THE BLANKET THAT CAN NEVER BE DRY

meowgon:

scar-lip:

1. You are human. You are worthy of respect. You deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with your gender. You are not broken, you are not disgusting, you do not deserve to be hurt.
2. You’ve been brought up and live in a world that’s designed to erase and demonize your existence, you’ve probably internalized a lot of that- and that’s not your fault. But it can be hard to deal with. But you aren’t alone in dealing with it. And sometimes you have to buy into it to be able to handle it (trigger warning: transphobic violence). And that’s okay.
3. Your gender is no more or less than anyone else’s. Your history doesn’t make you “not really” or “less” your gender than someone with a cis history, it just makes you a person of your gender with a different history.
4. You do not deserve to be held to higher standards than cis people. You do not have to “prove” your gender by forcing yourself into societal roles that may not fit. You are not “failing” anyone by fitting into societal roles that are comfortable. It is not your job to break down the binary/patriarchy/or anything else. If you want to, go for it, but you have no obligation to do anything for cis people just because you are trans.
5. Being yourself does not hurt trans rights (so long as you aren’t trying to do so while stopping others from being who they are) and is not a reason why people don’t have to treat you with respect. There is nothing wrong with being a feminine man or masculine woman, or being a person who’s comfortable in their body, or being a person who doesn’t transition all the way, or being out about having a non-binary or genderqueer gender. You have not “failed” anyone by doing this, you are not “less” of your gender than someone else. Being who you are is not a valid argument for why people can’t treat you as who you truly are.
6. No one else has the right to say your body needs to be changed. It only does if you need to change it. Or if you want to change it, that’s valid, too. Your body does not make you “less” your gender. It doesn’t make you “not really” your gender. It doesn’t mean you’re trapped in someone else’s body. You do not have to fix your body to “become” your gender- you already are your gender. All you need to do is what you need to do to be comfortable in your body. And if that includes reclaiming your right to label your own body, you are allowed to do that.
7. You have just as much of a right to privacy as anyone else. You do not need to tell anyone about your body, your medical history, or anything else. Whether or not your body needs to be changed for you to be comfortable, you do not have to change it to deserve to be treated as who you are. You do not owe anyone intimate details about your personal life before you can be treated as who you are.
8. You have no obligation to educate anyone. This includes trans people, but is most important with cis people. You are not a walking encyclopedia of transgender and/or transsexual information, you are a person. You do not have to answer every question any cis person comes up with, you do not have to represent trans people as a whole, (see 7) you do not have to bare the most personal and vulnerable parts of your soul to other people on demand.
9. Not educating people does not “hurt” trans rights. NEVER let anyone try to guilt you into educating people or doing something you don’t want to do by insisting that doing otherwise will “destroy trans rights/acceptance/whatever”. Trying to force trans people to become walking information desks or to put themselves in dangerous situations regardless of whether or not you’re even up for dealing with this destroys trans rights and shows a great deal of intolerance. Asserting that you don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want to? That really doesn’t.
10. If you do want to educate people, you are allowed to set limits and boundaries. You are allowed to say that you won’t talk about certain issues, or that you will only talk about them on your terms. You are allowed to decide which people you will talk to about which issues. You are allowed to change these boundaries if you become uncomfortable educating people you were previously willing to educate. You are not obligated to educate anyone just because you educated someone else.
11. You deserve to take care of yourself- whatever that means. You deserve to be comfortable and safe. You deserve not to be in dangerous situations. If you can’t handle something alone, you deserve to ask for- and get- help or, if you can, take a break from it until you can handle it. Or just stop doing it all together, that’s okay. Taking care of yourself does not make you weak, it does not make you an attention-grabber or overdramatic, it does not make you “less” your gender, it does not mean you betray other trans people by not being a full-time (or even part-time) activist. You’re human, you have limits, and that’s okay.
12. You deserve to have your boundaries respected. Any boundaries- how and where people can touch you, what information you give to who and when, what places you feel comfortable going or who you feel comfortable going with, what people can tell others about you.
13. You deserve to have the words you are and aren’t comfortable being referred to as respected. You deserve to have the proper pronouns used (and, if there are times when it’s unsafe for that to happen, you deserve to have your safety maintained by those around you), you deserve to be called the proper name, you deserve to have the words you want used to describe your body used, you deserve not to be called by any label, pronoun, word, or name that you don’t want to be called.
14. If you’re asking for something that you need to feel respected, comfortable, and safe- you are not asking for too much. Your identity is not “too complicated”. Your needs are not less important than anyone elses’.
15. You are human. You are worthy of respect. You deserve to be treated with the same dignity as anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with your gender. You are not broken, you are not disgusting, you do not deserve to be hurt.

