eat and how you dress. I've been all over the body-type spectrum and people have been way less judgmental to me for eating junk or wearing lazy, comfy clothes when I was thin. When I was at my skinniest a few years ago (140 lbs and 5'5", but I used to be a dancer so good posture was drilled into me at a young age and I pretty much always look thinner than I actually am), I would always get comments on how healthy I must be even when I was just eating cup noodles and chocolate. People listened to me and respected me so much more. When I was fat, I had to struggle just to get treated like a human by most people, let alone an equal. I still have emotional trauma from living as a fat girl for so long at such an impressionable time in my life. But the thing is, I never particularly cared that people weren't attracted to me because I was fat. I just wanted to be treated as their equal.

• Religion. Remember that I'm speaking as a white cultural Christian in America, but I've met a lot of Christians who excluded all non-Christians from their dating pool. I even used to be among that number. And when I became cognizant of Christian hegemony in the western world, this is something that bothered me a lot. But I've thought about it more and, while I would be fine in an interfaith relationship, I can understand why not everyone would be. Holidays, weddings, worship services, raising kids...those are all things that are influenced by religion. If you have a partner of a different religion than you, this can cause conflict around major life milestones and not everyone is okay with that. So I don't think it's a big deal if someone only wants to date people of the same religious belief as them, as long as they respect people regardless of religion.

• Gainful employment and financial stability. Not to be that person who's always talking about their ex, and definitely not trying to be the kind of person who would badmouth her, but this was also an issue for us. Because of the severity of her disabilities, she can't work. I, however, technically can - but managing being the sole breadwinner in the house on top of also contributing to domestic labor and managing to keep our relationship alive and take care of us both medically was a lot of pressure and way more strain than I could handle. So, I wouldn't date someone who's incapable of working. They don't have to be rich but they do need to be able to support themselves independently, contribute proportionately to household expenses, and have stable employment.

I've heard a lot of straight women say that they don't do 50/50 and that they expect a man who takes care of them by financially providing, by buying them a nice house, taking them shopping, paying for their beauty appointments, flying them all around the world, while they just relax, and I 100% get it, especially in the dynamic they often have with men. The truth is that women, statistically speaking, would be expected to do the bulk of thankless, exhausting labor every single day whether they were with a rich man or a poor one. They could get hurt or abused with a rich man or a poor one. That's the reasoning I've heard from most of them, and I don't fully agree with it because the thing is that while they could be abused either way, rich people, men, and especially rich men get away with a lot of horrifying shit toward vulnerable people. Harvey Weinstein, anyone? Epstein's island? Donald Trump? Elon Musk and his usage of slave labor?

However, what I do get is the desire to not have to worry about money, have high standards (God knows I would if I were straight), and to live in luxury. So, I would never ever advise anyone to rely financially 100% on their partner. Always have a backup way to make money, a second bank account that they can't touch, savings and assets that are in your name only - because all that shit is security if things go south for you. But I do also think that if you want a certain life for yourself, it makes sense to find someone who matches that - even if most low-income people aren't going to check the boxes for what you want in a partner.

• Diet. A lot of vegans and vegetarians don't want to date someone who eats meat and I completely get why. I generally say vegetarian because people are more likely to understand that, but I really identify more as plant-based and I try to be mostly vegan. I also grow some of my own vegetables and herbs. But my last girlfriend was very much a store-bought, meat and potatoes person. She had a lot of medical issues and disabilities that restricted her diet, and being vegetarian would have been a terrible idea for her. I don't resent her for it in the slightest, but the fact that our diets were so opposite was really hard for me. I found myself eating a lot more chicken and dairy than I was comfortable with. I also tend to use a lot of spice, and I absolutely love Indian food. My staple meals when I cook for myself are all things she physically can't eat because of her sensory issues and her gastroparesis.

This was something that would have continued probably forever if we had gotten married, because I would have been the primary breadwinner. I was going into social work and while you can absolutely live comfortably on a social worker's salary, you're pretty much always going to be stressed about money if you support yourself AND a spouse - especially since we're both disabled and therefore have more health expenses - AND travel (something I'd always wanted to do) when you're paying for two separate, polar opposite diets. Also, I would have been doing a lot of the cooking, and I never really learned to cook meat properly because I wasn't eating it and just didn't see the point.

I still love her so much as a friend, but I'm glad we broke up (we had a lot of reasons, it wasn't just diet) because that situation would have made both of us miserable. And what I learned from that experience is that, while I respect the choice to eat meat and understand my way of eating is not accessible to everyone because of factors like disability and food security, I wouldn't date someone whose diet is so incompatible with my own again.

Health and fitness is an issue for me as well, because at one point I briefly dated someone who completely neglected those things and was really toxic about it and I always felt like I was being dragged down with him, especially because we both have depression but I cared a lot more about my recovery and building a healthy and stable life than he did. Part of how I work on building that life is by being active. So in the six hours I had between classes at the time I would go to my college's free fitness center to swim, work out, and take dance classes (I had more mobility back then than I do now; I still exercise but wouldn't be able to take a strenuous dance class). I always asked if he wanted to come but he told me he didn't know how to work out or swim, so I offered to teach him but he didn't want to do that either. Or I would ask if he wanted to go with me or bring up the possibility of going hiking together on the trail near campus when the weather warmed up, and he would just roll his eyes and sigh like I couldn't possibly understand what he was going through. I would try to bring him healthy snacks because I'd noticed he only ate junk and he'd talked about having high blood pressure at his last doctor's appointment, or I'd surprise him by cleaning something in his dorm so it would be nice when he came back, but he'd just get annoyed at those too. He kept pushing me to buy him alcohol and bring it to his sober dorm just because I was older, even though I rarely drink and he had no intention of paying me back for that or anything else (and never took me out either). He got upset with me for not wanting to smoke weed with him, something he did constantly, even though I explained that weed is a depressant and that two of my cousins were addicted to drugs so I was just really not comfortable with that (and yes, you can get addicted to weed), and at one point he got on top of me and breathed the smoke directly into my face without my consent to try and get me high. He would skip class and neglect his homework, and get annoyed with me if I didn't text back within like five minutes because I was working on an assignment or actually going to sleep at a reasonable hour for once. He was also just really dismissive of my experiences as another mentally ill person and acted like I couldn't possibly understand him just because I choose to work on myself.

