queerness

The Definite Article

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Right-intentioned as it is, you can tell that an over-enthusiastic cis dude wrote the gender stuff in the star beast. I don’t begrudge it, he’s trying, but in particular a trans person would not have written that “binary” business the way that Davies did. It feels… a bit much.

There’s a shade of this positive othering going on. An exoticizing of the trans experience, in effort to elevate it and say, “Actually aren’t the transes ever so magical and unconstrained compared to us? Isn’t it lovely when you think about it?”

I see what he’s doing, but—😅

It reminds me of how, in escaping overtly malevolent cultural stereotypes, other marginalized peoples are often cast as these mystical seers, portals to a hidden world or another level of consciousness, for the “normal” characters to consult and regard with deference.

I mean. Davies’ heart is in the right place, and this is clearly his attempt at positive propaganda (as he has stated he fully intends to produce), to counter the toxic cultural and political forces that are making him so righteously angry. I appreciate that. It’s important work.

Normalization, this ain’t quite, though.

Trans people are just people, yo. “Transness” is something imposed on us by a society that insists on controlling everyone’s lives and bodies. I’m just a girl, one who’s a little fucked-up from decades of being forced to pretend I wasn’t.

I am of course special and mystical and wonderful in other ways, but those are individual to azurelore. They’ve nothing to do with any circumstances outside of my control that led people to project a lifetime of nonsense onto me because of what my genitals happened to look like.

I am all about the positive propaganda, Russell. I’m here for whatever raging anarchist screeds you have in store. Glad to see the show weird and progressive and passionate and curious again.

Just, maybe consider letting a trans writer handle trans characters and themes for you?

Never Not Queer

  • Reading time:5 mins read

With the end of my voice lessons, and the sudden nascent social need that followed, I followed my therapist’s advice and did that local trans Zoom meetup thing. It was… weird, and awkward, but I guess it reached a sort of equilibrium by the end. I don’t know if this sort of a thing is for me. I feel so lost in groups like this. Still I tried it anyway. So: bravery points for Azure! Would she have done this six months ago? No way!

I think I feel kind of weird in organized queer spaces, to be honest. I mean, any social situation is going to be odd, but—like. there are elements here, it’s like the Red-Headed League or something, right? Creating a space based on this sort of thing, it’s like, “Hey, you have Gender too? Amazing! Let’s both sit here and wait for one of us to talk!” That baseline of presumed trauma that underlies the queer experience also makes it, like—saying anything is a potential minefield. So that adds this extra layer of awkward. And I am So Very Inelegant in this regard, despite my efforts. So, whee, what do we do here, right? I’ve a notion I might manage better in spaces that are About Something, which also just happen to attract people who are very probably queer. That makes more sense to me.

It may not help that a third of the conversation was devoted to awkwardly sitting in silence while one of the members, logged in from her phone at a laundromat, yelled at someone else in the laundromat without muting the phone. At one point I had to ask, are we all on the same page? When she rejoined the conversation, she’d just start talking about whatever she felt like regardless of what anyone else was saying, and… often one sentence would bear no relation to the previous one, in a way I found very difficult to follow. She eventually left.

Another thing about all this is—I don’t know how to spin this. So let’s just air my internalized garbage, right. I’ve been doing my transition almost entirely in a bubble here. There’s been the COVID, under which I’ve rocked the medical angle. Before that, I was dealing with too much trauma to go outside or look at or talk to people in any form.

I tend to think of myself as, like… moderate, in my transition goals, right. I’m not a binary woman, but I do want to embrace the femme on my own terms. I’m my own kind of a girl. Likewise I’ve only been at this for so long; I’ve got a long way to go. I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, and I’m only ten months into the body stuff. But sitting there in my lace top and skirt, a face full of carefully if ineptly applied makeup, nodding and listening patiently to these other trans women rant and talk over each other about cars, I have never felt so prissy in my life.

Gender is what you make of it. It’s made up social garbage. Nothing matters but figuring out a version of yourself that you can actually like. Hell, I am extremely non-binary by ideology and just my lack of understanding of, feeling grossed-out by, gender extremes and stereotypes. This isn’t about anyone else, really. It’s just about me, and… like. My trouble feeling like I fit in anywhere. No matter how tailored the space might sound.

