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Forums » Smalltalk » Pride Month 2023

Talk about pride month here. Or just talk about gender and attraction in general, I don't care. I'm not the cops.

Anyway haha how do I gender
I'll start us off with this personal story I've wanted to tell for a while and waited until June 1st because that seemed poignant and I'm very pretentious. I've had this weird anger toward feminine things I could not explain for most of my life. If you hand me something pink "because I was a girl" as a kid, you would probably get what was (in hindsight, very deserved) smol Strob rage about how unfair it is that the boys get all the colors I like and I'm stuck with these because of something stupid like how I was born.

I chalked this up to Feminist Anger for a long time. How dare people put me and others in a box and expect us to perform for them?!

Well... One day, I was noodling around on Picrew with a new character idea. I use Picrew to test out human characters because my ability to draw humans is questionable at best. (And if I'm honest, my animals could use work, too.) And while I was doing that, I kept thinking, "I wish this site made it easier to make girls that didn't look so feminine, but everything I try just makes my character look more like a boy." Eventually settled on something that worked. Picrew is mostly full of anime styles and anime tends to lean femme regardless of gender, but also, all my characters are kids. (This one was 14, meant for a sci-fi setting.) So having them look a bit andro wasn't that bizarre.

Fast-forward to a couple days later and one of my friends is having Gender Wank in our Discord group. They had questions about their self-perception that another trans friend summed up with "Faceapp yourself as a girl and if it makes you cry yourself to sleep then congrats, you're trans." So we all had a laugh, my friend actually tried it for memes, and then 30 minutes later came back with "Oh no, I'm hot as a girl." Anyway, she's got a name and doing voice training now, but then I got curious and downloaded faceapp...

Bit of context beforehand: I don't recognize myself in the mirror. I know what I look like on a superficial level but if I don't know there's a mirror in a building, I will actually get confused and think someone else is walking up to me. It's been a little embarrassing in restaurants, but something about my own reflection has been that of a stranger for a very long time.

Decided to make myself look like a guy. Figured, lol I'm gonna hate this. I gave it a college try though, might as well. And... Yeah, I hated it. Everything about it. Seeing myself as a guy filled me with disgust.

So then I tried it as a girl... Same result. Filled with disgust, and... something worse. Something uncanny and wrong, like hearing some piece of me screaming about how that is not who I am. I had the same reaction to the male alterations but figured that was normal. This, though...

I decided to try telling faceapp to make me look like a kid instead. I play kids enough in RP so I figured, why not? And... I swear I must have stared at that image for 10 minutes. It was the first time I've half-recognized my own reflection in decades.

Needless to say, I had a lot of questions for my friends, which did result in an incredibly stupid argument at one point which ended with my newly-discovered trans friend asking me "Do you think people would choose to be feminine if they had a choice?" To which I replied "No, of course not. Who would CHOOSE to be a gender at all? Why put yourself in a box that tells you how to perform for others?" And both trans people active at the time were like "...Most people identify with their gender. That gender identity is performed for themselves before others, but the fact you assume otherwise means it's not the case for you."

And if I'm honest here, something clicked for me. I'd assumed before that trans or genderqueer people discovered they were trans because they found something inside themselves they didn't see before. But for me, I didn't find something new and exciting about myself. I discovered something I don't have, and more importantly, don't need. It's not some failing on my part to accept the birthright of my assigned gender like it had always been framed, it's... everyone in my life assuming something about me that just is not true, including me.

As for why seeing myself as a kid set this in motion, well, kids tend to be androgynous, and even my adult characters are very andro. I figured it was just because gender is hard to draw, at least without stereotyping it (and I do think that's true) but for me there was always a deeper layer of wanting something I could identify with easier and gender stuff always felt so additive and unnecessary. At least, for my characters. Making my characters explicitly male or female is like giving them wings or elf ears, it's applying something to them I did not think they needed on their base, and I suppose that's because the performance of gender felt that way to me.

