I genuinely wonder whether generation of people who played female avatars in MMOs to get free stuff has put the seed of TERFdom and assorted other anti-trans stereotypes into a generation of people's brains.
Nah. transpanic jokes are way older then that. The reveal at the end of the first Ace Ventura movie is an example of that. Good thing the second movie is way better.
If anything, guys playing as girls in MMOs would have softened the idea of trans people to a lot of people who would have never thought much about it.
Honestly, even disregarding the reveal at the end of the first one, the second one is still better. It just takes the concept farther and has a better location. I don't even think most people know there's a third movie.
For whatever reason, I always remembered that being in the second film and not the first; I haven't seen either since childhood, though, so they both just kind of blend together.
A lot of the 4chan-esque toxicity around trans people is some mix of taboo horniness and misogynist commoditization of femininity.
I don't think either encourage trans-inclusiveness. The very term "Trap" implies trans people are attempting to exploit other people through their presentation.
I've always thought of "Trap" as cross dressing with malicious intent. Not term to describe trans people, but it's not something I consider a hill worth dying on.
My idea is that "cross dressing" MMO players are just seeding the idea gender non-conformity into the player base's mind. Not that they're pro-trans activists.
That's a much more benevolent way to look at it. But I tended not to see the heavily adolescent male MMO community view men playing as women anything but
cross dressing with malicious intent
This, combined with the "No girls on the Internet" stigma tended to drive crassness and hostility towards all women avatars.
On the internet, anyone who claims to be a woman is really a man. Anyone who claims to be a man is really a child. Anyone who claims to be a child is really an FBI agent.
It's funny because you can kind of tell based on the username. I'll tell you right now, almost no guy is going to pick "Bb2" or "quackypeach" as their name
I had a friend get a fucking voice changer just to keep the lies going when he did that in D&Donline. It still irritates me that it actually worked. Dude was rolling in gifts and invites.
Oh to be clear it was a complete scam. I mean it would've been. And I would've known from the start by searching for the pictures they sent on tineye and finding they were from a former r/gonewild poster. Also the fact that they just messaged a random account out of the blue and were instantly smitten and sending nudes like the next day. And the fact that when I said I'm married they were not dissuaded in the least.
I have no idea if it would've been a blackmail scam or a sympathy scam or a phishing scam. I started out just intending to fuck with them, but eventually found I was looking forward to sharing what I made for dinner or drinks or hearing about their fictitious backstory. I mean they weren't deep conversations, but they acted interested and I could just ramble on about my day or where I like to vacation or whatever mundane shit.
At first I thought she was going to hit me with checking out her OF and I might've even thrown her a few bucks for taking the time to just talk with me. We talked for hours off and on without her asking me for money. I can appreciate establishing a connection, you know? But no. It wasn't OF. It was just a scammer of some variety. Then I let them know they were busted and got to enjoy hearing the sob story about her evil ex who posted her nudes online and all the excuses she couldn't prove it was her in any of the fifty ways I offered.
But sadly our relational ended when she started hitting me with ChatGPT. I don't need a middleman to pretend I'm talking to someone with an AI.
No, when the villain switches everyone's custom avatars to their irl bodies, one girl couple you saw in an earlier scene is revealed to both be dudes to both dude's surprise. I think there's another scene a few episodes later showing both dudes still hanging out with each other. Just background stuff.
Baldur's gate made a whole lot of believers; every character in that game is hot as fuck, including the horned demon lady. Especially the horned demon lady.
Proves you can have a gender system that doesn't feel as forced as "Body Type A/B" and in the process accommodate a larger portion of the gender spectrum.
It also shows you can be Pro-Woman AND Pro-Sexuality, you don't need to go the route of "Everyone looks like a guy, and boobs don't exist", you can just have hot chicks fucking hot chicks, hot guys fucking hot guys, turn into a bear and get your freak on...
I get that media's trying to change its tune to be more inclusive because we've kinda just catered to white guys for too long, and gender's proving slightly more complicated than initially believe, but... BG3 did it in a way that's actually fun, inclusive, and awesome, instead of feeling like lazy pandering that doesn't really help anyone outside of Right Wingers looking to get mad about shit.
Why is that beautiful? Sounds pretty obvious to me. If some of my dude friends were actually women, I'd love to be in a relationship with them. They're cool dudes.
I had someone tell me "He/Him Lesbians" were a thing recently and they weren't referring to FTM Transguys either (Which I was relieved by as that would be a horribly offensive thing to call that crowd since a lesbian is a woman who exclusively is attracted to other women, and FTMs are NOT women.) Somedays I just don't know if I'm getting too old and set in my ways or if the world has just lost the plot.
These days I just kinda "nod" at things and go along with them even if I don't agree or understand, within reason of course. (i'm not going to let anyone take fucking dieting advice from a breatharian)
he/him lesbians is largely a historical teem referring to lesbians in the 1980s scene who would identify as (typically butch) women but go by he/him pronouns (see stone butch blues)
(but it's old enough that some people have rediscovered it)
The feminine (and, by extension, lesbian) is constantly portrayed in such a sweet and gentle way and masculine us always so rough that I can't help but say "lesbian relationships to me, please"
And I'm a guy.
Where tf did we lose those cute gentle hetero relationships and representation? Okay there's GFD, but barely anyone notices it and it's strictly about women taking the lead and mostly sexual, which is only one side of the story.
