Can I refer to you as a genderblob from now on?

YES

TAKE NOTE, Y’ALL

‘genderblob’ is a perfectly acceptable way to refer to me/introduce me

20 March 7 Permalink

V Tech’s Disney Princess Magical Learning Laptop Vs. McQueen Learning…

gothicegg:

feministdisney:

damnitdisney:

V Tech’s Disney Princess Magical Learning Laptop Vs. McQueen Learning Laptop from VTech

Let’s see who can spot the bullshit from the following descriptions:

V Tech’s Disney Princess Magical Learning Laptop toy combines learning and role-play fun featuring every girl’s favorite Princesses. Cinderella, Snow White, Belle and Aurora lead the way to learn letters, letter order, emotions, numbers, counting, addition, subtraction, manners, matching and more. V Tech’s toy laptop includes a magic key to open a secret drawer, a heart-shaped cursor mouse, LCD screen and full working Qwerty keyboard.

AND

McQueen Learning Laptop from VTech®. Shaped like the Lightning McQueen character , and featuring the best-loved characters from Cars 2, this laptop will take your child on a learning adventure featuring 30 activities that teach letters, words, math and logic. A QWERTY keyboard and tire-shaped mouse add an additional element of fun and mimic a real grown-up laptop.

Because girls should learn emotions and manners and because they had to describe what math was by saying “numbers, counting addition, subtraction” instead of just saying MATH.

Now the McQueen doesn’t say “just for boys” but one would assume that because Disney is so gendered, that this would be the “boy” one. The boys get to go on a “learning adventure” and get to learn logic in order to be a REAL “grown-up.”

I spotted out these differences while I was working the other day browsing the Disney merchandise. Disgusting.

Thanks for taking the time to note all that!   I never cover it as often as I’d like but gendered merchendising is always an interesting aspect of Disney to talk about.

Something to look out for.

Also just funny to note via the second to last paragraph, but my youngest kid I take care of was looking through a magazine today at backpacks- some of them Disney- and even though it never says “for boys” or “for girls,” indeed the difference is obvious via descriptions, color choices, and image choices, and she (the child) without prompting said, “THIS is for girls, and this is for girls, and THIS is for girls!”  While pointing at all the “girl” ones.   (which isn’t supposed to be some sort of gasp no way statement for random anons cruising by, just pointing out that children do interpret which things are supposed to be “for them” or “not for them” based on repetitive context clues.)

Everything that’s wrong with the toy industry in one short post.

make it all green and gender neutral

I like green.

Source: damnitdisney

8 February 84 gothicegg Permalink

ok so this is really personal and something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time and might trigger some people in terms of misgendering

In this post when I say “women,” I mean anyone who identifies as a woman, unless otherwise specified. When I say “men,” I mean anyone who identifies as a man, unless otherwise specified. When I say “masculine, I am referring to actions/personality traits that are, in American culture, generally associated with men. When I say “feminine,” I am referring to actions/personality traits that are, in American culture, generally associated with women.

I hate it when hetero cis women say that it’s “such a loss” if a guy is gay, or think that they can “convert” a gay man.

(Same goes for cis men that say that about lesbians, but that’s not the point of this post.)

For a long time I was afraid that was what I was doing, privately in my own head. There had been instances in which I was attracted to gay men, and I was aware that they weren’t attracted to me. I would never try to push my attentions on them. I never made my attraction to them an issue and was fine with having a platonic friendship.

After coming to the realization that I do not identify as male or female, that I identify as genderqueer, I began to re-evaluate these feelings that I had.

I wasn’t upset that these men were gay, I was upset that they perceived me as female. They weren’t attracted to me because they perceived me as female. It felt like a negation of my gender identity.

It makes me want to scream “But I’m not a woman! I’m not a woman and you can love me.”

It makes me want to “butch it up,” take it to the extreme and be as masculine as I can, to divorce myself from the gender identity that others so frequently push onto me. 