I’m accustomed to feeling prissy and overly feminine in male spaces. My parents made it clear what a prissy child I was, and punished me for it. My ex-spouse made me feel extraordinarily prissy in the scope of my marriage, and made it a regular point of abuse. Here, though, I went in expecting, okay, there would be some common ground. Maybe a couple of super-girly femmes to make me feel normal, haha. Just left of androgynous.

Well. Guess not as much.

Again, this is just about me. Other people can do whatever, and it’s all valid. I just, it’s so hard to find a space that makes sense to me. I was so clearly the odd girl out here. as is ever the case. It just felt particularly extreme last night. Which is the last thing I expected, the last place I expected to feel that way. I’d mention some of the things I’ve been doing just for my own sake, to support my ideas about myself, and there’d be this collective shrug. “Yeah, I don’t really see the point of that.”

Then back to, like. Sports.

So, oh well. I need to get it in my head, I guess, that nothing is ever going to be set up for me. None of this is my world. Every little thing I do, I need to put it together myself from first principles or it ain’t gonna work at all and I’m going to come away frustrated, lonely, and miserable.

So when we come out of this pandemic… I guess it’s time to get building.

The Long Game

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Lady Cassandra O’Brien feels like she should bother me more than she does. On principle she’s… not great, right, but in practice it’s hard to even frown that hard. The trans element is misjudged, probably. but I don’t see it as malicious. I know Davies has readily evolved as he’s learned, and admitted his past limitations.

There’s also this thing with progressive transgressive humor, right. You start by making a joke about something, someone unmentionable. The transgression isn’t in demeaning the unmentionable; it’s for acknowledging it. admitting to an uncomfortable world that it exists. Making it a joke gets it in the door at all. When later that existence is normalized such that we’re not discussing validity and rights and compassion, the initial jokes can come off as cruel and insensitive—the sort of thing the regressive sort will latch onto, to try tear down what legitimacy has been built.

If you keep moving long enough, any landmark that once was a step forward becomes a step back. But that marker, its inherent value isn’t gonna always sit in relation to where things are now.

Doctor Who came back 15 years ago. Davies is an angry, militant anarcho-humanist. The offhanded trans joke with Cassandra was probably tasteless then as it would be now, but all things considered to me it doesn’t read as mean-spirited. Kind of the opposite, weirdly; it’s in the spirit of, can we get away with pushing the window here? If we make it a dumb joke, just maybe! This is in contrast to some other things one could cite, like the dialogue in any given Toby Whithouse episode—or, you know, Gareth Roberts. As a person. I know how Davies’ mind works, at least in creative terms, and so try as I might to disassemble this, it’s… fine?

That angry queerness is what connects 2005 Doctor Who to the last time the show was regularly broadcast, and in some ways back to its anarchist, marginalized roots. If we’re gonna get prescriptive, this is to my mind the mode that the show should be working in.

With the Cartmel era, Ace of course is meant to be… bi at least, if not finding her feet as a lesbian. And then serials like The Happiness Patrol, well. For those outside UK queer circles, section 28 may possibly not mean much in 2020, but it’s no accident that this tale of the state suppression of public displays of melancholy—everyone is compelled to be happy all the time, right—hits at the exact moment as legislation banning public displays of, depiction of, discussion of, homosexuality. Under the terms of that very law we can’t talk about how it’s illegal to be gay—but illegal to be sad? Just reverse the polarity and the censors will never notice. Then we can paint the TARDIS pink, and fill the story with glitter and candy—

Or… by 2018 standards, I guess we can rescue Amazon from the evil labor organizers so that society doesn’t collapse without its cheap merchandise.

The McCoy era of course deeply informed Davies. The 2005 episode, “The Long Game,” is based on an old spec script he wrote at the time for the Seventh Doctor and Ace. If you reach back, there is sort of a long predecessor to The Happiness Patrol in The Macra Terror—my sometimes-vote for maybe the best story of the Troughton era—which itself is a story Davies referenced at his best and most bonkers, in “Gridlock.”