I still have no idea what I am, but it's nothing in the binary. At least, not the far ends of it. I like things that are cute, and I think "cute" is more associated with feminine stuff, and I do assume characters are girls if they're cute, but that might just be conditioning. I also assume characters are girls that turn out to be guys when those characters look really cool, based on things like their hairstyle or facial features or whatever. (Like I said, some styles like anime do lean femme regardless.) So 'gender' is pretty confusing all around, at least, to me. Personally, I think it's a bunch of hooplah that means different things to different people anyway and treating genders like our names just 'makes the most sense' to me now.

But either way, something else that has changed is that so much of my anger about hyper-feminine things has left me. I still don't like it, but the reason I don't like it is because "That's not my aesthetic. It doesn't represent who I am. I'm not that. I'm something else. I don't HAVE to be that, but other people can be. Other people are not me. I'm not them. We're not alike in this way, and that's fine." Obviously there are oppressive things with how genders are placed on hierarchies under patriarchy but on an individual level, if someone is performing for themselves first, then I no longer have a reason to feel so strongly about it. I no longer project my own egg nonsense onto it, I guess.

Anyway the TL;DR here is that I don't really care if people use she/her for me. But I don't use it for myself. I actually didn't use that for myself as a kid and a teenager either. I used they/them because that felt right. I adopted using she/her as an adult to try conforming, and it didn't really work. When I started using they/them again, that was more comfortable. I'm probably still more on the feminine side of the spectrum anyway, but I do with I had smaller boobs...


Feel free to share whatever here, curious to see people talk about their own experiences.
Love that rainbow RPR emblem at the top every June. Happy pride month from a pansexual alien gal 🤟 (ps. I dig more than just pans....keep your slow cooker away from me, she won't be able to resist this)
I was surprised (and glad) when I woke up this morning and a topic like this was already created :) happy pride everyone!!
so like... hi, I'm gay! (specifically sapphic and asexual but y'know)
gender? oh I don't have one of those. what is gender. boggles at the concept of gender. etc.
also I LOVE MY WIFE (we are not actually married but saying "wife" is just so fun. it's the best. like she is! love that nerd <3)
I don't really have anything else to say right now, but I'll post again if I come up with anything funny or meaningful enough :)
Aardbei Topic Starter

Alien_Princess wrote:
Love that rainbow RPR emblem at the top every June. Happy pride month from a pansexual alien gal 🤟 (ps. I dig more than just pans....keep your slow cooker away from me, she won't be able to resist this)

I joined this forum during June 2 years ago and it feels weird not seeing the rainbow the rest of the year haha.
SoupGremlin wrote:
I was surprised (and glad) when I woke up this morning and a topic like this was already created :) happy pride everyone!!
so like... hi, I'm gay! (specifically sapphic and asexual but y'know)
gender? oh I don't have one of those. what is gender. boggles at the concept of gender. etc.
also I LOVE MY WIFE (we are not actually married but saying "wife" is just so fun. it's the best. like she is! love that nerd <3)
I don't really have anything else to say right now, but I'll post again if I come up with anything funny or meaningful enough :)

... <3 I hope you two get to spend a long time together.

Also, one of the best things about not having a conventional relationship with gender is that I get to say "dudes like me" without having to constantly correct myself with the mental "oh yeah, 'dude' means guy... as in, male. I'm not one of those." That was stupid. I got tired of doing it. I'm not going it anymore.
<3PRIDE TIME, PRIDE TIME, PRIDE TIME <3

Greetings and salutations, mortals! Just stopping by to wish you all a Happy Pride Month!
To celebrate, here's my (somewhat) new PFP- If you couldn't tell, I'm an asexual biromantic! :D
pride-time.png

SoupGremlin wrote:
also I LOVE MY WIFE (we are not actually married but saying "wife" is just so fun. it's the best. like she is! love that nerd <3)
I don't really have anything else to say right now, but I'll post again if I come up with anything funny or meaningful enough :)

also hello. wife is me. am wife
I love you too, you glorious gremlin <3
AYOOOOO 'tis time for the yearly Pride thread once again! Always a banger to read everyone's kickass lil' gender & sexuality discovery stories, I'm glad that ye good degenerates found yourself, or are at least in the process of figuring yourself out. Cheers to that!

