Reba "Roadkill" Rabbit

You know, I'm sure that by someone's metrics I qualify as a detransitioner which is sort of weird to think about.

I have zero regrets, but like, I have definitely gone from being very insecure about myself, to experimenting with gender, and subsequently coming out the other side massively more secure in my masculinity and what that means to me - and I'm positive some (cis, incurious) people would see that from the outside and think "Oh he changed his mind".

Actually I'm sure the people that might think that are exclusively from the pool of people who when I came out, instantly assumed I was exclusively transfemme despite me being very upfront about being Enby. Looking at you, certain family members.

this is good illumination on why I think we'd be better off eliminating the term "detransition" entirely. it frames harmless experimentation as a mistake. it's indelibly associated in the public mind with a body "permanently scarred" by "the wrong" hormones — simultaneously reinforcing stigmas around trans bodies, and usurping sympathy for them onto (assumed-)cis ones.

I'd love to see a real push to change the language to retransition, because it's really exactly that and the implications of "did it more than once!" are far better for everyone than "shouldn't have in the first place."

It REALLY poisons the waters for people talking about their needs and experiences. I have met one person who did transition for an extended period and now sees it as a mistake and is dealing with the issues of that and she can barely talk about it bc she doesn't want anyone to use her experience as a cudgel against trans people and access to HRT.

That's the messy reality of being human. Sometimes we do make mistakes, even about big important things. Sometimes things seem like exactly what we want and then it turns out differently when you try it. It shouldn't be anywhere near the big deal society makes it, if you're wrong about your gender what's the big problem? Lots of people regret having kids and that's way worse.

In the absence of those wishing to force their ideological beliefs and restrictions upon others, people would just be able to talk about their experiences earnestly with nuance. Sadly we live in a hell where people are unable to talk about their experiences openly without being used against their will as a faceless and voiceless example of the harms of free will. So they often choose silence so as to not be silenced in the commission of other's acts of cruelty...

I think the idea of "gender exploration" with medical assistance, has ended up being an almost taboo concept to discuss because the cruel authoritarian types have been fairly successful in framing uncertainty in ones gender as evidence that such individuals are mentally or emotionally unfit to be trusted with hormone therapy. That the knowing of ones gender is something inherent and absolute and if you express uncertainty about it you must be protected from yourself.

The result of this treatment by these sorts in the discussion of detransition/retransition is that when someone stops hrt, it's treated as a definitive mistake and a definitive decision to go back to what they once were. That isn't necessarily the case and may lead to different gender presentation decisions by the person in question. Maybe taking hrt to head in a more physically feminine or masculine direction ends up being a poor fit for the person as well, but the information learned in that journey may help them find the kind of presentation of their self that IS more comfortable. It might be a place on the gender spectrum that they hadn't previously considered prior to being on hrt.

...fascists suck, terfs suck, liberal "I wish I could help but you need to wait for a more advantageous season" types suck. Free will is not without consequence but living with the consequences of ones own actions produces less suffering on average than the consequences of being denied the opportunity to make mistakes and learn.

Hey! I got to thinking back to the origin of what I would call my 'progenitor' kink and I thought I would talk about it on here because the origin of kinks and stuff is always interesting!

So, I've got a lot of kinks, and lots of them intersect with each other and make pinning down the differing origins of them difficult. But there's one kink I have that I absolutely KNOW the origin of. And it was the first one I ever developed.

When I was young, maybe, starting in junior high and lasting through high school, I had a recurring fantasy that involved malleability. It was my first fantasy involving malleability in fact. During tough times when I had a quiet moment I would dream that I was in some sort of laboratory with different machines in it. There was only one machine that was important/I was interested in though; a large mold that a person could get inside of and be squashed into a different shape. I would get into the mold and it would close on me, the inside contracting in areas and expanding in other areas with great force to smoosh me into a different shape. There would then be gouts of steam issuing out of the crack in the mold as it began to open. And then I would peel myself free and step out in a new body, a different gender. Each time I had the fantasy I would imagine myself with a somewhat different, to wildly different body.

So, this was my first fantasy involving malleability, as well as the first sign that I miiight not be cis, a word that didn't even exist in common parlance at the time. Sooo, this whole malleability thing is closely tied to my gender. Always has been. That fantasy during those hard times helped me to survive, even though I didn't know why at the time (I just knew it was a fantasy that was good at taking my mind off of things lol).

To this day, while malleability is a kink for me, it isn't ONLY a kink. It's more important, something that's primordial to my being. I haven't really found any complete answers on my gender questions yet, I just know that as time goes on it becomes clearer and clearer that I'm not cis. I feel that the comfort I got from that fantasy transferred to a lot of other kinks that were similar or related as I grew older (even spider-webbing beyond that over time). Flattening, my second favorite kink, is, after all, basically a sub-kink to malleability. It's literally one aspect of malleability distilled and concentrated into its purest form. That's why I use it so much in stories and why I sometimes intersect it with melting, another offshoot of malleability, to show a character getting so mushed up that they don't just flatten but they begin to lose their solidity as well.

