this post is just a personal update but yeah! after many years of questioning some things about how my body works, talking to a gynecologist, figuring out stuff. i do think this term makes sense for me. i don’t have any specific diagnoses and i also don’t feel it like going into explicit detail about my body, but i’d be considered on the agenital spectrum.

i’m undoubtedly extremely privileged, largely because i grew up in a safe environment and was exposed to a lot of queer & sex positive information early, which has made my congenital variations much, much less of a stressor in my life than it would’ve been otherwise and could potentially be in the future. but it still has been a source of confusion and something that plays a major role in, not all, but some areas of my life. I am not sure I ever want to seek treatment for this and even if I did, it would be something I would have to keep up for a long time for it to work. which is just a lot of effort for something I don’t really care to change. and so it’s just something that I live with quietly.

this doesn’t make me an expert on intersex issues, and I’ll still defer to people who have been much more regularly impacted by intersexism as the authority on intersex issues. don’t treat me as an expert or representative of anything. but i wanted to share because it’s just. a quiet resolution to some things in my personal life, and it definitely influences how i understand to my body, my gender, and my sexuality. so. happy winter’s solstice everybody !

i really do think that the whole “girls are allowed to do boy things but boys arent allowed to do girl things” trope is genuinely patriarchal propaganda. not in the sense that everyone who invokes it is malicious or even that they are never describing real dynamics. but the fact that it is repeated over and over and over despite being blatantly provably false, especially in feminist & queer contexts where it should be the most obviously false? its misogynistic & transphobic propaganda.

btw “wanting to be seen as desirable by men” is not inherently a sign of internalized misogyny. it is in fact normal to want people you are attracted to, to be attracted to you. if someone is attracted to men & wants men to find them attractive, that is entirely normal.

the reason it is often intertwined with internalized misogyny, is because for many people who are seen or see themselves as women, “being desirable by [cis] men” is a priority akin to food and shelter, something they revolve their entire identity and self-worth and life plan around, oftentimes to the extent that they don’t even fully understand their own desires and if men are even a part of the picture because the impetus to be desirable comes before their desires were fully expressed.

similarly, “decentering men” is not about never having a person who is a man be a major priority in your life. the problem with “centering men” is that it is intended to describe how people who are seen or see themselves as women, again, are coerced into constructing their entire sense of self and life plan around their current or future husband/sons/brothers/father/etc. with the implicit assumption in themselves & the men in their lives that it is natural and normal for them to prioritize their male loved ones over anything, including & especially their own personhood and wellbeing.

i think it is actually quite important to be clear & nuanced about these pop culture feminism phrases, because they can very easily be part of the slip n’ slide into heteropessimism and female separatism, which are not only deeply unhelpful and generally quite racist, but also serves to drive away many women who need feminism the most because they feel like feminism demands a disconnection from their partners and children and family and friends who are men, and/or that their desires are innately wrong, which obviously is not going to be conducive to them developing a feminist consciousness.

watching a video on dr phil & my thoughts: 1. everyone get more psych-critical NEOWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and 2. if you work at the Vulnerable Child Torture Camp im sorry but im not gonna be super shocked or saddened when one of the vulnerable children being tortured kills you.

i feel like what is often read in transmascs and lesbians as a lack of care to police the boundaries of womanhood/femaleness is really better explained by trying to understand the patriarchal need to control not just people classed as women, but what can even be considered deviance from that class. this is not yet a fully formed thought but. something something the way the public sphere is masculinized and the private sphere is feminized. the way that the policing and punishment of deviant masculinity is made a public spectacle, while the policing and punishment of deviant femininity happens whenever possible behind closed doors. the way that queen victoria didn’t want to enact a law banning lesbian sex because she didn’t want to publicly admit it happened. the way that bodies perceived as female go understudied and health issues ignored, the way intersex variations in such bodies go ignored unless it causes issues with fertility or having vaginal sex with a penis. this is not a hard binary to be clear, just general trends, but still important to consider. there is a sense that the patriarchy wants everyone to know what it looks like to fail at being a man (creates a culture of scarcity around manhood) but it very much wants to restrict and control how we are able to conceive of failing to be a woman. it’s quite literally unspeakable! and people mistake the silence for absence constantly