I'm not trying to badmouth anyone or act like people who aren't interested in health for whatever reason are bad people, but I need to illustrate how incompatible I was with this person specifically because of his lack of interest in his health. Things like exercise, healthy eating, and avoiding substance use have all been really important to my recovery and I can't backtrack on that or avoid setting boundaries on what I will and won't tolerate in a relationship. I felt like I was an exhausted single mom managing a sullen rebellious twelve-year-old boy going through an edgy phase, not a boyfriend with an equal adult partner who put just as much into our relationship as I did and was working just as hard on himself as I was. And I refuse to be put in that position again. You don't have to be a total health nut or anything but I expect some evidence that my partner cares about being healthy.

We can acknowledge that certain boundaries around sex and relationships can be related to privilege. And we should. But like, for me? Acknowledging that doesn't change the fact that I personally would not date someone who didn't make their health and fitness a priority and that I would much rather date someone else plant-based. I shouldn't have to change those standards just to seem more progressive. It doesn't mean I would disrespect someone based on the fact that they aren't into healthy plant-based eating and don't exercise. It just means that I have certain boundaries around who I allow access to my romantic interest and my body. 

And while I understand there are barriers to attaining a physically fit and healthy body, being financially stable and gainfully employed, and avoiding meat, that it's not achievable for everyone, and that some people just aren't interested, I also understand that I am not obligated to have anything to do with these people and we can go our separate ways. I will still advocate for them to be treated with respect and dignity, of course. But that's not the same thing as consenting to sex.

I view bottom surgery the same way. Yes, there are barriers to receiving bottom surgery and it's not achievable for everyone. No, not everyone is interested. Yes, it's a matter of privilege and social justice. But people don't have to change their sexual standards and boundaries for you just to seem more woke! And if you voluntarily don't want bottom surgery, that's fine but it also means that fewer people will be attracted to you. It is not their fault or their problem if you are not okay with that.

I don't really have anything else to say but I do want to end with something. People have the right to say no to sex at any time for any reason. Will we always agree with their reasoning? No. But they should still have the right to do it, because that's what consent is.

The Gender Tag: This is Number Four

 I was planning to post this last summer but was dealing with way too much stress to bother, so it's going up in March.

1. How do you self-identify your gender, and what does that definition mean to you?

Nonbinary, gender nonconforming, trans, gender variant, or woman are all labels that I use. I'm also considering using the femme label.

What woman means to me is that I feel connected to the culture and history of women who love women, and that I live my life as a woman and experience sexism as a woman, that the ableism and homophobia I experience are also influenced by the fact that I'm perceived as a woman. I feel solidarity with women, as a woman, and don't intend to live as a man or feel that same affiliation with men.

What nonbinary means to me is that I have a complicated relationship to gender and don't think of myself as strictly female or male. Being perceived as strictly female feels restraining, coerced, and dysphoric to me at times. It makes me feel like I'm trapped in other people's perceptions of my body.

What trans means to me is to transcend gender, to not be cis, and to do something to transition in a way that feels more authentic to me.

What gender nonconforming and gender variant mean to me are that I feel more authentic expressing my gender and living my life in a way that doesn't fall in line with patriarchal, cishet expectations for women. I don't do any of this as a deliberate political statement, I just don't see clothes as gendered and want to determine for myself how I dress. But I understand that it is one.

What femme means to me is that I have a subversive, complex relationship to femininity influenced by my gender, disabilities, and attraction to women, that I reclaim femininity from its heteronormative ties and express my  femininity in a way that is inseparable from my sexuality and gender. I'm not perceived as feminine in cishet standards and when I do dress feminine, it's for myself and other women. The most feminine I ever feel is when I have feelings for a butch woman, and I don't think of myself as feminine in a way that allows me to relate to straight cis people.

2. What pronouns honor you?

He/him. They/them is fine, and she/her is okay sometimes but don't use it exclusively and do ask first.

3. What style of clothing do you most often wear?

What I've been wearing most frequently since the pandemic is sundresses, sweatshirts, leggings, jeggings, t shirts, tank tops, button-down shirts, and long sweaters. My style has been described as androgynous by a lot of people, but I draw a lot of inspiration from lesbian/wlw fashion. So I look like a cross between a gay barbie, a grill dad, a Christian tradwife (something I take a kind of sick pleasure in considering how much I hate them, and how much it pisses them off that I stole their feminine domestic aesthetic and made it leftist and gay), and an adult version of a 2015 emo teen.

I also wear a lot of nature-themed shirts (my favorite sweatshirt is a yellow hoodie with a grizzly bear that has mountains growing from its back) and things from fandoms that I'm in, like I have two shirts from Stranger Things and a pair of waffle-patterned leggings inspired by Eleven and her love of Eggos that I wear when I cosplay her, a Welcome to Nightvale t-shirt, a tank top from a Christian feminist podcast I just started listening to, a Lucifer sweatshirt, and two shirts from Warrior Nun.

The shoes that I wear are usually black hiking boots or men's beige hiking sandals. Those are the most versatile shoes I own; the boots look like Doc Martens but are cheaper, I can wear them to work, they're comfortable in most weather, they're nice enough to pass as normal boots, they're easy to clean, and they go with pretty much any outfit and look immediately gay. The sandals are comfortable, resilient, and work great for walking around in the summer.