help it’s 6 am and i’m crying with relief from a tumblr post

brofisting:

hefox:

The Ten Binding Commandments 

1. Never wear a binder so tight that you have a hard time breathing in it.
2. Never wear a binder or binding device that doesn’t have a form of elastic within the fibers. Your binder must allow you to breathe in and out without any trouble.
3. Never wear a binder for more than 12 hours in a single day. Optimum wearing time is between 8 to 10 hours, and less is always better. Bind as little as you can stand to.
4. Never wear a binder when you sleep. Your breathing slows when you sleep and your muscles relax. The binder could become too tight and cause apnea symptoms (you could stop breathing in your sleep) and could cause fluid to build up, resulting in a form of pneumonia.
5. If you hear a rattling or wheezing in your lungs when you breathe in or out, take off your binder NOW and cough hard a few times to loosen up fluid. This means you have been wearing your binder too long or too tight.
6. If you continue to hear rattling of fluid in your lungs for more than 24 hours, see your doctor. Do not ignore this; you could be heading toward pneumonia.
7. Always cough hard a few times when you take off your binder for the day. This will loosen any fluid that has built up in your lungs or the pleura of your lungs. Be sure to follow with a few deep breathing exercises to open the lungs.
8. If your muscles under your binder twitch or spasm, take off your binder and give them a rest. Muscle spasms are likely due to a diet poor in magnesium. Many people using testosterone have reported muscle spasm problems, which are helped with a good magnesium supplement. Always consult your doctor before starting any supplement!
9. In the long term (over months and years), binding can make the breast tissue less dense, which causes the breasts to sag/droop. This may or may not bother you, but it’s something to be aware of. It is permanent. The less dense the breast tissue is, though, the less it will resist and try to stick out when you bind.
10. Buy a binder that compresses the breasts just enough to hide them, but does not compress your rib cage. 

Saw someone asking about sleeping while binding, so looked around for this, and figured I’d post it here also.

reblogging for my husband

Thank you darling <3

hotblooded-sleuth:

hey so I need some help

does anyone have any good links or resources explaining genderqueer? this includes third gender, non-binary, bigender, genderfluid, the whole works. My mother is trying to understand the terminology but I’m pretty sure I’m not explaining it properly. It is very difficult to put into words what I know in my… everything???

(she’s kind of falling into the mindset that it’s a political statement, rather than a MTF or FTM trans type situation where you just are who are and there just isn’t a well-known term for it, like female or male)

thanks

T-Vox is sort of an aggregate trans*wiki that I have heard of.  It’s a little clinical (wiki-ish, of course) but might help?

Argh you’d think I would have a list on hand but my mind is going kind of blank here!  Followers, any suggestions?  I would agree that the sites that some other people reblogged are pretty great resources.

(via glamaphonic)

stackedstars:

I am a FAAB, femme-presenting genderqueer person. This means that I rarely, if ever, pass as anything other than female. And since I am almost always read as female by strangers, they treat me as if I were a woman.

This means that I, too, get catcalls and wolf whistles.

I, too, cannot walk down the street by myself without someone beeping their horn or yelling out their window at me.

I, too, have to be ever aware of my surroundings.

I, too, have to walk to my car with my keys in my hand.

