FREEEDOOOOM!!

… for gender expression

It seems like we’ve taken some steps backwards since then. Men wearing dresses is more accepted now, but only in the narrow confines of being trans. I don’t think Kobain or Bowie ever wanted to be defined as trans, they just wanted to be themselves and challenge cultural norms.

I wouldn’t agree with that wording, it’s more like people see wearing a dress or a skirt as something that makes you a woman (or woman-adjacent). They don’t see it as socially acceptable for a man to wear a dress or skirt not because they think it’s unacceptable but because they see him as a woman, or wanting to be a woman. Trans women aren’t men wearing dresses, trans women are women, who sometimes wear dresses.

The conflict here is that men (or masculine/androgynous enbies) who wear dresses aren’t women and don’t see themselves as such. So other people seeing them as women or wanting to be women for their fashion choices sucks. I agree that Kurt Kobain and David Bowie if they were alive today probably wouldn’t want to be defined as trans. Many GNC people today face hardship because society expects them to want to be women due to how they dress. Although I have noticed that getting better. Egging and Egg culture is way less acceptable these days, and most people in the community can recognize how nasty it is to dismiss someone’s identity and call them the wrong pronouns on purpose. 4 years ago I wouldn’t be so sure of that because it happened so much in queer communities I felt unsafe being open about my gender non-conformity online.

There’s a sort of societal pressure to present as your gender when you’re trans simply because it’s safer and the alternative is often being misgendered and marginalized. it’s also really scary to change presentation early on so early in the transition is when you’ll see many sort of “overcorrect” and go overly femme or masc, but many are perfectly happy to be gender non-conforming, and many try less hard as they get more comfortable with themselves.

There’s also the growing trend of femboys or guys that present more feminine, and I see guys painting their nails more than before these days.

I think a celebrity making a gesture or doing something symbolically is really cool, but at the end of the day the real signs of a cultural shift is what regular people are doing casually, and to me it feels like there’s something shifting, even if it’s slow going and there’s pushback.

PS the trans dress thing sounds sort of accidentally transphobic, but looking at your profile I don’t think that was intentional and is just an issue of phrasing.

It makes sense. A lot of fashion is showing off your wealth. It’s also showing that you don’t do manual labour. When I travelled in South-East Asia, a lot of taxi drivers had one very long fingernail. The accepted reason for that was that if you had that kind of nail, it showed you didn’t do a job that involved physical labour.

I run in circles

Buy it and start small! Debut it for friends indoors, get the validation and confidence and slowly start working your way up to wearing it outdoors :3

Do it do it do it do it do it do it

I think you should do it

Sad bad genetics noises :(

I have long hair, and it’s a major pain in the ass. Even though it’s in a braid 99% of the time, I still find long hairs everywhere. And, wrestling it into that braid is annoying because the only time it’s at all manageable is when it’s still wet from the shower. I can’t get a brush / comb through it any other time.

The main reason I stick with it is that I really hate hair styling sprays and gels, and I think parted hair looks really stupid. So, my choices are either very long and tied back, or very, very short.

Refrain from washing your hair everyday

i think that’s a phase. my hair got fatty when it was 4-5 cm long as well, but that stopped somehow when it got even longer. i guess the body just takes some time to adapt or sth.

Do some research about your hair and scalp type and what products they need in order to thrive. For me that was the key to better quality hair and no more irritated scalp :))

I get what are you trying to tell, but when i talked about everyone getting long hair, i mostly meant men, and how they should be more open to it. Its fine if people want to have long or short hair, but for men specifically, long hair is considered gay in my country, which is unfortunally homophobic, and ive heard stories about boys being bullied and even beaten in schools just because of long hair.

Minimalism was a forced choice at the time

Terrible news champ, when you cut jeans into shorts length you create jorts.

Here’s a helpful tutorial to illustrate my point.

hang out on this godforsaken site for long enough and you’ll see some users still trying to make þ happen.

This is written in the booklet of Incesticide:

At this point I have a request for our fans. If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us - leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.

The question is how do you know Kurt was binary trans or if they would’ve been okay with she/her pronouns? Comments like these are shitty in the way that egging comments are shitty. I have no doubt that Kurt was queer in some way. I’m not going to assume how or make assumptions on preferred pronouns because they’re no longer here to tell us or object to it if they don’t like it.

