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A Skirt's Not So Bad [Harry Potter]

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Tekomandor said:
She knew that tradition dictated that boys were supposed to ask girls to this sort of thing, but when had she ever bothered with respecting tradition? She didn't care if some stuffy witch writing in to Witch Weekly would disapprove - someone would probably disapprove whatever she did.
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Good, good. Keep thinking this way Holly, it will save you from a lot of worrying in future years.
Tekomandor said:
"Th-thanks, Holly," Ginny said, blushing, and suddenly Holly felt very stupid. There was a very pretty girl at Hogwarts who she knew liked girls, and who really knew her. Who made her feel safe, in a way very few people did. Who could understand why sometimes her hands shook and why she so often woke from nightmares.
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The only problem I could see is people assuming that, because she went to the dance with another girl, she isn't actually a girl. Because the wizarding world isn't a well informed place on these kinds of things, and I know that for a lot of uninformed people the idea that you can be both trans and be atracted to your own gender is a mystifying one.
Tekomandor said:
"Can I talk to you?" Holly asked Ginny as they neared the castle. Ron and Hermione were busy having one of their fun arguments and were completely involved in it.
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I love how she is so used to it that it's backround noise at this point.
 
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Shador said:
for a lot of uninformed people the idea that you can be both trans and be atracted to your own gender is a mystifying one
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Really? That's so weird - gender identity doesn't map to sexual orientation at all, so that sort of idea is completely out of left field for me. If you like guys, girls or neither then that's who you like, imo, and it doesn't matter what gender you identify as.

...I'm not leaving out sexual orientation choice beyond those three, right? I know there's a bunch of different terms, but not really what they are. Unless I'm thinking of gender identity varients.

In regards to the chapter, twas nice seeing Holly buck gender roles and ask the guy out; never got why that's socially frowned upon. Also nice to see the Yule Ball has no gender requirements for your dance partner, although I'm expecting a sane sex couple to trigger discussion amongst peers regardless.
 
Mizu said:
Really? That's so weird - gender identity doesn't map to sexual orientation at all, so that sort of idea is completely out of left field for me. If you like guys, girls or neither then that's who you like, imo, and it doesn't matter what gender you identify as.
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Annoyingly, 'girl' usually came with assumption 'like boys', and vice-versa. So if you want to 'be girl', well...
 
Mizu said:
Really? That's so weird - gender identity doesn't map to sexual orientation at all, so that sort of idea is completely out of left field for me. If you like guys, girls or neither then that's who you like, imo, and it doesn't matter what gender you identify as.
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I think it's based on an assumption (conscious or unconscious) that people 'become' trans so that they can sleep with people of their original biological sex without being homosexual. Stupid, but that's people for you.
 
Mizu said:
Really? That's so weird - gender identity doesn't map to sexual orientation at all, so that sort of idea is completely out of left field for me. If you like guys, girls or neither then that's who you like, imo, and it doesn't matter what gender you identify as.
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People who aren't LGBTQ generally don't have to think too hard about concepts like "what does it mean to be a man." Sure, they could, but there isn't some driving need to fully define those terms and it's easier subconsciously default to a fuzzy set of characteristics that are, on average, associated with them. Attraction to the opposite gender is one of the most visible and consistent of those characteristics, even if there are well known counter examples. As such, "I like women" can feel like a defining trait of what it means to be male, especially when you remove the morphological components.

Of course, that's not a very good way to define a gender, but that's kind-of the point.
 
king of hybrids said:
*canon ships intensify*
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Canon ship, but gay. Which is all it needed to be good, apparently!

Mizu said:
Really? That's so weird - gender identity doesn't map to sexual orientation at all, so that sort of idea is completely out of left field for me. If you like guys, girls or neither then that's who you like, imo, and it doesn't matter what gender you identify as.
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People who are both straight and cis don't really bother telling the two sets of norms apart. A gay cis person will obviously have another perspective.
 
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Awesome chapter, teko. I feIt very nervous right alongside Holly when she asked Cedric to the dance, and then you left us hanging on her asking Ginny! Curse you, but I also love it.
 
Mizu said:
Really? That's so weird - gender identity doesn't map to sexual orientation at all, so that sort of idea is completely out of left field for me. If you like guys, girls or neither then that's who you like, imo, and it doesn't matter what gender you identify as.
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It's about forcing people to fit into an ideologically defined gender role; to some people transgenderism is much less of an issue than is making sure people fit their idea of what a proper man/woman is. Which both leads to transgender people being pushed towards "Straight" behavior, and homosexual people being manipulated or coerced into gender reassignment surgery; Iran being a fairly well known example of the latter.

