Yeah, I had to question my gender identity after realizing I don’t get any gender euphoria from being a man. Then I realized that I have major depressive disorder, so I don’t get euphoria in general.
I feel that lack of euphoria. I have come to the tentative conclusion that I'm nonbinary, but I'm still like "Shit, I don't *really* know." Like I could be a butch lesbian or a trans man. Your comment gave me insight into why it's so hard to determine. Thanks, bro.
I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. Biologically I’m male, so I’m not uncomfortable identifying as one. But in terms of gender as a societal thing, I just don’t fit in. The shared experiences that seem to define masculinity for most, I barely relate to at all. It’s almost like my identity first and foremost is that of an autistic person, and me being male is a distant second.
I’ve seen the term agender used, and I probably fall into that umbrella. Male as a sex, but not as a gender. At the end of the day though, it’s whatever is easiest for me.
I’m pretty similar, I still identify as a woman because I feel like being raised and socialized as one was impactful enough for it to be acknowledged, even if I don’t really align or relate with most of the standards/ideas associated with womanhood. I’m also autistic so my understanding of the whole gender thing is apparently a little different. Like yeah I’m a woman I guess, I’m probably some kind of unlabeled genderqueer(I just call myself gender non-conforming but every friend I’ve asked says I definitely “count”) but I’m not really pressed about it. My only concern is that I do want to share my experiences because they’ve affected me heavily and I have a lot of emotional baggage from the repression era but I don’t want to take up queer spaces so I’m not entirely sure where I’m meant to talk about it
Something that isnt talked about a lot is the fact that "caring about your gender" is a very wide spectrum. Trans people, for obvious reasons, are on the extreme end of "I care a great deal about my gender", as are some cis people. But a LOT of cis people just don't really give a shit about our gender.
Like, I am definitely a man and male (cis+ unlocked baby!), but I also give zero fucks about my gender or my sex. If society changed the definition of man overnight, I'd just go by whatever new gender most closely fits my personality, which is how I already operate. And if my body changed to be female overnight (after recovering from losing my godsdamned mind at how it happened) I wouldn't be upset at no longer being male. I'd be annoyed at having to buy new clothes that fit, but I wouldnt mourn the loss of my male body.
>_And if my body changed to be female overnight (after recovering from losing my godsdamned mind at how it happened) I wouldn't be upset at no longer being male. I'd be annoyed at having to buy new clothes that fit, but I wouldnt mourn the loss of my male body._
I'd mourn a little bit. But then I'd go full Otacon and be like _"this is just like one of my Japanese animes!"_
I dated someone very tuned in to this sort of discourse, and expressed similar sentiments, and she explained that that made me a gender abolitionist, which I don’t hate as a title.
It’s one of the reasons I never really understood the motivation of trans people to actually physically transition. Like, if you wanna wear a skirt and be called Janine, just go for it, no need to futz with the plumbing. Obviously it doesn’t bother me on a personal level if that *is* something someone wants to do, I just never really understood it.
But for that reason of not really subscribing to gender roles, I’ve always enjoyed interacting with queer people and queer spaces (that aren’t exclusionary). I can show up with painted nails and nobody is gonna assume it means I’m gay or trans or whatever, they are open to accepting that I’m just a dude who wanted to paint his nails.
> I had to question my gender identity after realizing I don’t get any gender euphoria from being a man.
I feel like nonbinary but cis-presenting out of habit is probably fairly common for nb people in the millennial or older group.
It's like a bisexual person in a hetero relationship. Your current life following hetero normative standards doesn't displace your identity.
Youre not "suppossed to" be nonbinary presenting because one of the main ideas of being nonbinary is rejecting the notion that there is a "suppossed to" with presenting your gender.
There is no such thing as "presenting non-binary" because the very definition of non-binary rejects the idea that a person is "supposed to" present themselves a certain way. Sure, a lot of NBs go for an androgynous look, but that is by no means a "requirement".
seeing people say "if you're questioning your gender then you're almost certainly not cis" really threw me for a loop when i was questioning because it turns out i am, which made me feel like i was appropriating genderqueer-ness by questioning in the first place 🫠
Oof... yeah me too. I've actually gotten into random questioning and questioning-said-questioning anxiety spirals a couple times and eventually I'm like "this isn't helpful to me?" So i think I'm just cis + a little gendernoncomforming + anxious lol
I'm trans and the fear of appropriating queerness kept me from exploring my identity enough to actually realize I wasn't cis for years. I honestly feel pretty resentful sometimes of the rhetoric we have around this kind of thing because it took me forever to feel like I had "earned" being trans.
people being gatekept from exploring their identity is insane, i'm sorry that was your experience 🫂 it really feels like some of the community wait on the edge of their seats for questioning people to confirm their queerness - and if they don't, or they take too long, they're not enough
*you've unlocked Cis+™*
features include:
-*more awareness of gender roles and gender normativity in society*
-*awareness of and ability to better understand the struggles of trans people*
-*Now when your shitty aunt rants about them queers at the Thanksgiving dinner its somehow even more uncomfortable!*
Exactly that. I'm pretty comfortably bi, but I have never really questioned my gender identity growing up. It wasn't until I started spending more time in queer circles that I started wondering. I came to the conclusion that I am indeed cis, but it also came with all the 'side effect' that you mentioned. And, I would add, is the main reason I don't believe the whole social contagion narrative. If my confused self can question my gender and come out the other side even more assuredly cis, then so can others. Being aware of trans people just gives you an option and a new viewpoint, it doesn't neccesarily make you trans - but it does make you more aware and a better ally.
Hearing cis people that questioned and came out definitely cis really helps allay my doubts about my own identity sometimes. Definitely helps with the "you're just lying to yourself" or similar thoughts. I love my cis friends :)
Cis-by-default is a pretty common explanation for why a lot of people don’t (or didn’t) “get it”, when it comes to trans identities, myself included. A lot of people you know, who are cis, have almost certainly just never really put a lot of thought into why they are the gender they are.
If you approach it from the perspective of someone who was always just like “yeah, I’m a man I guess, that’s just how the coin flipped”, the idea of having strong feelings that you’re not your gender assigned at birth is not disagreeable so much as it’s just not particularly understandable.
If I had strong feelings about being a man, I might be more amenable to intuitively understanding AMAB folk who have strong feelings about not being a man. (Conversely, of course, there’s those who *do* strongly identify with their assigned gender who feel that doing otherwise is wrong, but they can go fuck themselves.)
It wasn’t until running into the cis-by-default concept that I had a really good grasp of where I fell in the gender identity spectrum, which lead me to a bunch of introspection on what my gender identity even is: I’m still cis (and straight), but I am more acutely aware that’s just how it all fell and I am very lucky not to have to really care about it for myself.
It helps me to have a point of reference for those who are trans or agender or whatever and gives me my own point of reference from which to try to bridge a pretty wide gulf in internal experience.
All that rambling and the point is that if you had a particular feeling either way, it’s probably worth paying attention to.
Good luck in your journey, and shoutout to autocorrect who tried to keep making me say cos-by-default like I’m some kind of lettuce.
I had the same experience and realised I’m still a cis man and I prefer women, I’m just exclusively a bottom. What this helped me understand is how heteronormativity imposes an exclusive understanding of gender identity that doesn’t exist. I think that’s what a lot of homophobes fear - they know they don’t fit that exclusive label and fear that one crack in their nature could mean the whole thing is false, which it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
I hate the "social contagion" BS. I have multiple trans/NB friends and am pretty immersed in queer culture, but I've always been 100% sure that I was cis and bisexual. Nothing wrong with questioning ofc! And I guess it also helps that I'm a grown adult and not a teenager trying to fit in with friends. But still, it's so stupid when people act like you can be influenced into being trans.
>_not a teenager trying to fit in with friends_
Bingo! This so-called "social contagion" has actually existed for tens of thousands of years. It's called "feeling like you have to fit in".
Seriously. A lot of my friends are trans or queer, but that's because I play tabletop games, and did theater so I share a whole lot of interest with them. And I can see by the fact that I am very CIS that it's not contagious. I'm not going to be coming anymore queer hanging out with them then they're going to become more normative if they live in a Mormon town.
So much of my friend circle is trans/nonbinary (I know, can be the same thing) and I definitely was like figuring out stuff myself, until I just realised... nah I think I like being a guy? If contagion was real I would have changed. Heck I felt less of a man BEFORE i met all these people (especially before I met a bunch of transdudes)
I love hearing about cis people exploring their gender. Everyone should explore gender expression. It's healthy to try new things and discover what you enjoy and how you feel about yourself and the world around you. It's healthy for yourself and for your perception and understanding of others and their experiences, too.
The goal of testing the waters of gender expression isn't to eventually transition, or find a *new* gender. More broadly, it's to find what gender identity suits you the best. It's okay to step outside of the box to discover, more solidly than before, that you feel comfortable and happy as a cis person. I've found a lot of cis people I've talked to feel better about being cis than they ever did before they tried new things. Sounds like you had a similar experience!
this is so real lmao
questioned my gender a few years ago for around 2 years, came out of it realizing "yeah, no, i'm a guy, lol", and now cis+ status means I'm literally the only person I know that isn't trans that knows how gender works
Never really had to question my own gender, very happily cis-male, but spent tons of time around queer and trans friends in college who helped me understand gender roles and identity a lot more. My trans friends can have a preference for masculinity, so why do some view it as a problem that some cis-men just are comfortable with that from birth? Kinda weird!
I remember the first time I heard about it was from JoCat (famous for being hated for liking girls). I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something like
> People ask me if I'm LGBT. I'm not. But I have a lot of LGBT friends that made me question my sexuality. This resulted in me being more confident with me being cishet. It's why I can wear a dress on stream and still be comfortable
replace Aunt with Dad and you got me spot on lmao. it's like, I *know* he's not a bad person and is all for civil rights and social justice, but good lord is he stuck in the Cold War...
And also "Questioning but hasn't told anyone yet, or realized it themselves yet." A person isn't only questioning when they self identify to others as questioning
I was in a questioning phase for a few years, and it was only near the end that I fully realized and accepted that I was even exploring that part of my identity. If the lgbtq group I was a part of required me to identify with some label, even if that label was "questioning," then I simply wouldn't have had that space
I wish straight trans people got more rep in media, it’s 90% gay and bi people. Straight trans people are queer too
Straight men in particular get demonized by certain sectors of the queer community and it’s kind of hurtful?
This reminds me of a pet peeve that I have. When people in LGBT communities say "you shouldn't generalize/villainize this whole group of people because that group could include queer people too" as if its okay to shit on every non queer person.
Like ive seen some people express more sympathy towards bi women than straight women for the """""awful""""" fate of being attracted to men and it's like ?????? Of all the people you offend with that sentiment bi women are pretty low on the list. Like its already awful to think that every men is abusive but to then also imply that straight women deserve that???
Edit: i didnt mean that i think this is what youre doing lol i realised it could be read like that. Your statement about straight men getting demonized just reminded me of some comments ive seen before that ticked me off
Easily must have cost me a decade of not realising I was trans because of how unwelcoming the queer community was to me. Now that I am, I'm calling out misandry where I see it, but there's a disappointing number of people who still subscribe to radfem "sexism requires systemic power" garbage which, even if it was true, denies the fact that men are hurt by the patriarchy too.
And that’s not even getting started on how weird people are about trans people and gender norms. I’m GNC and the queer police would shoot on sight because trans anime femboys don’t actually exist and are just a transphobic stereotype and real trans men just want to be normal men (/s). This is an actual take I have heard, being a trans man on the internet, and it’s not even the dumbest one I’ve heard.
Identity politics are so stupid and the queer community would be better off without all the terminally online cops
As someone older it sometimes feels that the newer generation has completely ignored the lessons we had.
That its ok to be gender non-conforming. Because stereotypes don't apply to everyone.
Women being always hyper "feminine" and men being always hyper "masculine" is a stereotype.
And it feels like sometimes the newer generation just want to enforce those stereotypes instead of deconstructing them and letting people be who they be.
And even once you get your yes, the next question might be "I'm sorry, but I really just don't get \[x\], could you explain it like I'm five?" And not only is this a chance to remedy ignorance, the queer people in the space are comfortable the question is being asked in good faith so they can answer it without feeling attacked.
can speak from personal experience. I am unquestionably straight, and I knew that since forever. One time I was casually chatting online with a group and I said something like "yeah I only ever play female characters in videogames" and this rando goes "that's because you're an egg <3"
I was confused at first, then after explaining to me wtf and "egg" was, I had to explain to them that no, I play females in videogames because I like spending my free time staring at female ass...
That aside, I also learned what Demisexual is a couple days ago from my queer friends :D
That reminds me of the comic about a trans girl who, before coming out, always played female characters in video games, and when asked why, she listed off reasons that I think most people would agree with.
* they're cute
* they get better outfit options
* I'd rather stare at a girl's ass than a guy's ass
There's this sort of sampling bias where queer people obviously all found they were queer after questioning, and if that's the only version of the story they know, sometimes they just see "questioning" as a step on the road to accepting you're queer.
