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  • ashinadash [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    5 months ago
    Trans Mega, but I terrify you with nonsense

    The only thing I have desired in my adult life is to talk about books I like with people. How hard can that possibly be, right?

    Dante Must Die Mode. It seems like 95% of the time I’d be more productive holding people up at gunpoint and treating it like an interrogation. Sucks to suck; the precious few times I’ve been able to do it, that shit’s like a drug. Please, I beg of you, we can talk about this forever, I have headcanons and fundamental misunderstandings!

    Something that’s been rolling around my head for years now is that, in Nevada by Imogen Binnie Orange Book Bad, there’s this one bit where Maria Griffiths in her narration observes some total bullshit about genderqueer identities, which is not epic and I’m actually gonna cw for transphobia:

    QUOTE

    Not to mention, if you are a total baby panda at Internet communities asking, like, How do I get hormones, Internet trans women are very nice: they will tell you. But when you ask a more complicated question, like say, how do you resolve a genderqueer identity with a female identity when it seems like acknowledging the restraints of female identity and then bursting them doesn’t make you no longer female, just empowered, and therefore is genderqueer a privileged identity that’s mostly available to female-assigned people with punk rock haircuts, in college, everybody gets all butt-hurt and you get in trouble.

    ENDQUOTE

    Wow, I should post literal Nevada quotes online more often. This is fun!!

    Anyway on its face this is stupid for a whole fucking mess of reasons I’m pretty sure, like Orange Book Bad itself references Gender Outlaw once or twice, (slightly dimly, fwiw) and this kind of read is noooot compatible with Bornstein’s read of gender as a class system. Ah yes, a non-cis identity is privileged and only available to one assigned gender…? Fuck off with that. It’s sort-of consistent with Binnie’s short I Met A Girl Named Bat in 2012’s The Collection as well, which uses “both genders” once, maybe just for the sake of being an asshole.

    The thing is, I have constantly wondered if I am missing something, or this is a bit or whatever, like an inside joke.This read feels kind of fucking stupid, but I don’t have any other evidence by which to prove or disprove its shittiness. You can also observe that most people would rightly not bother, and dismiss it as a dogshit take. I’m slightly biased though, if Orange Book Bad is shitty, I desire to know exactly on what level and why.

    Another factor is that someone could crawl out of the woodwork and be like “I lived next to a trans girl who said she was friends with Binnie, its actually a brilliant deliberate example of what an immovably awful person Maria is, Binnie said so” or something like that. I have low knowledge about this specific brainrot subject of books, so that’s a possibility. I only want to understand shit.