meme_of_bilitis | I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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Hi, I realise there's no easy way to decide where non binary people fit into discussions of f/f, and I am fine with the rules on those who are aligned with women or men, but what about non binary characters who aren't aligned with men OR with women, or those who are equally aligned with both?

For example characters who see themselves as entirely seperate to the concept of gender, or bigendered characters who intermittently flip completely between male and female.

I think the "aligned" language is wanky.

AYRT

Well yeah, to be honest I'm not a fan as a genderfluid person who feels dysphoric when people insist/imply I must be exactly one of "like a man" or "like a woman", whether using "aligned" language or something equivalent.

But it is a difficult problem, there isn't any neat way to define f/f in a way that includes all non binary people in a clear and logical way. I didn't want to be all YOUR DEFINITIONS ARE TRANSPHOBIC right off the bat in my first comment, and if they can find a way to include characters who aren't neatly male/female aligned in the rules one way or the other then I'll be happy enough.

+1 It's hard to express but aligned language often frames nonbinary people as Woman Lite or Man Lite and invites want on how masculine or feminine someone is.

Practically speaking though I feel like the nonbinary and queer female community have a history of solidarity and an overlap that being inclusive of nonbinary people in a space that is primarily about queer women makes sense to me.

Re: characters like Imperial Radch and Steven Universe gems I feel like we can Occam's Razor and say that even though their understanding of gender is inherently different from our own, from a Doylist perspective we are meant to associate them with the feminine, as represented by their use and comfort with she/her pronouns. Excluding them because of a quibble about what "she" really means is useless.

(just to be clear with the last paragraph i understand that a lot of nonbinary people who don't consider themselves women at all use she/her pronouns, it's complicated! It just feels... More fitting and less disrespectful I guess to consider gems who use she/her pronouns like the SU ones as under the f/f umbrella, as opposed to gems who use a variety of pronouns and appellations in an intentionally genderless way like the Houseki no Kuni gems.

Practically speaking though I feel like the nonbinary and queer female community have a history of solidarity and an overlap that being inclusive of nonbinary people in a space that is primarily about queer women makes sense to me.

Yeah, like...why would we not? No one is required to read or write fic with nonbinary characters here if they don't agree with that, but the lesbian community is my community.

I agree very hard with your first two paragraphs. (Less so with the Imperial Radch assessment, but that's a long-standing qualm that I've basically given up arguing.)

I get that there's no good answer to whether to include nonbinary characters in a femslash meme (or event, or whatever), and I understand both deciding to include them entirely (e.g., femslashex) and deciding to exclude them entirely (e.g., femslashafterdark), but I really feel like trying to include some nonbinary characters and exclude others is taking the worst of both options and inviting a hell of a lot of potential wank.

Trying to hash this out with no examples doesn't seem like a good starting point. What characters are you thinking of?

AYRT
Poking at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_non-binary_characters some characters who feel very much Not Gendered One Way or The Other:

Characters who are literally a male character and a female character smooshed together: Steveonnie from Steven Universe, Davepetasprite from Homestuck.

Characters who have literally zero gender markers, where the writer deliberately leaves it vague whether they're non binary or just a male/female character whose gender has never been stated: Frisk from Undertale,Vaarsuvius from Order of the Stick.

"Characters who are literally a male character and a female character smooshed together"

"a male character"

"male"

I think they're bringing them up as examples of characters who don't seem to fit this meme.

Uh, I think you're not understanding. I don't Honestuck, but Stevonnie is both a combination of Steven and Connie and a separate entity with their own personality. In Steven Universe, fusions are greater than the sum of their parts

AYRT

In case it's not clear: I'm not asking if Steven/Connie would be relevant to this meme because that's male character/female character, which is clearly het.

What I'm checking is: would Stevonnie/Sadie be relevant? That's nonbinary character/female character, where the non binary character is the combination of a male character (Steven) and a female character (Connie) into a new combined personality (Stevonnie).

I mean you could classify it as m/f/f and exclude it for that reason. Especially since Steven and Connie are well defined characters we see a lot, and who do surface as individuals within Stevonnie. But I don't think this is explicitly covered by the rules as they currently stand.

As a Carmilla fan, I'd be really uncomfortable seeing, say, Laferry discussion or recs here (not that anyone talks about Carmilla anymore, lol) because of how adamant LaF is about not being a girl.

I will talk about Carmilla with you, nonny!

Is it too much to ask that people just contribute earnestly and assume good faith?

hi! thank you so much for your comment, and thanks to everyone else who gave input in this subthread.

with the current phrasing of the rules, I was attempting to avoid either grouping all nonbinary characters in with female characters (thus treating them as "women-lite") or fully excluding all nonbinary characters from discussion here. as a nonbinary lesbian myself, I don't want to fully exclude nb characters from discussion here, but I also don't want to brush over nb characters in the rules in a way that implies it's fine to treat all nb characters as women-lite in discussions here.

how would everyone in this subthread feel about phrasing changes to Rule 1 as follows:

1. No boys allowed. Discussion of male characters is banned.
1.1 It doesn't matter whether the discussion is positive or negative in tone.
1.1.1 Yes this includes het.
1.1.2 Yes this means any whining about "yaoi" or "fujoshi" will be eagerly bahleeted by mods.
1.2 Discussion of Rule 63 characters/AUs, including trans woman headcanons for canonically male characters, is permitted at mods' discretion.
1.3 While this community's primary focus is female characters, good-faith discussion of nonbinary, bigender, genderfluid, and genderqueer characters is allowed.
1.4 Characters' gender is determined by the character's own self-identification or word of god when applicable.
1.4.1 Good-faith discussion of characters who don't neatly fit one gender category but could reasonably be interpreted as (cis or trans) women or as nonbinary (ex.: Jess from Stone Butch Blues, various fictional iterations of the Chevalier d'Eon, Jackrum and Mal from Monstrous Regiment) is allowed.
1.4.3 Discussion of female or genderqueer/nonbinary characters who use pronouns other than she/her is allowed.
1.4.4 In the context of this rule, gender-essentialist wank about sexuality/gender presentation/etc. and transphobic wank about genitalia/socialization/etc. are off-limits and extremely banned.

thank you all again for voicing your concerns here; making sure nb characters are handled respectfully by the rules of this comm is really important to me, so input on the gender rule is hugely valuable. in particular thanks to everyone who spoke up about the "aligned" language being wanky - although I'm comfortable with that terminology I see a lot of people aren't, so I will definitely change that.

ETA: this anon essentially voiced what I'm trying to codify in the rules: https://meme-of-bilitis.dreamwidth.org/879.html?thread=66415#cmt66415

Edited 2018-08-08 22:41 (UTC)

Ah. Hm, sorry then, I just called a dude from The Outpost boring. Oops.

lol thanks anon, but don't worry, I won't delete your comment for just calling a dude boring. it's more that this is intended to be a comm for discussing female characters, not discussing guys, so a 500-comments vitriolic thread wanking about how much, idk, tony stark sucks is not of general interest. a throwaway "[whatever dude] is boring" comment is fine, I'm only gonna freeze it if it starts devolving into a circlejerking wankstorm of how much we hate Whatever Dude.

Edited 2018-08-08 22:48 (UTC)

I like this.

AYRT

It's great, thank you for your quick and thoughtful response!

okay, I'm updating the rules to the above phrasing! @ everyone in the subthread, let me know if you think anything else needs to be tweaked.

Oh shoot, I'm three days late to the party and didn't realize this had already been addressed when I commented upthread a moment ago. Thanks, mod, I like this.

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I have doubts that [a femslash meme] would be very long-lived

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