I'm not comfortable with conventional bras, and binders are not an option to me because they tend to press down on an extremely sensitive and painful area of my back and they cause sensory overload. Plus, when I wore one, people just kept thinking I was a woman anyway so it just felt really pointless and made me feel more dysphoric. So I wear sports bras, if any at all, because they make me feel more supported.

The rest of the time, I go braless whenever I can. Hence, the sundresses, tank tops, and sweatshirts. Tank tops, especially ribbed tank tops, and sundresses with a cinched waist or latticework bust both make me feel supported and allow me to walk around in the heat without feeling uncomfortable. Sweatshirts allow me to feel comfortable without being harassed. You're not really supposed to wear bras all the time anyway, since it doesn't allow your chest muscles to develop properly if you do it all the time.

I also feel like my taste in jeggings and leggings is influenced by disability - the fact that they're so close to my skin allows a brace to wrap more tightly around my leg without pressing directly into skin.

4. Talk about your choices with body hair. How do you style your hair? Do you choose to shave? What do you choose to shave, or not shave?

I'm currently growing out my hair. It's about three inches long currently and I want it to be down to the middle of my back. Then, I'm going to shave the underside of it and dye the rest dark red. I have a few different styles saved on my Pinterest, some of which are stereotypically feminine and others of which are stereotypically masculine.

I rarely shave my legs, but do shave my armpits and everything else. I've thought about growing out my unibrow inspired by Sophia Hadjipanteli, a Cypriot-American model, and her unibrow movement. Now, whether you think Cypriots are white or not  (I've read that ethnically, geographically, linguistically, phenotypically, and culturally they are a mix of West Asian, Southern European, and North African, but many are read as white, some have assimilated into whiteness, and Sophia specifically is light skinned, naturally blonde, and blue-eyed. I don't know how she identifies racially or if the rest of her family has the same white privilege she does.), which is not a topic I feel comfortable broaching, she does ground her movement in her identity as a Middle Eastern woman rebelling against Eurocentric beauty standards. Her country also has a history of British colonialism, which is something I can relate to since I'm working to reconnect to my own culture for the same reason.

And, yes, the fact that Sophia is cishet, feminine, white-appearing, Christian, and has a comfortable well-paid job and college education gives her a lot of privilege to do this and make money off it, but considering how much hate she gets for it on her instagram, the fact that ANY woman is doing this is kind of badass. Besides, she's normalizing gender nonconformity, which is a good thing. Also, the unibrow is pretty hot, which is obviously part of the appeal for me. So, yeah, I kind of want a unibrow, but haven't worked up the nerve yet.

5. Talk about cosmetics. Do you choose to wear makeup? Do you paint your nails? What soaps and perfumes do you use, if any?

Currently, no. My skin is extremely sensitive and I never had much interest in makeup when I was younger so now I just don't know how.

Some forms of makeup that I don't wear are primer, countour, concealer, blush, and foundation, since I don't really feel like those are really about fun or artistry or self expression but were instead created just to make women feel bad about our appearances, alienate us from our natural bodies, and sell things to us that we don't need.

I do wear lipstick, lip gloss, liner, and nail polish - or would, if not for the apocalypse and the fact that my nail polish always chips off after a day at work - since with my skin sensitivity and sensory issues those are easiest for me to handle. I've also been interested in eye shadow and highlight lately, especially brighter or more artistic styles. I would use those if I could find one that wouldn't set off my sensory issues and would be gentle on my skin.

I try to go for unscented soaps and not use perfumes, since I've gotten rashes from both in the past, but haven't had much of a choice lately. I also use unscented lotions, but that's because I have an old burn on my arms and chest that gets dry and irritated easily and needs to be kept moisturized.

6. Have you experienced being misgendered? How often?

Yes, and constantly. I'm closeted at my transphobic shithole of a work - I actually recently found out that my ex-manager is transfeminine or a trans woman (I don't know exactly how she identifies or what name she's using and haven't gotten a chance to ask her or her roommate, but have been told she's on hormones and uses she/her pronouns, so I assume she identifies more with femininity or womanhood or both), and it was definitely a smart decision on her part to wait until she left to come out. So I do get misgendered all the time there.

I'm out to my family and some of them have decided it's okay for them to misgender me because they're "from another time" or they "disagree with my lifestyle choices." It's absolutely not okay, but I've decided that's a battle I'm not going to win and try to limit contact with those people. I've actually straight-up disowned some of them, which is honestly a major relief, but I do want any kids involved to be shielded from harm. It's not their fault they were born into this.

I'm also out on campus and you would think it would be better there, especially majoring in the social sciences, but it's really not. People are less open about their transphobia but that doesn't mean I'm not met with passive aggressiveness and hostility when someone decides they don't want to show me the basic respect I afford them all the time. Out of the three though, I would say I experience the most acceptance on campus - second only to being with my friends, because I don't make friends with transphobes.

7. Do you experience dysphoria? How does it affect you?

It's fluid and affects me both physically and socially. 

Physically - discomfort and distress with my chest, hips, ass, face, thighs, and voice to varying degrees because they're perceived as female. I don't bind for medical reasons, and decided against going on T because of the loss of control over my appearance and also the fact that I don't really want to look like a man either, but I am trying to exercise and cut my hair certain ways to gain more of a stereotypically androgynous frame. Say what you will about skinny white androgynous AFAB nonbinary people (though I've always found those criticisms a little transphobic - lots of people have pointed out how framing cis white gay men as inherently evil and toxic is often homophobic and a way to ignore gay men's oppression, erase trans/nonbinary gay men and gay MoC, and act like monosexual privilege is real, and framing feminists as affluent white western women serves a similar purpose for ignoring and erasing misogyny, but, what, it's totally fine to do the same thing to trans people? And also act like AFAB privilege is a real thing somehow??), but being one has helped my dysphoria so much. It's not my fault that thin AFAB people are more able to pass, it's transphobia's fault and if I can gain security and comfort in that it won't be anything that I object to.