So, uh, compared to last year, I think not a lot changed? I'm comfortable with myself where I am, even more so than last year. I know it's one hell of a privilege to figure meself out so early on in life, but I admit that I do still feel imposter syndrome whenever I see other butches flash by online (but then again it's on Instagram, and that's Imposter Syndrome And Body Insecurity Capital lmao). Anyway, as for label-drop: I'm a masc lesbian! Allosexual & -romantic, as far as I know, and generally Gender Non-Conforming, but I don't really use that to label myself a lot. I just dig masculine things and looks, but I don't consider myself a dude or 'something in-between/something-else-altogether'. I define my womanhood with being masc, if that makes sense? Just a tomboy who gets gender euphoria over finally being able to snip-snap their hair a lil' shorter.

Anyway, 'nother update! I have a wonderful awesome kickass girlfriend now (I wonder how she'd react if I started calling her my 'wife' now heuehuue) whom I've been together with for over 10 months at this point! She's so beautiful and cool and sweet and quirky 'n shit, man, so yo, cheers to turning those months in loads of years. I think she also made me feel more confident about my body (I've really felt your 'I wish I had smaller boobs' vibe, Aardbei, believe me), so that's another plus. Besides, the whole semi-long distance shit really helped me grow as a person too, so there's that.

A'right that's 'nuff 'bout ol' me simping 'bout my girl and talking vague-ass shit about my gender expression. Happy Pride, my dearest web-surfers, I wish all of ye an amazing time & be sure to pop more cool Pride talk into this here thread, RPR deserves to hear all those queer voices yo! 💪💪
y'know, I think it's basically sapphic culture to call your girlfriend your wife regardless of how long you've been together (my straight brother does it too but that started because of my influence)
of course I'm not saying every sapphic person does it or that they all have to do it, but it is definitely a Thing(TM)
SoupGremlin wrote:
y'know, I think it's basically sapphic culture to call your girlfriend your wife regardless of how long you've been together (my straight brother does it too but that started because of my influence)
of course I'm not saying every sapphic person does it or that they all have to do it, but it is definitely a Thing(TM)
Eyyy I'm definitely in favor of turnin' that into a lil' cultural aspect huehueuhehue
Happy Pride Month everybody from your friendly neighborhood (mostly?) ace Crit!!! <3

Yeah I'm still not any closer to find out if I'm fully ace because orientation is difficult BUT it's also not a race so anyone who's worried because they're still not 100% sure, *don't* feel rushed or let anyone make you feel rushed! Life is all about self-discovery and we never end learning new things about ourselves, do we?
My favorite month of the year (& my birth month! Coincidence?). I identify as a lesbian and I’ve been “out” for a long time. But however you identify, Happy Pride!
Happy Pride from your neighborhood Frog!

I've been happily out as pansexual for a few years now but initially it was pretty timidly!
This is a reminder that you just take all the time you need bbs, everyone blossoms differently

And always remember that if you ever need it, you have a mother/father figure with all the free hugs in this ol' frog prince <3
Aardbei Topic Starter

DumboOctopus

My birthday happens to be during pride month, haha. :D
I'm AMAB with an androgynous body, voice, etc., at first I was quite angry that I am not "masculine enough", but then I learned to love my androgynous nature. I met people that told me that it's attractive how androgynous I am, one straight guy even found out that he wasn't actually straight because of me. I think it's really adorable. I still work out pretty often, so maybe there will come a day when my muscles will "ruin" my androgynous appearance, but I don't care, muscles are cool as well! Currently, I think of myself as a GNC guy, but I don't really like to use labels, hehe.