I once got into a bit of a debate with a cis-gender homosexual man. He was arguing that trans* people shouldn’t have to have surgery to be considered the gender that they identify as. I’m down with that — not medically or surgically transitioning does not negate what you identify as.

But he was basically saying “Why can’t people just love their bodies as they are?!” Which is kind of bullshit. I brought up the issue of dysphoria, pointing out that surgery, for some people, can lessen dysphoria. He then argued that our ideas of gender are societally constructed and not having been born with a “real” penis didn’t mean you weren’t a man. I pointed out that, while that may be true, we don’t live in a magical world where people don’t judge your gender by your body. Maybe if we lived in that magical world, maybe if we weren’t raised with everything in the framework of a binary gender system, then maybe trans* people wouldn’t feel a need to surgically/medically transition because they wouldn’t have been raised in a worl where people conflated body with gender.

But we don’t live in that world and if surgical/medical transition is what a particular trans* person desires, then there’s nothing fucking wrong with that and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they hate the body they were born with.

I then asked Mr. Cis Male Gay Man if, because he felt gender was about individual identity and not the body, he would ever date a trans* man, pre- or post-any kind of surgery, or someone AFAB that identified as genderqueer.

He hesitated for a moment, said “No,” and then tried to explain that it wasn’t because he didn’t consider these people’s gender identities valid, but because he enjoyed sizeable cocks.

Like any one of my toys couldn’t make a perfectly sizeable cock, with vibrating capabilities too.

While inspecting my feelings about this, I began to wonder why I was so concerned with men invalidating my gender identity. I have no strict gender preference in sexual/romantic partners and while I may have some “types,” a compelling individual will always trump a type. However, I find that I am often attracted to aspects that most people consider to be “masculine” — butch lesbians, skinbyrds, metalheads, white trash boys, leather daddies. But it’s also a very very queer idea of “masculinity” — I love cis men that wear “women’s” clothing, dapper queers, butch trans* women, “effeminate” trans* men, “effeminate” cis men, hard femmes, submissive men, queers of every stripe.

I don’t know.

It’s complicated.

I’m just a giant ball of queer and I wish people didn’t think of me as anything else.

22 January 10 Permalink

I am done for the week! Ain’t got no classes on Fridays!

All my classes this semester are pretty awesome. The only class I have to take, contemporary biology, has a really awesome queer guy in it, Joel, who I am friends with. He has a tattoo of Darger’s Vivian sisters! How cool is that?!

However there were some odd moments, not bad, just… things to think about.

I’m taking psychosocial issues in the LGBT community and it looks like it’s gonna be an amazing class. All the students went around and introduced themselves and said why they were taking the class. There are a few LGBT identified people in the class, but the majority are hetero and cis. Several said that they were taking the class because they planned on being therapists and they wanted to have a better understanding of every kind of client that they may have. Several said they had gay or lesbian friends and family. Almost everyone said that they wanted a better understanding of the “community.”

I had this sudden epiphany — I’m the “community.” They’re on the outside, looking in. I’m on the inside, a part of the group being studied and taught about.

It was a rather disconcerting realization and struck me more personally than when we studied diagnoses in abnormal psychology that I have been diagnosed with.

It’s good that these people are taking a proactive approach to getting a better understanding of the particular that may face LGBT clients but I just felt weird. Like I had snuck in on something that I wasn’t supposed to be a part of.

The other thing was in my psychology of sexual behavior — another class that seems pretty good. Of course, I was a bit riled by the binary vocabulary — male orgasm vs. female orgasm, that kind of thing. Then the professor mentioned that we will be talking about recent studies into the “actual, biological differences between men and women.”

SO WE MEET AGAIN, BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM.

I’m going to make a point to be quite vociferous during those classes.

We were given cards to write questions for future discussion so I wrote asking for discussion of individuals that identify outside the binary.

However, I was pleased to find that the majority of the students in my psychology of the offender class recognized that polygraph tests are bullshit.

19 January 3 Permalink