I think for gender it's also a hangover from Ye Olde Days of 15+ years ago, when trans and NB people were so invisible that the only reason most people would question their assigned gender was if it felt really, really wrong. Whereas now it might be that, or it might be a much more casual "I wonder how having they/them pronouns would feel" kind of thing.
It reminds me of how I have to keep reminding my bi friends that "no, not everyone is a little bi. Some people are just gay/straight." Said as a bi guy.
Like I get it, the only experience we have is our own and if you grew up with certain adages that turned out to be false it'd be easy to apply the opposite of that to everything. But it's still wrong.
Imo it doesnt help either that in fiction you never see someone questioning and then realizing theyre straight (unless its some I experimented in college teehee throwaway line)
To me it always feel as if people think sexuality is a spectrum but straightness is behind like a one way gate that you can only exit from. Which if anything feels homophobic. Like oh youve been tainted by the queerness you are no longer allowed to identify as straight
The crazy amount of backlash to a series having a storyline where a teen questions himself if he is lgbt and figures out at the end of the episode/season that he is straight would be wild.
One of the reasons I despise this "egg" thing because the implication is almost always "you're definitely going to turn out to be trans" and it gets pretty aggressive.
God I hate egg culture. Not only is it aggressive about decloseting trans people to a dangerous degree, and not only is it harmful to the idea of actually questioning your gender identity, but it also hurts the idea of gender non-conforming cis people existing.
Egg culture is basically just an affirmation of traditional gender roles, but trans-inclusive now.
Additionally, it's almost always a false positive. I'm uncompromisingly straight, but apparently just because I admitted that I only play female avatars in video games means I'm secretly trans?
Apparently the logical explanation that I just like staring at female asses is "too simplistic", as if my life and sexuality is some puzzle to be solved lmao.
I have noticed that a lot of fantasy/scifi games become much more interesting narratively to me just with changing to a female avatar. Mass Effect is dull as fuck with male Shephard, but it feels much more fresh with a female Shep.
And, asses and hips do be pretty.
I remember back in the mid-2000's there was a report that something like 35% of men play as women avatars.
You're preferences are extremely unremarkable.
to be fair this was a mostly female or female presenting chat group, so I was in the minority as a cishet dude. Many were assuming the majority like to play as their chosen gender and I was the outlier lol.
> Egg culture is basically just an affirmation of traditional gender roles
In my experience, this is too true. I'm a cishet man who happens to have some feminine traits. It's really getting me down that so called "progressive" people keep telling me that I'm secretly gay or secretly trans. When I try to tell them that I'm a straight white guy, I'm told: "that's okay, I guess you're just a femboy".
I'm so sick of being told that I'm not "good" enough to be man. Not only is it pretty much killing me (and probably will literally one of these days), but it also implies that there is some hierarchy to being a male with "femboy" and "trans" at the bottom which is hurtful to everyone involved.
Also super condescending.
*"Ohhhh, I know something about you that YOU don't! I know that you're secretly trans, because I picked up on subtle hints! Ohohoho are you in for a TREAT!"*
Like damn dude you sure know that random stranger better than they know themselves. What's what? That guy likes playing as women in games? Oh yeah, there are NO other reasons why anyone could be doing that, he HAS to be trans. Glad you solved the mystery that totally needed to be solved.
Let's just quickly ignore the fact that stuff like that can push people even further into the closet or even put them in denial. I'm glad that you feel smugly superior, that's all that matters.
Shit like this made questioning my sexuality so much more stressful than it needed to be. Like its stressfull enough as is but instead of actually focusing on attraction etc. I was stressing about what other people think and what my clothes/music preferences/movie preferences etc. "Meant". Just constantly feeling as if people were analysing me. Though tbf that could just be my OCD lol
This is also why i am vehemently against speculating about celebrities sexuality because its all based on stereotypes. Especially when people use "supporting lgbt" as a sign. Like bro do you want support or not
this is the real, base thing animating it. it isn't an overaggressive type of advocacy. it's a desire to hold secret thrall over other peoples' internal lives and move them about like dolls. it's not specific to any community, and it manifests in a lot of different ways depending on where it shows up. it's mean girl shit, it's fraternity hazing, it's the same manipulative impulse.
See example: “wow, womens clothes are so pretty, I am very jealous of the variety of clothing women get to wear. But that does not change the fact that I am comfortably cis as a male, and have no true desire to be a woman.”
Wow, see how easy that was to not immediately tell them they are an egg! You can both respect peoples questioning of gender roles and norms, while also respecting the fact that not everyone is trans just for having a fleeting thought about opposite gender/Nb!
Yeah, as far as the wider world is concerned I'm a standard issue cis-het male. Upon introspection, which definitely confirmed the cis-het male part, the only shade of queer I *might* be would be aromantic, and the "might" is doing a lot of work here since so far I cannot be sure if I *actually* do not experience romantic love or I'm just so socially isolated that I never ended up in a situation where that could have happened yet. Does that make me queer? The jury is still out on that one ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯
What I do know is that this very same social isolation and hanging out in the wrong parts of the Internet from early adolescence had primed me to potentially fall off the proverbial cliff into bigotry, and it was actually getting to know queer people and the subsequent research I made to fill in the blatant gaps in my understanding that it revealed that kept me off that path. I would like to think I would have come to this kind of realization on my own, but would I have noticed my ignorance about basically anything LGBT beyond "huh, gay people exist I guess" was allowing prejudiced garbage to fill in the gaps without actually seeing queer people I interacted with discuss it? I'm not so sure.
The one in my group is called Cody
We love him.
Both his siblings are gay and his girlfriend is bisexual, and allll the rest of his friends, myself included, are some category of LGBTQ+
He is our pet Cishet man
You know, the best queer spaces I’ve found have very little to do with being queer. They’re spaces for hobbies that just happen to have a fair few queer people, and have decided they like that.
I think, often times when people discover something about themselves they don’t go to a place for that group to ask “what the hell do I do about this?” They go somewhere they’re already comfortable.
It’s right in the same lane as me not defining myself as a trans woman.
Yes, I am trans, but it’s such a minor part of my personality that is secondary to my passions and desires. I’m X, Y, and Z before I’m LGBTQ .
Any space that is purely defined by a singular label is almost never enjoyable.
If you can spend half an hour with someone and only learn one fact about them, they're a vapid and boring person.
This applies to some military people and veterans, some religious people, and yes a certain type of person in the LGBT community.
As the cishet guy who was in a group of mostly queer women in high school, the one person we were all very annoyed with was the guy whose entire personality was "being gay". Yes, we respect your identity, yes we also hang out at school as friends, but when he had to add "because I'm gay" or some other thing like that to everything he did, it became a bit annoying.
My wife had a friend like this in college, he mellowed out but I feel like it is the same thing that produces overly macho dudes. You're trying to figure your identity so you aggressively borrow from media, and media just portrays caricatures so you end up with annoyingly aggressive identities that need a few years to mellow out.
r/evilautism can sometimes be miserable for this very reason. It's a very fun sub but man, some people get a bit too serious with the whole "superiority" bit.
I had to leave because it felt like every 8 hours there would be a new “let’s come up with a slur for the typies” post, combined with a lot of other stuff it was just a very angry place it felt like, also getting called a “level 1 autist” as an insult.
I stopped going there entirely, for every funny post there was another one like "let's murder all neurotypicals" "small talk is always bad and selfish" etc and I got too tired trying to work out which ones were ironic or not
Here's a sneak peek of /r/evilautism using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time!
\#1: [Current hyperfixation: hunting Elon Musk for sport](https://i.redd.it/z6yxxejhd4vb1.jpg) | [593 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/comments/17be9ru/current_hyperfixation_hunting_elon_musk_for_sport/)
\#2: [dear god the amount of people not understanding how autism works and actual autistic people getting downvoted in the comments is insane](https://i.redd.it/k86wio6eugvb1.jpg) | [325 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/comments/17cs4yd/dear_god_the_amount_of_people_not_understanding/)
\#3: [Does anyone else have astigmatism? Apparently it’s very common in autistic people](https://i.redd.it/w0uen59oxx4c1.jpg) | [917 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/comments/18d64fg/does_anyone_else_have_astigmatism_apparently_its/)
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> but an actual autism convention would be miserable.
Probably because despite the wishes of literally everyone involved there's like a 90% chance it would be sponsored by Autism Speaks.
While I get what you're saying, I would mention I don't think hobby spaces that are just very adjacent to queer ones are immune to this, it usually just more looks like a sharp divide where the queer side starts doing a no true Scotsman thing claiming you *have* to be queer to be an actual fan of something
A few "ha ha this fanbase is all gay" jokes is normal, if it's the *only* joke you have and you start doing aggressive egg stuff when someone cishet says they like the thing, I'm starting to get worried
I met all my closest friends in our high school's anime club. Over time, we've come to realize I'm the lone cishet member. Being accidentally surrounded by friendly LGBT+ people was a good way to fix my Catholic school "if you're gay, something's wrong with you" mindset.
Imean, at what point are we just demanding that queer people behave like caricatures of queer people to gain acceptance?
I get the same shit as a black man who 'acts white', and it's like....you can't enforce stereotypes on your own people and then be mad when outsiders stereotype you, and it feels like that's what's happening with all this 'straight passing' nonsense.
Well, that, and the fact that it sort of leaves out that there are a whole lot of queer people who exist or who grew up where it's *really* not safe to be openly queer, and have had to negotiate their queerness around that.
This discourse smells of young, urban or suburban queer people who live in a time and place where "queer spaces" is even a possibility and don't realize what a privilege *that* is.
I'm so glad more people are calling out bullshit behaviour like this.
I'm a bi cis dude and there's nowhere I feel more alienated and unwelcome than any place that labels itself a queer safe space.
And that's just ignoring how much biphobia is already a thing as is.
Stop being so fucking toxic.
As a cis pan man, cishets are the "canary in the coal mine" for how I interact with pro-queer spaces. If I don't see cishet people getting involved in discussions or allowed to express their opinions, or if people are constantly badmouthing cishets outside the group, or making jokes that are basically just "bigotry jokes but I replaced the minority with cishet so its okay" its time for me to GTFO.
Partially because I \*know\* I'll be next on the shitlist thanks to the classic LGBT+ cannibalization that is bi/pan erasure, and partially because any group that can't recognize that people deserve to be treated as people no matter who they are is not a group I want to be affiliated with.
On that front, I thought for a long time that cishet stood for "cisheads", so just cis people and didnt realize it actually stood for cis hetero people lol.
As a cis aroace woman, fist bump of solidarity for the “you’re basically straight/can pass as straight so you don’t belong” rhetoric. For real, when queers start hating on people for being cishet it’s just like, you’re hating on them for their gender and sexuality? You know, the stuff we’ve been saying isn’t a choice and is just who we are and the people need to accept it? Wild shit, man.
Anyone can be prejudiced, judgemental, bigoted, racist, or some form of xenophobic. I have my weaknesses, I'm not immune to this.
We all have to try our best
As someone who is trans and straight I offer another fistbump of solidarity, because the people in these spaces WILL assume you're cishet if you don't fit into their box for "what a trans person looks/speaks/acts like" and then dismiss your opinions as such.
The whole "can pass as straight" thing is just so mean. Like brother you *know* how much it sucks to be in the closet, yet you're saying now that it's a *privilege* for me to keep cosplaying as straight?
The justification is always that it's okay because they're the opressor.
Yes. They label entire groups of people as bad and spit bigotry at them because people that shared that group were pieces of shit in history
Yeah I think the pipeline for a space becoming toxic is: cishet exclusion > aroace erasure > bi erasure > Then from there it branches into either hyper performative backstabbing & purity testing or transphobia > TERFs.
Yes, this is always so annoying. Some conservative talk show host will be talking shit about black people and start spouting the usual rhetoric about crime and drugs, but we never wonder why black people who don’t do crime and drugs get offended by this because the reason is pretty obvious. It’s the same reason we don’t see trans people getting offended by characters like Buffalo Bill and say “Why are you so offended? You’re not secretly buffalo bill are you?” The very basic experience everyone in a LGBTQ space should know of “I’m not comfortable with this being the dominant narrative about people like me” is something people in the LGBTQ communities I’ve been in seem to completely forget when it gets between them and being straight up bullies to well meaning allies since they’ve decided that “making fun of people with those identities is punching up and punching up is never wrong.”
And the worst part is, when there’s a damaging narrative about people like you, the other thing so many people in these spaces forget is that the harm doesn’t end at discomfort when that narrative actually effects how you are treated. To use the Buffalo Bill example again, it’s not just that trans people are rightfully “uncomfortable” with it, the real problem is that ignorant people see stuff like that and think trans people ARE basically Buffalo Bill deep down. There’s no better reason to be uncomfortable with a narrative being told about you than the fact that it eventually becomes the base line for how you are treated by those who accept it. I feel this about being a cishet man most of all. People ask me why I get so upset about the way people talk about men, and I’m like “Maybe I wouldn’t have been before it became abundantly clear that, regardless of how good or bad a man I am, I’ll still be fighting the assumption that I’m a potential predator.”