About relationships... I'm currently in a long-term gay relationship, but I don't consider myself 100% homosexual. As much as I am attracted to men "by default", it's still kinda fluid.
Sadly, I can't marry my boyfriend, as gay marriages are illegal in my country, and I don't think things will change anytime soon, as my country is one of the most intolerant ones. The government and media are actively supporting hatred towards the LGBT+ community, spreading misinformation and calling us "perverts" and "sinners". :( But hey, we never know, maybe something will actually change, or (more likely) I will move away with my partner to another country, idk.

Happy pride month, y'all! Not just to all the gays, but allies as well, for supporting us.
Aardbei Topic Starter

There goes all the rainbows.

https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3316a589-0179-4536-be61-44a5909db73c_850x630.png

tfw you join this site in June and now the logo looks really barren at every other time of the year.
Mm... Pack things up? Nah. No, really, not just on a personal level; the city I live in actually moved a lot of its Pride celebrations here to July this year due to scheduling conflicts in June. Between wanting to give other events proper space/recognition (especially things like Juneteenth and the technically-Canadian National Indigenous History Month) and how many events have to vie for use of the limited spaces that can accommodate them, this year they decided it'd be easier to just carry things over to July. Our main Pride Festival and parades were just this past weekend. This was only the second time I've ever intentionally/knowingly attended (I think I might have wandered in without realizing it once or twice before).

My own identity has shifted over the years, and I don't feel like typing out the whole story right now. Instead, gonna focus on where I'm at right now.

I'm genderfluid, though usually I'm either unaware of where my gender's sitting at or it's in some vague spot in the non-binary range (including just plain slipping out to agender sometimes). As I've settled into it more, and grown more at ease with the distinction between identity and presentation, I'm come to treat my gender sort of like feral cats: go ahead and provide it with some food and care utilities, and otherwise keep chill and mind your own business, and instead of it trying to run away the moment it notices you're around, sometimes it'll come on over and chill with you, letting you get a better look at it and stuff. Or, well... them, I guess, since it's not always the same "cat" for me. XD I was starting to with referring to myself as "queer soup" since it seemed like a good comparison to my experiences.

And... that unexpectedly was expanded just this year. Some folks may be aware that I've identified as asexual for a long time now, and some may even be aware that I've been unsure where to actually place myself within the ace spectrum, and that I've also been a bit confused around my romantic orientation - a confusion that has actually grown over the past few years. Earlier this year, I became aware of the term "abro" (abrosexual and abroromantic), which refers to an orientation that works similarly to genderfluid. Those who are abro can find themselves shifting between different orientations, causing them to gain or lose attraction to even the same individuals over time. At any given point, they might be gay, straight, bi, pan, ace/aro... and despite my issues with the lack of clarity around the term's meaning (it's pretty easy to guess at what "genderfluid" means the first time you hear it, but that's definitely not the case with abro), I suddenly had a word that seems to encapsulate what I was experiencing better than just "asexual spectrum" or "grey-ace" or such. And with it, I also realized that "queer soup" fit even better; at this point, I could pretty much just call myself alphabet soup, because I experience at least a little of so many of the letters in the acronym.

Naturally, this comes with... some complications... but right now, I'm pretty happy with being able to call myself queer soup. It amuses me, and I think has all the right kind of vague to pretty accurately illustrate what I mean by it. :)
I know it isn't pride month anymore but I just wanna say: I went to two pride festivals this summer, my first ones ever, and it was amazing! Plus a lot of the people I care about were there <3 :3 I wore my pride flag like a cape and got a shirt with kitties in space shooting lasers. And my brother and girlfriend got matching rainbow ponchos XD
also I've realized that my previous statement, saying I have no gender, isn't quite correct. It's more like my gender is a strange fuzzy creature that only sometimes comes out of hiding, and usually even then it only pokes its head out from a random corner. But I'll just leave it in peace, let it do its thing, feed it crumbs, and play silly songs for it :)

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