Socially - discomfort and distress when someone calls me ma'am, miss, daughter, granddaughter, or sometimes niece - I pretty much always prefer masculine terms, like sir, son, grandson, or nephew. When someone deliberately uses the wrong name or pronouns or calls me female. When someone uses most other female coded words for me, like sis. Girlfriend, though, is generally tolerable or good. Same for wife. If I wanted kids I would want to be called Mom, and if I had nieces and nephews or ever end up with any (like my wife's siblings' kids or our friends' kids) then I would just want to be called El. I don't know how I would do it or what I would want or be comfortable with when it comes to siblings. It's never really been an issue I had to worry about but it could be when I get married. Plus, I'm a believer in families of choice so if I had a sibling through that, I don't know what I would want them to call me.

8. Talk about children. Are you interested in having children? Would you want to carry a child, if that's an option for you? Would you want to be the primary caretaker for any child you have?

No, no, and no.

9. Talk about money. Is it important to you to provide for a family if you choose to have one? Is it important that you earn more than any partner you may have? Do you prefer to pay for things like dates? Do you feel uncomfortable when others pay for you or offer to pay for you?

It matters to me that my partner and I are financially stable, that our goals and life plans line up, that we are both contributing to the household, and that we both have realistic ideas for our lives that we are working to accomplish. Beyond that, I'm fine either way.

10. Is there anything else you'd like to share about your experience with gender?

Not that I can think of right now.

How I Left Evangelical Christianity

This post is a sort of follow-up to my last one on leaving evangelicalism. I thought here I'd share my own spiritual experience and how I came to my own conclusions about different facets of evangelicalism here. I'm hoping that someone will see themselves in my experience and it might help them on their own journey.

This post might take awhile because I just got a new phone and it has a bigger screen than I thought at first. Not easy with little hands and shitty motor skills. So it probably won't get published until I can get to my laptop.

• On Gayness and Bisexuality: I had never actually had a problem with any of this, believe it or not, even before I started questioning my sexuality. Even at my most conservative, it was like the one thing I was liberal about. How I rationalized it, though, was that while God had inspired the Bible, it was still written by humans with flaws and it had been translated so many times that some things were bound to be off - AND it never featured Jesus himself saying anything negative about gayness. So I just went with the parts that I still found God in, and used my faith and sense of grace, love, kindness, and humility to explain the rest.

• On Birth Control and Sex Education: I did at one point have an issue with both premarital sex and abortion, which affected my beliefs on sex ed and birth control (i.e. the morning-after pill). But in general, I just figured not every married couple wanted kids or could afford them, so they should have a way to prevent that so abortion wouldn't need to be a thing. Same for sex education, because when I was about twelve or thirteen I went to camp (a free charity camp, plus we got discounts on air fare and some hotels from my dad being ex-military; my mom was never rich enough to actually pay for summer camp) and shared a cabin with a girl my age who had never even heard of sex, a revelation that scandalized every other girl present and led us to clumsily try to explain, giggling and red-faced the whole time, that "it's like a car going into a garage, right? Except the car is the penis and the garage is the vagina and that's how babies are made." I've also heard of cases where people didn't know what sex was until they got married, which sounds horrifying, and were subjected to unwanted pregnancies because they didn't have access to birth control. I didn't want anyone to go through that and I didn't think God would either.

• On Abortion: I called myself pro-life for a long time and viewed abortion as murder, but I also had my doubts on it, since I believed in reincarnation and figured God would just put the soul into another life, and I could understand why some people got abortions. I still was way more in favor of adopting out and using birth control, though, in order to prevent the so-called murder. But the truth is, people are going to get abortions whether I like it or not, and I would rather they have it done in a safe, sterile space by actual doctors - especially if the pregnant person's life is at risk, they were raped, the pregnancy is a product of incest, or the pregnant person was in an abusive relationship. 

Plus, I don't ever want biological kids, partially because there are some life-threatening medical conditions in my family like epilepsy and MS that I don't want to pass on or see anyone else go through, and as a disabled person who struggles with caring for my own needs, I don't feel comfortable taking responsibility for someone else's full-time for around 20 years with the half-assed support offered to disabled moms, so I have some personal experience with why I personally would get an abortion if I were ever pregnant and can better understand why someone else would do the same. 

Not to mention: 

• not every pregnancy is viable
• I don't feel right promoting the idea that kids should be born as a punishment for their parents
• I know that abuse and rape cases aren't often taken seriously by the court system and that this often leads to unwanted pregnancies
• I know that pregnancy- and birth-related medical care are incredibly expensive even if you adopt out
• I know that the government tends to have awful views on single moms (especially young, low income moms of color)
• I don't think it's fair to expect anyone to risk their health and their life for the sake of religious or moral beliefs that they don't necessarily agree with
• I don't think it's fair that only one biological parent has the option of just walking away
• I don't think pregnant people should have to be on the verge of death before having access to bodily autonomy
• birth control isn't always covered by health insurance
• I know that anti-abortion laws often also lead to people being imprisoned for having miscarriages or not having access to an abortion when they desperately need one. 

There were just too many arguments in favor of abortion to justify denying or criminalizing them, and I don't think God would be in favor of taking rights away from the oppressed. I don't think you necessarily have to be in favor of abortions or ever want to get one yourself, though most people honestly would in some circumstances even if they don't want to admit it, but that doesn't mean you get to make that decision for someone else. You're not in their head and you don't know their story.

• On Transgender Issues: It's not so much that I had a problem with this, I just didn't really understand what being trans was until after realizing I was into girls and getting a chance to ask questions from actual trans and nonbinary people (and consequently coming to terms with being nonbinary myself). But I had always viewed it as sort of a "live and let live" situation. 