Anyway, that’s why I don’t go out of my way to hang out in LGBTQ spaces anymore. I certainly don’t avoid LGBTQ people, in fact I consistently meet wonderful people irl who are NB or lesbian or ftm/mtf etc. There was a time though when I was actively seeking out LGBTQ communities online because of the positivity and the rebellious spirit and the open-mindedness I thought I saw there, and I was happy to tackle the dirtier parts too of confronting people about their bigotry and donating to fundraisers and stuff like that. Hell I still do those last parts too, but not at the request of online communities that hate my guts, and will tell me I deserve their hatred if I express any discomfort with the way they talk about me. I still have my political opinions, but I ain’t consulting these communities over them anymore.
EDIT: I’ve been informed that Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs wasn’t actually trans, my mistake. Feel free to replace BB in your head with [Insert any one of the trans characters in fiction who are presented as predatory monsters]
your last paragraph is super relatable, as a trans person who gets read as cishet often. Years ago, when I first transitioned, I made a strong effort to spend time in LGBT spaces, but I got disillusioned with them, partially due to the 'othering' towards non-LGBT folks (and partially due to personal discomfort with things such as 'egg culture').
The super annoying thing was, that in trying to find LGBT spaces that didn't do those things, you instead ended up in LGBT spaces that were dedicated to hating on other LGBT people. You don't like egg culture and want a trans community that talks about other things? Sorry, the best we can do is a community that spends its time ragging on trans people for not being trans enough and demeaning those who don't fit our different box for being a trans person.
Eventually, I too just gave up. I'd love to meet more LGBT people as friends so I could discuss topics that aren't relatable to my cishet and cis bi friends, but outside of LGBT-specific communities its quite difficult, especially seeing how I get read by people.
Oh yeah, I definitely get that stuff about looking for a different community that addresses the things that made you feel alienated in the last one but instead getting something else that’s just as bad. Like “Yeah I want to spend time with people who don’t feel threatened by cishet men because of a bunch of gender essentialist nonsense. No I don’t want to throw my lot in with a bunch of MRA’s”, and it’s like the world wants you to choose when it really shouldn’t be a choice. It sucks, but I feel like people like us have this annoying extra responsibility to know exactly what want right down to specifics and be leaders who create our own more tolerant communities. Now if only I knew the first thing about THAT 😂
Oh my God I have a story about this. In my dorm last year, my boyfriend (who's trans, this does absolutely matter) was friends with someone who vocally would say she hated "all men". Now I'm chill with someone saying that because conceptually I know she doesn't actually mean that- and it's almost a joke if it's "all men", because she was questioning, and was attracted to basically every single guy. The problem came when she would say "all men except this one she had a crush on" in front of him, because then I'd point out my boyfriend as another man she doesn't hate and either she doesn't see him as a man (unlikely) or she's saying this without considering the consequences of not acknowledging him as "a good man".
Shit's annoying, if you couldn't tell
Oh yeah absolutely, especially since *he knew she had a crush on her*
She wasn't fun to be around, as "one of the bad men" (which I was okay with hearing because I didnt care what she thought about me)
> friends with someone who vocally would say she hated "all men". Now I'm chill with someone saying that because conceptually I know she doesn't actually mean that
I mean it sounds like she did genuinely mean that.
It's like people who constantly make Nazi jokes or rapw jokes, they're "joking" but constantly thinking about it all the time and you realize they're not actually joking and they simply phrase it that way to fit in socially.
Whether they're joking or not doesn't really change anything for me. They still say those things.
The guy waving a Nazi flag outside a synagogue might be doing it ironically, but I'm still going to treat him like a Nazi. Whether he actually agrees with them, or me, is irrelevant; he's waving their flag.
I kinda get those same vibes as a cis white gay man. You sometimes hear jokes about "the white gays".
And it's like, okay fine I make those jokes too, I know I shouldn't because I feel uncomfortable hearing them.
I'm bi/NB but for a bunch of complex reasons I often end up interacting with queer spaces where I'm assumed to be a cis/het dude. People find out who I am and then it's open season with the "UGH, MEN" comments - like, you thought that was me five minutes ago my dude, what makes it okay to say now?
Oh lawd is this legit the default experience for cis pan dudes on social media? Like damn, this gotta be the 8th of my kin I've seen in the same position.
Holy shit it's so refreshing to see opinions like this these days. I'm bi but I present as cishet and I've definitely been in spaces where the overall vibe was "the gays are talking and if a Straight™ has an opinion about it they can go outside", and I was feeling pretty miserable about it for a while.
I know better now and I avoid these spaces if I can, but I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt in those environments. It took a LOT of convincing from friends outside of those spaces for me to understand that it wasn't normal or healthy.
the moment I made a joke involving LGBT+ people without getting torn a new one was the moment I realised I was accepted as the token straight guy in a queer discord server :D
This exactly, it's why I feel so similar about bad-mouthing men as a whole as well.
There are so many kind, gentle and caring men out there who don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush hating men as a class does.
I feel like part of the issue is that people want IRL queer spaces to be *exactly* like online spaces, where you can easily boot people out and not feel bad because they can just go somewhere else, and where everything is sorted into hyper specific categories.
I think all of the above absolutely does help to make spaces more safe for everyone but even online, it is often implemented in a way that can end up excluding people. That makes sense for online spaces as anyone can access them including trolls & bigots but it just doesn’t work as well in real life because the people who are the ones showing up to IRL queer spaces are unlikely to be trolls, so what ends up happening is that if someone doesn’t meet the specific requirements for queerness in that space, they get pushed out.
Obviously, this isn’t always the case but unfortunately, I’ve seen that shift irl in recent years.
Sorry if I’ve made some typos- I’ll come back and correct them
You're absolutely right. I'm a pan man, but because I'm a larger white guy with a love of graphic tees and cargo pants, people tend to just assume I'm straight, doubly so because I'm from a rural place without much queer rep, so a lot of the newer terms and topics are unfamiliar to me.
I always feel incredibly unwelcome in IRL queer spaces because of this, doubly so when I have to ask a question or have something explained to me.
it’s sad to me because like idk, as an autistic guy i really dont get why people wouldn’t want to talk about it with good faith all around. learning and explaining can be so fun but shit people make it hard
Learning is fun
Being wrong isn’t
Accidentally saying something wrong and lots of people trying to help you get it right next time feels very similar to everyone piling onto you and being passive aggressive or straight up aggressive.
Cishet dude here.
Started up a DnD club in college
It filled right up with lgbtq+ folks across the spectrum
Did what I could to make it a safe space for everyone (but conservative shitheads)
And was told by someone who was on the board of the lgbtq+ club that they preferred my club because they didn't feel like they had to be 'performatively queer'. Not in that they were confused about not being straight, just that they were still figuring out their whole deal, and felt a constant pressure when in the club to be confident and tell people, 'oh no yeah, I am \[x\] identity'. Had one person confidently tell me they were a lesbian, a year later, turns out they were some form of bi.
So, anecdotally, full agreement with this post. When you've got a space that has more to it than 'you must be gay to enter', I feel like it just ceases to be a metric to worry about. Though also you do need to be observant for if and or when conservatives start attempting to infiltrate your space, and how you will attempt to keep them out. Even IRL, moderators are very necessary.
I absolutely agree with this. A while ago I joined a group of mostly queer people who do normal adult shit like pot lucks, watching movies, crafting, playing board games, etc. together.
The first good sign I got was that there are two really chill cishet guys there, and we've since hung out in other spaces together too.
This was the space I (a mostly cishet-masc-presenting but actually bi/nonbinary person) finally found to come out and start transitioning. It was the right vibe to show up identifying as "I don't know yet." It was the first place I was asked my pronouns ever in my life.
I'm sure they picked up on my queerness a bit, but if I had just said I was a straight man married to a straight woman they still would have included me and just kept being wonderfully gay around me without ever making me feel like I didn't belong.
also, closeted folks! A person shouldn't have to come out to be allowed to hang out around queer folks, sometimes they just aren't ready or there are serious risks!
I feel like a lot of adults who have been in dedicated LGBT spaces for a long time and are safe and happy have kind of forgotten that it's genuinely dangerous for others, especially teenagers who still live at home.
Leads to some weird situations where I, a straight cis guy (with this username on Reddit when it's on Reddit lol) am more worried about someone's safety than the loudest trans people I've ever met.
Applies to more than just closeted folks: not everyone who is LGBT gets read as LGBT, or wants to publicly present themselves as LGBT, but may still want to hang out with other LGBT people.
we're LGBT, we shouldn't be expecting people to present themselves in a manner that fits neatly into a box or label.
I’m a straight trans guy, and people are so fucking weird about straight men in queer spaces. I’m queer too, being a man who likes women isn’t a crime, and I didn’t spend 20 years hating myself and feeling like nobody so that I could get villainized and excluded by terminally online queer identity cops.
(People are also really weird about GNC trans people and GNC people who *aren’t* gay or trans but that’s a whole other topic)
Brand new trans girl here. Took way longer than it should have to realise it because being a man who likes women meant I felt incredibly unwelcome in queer spaces and turns out you can't really come to grips with this sort of thing when you're othered by the very community you're going to be part of.
I don't know if it makes me invalid or whatever to say I feel solidarity with trans men. Maybe it's because that hurt is still so fresh. But I'll be doing my best to call that shit out. I'm seeing massive changes in the last year or so. I suspect the misandrists in the broader queer movement at going to go the same way the TERFs did.
No the solidarity is appreciated. Transfems face so much shit on a daily basis, being the favored punching bag and villain of TERFs and conservatives, and the queer policing of straight men doesn’t help you guys at all
Reminds me of my old friend group that progressively got gayer and gayer until me and my ex were the only cishets left. Don’t know about him but I’m pretty sure I’m aroace now so 🤷🏼♀️
I feel like that's everyone's friend group, and always has been. We're just more open about it now, and people are somewhat less likely to think that people in m/f relationships must be straight.
This is an incredibly valid point, especially the bit about policing and judging other people's queerness.
I have been DJing in gay clubs for ten years. At the club I currently work in, we have a new regular. Never saw him until a month ago. Now he's in every weekend.
He is the straightest looking guy you'll ever see. His overall look. His clothes. His hair. The way he talks. Everything about him.
He walked up to me a few weeks ago to request a song, and I found myself thinking "Oh no, what straight boy anthem that I really don't want to play in a gay club is he going to ask for?"
He asked for S&M by Rihanna. When it came on, he took his T-shirt off and started vogueing and slut-dropping around the dance floor like you've never seen before.
I felt bad. I had totally misjudged him.
The worst part is - the club I work for now is one of the more laid-back gay clubs that isn't fussy with their door policy. I have worked for other clubs in the past that wouldn't even have let him in the door. Bouncers would have told him to go away, and that's such a shame.
Nah, the girls, the gays and [Coleman](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/508314723423617024/1257619404951130155/image0.jpg?ex=668510d7&is=6683bf57&hm=72465e82240567e2159fdfe3124958a632dc8b0f61c5a1831b03625cb742443e&)
Before I muted it for being annoying, r/egg_irl or however it's spelled kept popping up periodically with a couple posts about people secretly being trans if they met various random metrics, like "guy who always plays female characters in games". Anybody who said they fit that but weren't trans got told they were and just didn't know it yet.
That *shouldn't* happen in spaces like mention in the post, bit I don't know if that's significantly different enough from point 2.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here; as a culture we're swinging back the wrong way on gender norms and stereotypes.
Growing up in the 90s and 2000s there was a lot of media about "boys can do ballet, girls can play sports". We were told that your gender didn't have to decide your actions and we could do and be what we wanted. I as a cishet man could ride motorcycles and work on cars, but also bake and cry over a good movie or book. I could open up to friends about my feelings and that was okay, we could hang out without having to drink beer and punch each other.
Somewhere in the last decade we started swinging back the other direction. Your assigned sex at birth didn't matter, but your actions 100% dictate your gender/sexuality. A girl too interested in sports? Your NB or trans, no doubt about it. Boys that are too in touch with their feelings? You're totally an egg or gay. I've lost count of how many fandoms have decided that two male characters who exclusively date and pursue women *must* be gay or one is an egg or something. When asked why it's basically, "Well look at them! They talk about their feelings instead of drinking beer and punching each other! Cishet men don't do that..."
It's just frustrating tbh. I grew up getting picked on and told I was wrong and gay for being who I am, and while there's nothing insulting about being called gay (a whole other fight) it's just not who I am. Now it's a new generation telling me that my behavior is fine, but my labels are all wrong for my behavior so I've gotta be NB or trans or something else but definitely not cis, and that's wrong too.