Which, speaking of trans jokes, is a word that… I just… misread as another word entirely.

Basically, Doctor Who should be batshit and earnest, and it needs to have something to say. My mind so often reels when people assert the opposite, as with the popular fan response to Ghost Light, In that story, Ace gives a haunted monologue about a formative memory of a hate crime she witnessed against her friend. Apparently that whole scene, and by extension the serial and the era in general, is prime cringe because Ace references “the white kids” when she herself is white. “The white kids firebombed it!” the fans will chuckle at each other.

The same fans who think the one flaw in Talons is a shitty giant rat puppet.

(Which is, incidentally, the very best part of the serial. It’s so charming!)

It was such a good thing for this fandom when all the teenage girls began to rush in about 15 years ago, terrifying the aging-out middle-class white cis dudes. And that’s who Davies brought to the game. That’s who he wanted. That’s who he knew would make a difference.

Davies was right. For its own health, the fandom needed a massive change in its gender makeup. It was a Big Trans plot the whole time. His long game, if you will.

Appendage

  • Reading time:6 mins read

Seriously, how did I go over 41 years without breasts? How is that a thing that happened, where it never occurred to me, hey, something’s missing here? I know these things are sexualized in this culture—and I squeam at sex stuff, including words and basic ideation, when it involves me—but, like, that’s not the point of them, either biologically or in regard to why I’ve been going so mental about this lately.

It’s just, imagine suddenly having hands after never thinking about them much before. Boobs aren’t quite as versatile, but there’s this element of, oh, holy shit, that’s it; we’ve got it now. How did I not understand that a piece of me was missing? (Two pieces, I guess?) Now it’s just so obvious.

Have you ever met someone and immediately you sort of forget you didn’t grow up with them? You feel they’ve always been there, and it’s weird to think there was technically a before-time? It’s that, but with an actual physical piece of yourself. This is rewiring so much, so quickly. There’s so much “oh.”

I am literally becoming a more complete person here, and it is so fucking wild, I can’t stop obsessing.

To that end…

I swear to god, don’t expand this post.

Queering the Narrative

  • Reading time:4 mins read

For me, art is a big part of any conversation. The discussion and representation and normalization of often complex ideas in art and media allows people to understand themselves and each other, and can provide a frame of reference, at times a sort of shibboleth for a group.

I think a lot of people who live with trauma kind of fail to develop in certain dimensions until they get the support they were lacking. You have to build up those parts of yourself from square one, once you know what’s missing.

There’s so much queer art out there in every form, and so much more becoming available, so much in the mainstream—and that is going to be crucial.

From personal experience, I figured out my queerness (and identified many related problems in my life) by engaging with a children’s cartoon of all things. Musical artists bring a face and voice and familiarity, and when they get vocal about their queerness they can start some important conversations. Janelle Monáe is a great one right now.

Tumblr, with its heavy focus on visual art and transformative fandom, of course serves as a bubbling pot of queer theory and drama. It’s used as a semi-safe place to experiment with ideas and passions and identities. There’s been this explosion of queer terminology and conceptualization over the last decade, and if you look at the citations an absurd portion of that originates on Tumblr. There are some ugly corners, like everything. But it’s significant—as is the overlap of fandom and queerness.

What with AO3’s 2019 Hugo award, lately fanfic has emerged as a major cultural force on a level not previously appreciated. Its status as a low-stakes garbage medium can often be a way for people to work out their feelings and experiences that can be hard to grasp or otherwise express—and as a format, oh lawd is it queer, almost by default. Going back to the 1960s, even. The basic terminology goes back to desperate queers finding romance between James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock.

From my own experience, I wrote my first fanfic out of desperation at the lowest point of my life—just to latch onto some kind of a creative effort with no expectations, no pressure to perform—and within a few months realized I was aroace and trans. It took someone else reading it and pulling me aside for a conversation to realize what I was saying, and even then I had to stew on what they said. But, I must stress firmly, none of this is uncommon.