Plus I didn't buy the whole "God doesn't make mistakes" thing. After all, I'd been on different medications for my ADHD from 11 to 21, I'd been on medications  for digestive issues from about 7 to 14, and I've worn glasses since I was about 5 or 6. Wasn't that the same thing? Sure, I didn't need those things and they were altering the way God had naturally created me, but they'd improved my quality of life and my health. If someone else felt that hormones and surgery would improve theirs, was that really any of my business? Couldn't I just choose to be kind even if I didn't understand? 

Even the name and pronouns thing - I'd changed the name I went by when I was 14, and nobody had a problem with it because it was still a feminine name. So why should they care if I used a masculine name or masculine pronouns instead? Isn't what I or anyone else feels called to call ourselves between us and God (remember, I was operating from a Christian perspective back then)? And why do you care so much about other people's genitals, anyway?

• On Other Religions and Atheism: If you've ever read the Magnus Chase books by Rick Riordan, think of the characters Samirah al-Abbas and Amir Fadlan. If you haven't, Amir and Sam are an Iranian-American couple who are both Muslim and struggle with their faith after finding out the Norse gods are real, and that Sam, her half-sister Alex, and their friend Magnus are all demigods. Magnus asks Sam how she deals with it, since his own background was never all that religious and he'd previously identified as an atheist, and she explains that while she still believes there's only one God, she also can't deny what she's seen. She eventually decides that the Norse gods are actually some sort of powerful spirits that some people worship. I can relate to that because it's so similar to how I felt for a long time, except y'know without the superpowers and half-god heritage.

There are other reasons why I came to believe Christianity isn't the only valid religion though. For starters, I'd never really felt comfortable sitting through Mass. It was completely exhausting to have to be still that long, and there were so many other ways that I felt closer to God anyway, like youth group, hiking, writing, and music. So clearly, it's possible to feel God's presence outside of church -  why not in other houses of worship?

But then there was the "problem" of other belief systems. A major reason why I came to be more comfortable with other religions and recognize multiple valid ways to God is my high school Spanish teacher. We were all talking about the Camino de Santiago, a famous Catholic pilgrimage in Spain that I still kind of want to go on one day. You know. After a lot of physical therapy. So I asked if she was Christian, and she said that she had been raised Catholic and still believed in God but was more spiritual than religious as an adult. She figured that all religions were ultimately connecting to the same higher power. I meditated and prayed on that for awhile and eventually came to the conclusion that she was right, and that I didn't like how my Evangelicalism felt like a burden and distanced me from other people. I knew God wouldn't want that for me, and I felt that this conversation had happened for a reason. If all religions were connecting to the same divine source, what was I trying to evangelize for? Didn't it make more sense to live a Christlike life and lead by example and with compassion and empathy, even if I was wrong about this new revelation?

Besides that, there were two other arguments that swayed me. One was that if I hadn't been raised Christian in a Christian family, I wouldn't have those beliefs. If I'd been raised in Pakistan, I might have believed in Islam just as much as I do in Christianity. If I'd been raised Sri Lankan, I might've felt the same about Hinduism. If I'd been raised in Japan, it would have been Shintoism. I felt it was unlikely that the only true religion just happened to be the one I was raised in, that the only true God just happened to be the one I'd been raised to worship.

Another was WHY there are so many Christians in America and around the world: colonialism. How could it be inherently better for Polynesian, black, Asian, or indigenous people to be Christian when their ancestors had been murdered in the name of Christianity and their native religions had been criminalized?

I also watched the Tom Shadyac documentary I Am, which helped me a lot spiritually. I highly recommend it, not just for the purposes of this post but also because it's a great documentary.

• On Premarital Sex: The way I figured it, marriage has differed so much across time and culture that you can't really definitively say that a certain sex act is or is not taking place within the context of marriage. Like, two people could be married in one culture but not in another. Same, really, for sex. 

I remember borrowing a het romance novel from my grandma once, and it was one of the shittiest and most misogynistic books I'd ever read. I just googled it and it's called Long Time Coming by Sandra Brown. Like, the whole plot started because of this ~•~•~•manipulative teenage temptress seducing an innocent unknowing adult man and then trying to horrifically murder their innocent precious baby through the evils of abortion~•~•~ which I totally call bullshit on. I got mistaken for older from around 10 to 16, and then it just kinda stopped and now everyone thinks I'm younger than I actually am. A few weeks ago my mom almost got CPS called on her because someone thought I was in middle school and were horrified that she went on a weekend trip while leaving me home alone. 

So I'm well aware not everyone looks their actual age, and I get hit on by teenagers all the time, but I can still almost always tell the difference between a teenager and a young adult, and if I still don't know I fucking ASK.  Teenagers act like children. If a sixteen year old tried to hit on me, an adult, I absolutely would not be confident enough that they're ACTUALLY an adult to fucking sleep with them. Plus this poor girl's life was absolutely ruined because her sister (the sister who got pregnant was named Sharon and the other one is Marnie) ratted on her and her parents wouldn't let her get an abortion, both of which I feel really sorry for her about. But she's somehow the antagonist, just because she was a fucking child who made a mistake and tried to handle it in the most responsible way she could at the time, and an adult man was irresponsible and stupid enough to put his dick before his brain and not make sure the girl trying to sleep with him was actually of age and had the luxury to just waltz off like nothing happened afterward. His reproductive rights were never at risk.

Besides the slut shaming, pedophilia apologism, and vilification of teen girls, this book - which takes place seventeen years after Sharon got pregnant, and approximately thirteen years after Marnie started raising Sharon's son David - also has a whole thing with the Madonna/Whore complex. If you don't know, this is a sociological term for the view that all women can be sorted into two categories, pure and modest Madonnas and trashy, promiscuous whores. Marnie is the Madonna in this case. As the Madonna, she's Christian and doesn't want to have sex outside of marriage. Both of these facts about Marnie are fine, except obviously for the part where she completely slut-shamed her sister and was complicit in reproductive violence and never saw an issue with either one afterward. Because, you know, it's totally cool to force your own sister to be your personal broodmare, ruining her life and ultimately contributing to her death in the process, as long as you get a kid out of it. 