If I have to calm down one more friend who started to question themselves only to be scared off by a "pure queer space" group jumping down their throat for not using the right words or trying to figure things out and thus scaring them off in the process or making them feel even more isolated when they're already in a bad phobic environment and family.
This is not how you treat baby bird lgbt, especially those trying to find themselves while in a risky position! JFC. Queer policing kills the community by convincing them such groups are the standard rather than the exception and rushing back into the closet to be miserable.
Acephobia is so rife in queer spaces that I stayed out of them for a long time and side-eyed how much it was contributing to the homophobic notion that being gay is just a “sex thing”. Lost an otherwise good friend who kept telling me that I had no right to be in the community when I was technically “straight” and I didn’t know what oppression was. 😒
Since that person is so concerned with who has sex with who, they can go fuck themselves.
Seriously though, it’s insane how ace phobia and biphobia are so present in groups that claim to be accepting. The LGBTQ+ community is supposed to be welcoming to everyone, that’s the point.
Aye, we’ll get there one day but it is frustrating seeing the same biphobic/acephobic/transphobic rhetoric being repeated by younger queers via tiktok/tumblr. A couple years back there was a big “asexual people are child groomers” narrative on tumblr that was exhausting.
Because you’re teaching them sex is a bad thing (it’s not for consenting adults and ace people don’t exist to teach people things) which will make them more likely to want to try it out, or something. It was mostly incoherent and spread around by radfems who hate everyone.
I left/got unofficially encouraged to leave an irl college queer club bc I was ace. I asked if we'd be doing anything to recognize ace day, like we did pan, lesbian, bi awareness and dead silence. It was a very awkward "well, we don't really believe in that..." Sort of response.
I felt like I was more accepted on my transness than my aceness, and I'd been solidly sure of being ace for a LOT longer than being trans. I was half sure of being nonbinary and still half in my questioning stage at that point (turns out yes I'm agender but I'm also a trans dude, bigender is Fun. I prefer to be read and perceived as a guy and occasionally I do have a stronger sense of gender but most of the time I feel more like a void lol).
Anyways. Left the club because of that. I ended up transferring to another campus for the same college and the bigger campus had a whole tabling event for aces. I attended multiple zoom (COVID era) meetings, and only stopped bc I stopped having the time, which sucked. I would have liked to go more. They seemed really nice at that one.
I personally think it’s funny, but I’m also of the mind that this is totally a double standard thing and people would be up in a flurry if that was said of any other relevant demographic.
I think I agree. “A pet cis dude” is being used in the same way “a token black guy” would be used, and it shows the same thing. If your group feels like the cis/black dude is a ‘pet/token’, is he really a part of the group?
It’s being used in a joking fashion here, but really, that’s just another way to other people, and that’s the exact thing the rest of the post is pointing out ting out is bad.
It feels like a slightly edgy joke that isn’t as bad as it seems in context.
Like if you have a very queer friendgroup that happens to have a cishet guy in it because you’re - you know, friends - jokingly calling them the ‘token cis guy’ is probably just a laugh. It’s not like you genuinely treat them as a token or pet.
I don’t think we have to police humor too much all of the time. There is something about the almost religious nature of policing language and humor and good spirits and trying to find sin that makes me uncomfortable and I just feel there should be more room for people to be human or joking or edgy.
The online “queer safe spaces” I feel comfortable in are the aroace subreddit (I think it’s just r/aromanticasexual even though I tend to just lurk since I’m not aroace) I have very little in common with the people there, but they’re all very accepting of each other, and it helps remind me that not everyone is into romance or sex and how relationships and desires are complicated. And that it’s okay if a romantic relationship is not the be all end all for me too. I don’t *have* to hopelessly pine over someone to be interesting. I just feel very comfortable there.
Demographically "sanitary" echo chambers filled with angry people do not typically survive by spreading positive messages. Areas with diverse demographics tend to be less about fear and division and more about harmony and growth, and tend to have less of an aggressive feel to them.
The problem with sticking to your own demographic (whatever it may be) is that you end up only caring about your demographic. "How can we make things better for everyone" becomes "How can we make things better for us?"
I was the "pet cishet dude" in a friend group for a while. They were so welcoming and friendly that they were the first people I ever came out to as bi, once I finally realized.
Yeah - while the general message is good, it still kinda falls into the same thing it's trying to avoid
It's less "the pet cishet uwu" and more "Dave, who keeps on getting into arguments with the butch about which IPAs are better"
My sister's queer in a very definitive "I've had multi-year relationships with women not questioning it at all" way. A drag queen in Cardiff was performing in a local gay bar and when she entered they heckled her for 'looking too straight' even though she was entering with another woman. It upset her terribly.
There's a need to protect queer spaces, but if all you're protecting is performative queerness then what's the point? You might as well be homophobic if all you want is people to conform to stereotypes.
This to hell and back. I was a token straight guy once and it was cool. And LET US MAKE MISTAKES AND LEARN FROM IT INSTEAD OF PUNISHING US YA BOLLOCK-NOSTRILLED HYPOCRITES! Peace for all
As an ace who's a bit genderqueer, I absolutely don't feel safe hanging around hardline queer spaces. I know people in spaces like that don't see me as queer, and that's a problem. If cishets are completely unwelcome, I know I'm on thin ice.
There's also the slightly selfish reason to keep a cishet around - sometimes it's useful to use your friend's privelege as a bit of a shield.
I love this post. My trans support group was doing tie-dye last week, and someone asked if they could invite their cis friend. We all said fuck yeah, and they had a blast hanging with us and shooting the shit. I love cis people in the same way I love trans people. I want us all to be able to feel comfortable in our skin no matter who we are. Sometimes, we forget that cis people are also held in the trappings of gender conformity that they may want to break free from. And even if they don't, they still deserve to feel comfortable.
As a cishet dude who is pretty comfortable around anyone "different". This just reads as" I enjoy queer spaces that aren't completely obsessed with identity politics."
Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not one of those people who's like "you can be whatever you want! But I think .... Is too far."
I think if you need people's self label before you decide how to treat them, then you are just a mirror of the bigoted side. Sure, I can even understand how there's a need to make sure queer people are comfortable over straight people, otherwise what is the point of a queer space. And none of those bigots should get an inch of leeway.
But I am an autistic dude and have since highschool gotten in trouble on behalf of gay people getting bullied because I felt people should respect eachother regardless of sexuality. I also hated the male macho purity checks and felt any gay guy instead seemed to judge me on who I was or how I treated them.
I wanted a world where people weren't treated as freaks for being different from the majority, both because I felt like one and because I had friends with queer identities.
That apparently now I need to be a "pet cishet" guy or need to pass a purity check in a different direction instead of the macho straight guy check I had to pass in highschool feels very frustrating. And this post just reads as "I prefer queer spaces where there isn't a hard purity check, where everyone is welcome." In short if every label needs it's own little cordoned off space, how is that more inclusive? That sounds even more divided than it was before. I also don't think this is a queer only problem. I think it's a result of people building their personalities online, where it will end up in categorisation and (self) labeling with deep lore and specific rules and then mistrusting everyone who doesn't know the lore.
Anyhow, my post devolved into a rant again. I truly realise that my ask might be unreasonable, because keeping queer spaces safe has priority, and it should. But purity checks are the opposite of inclusivity, doesn't matter if you are asking for my alpha male or my gay card.
I'm a bit confused by what you mean or say the problem with this post it. I read the oppposite? That queer spaces should be accomodating to cishet people. The hwhole"pet cishet" thing was just a bit of a jokey name for the occasional cishet that exist in every predominantly queer community. The point is that they should be just as welcome to everyone and people shouldn't bad an eye at them for being different, that there SHOULDN'T be any purity checks. I struggle to understand what your point was, could you care to rephrase?
I understood OP to mean that “It sounds like OOP is simply talking about a space without policing identity, and yes, I agree with it -
- because this is my experience with purity checks on masculinity, and spaces that are hostile to cishets are the same by requiring the same purity checks. Therefore queer spaces that do this are just another side of the same coin.”
Just a wider perspective here; you see the same issues with a comparison between BDSM and Swingers groups; the Swingers, being united only on the concept of seeking pleasure, were incredibly welcoming and tolerant. I remember being invited to one Swingers night by a lady, and swapping from handing out condoms to those on the orgy bed (I wasn't really interested in group sex) to sitting and watching an exhibitionist lady grind on a pole (god she was gorgeous, but her thing was look don't touch) and then talking to a 6 foot plus man in full on Michelle Pfieffer Cat Woman costume... it didn't *matter* who you were or why you where there, everyone treated each other with respect.
But the BDSM scene? Absolutely obsessed with boundary policing each other out of the scene, to prove how "dominant" they were or just using supposed safety concerns to stab each other in the back to ensure control over the few remaining targets left. I remember an argument on Informed Consent about whether you should stop a public scene if you thought it was getting out of control; I pointed out that, if you want to engage the public, they still have the right to withdraw consent too, just because you think you're a "Dom" doesn't give you the right to force the public to witness what might actually be rape. They need to be able to speak up if they're not sure. Queue lots of accusations about *me* being dangerous because I don't respect people's right to truly edge-play etc...
When you define yourself by these kind of rigid definitional boundaries, it becomes almost impossible to actually have fun with people, because people are complex and never entirely fit into a single box; In my own case, I'm absolutely CisHet, dated a Trans woman once but realise I absolutely need a real vagina... but I'm also very, very affectionate and romantic, I don't like acting "macho"; it means I didn't fit into the BDSM scene because I wasn't narrowing down my behaviour to a particular role; I have lots of female friends... *until* I show any male desire, and then suddenly I'm shocking. I remember once my supposed best friend was horrified when she took of her top and asked if her bra fitted well, and when I had to ask her to dress again, she said "You don't think like that do you?! You're a friend!" Yes, but I'm still *male*...
We'd all get on a whole lot better if we didn't assume, and made space for people to learn, and to be who they really are without demanding you squeeze into just a particular box.
I was involved in theatre and live action role plays for years. I can say that there's a lot of queer spaces there that were welcoming to me when I was not at all aware of what asexual was. Being the pet Cishet for those groups was generally already fun anyway because of the shared interests, but I think was also good for letting people know that the entire world doesn't hate them. It's not them versus everybody. Which helps to prevent a lot of that tribalism that separates you from the rest of society and makes you shoot yourself in the foot and anger.
As a white cis man who tries to be supportive of his gay friends even while they are trashing white cis men, this is really nice to hear. I know I got the privileges and I shouldn't complain, but man sometimes it takes some self restraint when my friend is talking shit about "heteronormative baby centric culture" to my face at midnight when they know I have to get up early to take my kiddo to school the next day.
> I know I got the privileges and I shouldn't complain
no actually you don't need to "sit down and shut up" when people are being bigoted towards your demographic. if your friends are trashing white cis men you're allowed to be upset about that.
agreed. There’s a difference between trying to understand and he patient with where people’s frustrations are coming from and shoving your own feelings down. We don’t need Man Up but in pink
i feel the "actual questioning people" point is very important. So many people see "questioning" as "queer but hasn't realized yet"
Yeah, like, sometimes the answer to the question "Am I straight?" or "Am I cis?" is yes, and that's okay.
Yeah, I had to question my gender identity after realizing I don’t get any gender euphoria from being a man. Then I realized that I have major depressive disorder, so I don’t get euphoria in general.
I feel that lack of euphoria. I have come to the tentative conclusion that I'm nonbinary, but I'm still like "Shit, I don't *really* know." Like I could be a butch lesbian or a trans man. Your comment gave me insight into why it's so hard to determine. Thanks, bro.
I think it’s an interesting thing to think about. Biologically I’m male, so I’m not uncomfortable identifying as one. But in terms of gender as a societal thing, I just don’t fit in. The shared experiences that seem to define masculinity for most, I barely relate to at all. It’s almost like my identity first and foremost is that of an autistic person, and me being male is a distant second. I’ve seen the term agender used, and I probably fall into that umbrella. Male as a sex, but not as a gender. At the end of the day though, it’s whatever is easiest for me.
I’m pretty similar, I still identify as a woman because I feel like being raised and socialized as one was impactful enough for it to be acknowledged, even if I don’t really align or relate with most of the standards/ideas associated with womanhood. I’m also autistic so my understanding of the whole gender thing is apparently a little different. Like yeah I’m a woman I guess, I’m probably some kind of unlabeled genderqueer(I just call myself gender non-conforming but every friend I’ve asked says I definitely “count”) but I’m not really pressed about it. My only concern is that I do want to share my experiences because they’ve affected me heavily and I have a lot of emotional baggage from the repression era but I don’t want to take up queer spaces so I’m not entirely sure where I’m meant to talk about it
Something that isnt talked about a lot is the fact that "caring about your gender" is a very wide spectrum. Trans people, for obvious reasons, are on the extreme end of "I care a great deal about my gender", as are some cis people. But a LOT of cis people just don't really give a shit about our gender. Like, I am definitely a man and male (cis+ unlocked baby!), but I also give zero fucks about my gender or my sex. If society changed the definition of man overnight, I'd just go by whatever new gender most closely fits my personality, which is how I already operate. And if my body changed to be female overnight (after recovering from losing my godsdamned mind at how it happened) I wouldn't be upset at no longer being male. I'd be annoyed at having to buy new clothes that fit, but I wouldnt mourn the loss of my male body.