This entire cluster of gender/sexuality issues all boil down to different forms of gender & sexuality essentialism. The idea that there are men, who all look, act and think one way; and there are women who all look, act and think one way; and absolutely nothing else is permitted/exists. Everyone must fit into their assigned boxes. They look like a lot of different issues, but it's all really just the same mindset manifesting in different ways.
 
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Mizu said:
...I'm not leaving out sexual orientation choice beyond those three, right? I know there's a bunch of different terms, but not really what they are. Unless I'm thinking of gender identity varients.
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It gets a lot more complicated when you factor in that gender is a (multidimensional) spectrum, not a binary, which means that sexual orientation is also a spectrum. And it gets still more complicated when you take gender presentation into account as well. So, for example... (1) A nonbinary person who's attracted to some nonbinary people and women but not to men: "straight", "gay", or "bisexual"? Does the answer depend on which nonbinary gender they are, and which nonbinary genders they're attracted to? (2) What about a man who's attracted to some men and nonbinary people but the range of nonbinary people they're attracted to is broader than the first person? (3) What about a woman who's attracted to more masculine-presenting or butch women and to a fairly narrow range of nonbinary people whose gender is on the closer end to "woman" and whose gender presentation is more butch? And this isn't even getting into how you can separate out sexual and romantic attraction and how these don't always line up (e.g. some people are bisexual and homoromantic, or biromantic and asexual, or any number of other combinations).

And this is why a fair number of people kinda don't bother with most of the labels and just go with an umbrella term like "queer". The human experience isn't so neatly classified into discrete boxes, as useful as they can be at times.
 
aspen said:
*Snip*
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Stuff like this is why I tend not to care about labels. Specifically, I think people should identify with what they like, and that can morph and change over time and that's all right. And then ofc fuckheads on twitter call me a mogai coz they think people should fit into only one or two neat labels 🙄 to each their own, and each should only ever analyze their own
 
While I do hope Ginny says yes, it occurs to me that by this point Neville and Krum may already have asked Ginny and Hermione respectively; which means Holly and Ron can either chance their arms with the Patil twins or…

Snape: going to the Yule ball with your best friend. Pathetic
Ron: so I'm already doing better than you then?
Snape: *cries in Alan Rickman*
 
king of hybrids said:
While I do hope Ginny says yes, it occurs to me that by this point Neville and Krum may already have asked Ginny and Hermione respectively; which means Holly and Ron can either chance their arms with the Patil twins or…

Snape: going to the Yule ball with your best friend. Pathetic
Ron: so I'm already doing better than you then?
Snape: *cries in Alan Rickman*
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Honestly, having Holly and Ron go to the ball together could be kind of a fun twist. Plus it'd potentially make them both overly self-conscious about their friendship in a way that makes for delicious teenage drama.
 
emma.v3 said:
That table is so fucked up to look at, what the actual fuck
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Welcome to the fucked up world of trans healthcare! Even in "progressive" countries there're still doctors and even hospitals stubbornly holding on to these standards, and recommending conversion therapy to nine outta ten trans people that walk through their door.
 
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Tealg said:
Welcome to the fucked up world of trans healthcare! Even in "progressive" countries there're still doctors and even hospitals stubbornly holding on to these standards, and recommending conversion therapy to nine outta ten trans people that wall through their door.
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I'm fortunate enough to live in a northern state in the US where informed consent is all you need to get hrt. The fact that conversion therapy is still legal just makes me so sad. Blah

This is derailing and it's going nowhere good, let's get back to the story lol
 
aspen said:
<snip>

And this is why a fair number of people kinda don't bother with most of the labels and just go with an umbrella term like "queer". The human experience isn't so neatly classified into discrete boxes, as useful as they can be at times.
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Yes. When people try to create discrete categories for something that is a continuum, especially a complicated and fuzzily-defined one you tend to end up with either a few vague categories, or an endless proliferation of ever-narrower categories. Because no matter what arrangement of categorical boxes you create, there's going to be edge cases that don't quite fit, so you create new boxes for those but there's other cases that don't quite fit that and so on in a cycle effectively without limit.

It's not limited to sexuality either; you see the same phenomenon in everything from attempts to define political & religious positions to attempts to define fiction genres or biological structures. We live in a messy, fuzzy world where the attempt to divide everything into neat categories is generally at best a useful simplification, not the objective reality.
 
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