I, too, cannot go out alone at night.

I, too, am affected by misogyny, patriarchy, and rape culture. I, too, see my body distorted, objectified, and idealized in the media. I, too, am constantly made to feel ashamed of my body. I, too, have to fight the notion that my body is inherently sexual and not my property. I, too, have to hear almost daily about how my body or genitalia is bad, weak, wrong, undesirable, or disgusting. I, too, have my opinion belittled or dismissed. I, too, am made to feel ashamed for my intelligence.

I’m tired of trying to make myself fit in the feminist movement. I love feminism, I love the movement, and I think it has a lot of important criticisms of our society. For so long, I have been trying to find my place in feminism. I am not a woman, and yet feminism speaks for issues that I have battled my entire life. I do not benefit from male privilege, but I am not a woman either. I want what feminism has to offer. I want the strength, the empowerment, the support. Feminism stands up for me in so many ways that the LGBT movement does not, and I want to feel like I actually am a part of it. I want to be recognized. I want feminists to acknowledge that patriarchy, misogyny, and rape culture affect other people the exact same way they affect women. 

So I am writing this letter to all feminists, of all gender identities, to begin reconsidering how they talk about feminist issues. To realize that not only women are affected in the way that they are by misogyny. I want the feminist movement to be a place where I feel safe, represented, and visible. I want to have a voice to fight the oppression I face, the same oppression that women face.

Please help me by reblogging this so we can begin a discussion about this. I am but one voice and I cannot speak for anyone’s experiences but my own. Spread the word, share your story, show this to your genderqueer friends - let’s start a discussion.

Thank you.

(via formerlyroxy)

radicalqueery:

Genderqueer Links and Books

subtlecluster:

Genderqueer Links and Books

The following are link and book recommendations, all evaluated by myself as helpful resources for learning and/or places of connection that relate to genderqueer concepts and identities. If there is a resource you would like to suggest, please use the GQID ask box or submit form (select Submit a Link from the drop-down). If you are instead looking for the bibliography for the Genderqueer History and Identities project, click here.

Genderqueer-friendly Tumblrs: Ask a Non-Binary, Break the Binary, LGBTQ Advice, Fuck Yeah Androgyny!, Fuck Yeah Gender Studies!, Fuck Yeah Non-Binaries, Genderforkr, Gender Queeries, Genderqueer, Neutrois, Nonbinary Autistics!, Queer Watch, STFU Binarists, TRANSPRIDE 

GQ-friendly Livejournal Communities: Androgynes, Bigender, Birls, Gender Blur, gender_fluid, Genderqueer, Girlfags and Guydykes, I Am the Confuser, Transgender, Queer by Choice 

GQ Sites: Genderfork, The GenderQueer Coalition/Trans & Queer Wellness Initiative, GenderQueer Revolution, Gender Sphere

GQ-related Identity Sites: Androgyne Online, The Androgyny Rarely Asked Questions (RAQ) [Archived], Bi-Gender the Bisexual Partner, GirlFags, Neutrois.com/Neutrois Outpost, Neutrois Nonsense, Practical Androgyny, Queer By Choice

Prounouns: Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog

Fun: Kreative Korporation -Yay genderform! (an intensely comprehensive - and fun to play with! - list of gender, sex, orientation, and more identities)

CCSF: Gender Diversity Project (resources about gender for schools and educators)

Gender Spectrum: Resources

TRANScending Identities: A Bibliography of Resources on Transgender and Intersex Topics

Books: 

 Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us - Kate Bornstein

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation - Kate Bornstein

GenderQueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary - Joan Nestle, Riki Wilchins, Clare Howell

My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely - Kate Bornstein

Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality - Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel

Queer Theory, Gender Theory - Riki Anne Wilchins

Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender - Riki Anne Wilchins

That’s Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation - Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men - Lori B. Girshick and Jamison Green

—-

General LGBTQ and Queer-Interest Sites: [under construction!]

QueerTheory.com

(via guerreragrrrls)