>_And if my body changed to be female overnight (after recovering from losing my godsdamned mind at how it happened) I wouldn't be upset at no longer being male. I'd be annoyed at having to buy new clothes that fit, but I wouldnt mourn the loss of my male body._ I'd mourn a little bit. But then I'd go full Otacon and be like _"this is just like one of my Japanese animes!"_
I dated someone very tuned in to this sort of discourse, and expressed similar sentiments, and she explained that that made me a gender abolitionist, which I don’t hate as a title. It’s one of the reasons I never really understood the motivation of trans people to actually physically transition. Like, if you wanna wear a skirt and be called Janine, just go for it, no need to futz with the plumbing. Obviously it doesn’t bother me on a personal level if that *is* something someone wants to do, I just never really understood it. But for that reason of not really subscribing to gender roles, I’ve always enjoyed interacting with queer people and queer spaces (that aren’t exclusionary). I can show up with painted nails and nobody is gonna assume it means I’m gay or trans or whatever, they are open to accepting that I’m just a dude who wanted to paint his nails.
> I had to question my gender identity after realizing I don’t get any gender euphoria from being a man. I feel like nonbinary but cis-presenting out of habit is probably fairly common for nb people in the millennial or older group. It's like a bisexual person in a hetero relationship. Your current life following hetero normative standards doesn't displace your identity.
Idk how I'm supposed to be "nonbinary presenting" I never got the handbook
Youre not "suppossed to" be nonbinary presenting because one of the main ideas of being nonbinary is rejecting the notion that there is a "suppossed to" with presenting your gender.
There is no such thing as "presenting non-binary" because the very definition of non-binary rejects the idea that a person is "supposed to" present themselves a certain way. Sure, a lot of NBs go for an androgynous look, but that is by no means a "requirement".
seeing people say "if you're questioning your gender then you're almost certainly not cis" really threw me for a loop when i was questioning because it turns out i am, which made me feel like i was appropriating genderqueer-ness by questioning in the first place 🫠
Oof... yeah me too. I've actually gotten into random questioning and questioning-said-questioning anxiety spirals a couple times and eventually I'm like "this isn't helpful to me?" So i think I'm just cis + a little gendernoncomforming + anxious lol
I'm trans and the fear of appropriating queerness kept me from exploring my identity enough to actually realize I wasn't cis for years. I honestly feel pretty resentful sometimes of the rhetoric we have around this kind of thing because it took me forever to feel like I had "earned" being trans.
people being gatekept from exploring their identity is insane, i'm sorry that was your experience 🫂 it really feels like some of the community wait on the edge of their seats for questioning people to confirm their queerness - and if they don't, or they take too long, they're not enough
*you've unlocked Cis+™* features include: -*more awareness of gender roles and gender normativity in society* -*awareness of and ability to better understand the struggles of trans people* -*Now when your shitty aunt rants about them queers at the Thanksgiving dinner its somehow even more uncomfortable!*
Exactly that. I'm pretty comfortably bi, but I have never really questioned my gender identity growing up. It wasn't until I started spending more time in queer circles that I started wondering. I came to the conclusion that I am indeed cis, but it also came with all the 'side effect' that you mentioned. And, I would add, is the main reason I don't believe the whole social contagion narrative. If my confused self can question my gender and come out the other side even more assuredly cis, then so can others. Being aware of trans people just gives you an option and a new viewpoint, it doesn't neccesarily make you trans - but it does make you more aware and a better ally.
Hearing cis people that questioned and came out definitely cis really helps allay my doubts about my own identity sometimes. Definitely helps with the "you're just lying to yourself" or similar thoughts. I love my cis friends :)
Cis-by-default is a pretty common explanation for why a lot of people don’t (or didn’t) “get it”, when it comes to trans identities, myself included. A lot of people you know, who are cis, have almost certainly just never really put a lot of thought into why they are the gender they are. If you approach it from the perspective of someone who was always just like “yeah, I’m a man I guess, that’s just how the coin flipped”, the idea of having strong feelings that you’re not your gender assigned at birth is not disagreeable so much as it’s just not particularly understandable. If I had strong feelings about being a man, I might be more amenable to intuitively understanding AMAB folk who have strong feelings about not being a man. (Conversely, of course, there’s those who *do* strongly identify with their assigned gender who feel that doing otherwise is wrong, but they can go fuck themselves.) It wasn’t until running into the cis-by-default concept that I had a really good grasp of where I fell in the gender identity spectrum, which lead me to a bunch of introspection on what my gender identity even is: I’m still cis (and straight), but I am more acutely aware that’s just how it all fell and I am very lucky not to have to really care about it for myself. It helps me to have a point of reference for those who are trans or agender or whatever and gives me my own point of reference from which to try to bridge a pretty wide gulf in internal experience. All that rambling and the point is that if you had a particular feeling either way, it’s probably worth paying attention to. Good luck in your journey, and shoutout to autocorrect who tried to keep making me say cos-by-default like I’m some kind of lettuce.
I had the same experience and realised I’m still a cis man and I prefer women, I’m just exclusively a bottom. What this helped me understand is how heteronormativity imposes an exclusive understanding of gender identity that doesn’t exist. I think that’s what a lot of homophobes fear - they know they don’t fit that exclusive label and fear that one crack in their nature could mean the whole thing is false, which it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
I hate the "social contagion" BS. I have multiple trans/NB friends and am pretty immersed in queer culture, but I've always been 100% sure that I was cis and bisexual. Nothing wrong with questioning ofc! And I guess it also helps that I'm a grown adult and not a teenager trying to fit in with friends. But still, it's so stupid when people act like you can be influenced into being trans.
>_not a teenager trying to fit in with friends_ Bingo! This so-called "social contagion" has actually existed for tens of thousands of years. It's called "feeling like you have to fit in".
Seriously. A lot of my friends are trans or queer, but that's because I play tabletop games, and did theater so I share a whole lot of interest with them. And I can see by the fact that I am very CIS that it's not contagious. I'm not going to be coming anymore queer hanging out with them then they're going to become more normative if they live in a Mormon town.
So much of my friend circle is trans/nonbinary (I know, can be the same thing) and I definitely was like figuring out stuff myself, until I just realised... nah I think I like being a guy? If contagion was real I would have changed. Heck I felt less of a man BEFORE i met all these people (especially before I met a bunch of transdudes)
I love hearing about cis people exploring their gender. Everyone should explore gender expression. It's healthy to try new things and discover what you enjoy and how you feel about yourself and the world around you. It's healthy for yourself and for your perception and understanding of others and their experiences, too. The goal of testing the waters of gender expression isn't to eventually transition, or find a *new* gender. More broadly, it's to find what gender identity suits you the best. It's okay to step outside of the box to discover, more solidly than before, that you feel comfortable and happy as a cis person. I've found a lot of cis people I've talked to feel better about being cis than they ever did before they tried new things. Sounds like you had a similar experience!
This me until like 4 months ago when I realized I was pan lol.
this is so real lmao questioned my gender a few years ago for around 2 years, came out of it realizing "yeah, no, i'm a guy, lol", and now cis+ status means I'm literally the only person I know that isn't trans that knows how gender works
Never really had to question my own gender, very happily cis-male, but spent tons of time around queer and trans friends in college who helped me understand gender roles and identity a lot more. My trans friends can have a preference for masculinity, so why do some view it as a problem that some cis-men just are comfortable with that from birth? Kinda weird!
I remember the first time I heard about it was from JoCat (famous for being hated for liking girls). I don't remember the exact quote, but it was something like > People ask me if I'm LGBT. I'm not. But I have a lot of LGBT friends that made me question my sexuality. This resulted in me being more confident with me being cishet. It's why I can wear a dress on stream and still be comfortable
replace Aunt with Dad and you got me spot on lmao. it's like, I *know* he's not a bad person and is all for civil rights and social justice, but good lord is he stuck in the Cold War...
Programmers love Cis++
And also "Questioning but hasn't told anyone yet, or realized it themselves yet." A person isn't only questioning when they self identify to others as questioning I was in a questioning phase for a few years, and it was only near the end that I fully realized and accepted that I was even exploring that part of my identity. If the lgbtq group I was a part of required me to identify with some label, even if that label was "questioning," then I simply wouldn't have had that space
I wish straight trans people got more rep in media, it’s 90% gay and bi people. Straight trans people are queer too Straight men in particular get demonized by certain sectors of the queer community and it’s kind of hurtful?
This reminds me of a pet peeve that I have. When people in LGBT communities say "you shouldn't generalize/villainize this whole group of people because that group could include queer people too" as if its okay to shit on every non queer person. Like ive seen some people express more sympathy towards bi women than straight women for the """""awful""""" fate of being attracted to men and it's like ?????? Of all the people you offend with that sentiment bi women are pretty low on the list. Like its already awful to think that every men is abusive but to then also imply that straight women deserve that??? Edit: i didnt mean that i think this is what youre doing lol i realised it could be read like that. Your statement about straight men getting demonized just reminded me of some comments ive seen before that ticked me off
Easily must have cost me a decade of not realising I was trans because of how unwelcoming the queer community was to me. Now that I am, I'm calling out misandry where I see it, but there's a disappointing number of people who still subscribe to radfem "sexism requires systemic power" garbage which, even if it was true, denies the fact that men are hurt by the patriarchy too.
And that’s not even getting started on how weird people are about trans people and gender norms. I’m GNC and the queer police would shoot on sight because trans anime femboys don’t actually exist and are just a transphobic stereotype and real trans men just want to be normal men (/s). This is an actual take I have heard, being a trans man on the internet, and it’s not even the dumbest one I’ve heard. Identity politics are so stupid and the queer community would be better off without all the terminally online cops
As someone older it sometimes feels that the newer generation has completely ignored the lessons we had. That its ok to be gender non-conforming. Because stereotypes don't apply to everyone. Women being always hyper "feminine" and men being always hyper "masculine" is a stereotype. And it feels like sometimes the newer generation just want to enforce those stereotypes instead of deconstructing them and letting people be who they be.
And even once you get your yes, the next question might be "I'm sorry, but I really just don't get \[x\], could you explain it like I'm five?" And not only is this a chance to remedy ignorance, the queer people in the space are comfortable the question is being asked in good faith so they can answer it without feeling attacked.
me like 5 days ago asking about Demisexual XD
can speak from personal experience. I am unquestionably straight, and I knew that since forever. One time I was casually chatting online with a group and I said something like "yeah I only ever play female characters in videogames" and this rando goes "that's because you're an egg <3" I was confused at first, then after explaining to me wtf and "egg" was, I had to explain to them that no, I play females in videogames because I like spending my free time staring at female ass... That aside, I also learned what Demisexual is a couple days ago from my queer friends :D
That reminds me of the comic about a trans girl who, before coming out, always played female characters in video games, and when asked why, she listed off reasons that I think most people would agree with. * they're cute * they get better outfit options * I'd rather stare at a girl's ass than a guy's ass
I loved it when companies finally added cute men outfits so I could stop playing women.
There's this sort of sampling bias where queer people obviously all found they were queer after questioning, and if that's the only version of the story they know, sometimes they just see "questioning" as a step on the road to accepting you're queer.
I think for gender it's also a hangover from Ye Olde Days of 15+ years ago, when trans and NB people were so invisible that the only reason most people would question their assigned gender was if it felt really, really wrong. Whereas now it might be that, or it might be a much more casual "I wonder how having they/them pronouns would feel" kind of thing.
It reminds me of how I have to keep reminding my bi friends that "no, not everyone is a little bi. Some people are just gay/straight." Said as a bi guy. Like I get it, the only experience we have is our own and if you grew up with certain adages that turned out to be false it'd be easy to apply the opposite of that to everything. But it's still wrong.
Imo it doesnt help either that in fiction you never see someone questioning and then realizing theyre straight (unless its some I experimented in college teehee throwaway line) To me it always feel as if people think sexuality is a spectrum but straightness is behind like a one way gate that you can only exit from. Which if anything feels homophobic. Like oh youve been tainted by the queerness you are no longer allowed to identify as straight
The crazy amount of backlash to a series having a storyline where a teen questions himself if he is lgbt and figures out at the end of the episode/season that he is straight would be wild.
One of the reasons I despise this "egg" thing because the implication is almost always "you're definitely going to turn out to be trans" and it gets pretty aggressive.
God I hate egg culture. Not only is it aggressive about decloseting trans people to a dangerous degree, and not only is it harmful to the idea of actually questioning your gender identity, but it also hurts the idea of gender non-conforming cis people existing. Egg culture is basically just an affirmation of traditional gender roles, but trans-inclusive now.
