"Hey, AE, what do you think about transwomen reclaiming the word 'shemale'?"

Nobody's actually asked me that recently, but I'm posing the question to myself to avoid permanently digressing somebody else's post with a long discussion in comments.

The short answer is that I don't feel it's reclaimable.

I don't think it would be worth reclaiming if it were... I mean, that presupposes there's some kind of redeeming value to be had. This word has no cultural history. It makes no linguistic or etymological sense... if she plus male meant "chick with dick", then so should "fe-male".

But I don't feel it would be possible to "reclaim" it, in a meaningful way, right now. It has too many claims on it as it is. Apart from being used as a horrible, hateful, hurtful slur, it's also in use in the porn industry to advertise the worst kind of exploitation of transwomen, and it's also apparently used by fetish fiction writers and chatroom chasers as (I'm told) what's supposed to be an innocent term of endearment for an ideal of beautiful women with giant cocks.

Sorry, but I'm not fighting all those people off for an identification I don't need or want. They want the word? They can have it. It's useless. It means nothing to me... and so I'd say it's no skin off my back if some other transwoman decides to take it upon herself to reclaim it, but... it is skin off my back. Nobody else can tell me it's not. If there's one thing I know, it's the feeling of having my back skinned. If somebody else chooses to use it as a label, that affects all of us.

It's all very well and good for a secure, fully transitioned transwoman living in a stable environment to take it upon herself to "reclaim" it... but once the label's present in a community, that creates a barrier to participation for the more vulnerable members, for the people who have the least support and the most damage... the people who are still finding themselves, who still reel every time they see it.

I don't see how the benefit to those secure enough to feel comfortable "reclaiming" a slur outweighs the damage. If the people doing the reclaiming are fine with that, that's their choice. I mean, they don't owe anybody else anything.

And the damage spreads, because the would-be reclaimer becomes the authority who's invoked by other people who insist they should be able to throw it around with even less consideration.

If somebody decides to use a word like that as their screenname because they're being ~*edgy*~ and ~*ironic*~ and they think it's hilarious to name themselves after a porn genre because then "tranny chasers" message them thinking that they must be some kind of idealized porn figure who exists for male fantasies, I don't see that as a political statement... I see that as another kid on the internet trolling for lulz with no consideration of the larger impact of their actions.

Because that shit splatters. It gets on all of us. No, it isn't every individual transperson's job to go around ejumacatin' folks on proper forms of address and on the fact that our existence serves other purposes than being fap-and-fuck fodder for fetishists... but is it too much to fucking ask that we don't go around undoing whatever minimal education exists just for fun?

Yeah, it's important for marginalized folks to be able to laugh at what we go through, but it stops being a private in-joke when it's conducted in public.

Random notes since I'm awake at 5 in the morning.

Whoo... page-a-day thing's going pretty well so far. My regularly irregular sleep schedule means that the actual dates on the updates don't quite match up to the calendar yet, but I don't feel like fighting with that right now. Stories are getting done and going up.

One side effect of the bite-sized pieces is that it's easier to write ahead a bit, which I've done on 3 Seas since I've been riding high on it lately... when my enthusiasm shifts around to Void Dogs or Star Harbor, as it will, I can do the same with those.

The funny thing is that the Tribe updates are taking the longest of the four shorts right now, even though they're the shortest of them, because (spoiler alert! Well, not really) I'm building towards The Dramatic Conclusion of the fourth chapter. Endings take more work for me than middles do. I've got a science fiction story intended for submission to a magazine sitting on my hard drive waiting on a punchy ending note to present itself to me.

( Click here if you're really truly desperate to know what I think after having re-read the beginning of Les Miserables after sixteen years or so. )

Shill be comin' 'round the mountain when she comes...

I'm not great with calendars, but it's impossible for anybody in the U.S. to miss the fact that it's April 15th. Apart from any other trifling significance of that date, this tells me it's the middle of the month. I was planning on waiting a whole month from my last call for sponsorships before making another big push, but then I realized that always doing my fundraising efforts towards the end of the month has been having a bit of an unintended effect.

See, your monthly sponsorship pays out to me on the same calendar day you set it up eachmonth, so most of the money I get in a month is now coming in a big chunk. That's handy in some ways but inconvenient in others. Just having steady, predictable income is a huge step up for me, but if it's a little more evenly distributed through, that would make things even easier... as with my last call, I'm not sending up an SOS here but looking towards the future.

A lot of steady jobs do paychecks either twice a month or every other week (which amounts to practically the same thing). It's a good arrangement. I'm still a third of the way away from my current goal and if I can get a second big glut of sponsors here in the middle of the month, that'll work out really well.

So if anybody else has been thinking about becoming a sponsor, it would be awesome if they could do it around nowish... if you can commit to giving $1, $2, $5, or any other amount a month, it would be outstanding. My commitment to you is to keep writing as much as I'm able to, as long as I'm able to. Is that worth a couple of bucks? If not, thank you and enjoy the stories all the same, but if it is, please take a minute to sign up through PayPal.

If you've been enjoying the newly revived 3 Seas story, a sponsorship option is available for that. We've got one person who's signed up to climb aboard the Horizon Chaser... one person who actually asked for that option as soon as the story returned to production... but there's certainly room for more.
If you haven't checked it out, it might interest you. Like with Tribe, it's generally "tamer" than most of my milieu. It's also more of a traditional plot-driven fantasy adventure story. If you're one of the people who's been reading MU and going "I like this writing but I wish the story would move faster and there would be fewer spankings that would be outstanding", there you go. And even if you like the meandering plot and the spankings, there you go. I don't like writing just one kind of thing, I imagine most people don't like reading just one kind of thing.

And since I'm mentioning fundraising: I have started sending out diplomas. Yes, finally. Thank you and sorry it's taken so long. The last of them will be in the mail by Saturday. When I've got all outstanding orders fulfilled, I'm going to make a post detailing how not to handle starting up a mail order business, and also detailing the system I've worked out for handling future orders. Actually, it's all very embarrassingly straightforward, it's just things that didn't occur to me as I was going, so on the chance that somebody else out there decides to adopt a similar model for commercializing a story or webcomic or other creative endeavor, that information will be there.

I've already had people ask about more majors, higher degrees, and similar nifty certificates for the other story universes... so I'll also be making a discussion post on that. I don't want to expand too quickly (I think I should have started with fewer majors and maybe done a limited test run instead of throwing open the floodgates. Hindsight 20/20.), but I also don't want to tell people no when they're asking me if they can give me money for something.

I do also have other developing ideas: i.e., the mapping project, merchandising opportunities people approached me with, the voice project, that I'm going to be able to turn my attention back to once the diploma backlog is cleared (and tax season is over. More on the job learnin': don't undertake to launch new projects in March and April.)

Anyway, that's enough PBSin' for now. I'm about halfway done with today's TOMU and I should get back to it.