And let's just forget about the ADULT MAN who totally wasn't a pedophile and hung around these two girls for a summer. I can believe he maybe for a second thought Sharon was like 19 or so, though it was his responsibility to ask, but a fourteen year old? I could've passed as MAYBE 18 when I was 14, but the vast majority of 14 and 16-year-old girls absolutely don't look or act like women in their twenties. And even if she did make as convincing an adult as I would've at that age, it's his job to ask. Once you figure out that she's never had a job, isn't in college, lives with her parents, can't drink alcohol, has never had sex, and isn't worried about things like health insurance or tuition like I started to be once I was, you know, actually an adult woman...there's just no way to not know. Plus, even if this guy genuinely didn't know, there's still a scene where he makes fun of Marnie for not wanting to go skinny dipping with him, when he KNEW her age for sure. And when he gets back and starts to fall for Marnie, he has the absolute nerve to call her sister, the dead underage girl he slept with, a slut and a whore. Don't pull that shit with me. I was a teenage girl with an inappropriate crush an adult man once, and he actually didn't take advantage of the situation because he wasn't a fucking predatory creep. But other adult men tried to, and it fucks me up to this day. I will fucking fight you over the safety of teen girls.

I'm getting really heated over this, but the reason I mention this story here is because there's a scene where Marnie and Law, the totally-not-a-pedo baby daddy, have oral sex. And not long after, Law wants to have penetrative vaginal sex, and Marnie completely freaks out over it and tells him no because she's Christian and wants to wait until marriage. Even as pissed off at Marnie and Law as I was because of their horrible treatment of Sharon, my reaction to this scene was mostly just confusion. After all, it's her body and her choice, something Marnie never seemed to realize about her sister, but she and Law just had sex, so what's the problem? Why is she saying she wants to wait to have sex when she just had sex?

What I'm trying to explain here - besides that I want a t-shirt that says "I hate Marnie Hibbs and Law Kincaid" - is that Marnie and I clearly have different definitions of sex. By mine, she had had premarital sex. By hers, she hadn't. I definitely chalk this up to straight people being patriarchal and weird and thinking sex inherently has to involve a penis, but in general, different people have different definitions of sex. Like, is it sex when you suck a titty? Is a blowjob sex? Handjob? Touching? Fingerfucking? Does watching porn count as sex? Masturbating? I've even heard of people having had anal before and still calling themselves virgins because they had never had penetrative vaginal sex.

In order to validly argue "It's a sin to have sex outside of marriage" (which it's not, and you don't get to decide that for other people, but whatever), we need to have a universal operational definition of both sex and marriage. And we don't. It's just not possible.

• On Modesty: I used to see modesty - the term I used as a way to refer to physical, clothing-related modesty - as a way of respecting God, one's body, and one's future spouse.

Something that helped me a lot with this, actually, was leggings. Nowadays, leggings are generally a non-issue, but remember that this was back in 2014 and even wearing leggings as pants at all was controversial and could get you branded a slut. That Madonna/Whore complex, again. But I was Christian, and I was also closeted and trying to look feminine - and while I don't think of leggings as inherently feminine now, at sixteen they were an easy way to fake heterosexuality and femininity. They were also comfortable and practical and no more revealing than skinny jeans, and could be worn for a lot of occasions and in any season. And so I found myself happily wearing the same article of clothing I'd once judged and shamed women for.

Something else that helped was the Airhead trilogy by Meg Cabot. I saw a lot of myself in the main character, Em, a tomboy whose brain had been transplanted into the body of a supermodel and forced to live the other girl's life. Which meant looking the part and gaining respect for the feminine part of herself that she'd never felt she could embrace. Like Em, I had suddenly been thrust into a position where I had to pretend I was someone I wasn't, someone who was a lot more feminine than I was. Straighter than I was.

But that didn't mean I hated all of it. Leggings. Dresses. I still hate the makeup industry, but it's not the fault of the makeup itself. Makeup is just paint, and when we're not all expected to look like an army of clones or hide normal features and become alienated from our own bodies, it's actually fun. The only reason I rarely wear it now is because my skin develops hives, painful acne, and rashes easily, plus I have sensory issues, so the only kinds of makeup I can handle are lipstick/gloss and nail polish, one of which nobody can ever see and gets smudged under my mask and the other always chips off when I'm working. So even though I was starting to physically look like what I had always been told to think of as a slut, it had nothing to do with my sex life and didn't mean I was undeserving of respect. I was a child just trying to be safe and comfortable and experiment with my appearance, and survive in a society that saw me as lesser because it saw me as a girl.

Once I started to embrace feminism, I realized something else about the Christian modest ideals I'd once been so proud to embrace: the advertizing and speeches and movies and books that had promoted it to me for years were almost exclusively aimed at women and girls. If modesty were really as important to God as I had been led to believe, why did the way it was carried out seem so sexist? Why did MY body need to be hidden so badly that I couldn't even have a bra strap showing, but my male classmates could wear muscle shirts that showed their whole chest? Why was it so all-important for girls and women to show "respect" to our male peers by sacrificing our bodily autonomy and covering up to protect their sexuality, when I as a gay woman was completely able to take responsibility for my own actions and respect women regardless of what they were or were not wearing?

• On Sex Work: This was actually fairly easy once I accepted that premarital sex and immodesty weren't sins, since that was my main problem with them. Also, I had definitely had the toxic mindset that sex workers don't respect themselves and don't use protection, which I quickly discovered was false.

Even if everything I've written here doesn't sway you away from evangelicalism, I want you to think about what would realistically happen if [insert your country here] was really as much of a Christian theocracy as some of you want it to be. If abortion were illegal in all circumstances, if sex work were illegal in all circumstances, if being gay or trans was illegal, if birth control was illegal, if all sex education was abstinence only, if premarital sex was illegal, if not being Christian was illegal. Whether you like it or not, people are still going to do things that are illegal. It just won't be as safe and they'll be persecuted for it.