That’s actually really gross and an erasure of trans people from history. There are a lot of cases now and throughout history of trans people unable to come out but have personal records or accounts from those close to them detailing how they felt about themselves. Saying we shouldn’t suggest anyone who was never out was trans isn’t just taking an unbiased stance, trans people are deliberately and systemically pressured from not coming out and there’s cases of trans people who were out who have their identities erased postmortem. So contributing to that feels at best like giving up ground to people who want us dead and erased.

But neither can we say definitively she was cis. Kurt has gone on the record stating that she always associated more with femininity, there is an early draft of “All Apologies” with the line “let me grow some breasts”, etc.

Assuming that the natural and “neutral” state for historical figures is to be cis is due to societal cis-heteronormativity. Yes, it’s true that she never came out or went on the record saying she’s trans. But she also never called herself cis. Public awareness of trans identity was much, much worse even thirty years ago. So she might just not have gotten the chance. And due to that, we can never ask her.

It’s okay if not everyone agrees with this analysis of her identity through a modern lens. If people think she was cis, or a genderqueer man, we can also never refute that. But I, as well as many other trans women, think that for her the signs are quite obvious. And there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that.

The same is true for a number of other figures, btw. Ted Kaczynski was likely a trans woman and abused by her psychiatrist:

Imagine you had an AMAB friend who gave you really eggy vibes, and one day you decided to start referring to them as “she”. Your friend hasn’t come out, hasn’t even said anything to you in private, but you insist on using she/her pronouns for them everywhere, to everyone they know, against their wishes. That would be pretty fucking gross right?

I’ve both had that experience personally, and I’ve experienced someone I’m close to being posthumously misgendered in that way. It feels extremely shitty. Actually having that person misgender my dead brother and make false claims about how he died was soul crushing to me (that’s an understatement, I can’t describe the grief and rage I felt at that). It destroyed me, I hated them for it, and I still hate them now. Egging sucks and hurts people. When you egg living people it feels shitty, invalidating, it can also feel infantizing and condescending. When dead people are egged, it doesn’t hurt them but it can hurt their living relatives to an extreme degree. It certainly hurt me when it was done to me. I don’t know if Kurt’s family feels the same way. Famous people likely get used to hearing lots of horrible things about their family members and vice versa. I know that for me that sucked, and personally, re-aggravated a lot of old trauma.

​

I actually agree completely that Kurt was very likely trans. But I don’t think it’s cool to loudly and publicly misgender people, no matter the intent.

Also there’s more than one way to be trans or queer. An insane amount actually. One can say someone was probably trans or queer in some way, but it’s not possible to say in what way. Which includes pronoun preferences. When someone doesn’t tell you, you can’t know.

I agree. Egg culture is already shitty as it is. Posthumous egg culture combined with posthumous misgendering is really shitty and I for one hate it. The dead can’t defend themselves against intentional misgendering, and even if you make the argument that the dead can’t suffer anymore, that isn’t true for their loved ones who are still here.

On the one hand, we should always be cautious never to conclude anything about another person’s gender on their behalf.

On the other hand, it’s a lot more than one photo. Kurt’s family found a pretty sizeable collection of women’s clothes and makeup in his home. There are multiple interviews where he talks about feeling closer to the feminine side of the human experience or how he always tended to gravitate more towards having female friends, lots of stuff like that.

There’s also supposedly an early draft of All Apologies - supposed because the document exists but some people contend the authenticity - with the line “Let me grow some breasts.”

None of this is conclusive and should not be read as such, but anyone who has seen someone struggling with their gender is going to have a hard time coming to any other conclusion. Given Kurt’s obvious struggles with self-worth and eventual suicide, it’s hard not to see a painfully familiar pattern playing out here.

I disagree with people who posthumously assign him she/her pronouns and insist on categorically stating he was trans - that’s just as much misgendering as it would be to deny a trans person’s identity - but I think it’s a pretty reasonable assumption all told.

What I find particularly gross about egg culture is that the people pushing it are making the assessment that a person being GNC is either not possible or that they don’t consider it likely. So they just decided that the person must be trans due to dressing as a woman. Which seems problematic doesn’t it?

Yes it is, they, whether they understand what they’re doing or not are essentially using gender stereotypes to guess someone’s internal feeling of gender, under the idea that most people are just conforming to some set of gender stereotypes and ignoring or dismissing the people who don’t conform or care about them.