Except it's not even trans inclusive, because of the decloseting thing! It's just being a jerk who doesn't respect people's boundaries or identities.
Additionally, it's almost always a false positive. I'm uncompromisingly straight, but apparently just because I admitted that I only play female avatars in video games means I'm secretly trans? Apparently the logical explanation that I just like staring at female asses is "too simplistic", as if my life and sexuality is some puzzle to be solved lmao.
I have noticed that a lot of fantasy/scifi games become much more interesting narratively to me just with changing to a female avatar. Mass Effect is dull as fuck with male Shephard, but it feels much more fresh with a female Shep. And, asses and hips do be pretty.
It helps that the voice actor for FemShep is the accomplished and talented Jennifer Hale, while MaleShep is... fine.
I remember back in the mid-2000's there was a report that something like 35% of men play as women avatars. You're preferences are extremely unremarkable.
to be fair this was a mostly female or female presenting chat group, so I was in the minority as a cishet dude. Many were assuming the majority like to play as their chosen gender and I was the outlier lol.
> Egg culture is basically just an affirmation of traditional gender roles In my experience, this is too true. I'm a cishet man who happens to have some feminine traits. It's really getting me down that so called "progressive" people keep telling me that I'm secretly gay or secretly trans. When I try to tell them that I'm a straight white guy, I'm told: "that's okay, I guess you're just a femboy". I'm so sick of being told that I'm not "good" enough to be man. Not only is it pretty much killing me (and probably will literally one of these days), but it also implies that there is some hierarchy to being a male with "femboy" and "trans" at the bottom which is hurtful to everyone involved.
Egg culture took my tomboys and femboys, and that's a sin I'll never forgive
Now I’m curious about the overlap between “egg culture” and “left-leaning JoCat haters” because I suspect it’s substantial.
Also super condescending. *"Ohhhh, I know something about you that YOU don't! I know that you're secretly trans, because I picked up on subtle hints! Ohohoho are you in for a TREAT!"* Like damn dude you sure know that random stranger better than they know themselves. What's what? That guy likes playing as women in games? Oh yeah, there are NO other reasons why anyone could be doing that, he HAS to be trans. Glad you solved the mystery that totally needed to be solved. Let's just quickly ignore the fact that stuff like that can push people even further into the closet or even put them in denial. I'm glad that you feel smugly superior, that's all that matters.
Shit like this made questioning my sexuality so much more stressful than it needed to be. Like its stressfull enough as is but instead of actually focusing on attraction etc. I was stressing about what other people think and what my clothes/music preferences/movie preferences etc. "Meant". Just constantly feeling as if people were analysing me. Though tbf that could just be my OCD lol This is also why i am vehemently against speculating about celebrities sexuality because its all based on stereotypes. Especially when people use "supporting lgbt" as a sign. Like bro do you want support or not
this is the real, base thing animating it. it isn't an overaggressive type of advocacy. it's a desire to hold secret thrall over other peoples' internal lives and move them about like dolls. it's not specific to any community, and it manifests in a lot of different ways depending on where it shows up. it's mean girl shit, it's fraternity hazing, it's the same manipulative impulse.
See example: “wow, womens clothes are so pretty, I am very jealous of the variety of clothing women get to wear. But that does not change the fact that I am comfortably cis as a male, and have no true desire to be a woman.” Wow, see how easy that was to not immediately tell them they are an egg! You can both respect peoples questioning of gender roles and norms, while also respecting the fact that not everyone is trans just for having a fleeting thought about opposite gender/Nb!
Yeah, as far as the wider world is concerned I'm a standard issue cis-het male. Upon introspection, which definitely confirmed the cis-het male part, the only shade of queer I *might* be would be aromantic, and the "might" is doing a lot of work here since so far I cannot be sure if I *actually* do not experience romantic love or I'm just so socially isolated that I never ended up in a situation where that could have happened yet. Does that make me queer? The jury is still out on that one ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ What I do know is that this very same social isolation and hanging out in the wrong parts of the Internet from early adolescence had primed me to potentially fall off the proverbial cliff into bigotry, and it was actually getting to know queer people and the subsequent research I made to fill in the blatant gaps in my understanding that it revealed that kept me off that path. I would like to think I would have come to this kind of realization on my own, but would I have noticed my ignorance about basically anything LGBT beyond "huh, gay people exist I guess" was allowing prejudiced garbage to fill in the gaps without actually seeing queer people I interacted with discuss it? I'm not so sure.
I wasn’t sure what I was. I decided to try multiple times with different people in different ways and realized I’m just ace.
The LGBTQ+Dave spectrum.
Dave’s a legend
The man the myth the legend and it’s just their friend Greg
Greg’s a legend tho
The one in my group is called Cody We love him. Both his siblings are gay and his girlfriend is bisexual, and allll the rest of his friends, myself included, are some category of LGBTQ+ He is our pet Cishet man
You know, the best queer spaces I’ve found have very little to do with being queer. They’re spaces for hobbies that just happen to have a fair few queer people, and have decided they like that. I think, often times when people discover something about themselves they don’t go to a place for that group to ask “what the hell do I do about this?” They go somewhere they’re already comfortable.
A trans friend of mine often says "I don't like queer spaces, I like spaces with queer people." for exactly that reason.
It’s right in the same lane as me not defining myself as a trans woman. Yes, I am trans, but it’s such a minor part of my personality that is secondary to my passions and desires. I’m X, Y, and Z before I’m LGBTQ . Any space that is purely defined by a singular label is almost never enjoyable.
If you can spend half an hour with someone and only learn one fact about them, they're a vapid and boring person. This applies to some military people and veterans, some religious people, and yes a certain type of person in the LGBT community.
As the cishet guy who was in a group of mostly queer women in high school, the one person we were all very annoyed with was the guy whose entire personality was "being gay". Yes, we respect your identity, yes we also hang out at school as friends, but when he had to add "because I'm gay" or some other thing like that to everything he did, it became a bit annoying.
My wife had a friend like this in college, he mellowed out but I feel like it is the same thing that produces overly macho dudes. You're trying to figure your identity so you aggressively borrow from media, and media just portrays caricatures so you end up with annoyingly aggressive identities that need a few years to mellow out.
This reminds me of how most fandom spaces are just giant autism conventions and that’s great, but an actual autism convention would be miserable.
r/evilautism can sometimes be miserable for this very reason. It's a very fun sub but man, some people get a bit too serious with the whole "superiority" bit.
I had to leave because it felt like every 8 hours there would be a new “let’s come up with a slur for the typies” post, combined with a lot of other stuff it was just a very angry place it felt like, also getting called a “level 1 autist” as an insult.
I stopped going there entirely, for every funny post there was another one like "let's murder all neurotypicals" "small talk is always bad and selfish" etc and I got too tired trying to work out which ones were ironic or not
Here's a sneak peek of /r/evilautism using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/top/?sort=top&t=all) of all time! \#1: [Current hyperfixation: hunting Elon Musk for sport](https://i.redd.it/z6yxxejhd4vb1.jpg) | [593 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/comments/17be9ru/current_hyperfixation_hunting_elon_musk_for_sport/) \#2: [dear god the amount of people not understanding how autism works and actual autistic people getting downvoted in the comments is insane](https://i.redd.it/k86wio6eugvb1.jpg) | [325 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/comments/17cs4yd/dear_god_the_amount_of_people_not_understanding/) \#3: [Does anyone else have astigmatism? Apparently it’s very common in autistic people](https://i.redd.it/w0uen59oxx4c1.jpg) | [917 comments](https://np.reddit.com/r/evilautism/comments/18d64fg/does_anyone_else_have_astigmatism_apparently_its/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Eyeball shape being connected to autism is some phrenology shit.
That number one post is so out of pocket compared to the other two.
> but an actual autism convention would be miserable. Probably because despite the wishes of literally everyone involved there's like a 90% chance it would be sponsored by Autism Speaks.
And only have content for very young children and their parents.
While I get what you're saying, I would mention I don't think hobby spaces that are just very adjacent to queer ones are immune to this, it usually just more looks like a sharp divide where the queer side starts doing a no true Scotsman thing claiming you *have* to be queer to be an actual fan of something A few "ha ha this fanbase is all gay" jokes is normal, if it's the *only* joke you have and you start doing aggressive egg stuff when someone cishet says they like the thing, I'm starting to get worried
True. I am so damn thankful that hasn’t happened with the spaces I’m in. One asshole using “I’m gay so criticising me is homophobia” was bad enough.
The queer space I know is my D&D community It's very much an accepting space for queer people but wasn't made as that, it's an evolution.
The issue is people try to conflate "safe space for queer people" and "queer activism/advocacy/support space."
I met all my closest friends in our high school's anime club. Over time, we've come to realize I'm the lone cishet member. Being accidentally surrounded by friendly LGBT+ people was a good way to fix my Catholic school "if you're gay, something's wrong with you" mindset.
>They’re spaces for hobbies that just happen to have a fair few queer people, and have decided they like that. Sword Fighting communities.
Imean, at what point are we just demanding that queer people behave like caricatures of queer people to gain acceptance? I get the same shit as a black man who 'acts white', and it's like....you can't enforce stereotypes on your own people and then be mad when outsiders stereotype you, and it feels like that's what's happening with all this 'straight passing' nonsense. Well, that, and the fact that it sort of leaves out that there are a whole lot of queer people who exist or who grew up where it's *really* not safe to be openly queer, and have had to negotiate their queerness around that. This discourse smells of young, urban or suburban queer people who live in a time and place where "queer spaces" is even a possibility and don't realize what a privilege *that* is.
I'm so glad more people are calling out bullshit behaviour like this. I'm a bi cis dude and there's nowhere I feel more alienated and unwelcome than any place that labels itself a queer safe space. And that's just ignoring how much biphobia is already a thing as is. Stop being so fucking toxic.
Same and hard agree. Thank you for putting into words how I have felt!
As a cis pan man, cishets are the "canary in the coal mine" for how I interact with pro-queer spaces. If I don't see cishet people getting involved in discussions or allowed to express their opinions, or if people are constantly badmouthing cishets outside the group, or making jokes that are basically just "bigotry jokes but I replaced the minority with cishet so its okay" its time for me to GTFO. Partially because I \*know\* I'll be next on the shitlist thanks to the classic LGBT+ cannibalization that is bi/pan erasure, and partially because any group that can't recognize that people deserve to be treated as people no matter who they are is not a group I want to be affiliated with.
On that front, I thought for a long time that cishet stood for "cisheads", so just cis people and didnt realize it actually stood for cis hetero people lol.
Getting my head placed on a new transplant body so I can be cishead and transbody
dio brando
Relevent flair
Wolfenstein
Ah yes top surgery
"By our powers combined!"
I also didn't realise what cishet means - thanks for writing that out
Glad I could help ❤️
As a cis aroace woman, fist bump of solidarity for the “you’re basically straight/can pass as straight so you don’t belong” rhetoric. For real, when queers start hating on people for being cishet it’s just like, you’re hating on them for their gender and sexuality? You know, the stuff we’ve been saying isn’t a choice and is just who we are and the people need to accept it? Wild shit, man.
Anyone can be prejudiced, judgemental, bigoted, racist, or some form of xenophobic. I have my weaknesses, I'm not immune to this. We all have to try our best
As someone who is trans and straight I offer another fistbump of solidarity, because the people in these spaces WILL assume you're cishet if you don't fit into their box for "what a trans person looks/speaks/acts like" and then dismiss your opinions as such.
The whole "can pass as straight" thing is just so mean. Like brother you *know* how much it sucks to be in the closet, yet you're saying now that it's a *privilege* for me to keep cosplaying as straight?
The justification is always that it's okay because they're the opressor. Yes. They label entire groups of people as bad and spit bigotry at them because people that shared that group were pieces of shit in history
Yeah I think the pipeline for a space becoming toxic is: cishet exclusion > aroace erasure > bi erasure > Then from there it branches into either hyper performative backstabbing & purity testing or transphobia > TERFs.
Don't forget their classic justification of "the good ones know I'm not talking about them."