Trash art like this is amazing, as it is so unguarded and earnest. And much of queerness is about embracing flaws and things other people write off, and saying, you know what, this is important too. To add to that, online in particular, such a community forms around it. Not just on Tumblr, though yeah, that remains a big launching pad even after the 2018 purge and exodus. There are so many outlets for this kind of a thing now, for people’s subconscious minds screaming to be heard.

Art is a way to communicate so much, coded so tightly, that you can transmit reams of information forming a sort of emotional handshake that no one will get unless they do, and for them the message is, you’re not alone. You are not wrong. We are out here.

Art is like Radio Free Europe for the dispossessed and the marginalized, who are told every day they are uniquely aberrant. It’s a way of reaching across the void and affirming a basic humanity to people who are denied it on the regular. And if that art can also speak to a broader audience, and loop them in on the message that there are other ways to be valid? It just knits us all that much closer.

These communities—sites like Tumblr and AO3—highlight how, unshackled from concerns for IP ownership, art serves as a conversation. Stories and icons and themes return to the culture where they live, where people spin them, riff on them, build on them as tools to understand their own lives and to model for others.

All our understanding of life and the world and ourselves, it’s a story we’ve been handed by the people around us, with a frame selected to encourage a particular reading and behavior.

Queerness is realizing, other stories are available. And we can write them together.

Representing Choice

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So no kidding, the key that lodged in the back of my head and led me to recognize my queerness, some 30 years after it would have been useful to know, is this whole scene here—the dynamics of which we’ve all seen discussed in abstract, right? But to see it dramatized like this, and to recognize these thoughts and feelings so deeply…

  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 17
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 18
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 19
  • Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), page 20
Steven Universe Ongoing #2 (Feb 2017), pages 17-20

This is precisely what I’ve felt whenever someone’s gotten close to me, and these are exactly the thoughts that have always run through my head. Even when the relationship lasts for years, that thought hangs there, coloring every single interaction: how long until they see me for who I really am, and then what will happen?

Like… it took a bit of unpacking for me to understand why I identified so closely with this business, based on what I had come to recognize about myself. The first step was recognizing the aroaceness, as reflected in the early interaction here. That wasn’t too tricky. I had empirical data to work with, and had been wrestling with years of browbeating for my lack of sexuality in relationships, which I just sort of interpreted as queerplatonic situations, without knowing the term.

The transness took a little longer to click, but then it was the biggest fucking “oh” in the world. My pan business… well, that took longer still, and isn’t directly informed by this comic, but after everything else it was more of a shrug. Sure, we’ve gone this far. Let’s just collect all the flags. Why not.

I think what really sells it is Steven’s awful, brain-dead avoidance strategy, which… yeah… followed by, “Maybe, instead, we should talk about what we want to do?” 

What we want to do?

…

Oh.

…

OH.

…

oh?

Like, I genuinely never understood that I had a choice. I thought I just had to play with what I was dealt, go along with other people’s expectations for me. When people gave me an ultimatum and told me we couldn’t be friends anymore unless we changed the terms of our relationship and did things I didn’t feel comfortable doing, I had the option to say no, you go coerce someone else. I’m fine here. I didn’t have to actively suppress everything I was in order to make other people comfortable all the time. I didn’t have to deal with abuse. I didn’t have to be who other people wanted me to be, and were angry when I wasn’t.

The autistic masking sure as hell plays into the above as well. like, there’s always this anxiety in the event one manages to “pass” that one is just working one’s self into a bigger and bigger problem, so that when they notice the truth, some real shit is going to go down.

“… what we want to do.”

Like, that kind of shook me. and for several months after I stumbled over the comic, I kept dwelling on it, putting myself in the place of Stevonnie, making analogies to all these scenes from my own past—thinking, what would I want to do? What do I want to do now? Does this apply in a real way? Is it too late? Do I have choices? What are they?

It turns out, yes. I had choices. Choices that I didn’t know enough to make. And then, I did.

Now here I am.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So much of my life takes a different focus when I understand it’s not my responsibility to convince bigots that I’m human. It doesn’t matter who they are, how they may be related, what leverage they may carry over me. They were always wrong. And I survived, and I’m here now.

