Flattened Ears

Content warning: References to politically- and racially-motivated violence, and quite a bit of coarse language directed toward gay and transgender people, including a slur which you can probably guess pretty easily. One of the biggest talking points online among all segments of the liberal political population, be they liberal in the modern american political sense, centrist, or conservative, is free speech. So much so in fact that it's become something of a meme among people who either don't know or don't care how terrible making fun of "freeze peach" looks to people who don't have a particular theoretical background to contextualize such statements. I say this as someone who was myself one of those centrists who would always get really conspicuously upset at anything I perceived to be a danger to freedom of speech, and get really annoyed at people who ridiculed these concerns. (It doesn't help that a lot of the arguments posted in response were infu...

One of the hot button issues of the day when it comes to gender and sexual politics is the question of "is it gay for a cis dude to date a transgirl," a topic often discussed mostly by cis dudes who are maybe kinda just a little bit homophobic or transphobic. Now I'm not suggesting that asking the question is in itself a hateful or bigoted thing, and for that matter I wouldn't really use the term "hateful" to refer to most of the people asking; I don't think that it represents some epidemic of people who despise or fear gay dudes or transwomen and want to take away their rights; more so it just seems to be a conversation that's mostly had by mildly insecure straight guys who seem to have a vested interest in not being gay, and the discussion will often center around at least an implication of transgirls as "not really women," intentionally or otherwise. Obviously this leaves something to be desired. Enter postmodern/feminist/trans-cen...