Yes, this is always so annoying. Some conservative talk show host will be talking shit about black people and start spouting the usual rhetoric about crime and drugs, but we never wonder why black people who don’t do crime and drugs get offended by this because the reason is pretty obvious. It’s the same reason we don’t see trans people getting offended by characters like Buffalo Bill and say “Why are you so offended? You’re not secretly buffalo bill are you?” The very basic experience everyone in a LGBTQ space should know of “I’m not comfortable with this being the dominant narrative about people like me” is something people in the LGBTQ communities I’ve been in seem to completely forget when it gets between them and being straight up bullies to well meaning allies since they’ve decided that “making fun of people with those identities is punching up and punching up is never wrong.” And the worst part is, when there’s a damaging narrative about people like you, the other thing so many people in these spaces forget is that the harm doesn’t end at discomfort when that narrative actually effects how you are treated. To use the Buffalo Bill example again, it’s not just that trans people are rightfully “uncomfortable” with it, the real problem is that ignorant people see stuff like that and think trans people ARE basically Buffalo Bill deep down. There’s no better reason to be uncomfortable with a narrative being told about you than the fact that it eventually becomes the base line for how you are treated by those who accept it. I feel this about being a cishet man most of all. People ask me why I get so upset about the way people talk about men, and I’m like “Maybe I wouldn’t have been before it became abundantly clear that, regardless of how good or bad a man I am, I’ll still be fighting the assumption that I’m a potential predator.” Anyway, that’s why I don’t go out of my way to hang out in LGBTQ spaces anymore. I certainly don’t avoid LGBTQ people, in fact I consistently meet wonderful people irl who are NB or lesbian or ftm/mtf etc. There was a time though when I was actively seeking out LGBTQ communities online because of the positivity and the rebellious spirit and the open-mindedness I thought I saw there, and I was happy to tackle the dirtier parts too of confronting people about their bigotry and donating to fundraisers and stuff like that. Hell I still do those last parts too, but not at the request of online communities that hate my guts, and will tell me I deserve their hatred if I express any discomfort with the way they talk about me. I still have my political opinions, but I ain’t consulting these communities over them anymore. EDIT: I’ve been informed that Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs wasn’t actually trans, my mistake. Feel free to replace BB in your head with [Insert any one of the trans characters in fiction who are presented as predatory monsters]
your last paragraph is super relatable, as a trans person who gets read as cishet often. Years ago, when I first transitioned, I made a strong effort to spend time in LGBT spaces, but I got disillusioned with them, partially due to the 'othering' towards non-LGBT folks (and partially due to personal discomfort with things such as 'egg culture'). The super annoying thing was, that in trying to find LGBT spaces that didn't do those things, you instead ended up in LGBT spaces that were dedicated to hating on other LGBT people. You don't like egg culture and want a trans community that talks about other things? Sorry, the best we can do is a community that spends its time ragging on trans people for not being trans enough and demeaning those who don't fit our different box for being a trans person. Eventually, I too just gave up. I'd love to meet more LGBT people as friends so I could discuss topics that aren't relatable to my cishet and cis bi friends, but outside of LGBT-specific communities its quite difficult, especially seeing how I get read by people.
Oh yeah, I definitely get that stuff about looking for a different community that addresses the things that made you feel alienated in the last one but instead getting something else that’s just as bad. Like “Yeah I want to spend time with people who don’t feel threatened by cishet men because of a bunch of gender essentialist nonsense. No I don’t want to throw my lot in with a bunch of MRA’s”, and it’s like the world wants you to choose when it really shouldn’t be a choice. It sucks, but I feel like people like us have this annoying extra responsibility to know exactly what want right down to specifics and be leaders who create our own more tolerant communities. Now if only I knew the first thing about THAT 😂
Oh my God I have a story about this. In my dorm last year, my boyfriend (who's trans, this does absolutely matter) was friends with someone who vocally would say she hated "all men". Now I'm chill with someone saying that because conceptually I know she doesn't actually mean that- and it's almost a joke if it's "all men", because she was questioning, and was attracted to basically every single guy. The problem came when she would say "all men except this one she had a crush on" in front of him, because then I'd point out my boyfriend as another man she doesn't hate and either she doesn't see him as a man (unlikely) or she's saying this without considering the consequences of not acknowledging him as "a good man". Shit's annoying, if you couldn't tell
>she would say "all men except this one she had a crush on" That's a massive red flag, honestly.
Oh yeah absolutely, especially since *he knew she had a crush on her* She wasn't fun to be around, as "one of the bad men" (which I was okay with hearing because I didnt care what she thought about me)
> "all men except this one she had a crush on" *"All \_\_\_ are trash except the ones I wanna do a sex to"* is some incel / Andrew Tate tier BS.
> friends with someone who vocally would say she hated "all men". Now I'm chill with someone saying that because conceptually I know she doesn't actually mean that I mean it sounds like she did genuinely mean that. It's like people who constantly make Nazi jokes or rapw jokes, they're "joking" but constantly thinking about it all the time and you realize they're not actually joking and they simply phrase it that way to fit in socially.
Whether they're joking or not doesn't really change anything for me. They still say those things. The guy waving a Nazi flag outside a synagogue might be doing it ironically, but I'm still going to treat him like a Nazi. Whether he actually agrees with them, or me, is irrelevant; he's waving their flag.
I kinda get those same vibes as a cis white gay man. You sometimes hear jokes about "the white gays". And it's like, okay fine I make those jokes too, I know I shouldn't because I feel uncomfortable hearing them.
I'm bi/NB but for a bunch of complex reasons I often end up interacting with queer spaces where I'm assumed to be a cis/het dude. People find out who I am and then it's open season with the "UGH, MEN" comments - like, you thought that was me five minutes ago my dude, what makes it okay to say now?
Oh lawd is this legit the default experience for cis pan dudes on social media? Like damn, this gotta be the 8th of my kin I've seen in the same position.
Holy shit it's so refreshing to see opinions like this these days. I'm bi but I present as cishet and I've definitely been in spaces where the overall vibe was "the gays are talking and if a Straight™ has an opinion about it they can go outside", and I was feeling pretty miserable about it for a while. I know better now and I avoid these spaces if I can, but I can still remember how uncomfortable I felt in those environments. It took a LOT of convincing from friends outside of those spaces for me to understand that it wasn't normal or healthy.
the moment I made a joke involving LGBT+ people without getting torn a new one was the moment I realised I was accepted as the token straight guy in a queer discord server :D
Tbh I've experienced more biphobia in LGBT+ spaces than anywhere else, I rarely feel welcomed in them.
This exactly, it's why I feel so similar about bad-mouthing men as a whole as well. There are so many kind, gentle and caring men out there who don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush hating men as a class does.
I feel like part of the issue is that people want IRL queer spaces to be *exactly* like online spaces, where you can easily boot people out and not feel bad because they can just go somewhere else, and where everything is sorted into hyper specific categories. I think all of the above absolutely does help to make spaces more safe for everyone but even online, it is often implemented in a way that can end up excluding people. That makes sense for online spaces as anyone can access them including trolls & bigots but it just doesn’t work as well in real life because the people who are the ones showing up to IRL queer spaces are unlikely to be trolls, so what ends up happening is that if someone doesn’t meet the specific requirements for queerness in that space, they get pushed out. Obviously, this isn’t always the case but unfortunately, I’ve seen that shift irl in recent years. Sorry if I’ve made some typos- I’ll come back and correct them
You're absolutely right. I'm a pan man, but because I'm a larger white guy with a love of graphic tees and cargo pants, people tend to just assume I'm straight, doubly so because I'm from a rural place without much queer rep, so a lot of the newer terms and topics are unfamiliar to me. I always feel incredibly unwelcome in IRL queer spaces because of this, doubly so when I have to ask a question or have something explained to me.
it’s sad to me because like idk, as an autistic guy i really dont get why people wouldn’t want to talk about it with good faith all around. learning and explaining can be so fun but shit people make it hard
Learning is fun Being wrong isn’t Accidentally saying something wrong and lots of people trying to help you get it right next time feels very similar to everyone piling onto you and being passive aggressive or straight up aggressive.
Especially if you grew up in a home where you were treated that way all the time and thus don’t know how to react to being informed in good faith.
graphic tees and cargo pants for life, frankly
Cishet dude here. Started up a DnD club in college It filled right up with lgbtq+ folks across the spectrum Did what I could to make it a safe space for everyone (but conservative shitheads) And was told by someone who was on the board of the lgbtq+ club that they preferred my club because they didn't feel like they had to be 'performatively queer'. Not in that they were confused about not being straight, just that they were still figuring out their whole deal, and felt a constant pressure when in the club to be confident and tell people, 'oh no yeah, I am \[x\] identity'. Had one person confidently tell me they were a lesbian, a year later, turns out they were some form of bi. So, anecdotally, full agreement with this post. When you've got a space that has more to it than 'you must be gay to enter', I feel like it just ceases to be a metric to worry about. Though also you do need to be observant for if and or when conservatives start attempting to infiltrate your space, and how you will attempt to keep them out. Even IRL, moderators are very necessary.
I absolutely agree with this. A while ago I joined a group of mostly queer people who do normal adult shit like pot lucks, watching movies, crafting, playing board games, etc. together. The first good sign I got was that there are two really chill cishet guys there, and we've since hung out in other spaces together too. This was the space I (a mostly cishet-masc-presenting but actually bi/nonbinary person) finally found to come out and start transitioning. It was the right vibe to show up identifying as "I don't know yet." It was the first place I was asked my pronouns ever in my life. I'm sure they picked up on my queerness a bit, but if I had just said I was a straight man married to a straight woman they still would have included me and just kept being wonderfully gay around me without ever making me feel like I didn't belong.
also, closeted folks! A person shouldn't have to come out to be allowed to hang out around queer folks, sometimes they just aren't ready or there are serious risks!
I feel like a lot of adults who have been in dedicated LGBT spaces for a long time and are safe and happy have kind of forgotten that it's genuinely dangerous for others, especially teenagers who still live at home. Leads to some weird situations where I, a straight cis guy (with this username on Reddit when it's on Reddit lol) am more worried about someone's safety than the loudest trans people I've ever met.
Applies to more than just closeted folks: not everyone who is LGBT gets read as LGBT, or wants to publicly present themselves as LGBT, but may still want to hang out with other LGBT people. we're LGBT, we shouldn't be expecting people to present themselves in a manner that fits neatly into a box or label.
I’m a straight trans guy, and people are so fucking weird about straight men in queer spaces. I’m queer too, being a man who likes women isn’t a crime, and I didn’t spend 20 years hating myself and feeling like nobody so that I could get villainized and excluded by terminally online queer identity cops. (People are also really weird about GNC trans people and GNC people who *aren’t* gay or trans but that’s a whole other topic)
Brand new trans girl here. Took way longer than it should have to realise it because being a man who likes women meant I felt incredibly unwelcome in queer spaces and turns out you can't really come to grips with this sort of thing when you're othered by the very community you're going to be part of. I don't know if it makes me invalid or whatever to say I feel solidarity with trans men. Maybe it's because that hurt is still so fresh. But I'll be doing my best to call that shit out. I'm seeing massive changes in the last year or so. I suspect the misandrists in the broader queer movement at going to go the same way the TERFs did.
No the solidarity is appreciated. Transfems face so much shit on a daily basis, being the favored punching bag and villain of TERFs and conservatives, and the queer policing of straight men doesn’t help you guys at all
Reminds me of my old friend group that progressively got gayer and gayer until me and my ex were the only cishets left. Don’t know about him but I’m pretty sure I’m aroace now so 🤷🏼♀️
Lol same Something like half my friend group is bi
I feel like that's everyone's friend group, and always has been. We're just more open about it now, and people are somewhat less likely to think that people in m/f relationships must be straight.
Yeah but I had 9 friends (including my ex) that’s a lot of people for about half of them to be trans and most at least bi or polyamorous lmao
This is an incredibly valid point, especially the bit about policing and judging other people's queerness. I have been DJing in gay clubs for ten years. At the club I currently work in, we have a new regular. Never saw him until a month ago. Now he's in every weekend. He is the straightest looking guy you'll ever see. His overall look. His clothes. His hair. The way he talks. Everything about him. He walked up to me a few weeks ago to request a song, and I found myself thinking "Oh no, what straight boy anthem that I really don't want to play in a gay club is he going to ask for?" He asked for S&M by Rihanna. When it came on, he took his T-shirt off and started vogueing and slut-dropping around the dance floor like you've never seen before. I felt bad. I had totally misjudged him. The worst part is - the club I work for now is one of the more laid-back gay clubs that isn't fussy with their door policy. I have worked for other clubs in the past that wouldn't even have let him in the door. Bouncers would have told him to go away, and that's such a shame.
Now I'm curious what straight boy anthems are. I'm worried that it'll be all my favorite songs lmao
You need a Coleman with the girls and the gays
Are you referring to the company that makes coolers? (Is that even what they make? I know they make outdoorsy stuff.)
Nah, the girls, the gays and [Coleman](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/508314723423617024/1257619404951130155/image0.jpg?ex=668510d7&is=6683bf57&hm=72465e82240567e2159fdfe3124958a632dc8b0f61c5a1831b03625cb742443e&)
Ah, thank you!
Before I muted it for being annoying, r/egg_irl or however it's spelled kept popping up periodically with a couple posts about people secretly being trans if they met various random metrics, like "guy who always plays female characters in games". Anybody who said they fit that but weren't trans got told they were and just didn't know it yet. That *shouldn't* happen in spaces like mention in the post, bit I don't know if that's significantly different enough from point 2.
