cuddleah:

A coworker asked me if i was going to our local pride “they’re doing a drag thing before the Rocky Horror showing"

I, quite calmly, went. The fuck. Off.

Told her exactly what I thought of Drag, RHPC, and cis peoples fascination with them both. Surprisingly only dropping one F-bomb.

She was shocked af, I’m usually all smiley happy upbeat girl, even on the worst days i can usually fake positivity.

She came back and tried to “its not that bad” and “is all in fun” and crap. I shut down everything she came up with. I would like to take this opportunity to thank tumblr for prepping me for that moment. :)

It’s always weird trying to transition between real-world LGBT spaces and tumblrized LGBT spaces.

In the rest of the world, Rocky Horror is a thing which has been a clearly positive transformative influence on probably a majority of the LGBT people I’ve known, does a lot to undermine gender assumptions, and is the specific thing that got at least some people I know to realize that they were trans.

On tumblr, it’s “problematic”.

In the rest of the world, drag undermines the gender binary and drag communities are where a lot of trans women first find some kind of acceptance or comfort, and are generally well-regarded.

On tumblr, drag is horrible and drag communities are horrible and the people who found those communities to be safe and welcoming don’t count because their narrative doesn’t fit some academic theory about the right way to be trans.

In the rest of the world, the stuff being done at pride events is usually understood to be at least predominantly organized by and catering to the LGBT community.

On tumblr, that’s “cis people’s fascination”, and the LGBT people involved with it are completely erased.

In the real world, you’re a fucking asshole.

On tumblr, you imagine that you “shut down” everything she came up with by being ignorant of LGBT history and being rude. But I suspect that anyone else who’d overheard the conversation would have thought of it rather differently.

Gosh, I sure hope we can progress towards the idealized utopia you envision where nonbinary filmmakers don’t get to make the films that they want to, and we can always judge every work of art by the very latest cutting-edge standards, and never consider how our history got us where we are today.

How the fuck can you be in your 30s and not know better than this? It’s one thing when it’s the 16-year-olds who genuinely have no idea what life was like in the past, but you ought to be old enough to remember this. I guess maybe not; the point at which the people I mostly talk to were going to RHPS woulda been the late 80s, and back then, “two hours a week where you aren’t worried about being killed for dressing to the wrong gender norm” was a pretty amazing thing.