It was they who failed me, not the other way around.

How the Right Ignites the Left

  • Reading time:4 mins read

Just so we’re clear, the Bow business was not great. Not malicious, it would seem, but just so very Dumbass White^TM, in a way that can only go unchecked if there are no Black people in the room. Everyone concerned seems aghast in hindsight, and so on. Fine. But that’s a legitimate grievance. Everything else about the livestream, though, and the online firestorm in response? It’s in such intense bad faith, and in such a specific familiar way, that I can’t help but wonder.  

There are a few things that precede these events, you see. Not long before this livestream, Noelle came out as non-binary—in some puttering, early, confused capacity, as one does. (Speaking from personal experience.) They also began to express they may be neurodiverse. And then they had a long, long interview with Rebecca Sugar, where the two of them compared notes. As it turns out, Double Trouble was… sort of, in part, a self-insert character. Stevenson had been thinking about this character for years and years, and using them as a way to work through some things before they really understood why.

Up until all of this, Stevenson was held up as some bastion of progressive showrunning. But after this series of revelations, we see baseless accusations of lesbophobia (?!?!), of ableism, and of creepy attitudes toward non-binary people.  

You see how this works, right. It’s all great to talk about marginalized identities until marginalized people start doing the talking, at which point everything they say comes under the most intense scrutiny. When Noelle came off as a normal white lesbian girl, they were largely free to talk about whatever. But now that they’re exploring their gender identity and neurology, and revealing how much of this stuff was actually personal—and that they’re on good terms with, comparing their own work to, the last person to take this dark turn toward the margins of society? Oh, ew, throw them to the wolves.

The specific way that passing statements were twisted out of context with the worst possible interpretation, it’s like 2018 SU Crit territory all over again. Or just the TERf/alt-right playbook. Not that there’s any real ideological difference. Once you nail a plausible accusation, it doesn’t matter if it gets refuted; the impression remains: there’s something off with this person; it’s best to approach with caution.

Of the scurrilous accusations, lesbophobia is especially pointed and significant. Where it comes from: the host of the stream, when introducing a participant, read off the name of her podcast, which includes the word “dyke” because it’s a podcast by a queer woman about queer stuff. Right? So this gets abstracted out to, THE PRODUCTION TEAM USED THE D-SLUR. Which by metonymy gets translated into Noelle Stevenson in particular. Which is… not what happened, and just, you know, fucking hell, come on. There’s no good-faith way you could come to this reading. 

What’s important is why we see this bizarre frame. It’s important because Stevenson just came out as non-binary. To emphasize this, there’s a similar kind of misrepresentation to suggest that the production team was intentionally creepy about Double Trouble, casting them as sort of a predator. Again: Double Trouble is Noelle. (Sort of, partially.)  Similar story for the purported ableism, in regard to Entrapta’s neurology, etc., when Stevenson is also apparently neurodiverse. 

What this framing is trying to assert without saying it directly is, okay, Noelle is creepy, deviant, and lesbophobic. And the Bow thing, which sucks and is real, comes as a convenient wedge issue so that people don’t examine the other claims too deeply. It’s a perfect storm to try to take down a gender traitor, basically. 

Support Strikers

  • Reading time:4 mins read

So here’s a hot take.

The King of Fighters has always carved out a queer-friendly space. It has an enormous cast, defined more than anything by personality dynamics—representing a huge array of gender expressions and unconventional relationships. The team dynamics in this series are akin to found families. With a few exceptions, no one in KoF is ever fighting alone. Personal support systems are the norm.

Of the fourteen main games in the series, The King of Fighters 2001 is easily the queerest—with ’99 as closest runner-up. (That whole K’/Krizalid storyline sure is something!) Those bookends to the NESTS saga (the second story arc in the series, with KoF 2000 in the center) are the most I-don’t-give-a-fuck, expressive chapters in the series, unconcerned with expectations, with fitting into forms. Instead they spend their time grasping and scraping the margins to say what they feel they have to say, even if it comes off as broken or ugly or annoying.