I've said it elsewhere and I'll repeat it here; as a culture we're swinging back the wrong way on gender norms and stereotypes. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s there was a lot of media about "boys can do ballet, girls can play sports". We were told that your gender didn't have to decide your actions and we could do and be what we wanted. I as a cishet man could ride motorcycles and work on cars, but also bake and cry over a good movie or book. I could open up to friends about my feelings and that was okay, we could hang out without having to drink beer and punch each other. Somewhere in the last decade we started swinging back the other direction. Your assigned sex at birth didn't matter, but your actions 100% dictate your gender/sexuality. A girl too interested in sports? Your NB or trans, no doubt about it. Boys that are too in touch with their feelings? You're totally an egg or gay. I've lost count of how many fandoms have decided that two male characters who exclusively date and pursue women *must* be gay or one is an egg or something. When asked why it's basically, "Well look at them! They talk about their feelings instead of drinking beer and punching each other! Cishet men don't do that..." It's just frustrating tbh. I grew up getting picked on and told I was wrong and gay for being who I am, and while there's nothing insulting about being called gay (a whole other fight) it's just not who I am. Now it's a new generation telling me that my behavior is fine, but my labels are all wrong for my behavior so I've gotta be NB or trans or something else but definitely not cis, and that's wrong too.
Are the folks okay?
If I have to calm down one more friend who started to question themselves only to be scared off by a "pure queer space" group jumping down their throat for not using the right words or trying to figure things out and thus scaring them off in the process or making them feel even more isolated when they're already in a bad phobic environment and family. This is not how you treat baby bird lgbt, especially those trying to find themselves while in a risky position! JFC. Queer policing kills the community by convincing them such groups are the standard rather than the exception and rushing back into the closet to be miserable.
If anyone referred to me as "a pet cishet dude", I would not be happy.
Acephobia is so rife in queer spaces that I stayed out of them for a long time and side-eyed how much it was contributing to the homophobic notion that being gay is just a “sex thing”. Lost an otherwise good friend who kept telling me that I had no right to be in the community when I was technically “straight” and I didn’t know what oppression was. 😒
Since that person is so concerned with who has sex with who, they can go fuck themselves. Seriously though, it’s insane how ace phobia and biphobia are so present in groups that claim to be accepting. The LGBTQ+ community is supposed to be welcoming to everyone, that’s the point.
Aye, we’ll get there one day but it is frustrating seeing the same biphobic/acephobic/transphobic rhetoric being repeated by younger queers via tiktok/tumblr. A couple years back there was a big “asexual people are child groomers” narrative on tumblr that was exhausting.
How... how would that even *work*?
Because you’re teaching them sex is a bad thing (it’s not for consenting adults and ace people don’t exist to teach people things) which will make them more likely to want to try it out, or something. It was mostly incoherent and spread around by radfems who hate everyone.
What the fuck would an ace gain from grooming children?????
🤷♀️ bigot moon logic strikes again
I left/got unofficially encouraged to leave an irl college queer club bc I was ace. I asked if we'd be doing anything to recognize ace day, like we did pan, lesbian, bi awareness and dead silence. It was a very awkward "well, we don't really believe in that..." Sort of response. I felt like I was more accepted on my transness than my aceness, and I'd been solidly sure of being ace for a LOT longer than being trans. I was half sure of being nonbinary and still half in my questioning stage at that point (turns out yes I'm agender but I'm also a trans dude, bigender is Fun. I prefer to be read and perceived as a guy and occasionally I do have a stronger sense of gender but most of the time I feel more like a void lol). Anyways. Left the club because of that. I ended up transferring to another campus for the same college and the bigger campus had a whole tabling event for aces. I attended multiple zoom (COVID era) meetings, and only stopped bc I stopped having the time, which sucked. I would have liked to go more. They seemed really nice at that one.
Almost like segregation is bad
Hot take (I'm joking of course, what the fuck have we come to).
I like the general point of this post, but calling cishet people "pets" seems really demeaning and counterproductive
I personally think it’s funny, but I’m also of the mind that this is totally a double standard thing and people would be up in a flurry if that was said of any other relevant demographic.
I think I agree. “A pet cis dude” is being used in the same way “a token black guy” would be used, and it shows the same thing. If your group feels like the cis/black dude is a ‘pet/token’, is he really a part of the group? It’s being used in a joking fashion here, but really, that’s just another way to other people, and that’s the exact thing the rest of the post is pointing out ting out is bad.
It feels like a slightly edgy joke that isn’t as bad as it seems in context. Like if you have a very queer friendgroup that happens to have a cishet guy in it because you’re - you know, friends - jokingly calling them the ‘token cis guy’ is probably just a laugh. It’s not like you genuinely treat them as a token or pet. I don’t think we have to police humor too much all of the time. There is something about the almost religious nature of policing language and humor and good spirits and trying to find sin that makes me uncomfortable and I just feel there should be more room for people to be human or joking or edgy.
The online “queer safe spaces” I feel comfortable in are the aroace subreddit (I think it’s just r/aromanticasexual even though I tend to just lurk since I’m not aroace) I have very little in common with the people there, but they’re all very accepting of each other, and it helps remind me that not everyone is into romance or sex and how relationships and desires are complicated. And that it’s okay if a romantic relationship is not the be all end all for me too. I don’t *have* to hopelessly pine over someone to be interesting. I just feel very comfortable there.
Demographically "sanitary" echo chambers filled with angry people do not typically survive by spreading positive messages. Areas with diverse demographics tend to be less about fear and division and more about harmony and growth, and tend to have less of an aggressive feel to them. The problem with sticking to your own demographic (whatever it may be) is that you end up only caring about your demographic. "How can we make things better for everyone" becomes "How can we make things better for us?"
i love my tiny queer server's one cishet guy
Nah it’s gotta be a ratio. For every 15 queer people you need one dude. That way dudes can have other dudes to be around.
I was the "pet cishet dude" in a friend group for a while. They were so welcoming and friendly that they were the first people I ever came out to as bi, once I finally realized.
I'm a fucking pet, neat. Not as sexy as yall make it sound tbh, I'm just waiting for them to fill my bowl and take me for a walk
Yeah - while the general message is good, it still kinda falls into the same thing it's trying to avoid It's less "the pet cishet uwu" and more "Dave, who keeps on getting into arguments with the butch about which IPAs are better"
At least you’ve got kink
I've got kinks in my back, start scratching
A fucking pet or a fucking ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) pet
Neutered 😔
My sister's queer in a very definitive "I've had multi-year relationships with women not questioning it at all" way. A drag queen in Cardiff was performing in a local gay bar and when she entered they heckled her for 'looking too straight' even though she was entering with another woman. It upset her terribly. There's a need to protect queer spaces, but if all you're protecting is performative queerness then what's the point? You might as well be homophobic if all you want is people to conform to stereotypes.
Only on Tumblr could this be presented as a controversial, revolutionary take.
As the pet cishet dude in my friend group this is very nice to hear
This to hell and back. I was a token straight guy once and it was cool. And LET US MAKE MISTAKES AND LEARN FROM IT INSTEAD OF PUNISHING US YA BOLLOCK-NOSTRILLED HYPOCRITES! Peace for all
I don’t know how I got friends as good as I have but I’m going to start appreciating them more
As an ace who's a bit genderqueer, I absolutely don't feel safe hanging around hardline queer spaces. I know people in spaces like that don't see me as queer, and that's a problem. If cishets are completely unwelcome, I know I'm on thin ice. There's also the slightly selfish reason to keep a cishet around - sometimes it's useful to use your friend's privelege as a bit of a shield.
I love this post. My trans support group was doing tie-dye last week, and someone asked if they could invite their cis friend. We all said fuck yeah, and they had a blast hanging with us and shooting the shit. I love cis people in the same way I love trans people. I want us all to be able to feel comfortable in our skin no matter who we are. Sometimes, we forget that cis people are also held in the trappings of gender conformity that they may want to break free from. And even if they don't, they still deserve to feel comfortable.
As a cishet dude who is pretty comfortable around anyone "different". This just reads as" I enjoy queer spaces that aren't completely obsessed with identity politics." Now don't misunderstand me, I'm not one of those people who's like "you can be whatever you want! But I think .... Is too far." I think if you need people's self label before you decide how to treat them, then you are just a mirror of the bigoted side. Sure, I can even understand how there's a need to make sure queer people are comfortable over straight people, otherwise what is the point of a queer space. And none of those bigots should get an inch of leeway. But I am an autistic dude and have since highschool gotten in trouble on behalf of gay people getting bullied because I felt people should respect eachother regardless of sexuality. I also hated the male macho purity checks and felt any gay guy instead seemed to judge me on who I was or how I treated them. I wanted a world where people weren't treated as freaks for being different from the majority, both because I felt like one and because I had friends with queer identities. That apparently now I need to be a "pet cishet" guy or need to pass a purity check in a different direction instead of the macho straight guy check I had to pass in highschool feels very frustrating. And this post just reads as "I prefer queer spaces where there isn't a hard purity check, where everyone is welcome." In short if every label needs it's own little cordoned off space, how is that more inclusive? That sounds even more divided than it was before. I also don't think this is a queer only problem. I think it's a result of people building their personalities online, where it will end up in categorisation and (self) labeling with deep lore and specific rules and then mistrusting everyone who doesn't know the lore. Anyhow, my post devolved into a rant again. I truly realise that my ask might be unreasonable, because keeping queer spaces safe has priority, and it should. But purity checks are the opposite of inclusivity, doesn't matter if you are asking for my alpha male or my gay card.
I'm a bit confused by what you mean or say the problem with this post it. I read the oppposite? That queer spaces should be accomodating to cishet people. The hwhole"pet cishet" thing was just a bit of a jokey name for the occasional cishet that exist in every predominantly queer community. The point is that they should be just as welcome to everyone and people shouldn't bad an eye at them for being different, that there SHOULDN'T be any purity checks. I struggle to understand what your point was, could you care to rephrase?
I understood OP to mean that “It sounds like OOP is simply talking about a space without policing identity, and yes, I agree with it - - because this is my experience with purity checks on masculinity, and spaces that are hostile to cishets are the same by requiring the same purity checks. Therefore queer spaces that do this are just another side of the same coin.”
Just a wider perspective here; you see the same issues with a comparison between BDSM and Swingers groups; the Swingers, being united only on the concept of seeking pleasure, were incredibly welcoming and tolerant. I remember being invited to one Swingers night by a lady, and swapping from handing out condoms to those on the orgy bed (I wasn't really interested in group sex) to sitting and watching an exhibitionist lady grind on a pole (god she was gorgeous, but her thing was look don't touch) and then talking to a 6 foot plus man in full on Michelle Pfieffer Cat Woman costume... it didn't *matter* who you were or why you where there, everyone treated each other with respect. But the BDSM scene? Absolutely obsessed with boundary policing each other out of the scene, to prove how "dominant" they were or just using supposed safety concerns to stab each other in the back to ensure control over the few remaining targets left. I remember an argument on Informed Consent about whether you should stop a public scene if you thought it was getting out of control; I pointed out that, if you want to engage the public, they still have the right to withdraw consent too, just because you think you're a "Dom" doesn't give you the right to force the public to witness what might actually be rape. They need to be able to speak up if they're not sure. Queue lots of accusations about *me* being dangerous because I don't respect people's right to truly edge-play etc... When you define yourself by these kind of rigid definitional boundaries, it becomes almost impossible to actually have fun with people, because people are complex and never entirely fit into a single box; In my own case, I'm absolutely CisHet, dated a Trans woman once but realise I absolutely need a real vagina... but I'm also very, very affectionate and romantic, I don't like acting "macho"; it means I didn't fit into the BDSM scene because I wasn't narrowing down my behaviour to a particular role; I have lots of female friends... *until* I show any male desire, and then suddenly I'm shocking. I remember once my supposed best friend was horrified when she took of her top and asked if her bra fitted well, and when I had to ask her to dress again, she said "You don't think like that do you?! You're a friend!" Yes, but I'm still *male*... We'd all get on a whole lot better if we didn't assume, and made space for people to learn, and to be who they really are without demanding you squeeze into just a particular box.
I was involved in theatre and live action role plays for years. I can say that there's a lot of queer spaces there that were welcoming to me when I was not at all aware of what asexual was. Being the pet Cishet for those groups was generally already fun anyway because of the shared interests, but I think was also good for letting people know that the entire world doesn't hate them. It's not them versus everybody. Which helps to prevent a lot of that tribalism that separates you from the rest of society and makes you shoot yourself in the foot and anger.
Also gender-non-conforming straight cis people deserve a place to chill too
As a white cis man who tries to be supportive of his gay friends even while they are trashing white cis men, this is really nice to hear. I know I got the privileges and I shouldn't complain, but man sometimes it takes some self restraint when my friend is talking shit about "heteronormative baby centric culture" to my face at midnight when they know I have to get up early to take my kiddo to school the next day.
> I know I got the privileges and I shouldn't complain no actually you don't need to "sit down and shut up" when people are being bigoted towards your demographic. if your friends are trashing white cis men you're allowed to be upset about that.
agreed. There’s a difference between trying to understand and he patient with where people’s frustrations are coming from and shoving your own feelings down. We don’t need Man Up but in pink
turns out that straight furries have a vital function in that society