Anyway, I believe I can trace the inspiration for this fantasy back to an old cartoon on a VHS tape I had as a kid (it was one of those compilation tapes of different classic cartoons including superman and others). It seemed to be about some world's fair of the future and involved a lot of absurd and humorous contraptions that would make life easier in the future. One of the contraptions was a big mold that a line of fat women took turns going into and being pressed into the same, slimmer, but more curvaceous form (kind of a dystopian misogynist homogeneous idea really [say that three times fast]). I don't know the name of the cartoon but It's not "All's Fair At the Fair" which actually has a SIMILAR device in it that does the SAME thing to the Mirandy character. All's Fair At the Fair can be found on YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdwpvxuIYSQ if you're curious, but I've never found the one that I had seen on VHS (if anyone has any leads I'd LOVE to hear them).

So, that's the origin of me being into this weird, squishy cartoonish stuff. It dates back to an ancient, I'm guessing 1930's to 40's, cartoon and links to what must have been early questions about my gender before I even had any vocabulary to describe or understand anything of the sort. Hope this has been an interesting little post for ya! Now back to your regularly scheduled squishin! ;3

Being (a group of entities some of which are) nonbinary, it's unfortunate that the main terms for orientation still presume binary gender.

I don't doubt that the words gay and straight are still useful for very many people… maybe even most. But when they shouldn't apply to me as an ideally ungendered being, it's rough hitting a snag every time i want to parse my orientation (which is already enough of a mess). I feel forced to either:

• Use rare terms, which i don't remember on the spot, most people won't know, and there are probably a ton of competing options, or
• Circumlocute, in spite of English giving me a complex over remembering the perfect neo–Greco–Latinate compound for a concept.

While i can get why things turned out this way, it's not "yknow-what-i-can't-box-myself-into-this-gender-binary-bullshit"-proofed at all.

And i'm torn on whether it makes sense to define orientation by the interplay with your own gender when that feels even more reductive, defining everything in relation to the fluke of heteronormativity.

And like, genderfluid people exist, and i doubt the sense of orientation completely flips alongside gender since Gay And Trans Are Not The Same Thing

And speaking of, it also exposes freshly uncloseted trans people to a lot of malformed questions about whether they're going to have to change their orientation so that the term gay or straight remains constant. Because those labels hold so much more weight than the underlying attraction they're supposed to exist in service of…

I think we, and seemingly a lot of other nonbinary people?, are more drawn to using gay and lesbian than straight, even when the attraction is more opposite-gender-tinged. Like, those options still acknowledge our queerness, even if it's not the right type of queerness. But like. it's not the right type of queerness. so not all of us find it satisfying enough

Why did this have to be the specific sociolinguistic planisphere that our civil rights movement chose to weave itself around and promote,

This resonates with something I've been feeling a lot at the moment, as someone who's just nonbinary, there always seems to be a lot of emphasis on either being masc-leaning or fem-leaning. I think a lot of that is tied up with how much of language is divided up into binary genders still. It'd be so nice to have more nonbinary alternatives that are commonly known and can just be casually slung into conversation

Even after all these years I'm still not certain about what EXACTLY my gender is... I think I lean femme at the very least but only in the way that I see my body? If that makes sense? I'm not really all that interested in most other things that are considered feminine or "girly." Just not my bag. Skirts and dresses? No thanks, I'll just take a nice pair of tight jeans. Flowery patterns? Flowers are pretty but I don't really want to adorn myself in depictions of them. Not fond of patterns in general really. Hair styles? Could be anything masc to femme or otherwise, but it'll lean heavily into not needing special treatment. If I can't just get out of the shower, blow dry it and go on my way I'm not interested. Footwear? Hmm... I prefer sneakers and the like for comfort... but I'm not gonna deny that I like the way my paws look stuffed into a nice pair of high heels~ <3

Point is, we define gender based on a bunch of different variables, the three most prevalent one's seeming to be the form/depiction of form of one's body, performance and depiction of mannerisms/attitudes/behaviors, and the kind of things that a person prefers to adorn their body with. There's tons of other stuff involved though. It's a spectrum.

Sexuality and attraction is another spectrum. Masc and Femme attractions are parts of that spectrum but I don't think they're even major parts of the spectrum... or at least I don't think what we think of as masc and femme are the exact KIND of monoliths we currently perceive them to be.

Case in point: Like I said earlier, when it comes to gender I at least lean femme. Also, I've pretty well always been attracted to people who are femme or who are femme leaning in appearance. At least as far as what I've understood masc and femme appearances to be! So auntie Reba is some sorta lesbian. THIS VERY MORNING however, I ran across a picture of a male character on FA that I found super attractive and cute. This character was masc but tickled a different part of my brain than what I normally see as masc does AND a different part of my brain than what I normally see as femme does. The best way I can describe it is that the character I saw wasn't BETWEEN what I would normally think of as masc or femme but was somewhere on the masc line but out laterally from it at a distance that I recognize it almost as a completely different quadrant?

If you've got an FA and you want to check out how this character looks, to maybe understand how my brain interpreted this, here ya go:
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/54737219/

I feel like when a lot of people try to graph where they are on these two spectrums they use a flat 2D plane for that purpose. But honestly? I doubt Gender OR Attraction could be confined to only two dimensions (yes, I know, this is being said by someone who LOVES to be confined to two dimensions). I figure if someone even wanted to START mapping different gender representations and types of gender affected attraction, they would need a three dimensional grid.

So yeah. That's my two cents ;)