The preceding Orochi saga had been, to a large extent, about living up to roles and expectations foretold centuries before one was even born. There are queer dynamics within that, but what’s astounding about the NESTS arc is how it dumps the rest and redoubles its attention on those elements.

There is something so essentially queer about the NESTS saga, coming up as it does to shred everything that came before, oust the main character, and refocus the series on this new sci-fi story about finding identity that’s been systemically stolen.

The team dynamics, which define KoF as a sereies, becomes all the stronger in this period, with larger teams allowing a more complete and varied support system and more potentials for character interaction. Part of the story progress is watching the likes of K’ slowly assemble his crew—which takes almost-full form with 2001.

All of the principle cast, during the NESTS years—it’s about discovering who they really are apart from how everyone else views them and all the burdens they carry. Even Kyo and Iori getting dumped from the burden of series leads for a while to focus on each other fits this.

2001 is the least fuckful of the trilogy, both in its astounding-it-even-got-made design and its story and aesthetics. It is what it is. The characters are embracing who they are, the good and the bad. The art isn’t trying for gloss: it’s as straight-up expressive as it’s been. I am on record for feeling the most affinity with this game, out of all of them. I think I’m developing a better handle on why.

King, the most stable presence in the franchise—so named for her gender ambiguity in her first role.

Also, on the EDM/queerness axis, the NESTS era has the best music in the series. Which is saying something, considering the series is known for its music almost as much as Castlevania or Mega Man or Sonic. Into which I stubbornly rope the 2001 AST, yes:

Though given their polish, ’99 and 2000 are a bit of an easier argument:

I mean. If you’re gonna have a queer-coded sci-fi revamp, might as well go full EDM, right?

And Christ, if we’re talking about associated emotional issues, the level of angst the series rises to in this arc:

The Presence of Absence

  • Reading time:3 mins read

It sounds dumb compared to what so many more-clearly marginalized people have to go through, but I’m starting to understand how many of my problems in life have centered on misunderstanding or suppressing or denying my absence of sexuality. So many bad decisions.

I kind of resent having to define anything by what it isn’t. Like, I’m not an atheist; the concept of religion just doesn’t apply to me. By similar logic, I don’t know that I’m comfortable defining myself as asexual, as such. I just… don’t want to play that game, as it turns out.

So many of my meltdowns in life have come out of trying to force the issue for one reason or another. I’m really not made for that kind of a relationship. I don’t understand its demands, and frankly they creep me out. I think I have some serious body issues. I need distance.

And so, there’s this kind of a built in wariness that I carry around with me. As long as I can remember, I’ve… kind of been afraid of being, er, physically imposed-upon. I think on some level most of my intimate relationships have been an attempt to find a safe place to hide, so I don’t have to worry about anyone else imposing on me. I’ll just have the known problem to deal with, and maybe that’s something I can manage.

What’s kind of frustrating is that as a general rule I’ve always found women way cooler than men, but it seems any social situation ends up kind of like this. So no matter who I’m close to, I wind up feeling on some level unsafe.

I just want to be left alone, basically. But, in this culture it’s hard to resolve one’s self to that. There’s this association that people make between sexuality and basic personhood, and I find it… gross? And sad, and insulting. And small. Which isn’t to diminish what anyone else cares to do. But, it’s all very… loud.

I don’t know. I think it’s just taken a long time for me to realize how much of a problem this is, my trying to play this system that I don’t feel I really fit into. It’s done a real number on me over the years.

I’ve always felt a sort of adjunct affinity for queerness, like a familial understanding. Not because—I mean, I guess I don’t really get any sexuality, very much—but because of the sense of expectation and pressure. The misfit factor. Like, awesome; you go define your life. And, like, always being told you’re playing the game wrong must be far more problematic than this expectation that you have to play at all. But, I get it, you know. Big sympathy there. It’s all on a spectrum of being wrong, just because you exist. I’m way on the shallow end, but.

Anyway. I guess through trial and error I’m starting to figure out what I’ve been doing wrong in life. Keep this up, and maybe I’ll stumble onto something right for a change.