And it will lead to (or result in an increase of):

• police brutality against LGBT people, sex workers, and religious minorities
• deaths from unsafe abortions
• a rise in teen pregnancies
• a rise in sexual assaults
• a rise in domestic violence
• a rise in homelessness
• drug epidemics
• STI epidemics
• hate crime
• concentration camps

Does that sound like something you want? Like something Jesus would want? You don't have to participate in anything I've listed above, obviously. You never have to have gay sex or get an abortion. But if you extend that to your vote, or if you use your voice and your privilege to normalize hate, then all of this will happen.

So You're Questioning Your Evangelical Christian Faith

 This post is intended for people who were raised in extremist, conservative Christian families and communities and have started to come to the conclusion that they no longer hold the beliefs they were raised with, as well as for people who were once born-again Evangelical Christians who have decided they no longer hold those beliefs.

First off, I'm proud of you! Regardless of why you're leaving, I think you deserve congratulations. What you're doing involves so much courage.

Second, remember that the whole world is open to you now. You can join another religion, choose to reject religion, syncretize a religion that's open to you with Christianity, or remain Christian - but in a more loving way. It's your choice and any of the above options are wonderful and valid.

Third, I know it's hard and scary, and that there are a lot of toxic, draining, triggering influences from other people and things in your former environment. I know you're probably feeling a lot of guilt over leaving, and a lot of fear that you're going to hell. That's okay. It's not rational, but since when are feelings rational? Be patient and kind to yourself, surround yourself with positive influences that make you feel good, and remind yourself of why you're on this spiritual journey. God, or the gods, if you end up believing in any, will guide you to a better place in your life.

So here's a few quotes from a group of former Evangelicals who have managed to leave but still remain Christian, after I asked them what they wished someone would have told them back then:

• "So much of what I would say probably wouldn’t resonate with young evie me! But maybe I could convince him/me to meditate on these verses until something clicked:

Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made for humans, and not humans for the Sabbath.” Mark 2:27

Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?

James 2:15-16

I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me... Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! Amos 5:21-24" - Jon

• "Just because you are beginning to believe in a higher power and you love the story of Jesus doesn't mean that it automatically slots into the paradigm of evangelicalism." - Liz

• "Reading The Universal Christ and listening to its accompanying podcast, Another Name for Every Thing, was instrumental in feeling like deconstruction was okay. I wish I’d read it much sooner.
  I also wish I’d known how to identify spiritual abuse earlier, and learning more about that was an important piece of deconstructing, too. Wade Mullen is an author and speaker that I found really clear and helpful on this." - Emily

• "For people raised in churches that teach the doctrines of election*, "once saved always saved", and hell for those who aren't elect: If you are elect, you cannot lose your salvation by questioning everything. If you are not elect, you cannot be saved by refusing to question anything." - Abigail

• "I don't know how to explain it in words. It is about how to go down to the deepest level of myself where I always had reservations about the evangelical culture. I am not sure what needed to happen to bring those long held personal doubts to the surface sooner. I kept thinking that I was now finding something that worked for me but each different church was all still part of a larger system and not really different at all." - Luana

• "There's so much more they aren't telling you." - Alan

• "An oath is not binding if you were not given a choice." - Joy

• "I wish I could have convinced my younger self: 'Trust yourself, trust Love, question everything else.' I don’t think I could have received it, but if I could, what a difference it would have made." - Jaxn

• "A close comparison of what Jesus said with what evangelicals do, maybe? It was a really gradual process for me so it’s hard to know if I would have listened until Christian conservative hypocrisy suddenly got too personal to keep ignoring. But a factual breakdown might have helped—like, statistics on how evangelicals spend their time, money, and votes on things that AT BEST don’t help others." - Kyra**

• "Two things helped me: what is more valuable: a faith that has been searched, or an untested blind faith? And, the idea that God is powerful and good and loving enough to handle your full doubt and still see and love you through that." - Dorothea

• "Women, your identity as a Christian and as a woman is not “completed” by marriage. You do you wherever you are!" - KT

Some other things that might help you on your spiritual journey:

How I Became an LGBTQ-Affirming Christian

Hymns of Heresy (this is one of my favorite blogs!)

Reclaiming God

Why this Christian mom is pro-choice

Why Christians Should Vote Pro-Choice

Transgender and Christian: God Doesn't Make Mistakes

25 Signs of Spiritual Abuse

Why I Left an Evangelical Cult

Unlearning Christian Homophobia

*Apparently, doctrines of election means that salvation was predestined, similar to Calvinist theology. So if you were destined to be saved and you're questioning it, you're not really losing out on anything because you're going to end up being saved anyway. If not, you don't really have anything left to lose. Either way, you're not really affecting your chances at all so why not question while you still can, right?

**Here's a list of articles from the Pew Research Center on Evangelical Christianity.

Summarizing the Land Back Movement, From One White Activist to Another

 If you're even vaguely progressive and active online, you've probably heard of the Land Back movement by the indigenous people of Turtle Island (and, presumably, other indigenous cultures worldwide). You might be confused about what it is and what its goals are.

