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June 29, 2012
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“I’m so tired of this ‘No Male Role-models in Brave’ shit.”

quixoticandabsurd: 

So tired of it.

Because seriously, nobody batted an eye when I was little and walked out of the theater after seeing Toy Story proclaiming, “Woody is so cool! I want to be just like him!” Nobody cared that I was a little girl looking up to a male character. Not a single person would have been upset if I wanted a Sully toy, or if I admired Simba more than Nala. No parents said to their daughters, “No, I’m not taking you to see Up! because there’s no females for you to look up to!”

Because as long as it was men being awesome, parents decided that our kids could see through typical gender stereotypes. They decided, “my kid can learn something from this film even though she is a girl and that character is a boy.”   But as soon as the roles are reversed everyone is up in arms about it. Well that’s nonsense. Because if you’re really not a sexist, you’ll realize that it’s just as fine for your daughter to like Finding Nemo as it is for your son to like Brave.

So get off your sexist pedestal, stop complaining, and take your son to see Brave. And hope to all that is holy that he learns something from it…like how to fight against the current patriarchal system. Because he sure as hell isn’t going to learn that from you.

Nailed it.

Brave sexism feminism Toy Story The Lion King Monsters Inc. Finding Nemo

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May 29, 2012
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Is He Checking Me Out, Or Just Staring At The Freak?

While cis girls, throughout their socialization and lives in our culture, internalize cultural messages about ideal womanhood as a demand of what they need to be in order to be considered valuable, desirable, good women, they have the comparable “advantage” of at least already being girls / women (or at least already having that assignment). Trans girls, though, are subjected to those same messages but internalize them as what is required to manifest womanhood at all. We’re swimming upstream against our gender assignment, and if THAT is what “being a woman is all about,” THAT gets internalized as the standard we need to live up not simply to be loved and valued, but in order to simply be read and perceived as ourselves. In other words, while cis girls internalize it as what they need to be in order to be good girls, trans girls internalize it as what they need to be in order to be.

This ends up creating a whole lot more existential urgency in a trans woman to live up to the cultural standards of womanhood. For us, the question driving our self-hatred and self-consciousness over stupid things like our body not meeting arbitrary-cultural-standard-of-beauty isn’t as relatively easily conquered as the desire to “fit in” or be “good.” It’s instead driven by the pressing need to exist, to be embodied, to be seen by others and understood as who we are rather than who we aren’t.

The whole thing is worth a read.

via artemissian: kiriamaya

transgender feminism femininity