I first heard of Land Back from a Discord thread on colonialist attitudes in the cottagecore community, and no one there really explained what it was, so I had a very wrong and racist impression of the movement. I literally thought that it meant sending all white people back to our ancestral countries, and while I understood where this desire would be coming from for indigenous people, I didn't agree. After all, how would that work when a lot of white Americans and Canadians are a mix of many different ethnicities, don't speak our ancestors' languages, and aren't even necessarily sure where they come from? What about non-indigenous people of color? What about mixed-race Indigenous people? What about white Jewish people and others whose families came as refugees? Would MENA/SWANA people, who often don't identify as white but are legally classified as such, be grouped with white people under this system? Would this also be applied to white people with indigenous heritage, such as many in Latin America? For the purposes of Land Back, would Samoan, Chamorro, and Puerto Rican people be considered indigenous because their native lands had been colonized by the U.S. similarly to how Turtle Island Indigenous people's have? What about Hawaiians, since many indigenous Hawaiians don't identify with mainland Native people? What about victims of the Sixties Scoop and other Natives who were forcibly taken from their families, who might not be sure what tribe they're from or have proper documentation of their indigenous heritage?

I think a lot of other white progressives have similar questions. While I don't think they consciously come from a bad place and that we should be able to learn, grow, and ask questions in order to become better allies, I also don't think it's fair to expect indigenous people and other people of color to educate us when we could be doing it ourselves very easily.

So! A summary of what I have learned about Land Back since that thread, and why I'm in favor of it now:

1. It does not aim to create an indigenous ethnostate.

2. It does not aim to send all white people or anyone else back to our ancestors' native countries. We will still be living on Turtle Island and will not be oppressed under Native control of the land.

3. It does aim to return control of the land - including guardianship of the environment - to Native people.

4. It does aim for indigenous sovereignty from colonial governments.

5. It does aim to revive indigenous languages and religions for those whose traditions had been forcibly taken away through means such as residential boarding schools, and to abolish the expectation that everyone speak English.

6. It does aspire for a return to traditional indigenous hunting rights and cultural values.

7. It does involve reparations, which I assume means an increase in community resources such as better public schools and mental health care and isn't super different from the taxes we pay now, except that these won't go to racist death squads. This is something else that a lot of white people ask about and that I feel is worthy of mention here.

8. It does involve accurately teaching about the history of white supremacy in America and Canada.

9. It does necessitate the death of capitalism.

I would make this post more detailed but I have homework due tonight and I'm also planning on working out and making another post. Anyway, I hope this answered some questions, but please listen to actual indigenous people rather than making ignorant assumptions as I did.

An Open Letter to the White Pagan Community (and Other Discussion of Current Events)

This was intended to be published on January 7th, but I dealt with a personal crisis not long after so I had to put it off. I'm not sure what the date will say when it's published.

I've been wanting to write a post like this for awhile. Since George Floyd, since Breonna Taylor, since Tony McDade and their deaths - after which Tony's was completely brushed over by the media and even some protestors because they didn't want to call a black trans man by his name. This post is long overdue, and though I did continue activism through donations, education, calls to the Department of Justice, and my other blogs; I feel that a lot of other activists have discussed the issue of white supremacist violence far better than I can; and there are valid reasons I took some time off from this blog, I don't want to make this post about that. I don't want to try to justify why I would make a post about classism and abuse apologist rhetoric against white people as a working-class white person, but then be completely silent for months about both the murders of black civilians and one of the most historically significant elections in my country's history.

I'd like to talk about the fact that one member of the recent attempted coup was a Norse pagan, from my own perspective as another white pagan.

I've experienced my share of religious discrimination as a pagan, and yeah it is almost certainly amplified by me being a nonbinary bisexual and not having been seen as a legitimate Christian even before my conversion. I've read about other instances of anti pagan discrimination as well. So like, it does annoy me that people act as if pagans don't face any marginalization, because if I as someone living in a liberal area with a relatively high population of pagans and witches can be ostracized by my family, lose a 14-year friendship, and almost be kicked out of my home because of my faith then I'm sure it must be even worse for someone living in, say, a conservative, highly evangelical town in the bible belt. I introduce my post with this as a way of saying that I understand some of your frustrations, but they are not my priority.

That said. White, goyische, American pagans, including LGBT pagans, we need to acknowledge that we are not the intended or primary victims in political conflict. The fact that so many of us are culturally Christian may be alienating when it comes to family interactions or losing social support but when it comes to state-sanctioned religious oppression, we have privilege over Jewish and Muslim people (as well as Sikhs, black ATR practitioners, Hindus, etc) and over Christians of color.

Nowhere in our reaction to the invasion of the US Capitol building should there be any centering of our own feelings or any defensiveness when Jewish people and PoC point out the racism and antisemitism rampant in the white pagan community. At no point should we interrupt their (incorrect, as I've discussed in another post) assertions that white pagans face no oppression - even though we do face some, the fact that we're also white gentiles assumed to be Christian, white gentiles raised Christian, white gentiles with the connections and leg up of things like past youth group involvement and knowing people from church who are able to get us into certain elite circles means that we're also massively privileged. None of us are immune from that. We are not "special" whites.

White, goyische pagans, the religious violence in this country is almost never targeted at us, and some of it is committed by us. The fact that we are often assumed to be Christian and can frequently blend in with Christians and are very commonly culturally Christian is a source of privilege and is something that has caused many people to treat me and many of you with more respect!

We need to remember this and not center ourselves in discussions of religious discrimination, and we need to remember that we are just as capable of being white supremacists! Racist, islamophobic, and antisemitic behaviors, thoughts, and tendencies must be stamped out in our community and ourselves. It is our job to stand in solidarity with Jewish and Muslim people and with PoC of all religions, including Christianity. The brown Christian immigrants at the border and the black Christians who are shot in church and the Jewish and Muslim people who are some of America's most frequent victims of hate crime face racialized religious oppression that I can only hope to fight for but will never fully understand.

We need to acknowledge that even though electing Biden was a form of harm reduction over the very real possibility of another four years of Trump and the possibility of a Pence presidency, having a Democrat in the White House is not the end for racism, islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, classism, or misogyny any more than Trump's election was the start of it - both are enablers of and participants in white supremacy. Biden is right about one thing, we need unity. But not with him, with the most marginalized people in America and abroad, and it will not involve reaching across the aisle to make nice with the right and using our whiteness to remain complacent.