I am a happily being a guy but I identified with Samuel in that story more than I ever would have guessed would have been possible. I have always been jealous of how easy it is for women to make friends and how tender their friendship are. I have never gotten along with macho guys and multiple times in my life people thought I was gay (I am only attracted to women, I just want tender friendships like women have with each other)...
honestly when i was a kid i always picked male characters (despite being afab) because "the clothes looked better", fast forward a couple of years, i transitioned to male and i realised i used video games as my main escape from worsening gender dysphoria
I knew a guy who used that exact same reasoning to play female characters. It's funny how the way you want to look in a videogame can sort of tap into subconscious desires sometimes.
"Obviously I couldn't dress like that IRL because of gender rules, but since I can choose my gender in this game..."
Girls just have better clothes in general. I like clothes shopping with my daughter all the outfits and dresses are so cute and fun, theres so much variety! Clothes shopping for my son is such a bore :/
For reference I am dad, and theyre both in elementary school.
I often play RPGs as a female character, as a means of stepping outside of myself and actually, you know, role-playing. But I seldom play online games, and do not try to convince anyone that I'm a woman irl.
Still, it's interesting how people assume that because I've chosen to spend my game time watching a female avatar run about, I must be a woman. I've been in some sticky situations, but none thus far involving anyone claiming to be lesbian.
That used to be my personal reason, but nowadays, I end up picking female characters even in games like Terraria where there isn't exactly much sex appeal going around. Turns out I like the sounds too, and not just dialog. I prefer hearing a girl grunt instead of some big macho man when I'm jumping or getting shot or whatever.
Haha. If you wanna jork it then go for it. The gameplay doesn't look bad either but the grind is somehow worse than destiny 2, and optimal builds are more complex than borderlands.
Also unfortunately most of the coomer skins are premium macrotransactions.
Honestly I'm not really an arse enthusiast so there's not a great deal of that going on in my case. It does make me laugh though when gamerdudes moan about the "gayness" of having to play a female character.
Yeah, when I play an RPG and I create a character, I'm creating a whole character, not just a self-insert one. That character has a name, a backstory, a way of thinking, skills, experiences. When that character decides to join the Stormcloacks, it's not because that's what I would do. It's what the character would do.
Some of those characters are women. Some are nonhuman. It's a character, it's not me.
As we used to say, "MMORPG means Many Men Online Role-playing Girls".
Which has went in a couple different directions, looking back.
Ah, the Internet. A place where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.
And the moderators have beards. Women too
Bold of you to assume that moderators are married.
GIRL is also an acronym for Guy In Real Life.
I can remember the Yahoo chat rooms of the 90's. It's always been doods cybering lesbian sex with each other.
Scissor me xerces
Scissor me timbers
I put on my robe and wizard hat
I can confirm it happened at least once in MSN too 😬
why would you do this to me david
The ones who kinda knew but kept doing it 🙈🙈💀💀
There are no girls on the internet
The Internet: Where men are men, women are men and the children are FBI agents.
We've always been trans-inclusive.
I genuinely wonder whether generation of people who played female avatars in MMOs to get free stuff has put the seed of TERFdom and assorted other anti-trans stereotypes into a generation of people's brains.
Nah. transpanic jokes are way older then that. The reveal at the end of the first Ace Ventura movie is an example of that. Good thing the second movie is way better.
If anything, guys playing as girls in MMOs would have softened the idea of trans people to a lot of people who would have never thought much about it.
That's... a good reason why when I watch Ace Ventura, I skip the first one and pretend there's no third one.
Honestly, even disregarding the reveal at the end of the first one, the second one is still better. It just takes the concept farther and has a better location. I don't even think most people know there's a third movie.
That was the conclusion I had even before I came out as trans
For whatever reason, I always remembered that being in the second film and not the first; I haven't seen either since childhood, though, so they both just kind of blend together.
A lot of the 4chan-esque toxicity around trans people is some mix of taboo horniness and misogynist commoditization of femininity.
I don't think either encourage trans-inclusiveness. The very term "Trap" implies trans people are attempting to exploit other people through their presentation.
I've always thought of "Trap" as cross dressing with malicious intent. Not term to describe trans people, but it's not something I consider a hill worth dying on.
My idea is that "cross dressing" MMO players are just seeding the idea gender non-conformity into the player base's mind. Not that they're pro-trans activists.
That's a much more benevolent way to look at it. But I tended not to see the heavily adolescent male MMO community view men playing as women anything but
This, combined with the "No girls on the Internet" stigma tended to drive crassness and hostility towards all women avatars.
I'll be your runescape girlfriend if you'll trim my armor set for free
On the internet, anyone who claims to be a woman is really a man. Anyone who claims to be a man is really a child. Anyone who claims to be a child is really an FBI agent.
Expected this to be higher on urban dictionary, it's on the end of 2nd page.
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
It's funny because you can kind of tell based on the username. I'll tell you right now, almost no guy is going to pick "Bb2" or "quackypeach" as their name
Two dudes cybering lesbian porn at each other describes half the content of Literotica.
Welcome to the internet
Have a look around...
We've got mountains of content
Some better, some worse
But none of it is interesting to me
And you're the first!
Pretending to be a girl for free handouts in MMOs was peak metagaming.
I had a friend get a fucking voice changer just to keep the lies going when he did that in D&Donline. It still irritates me that it actually worked. Dude was rolling in gifts and invites.
Egg in real life? How far did he take it? Did he wear a cat-ear hairband, slather himself in oil, and meow?
What? No. Like a popo man pretending to be a kid, he was only doing it to get the shit he wanted.
Eventually they'll both think a little more deeply about why they """pretended""" to be girls online. 🤔 😊
Loneliness
Ever deliberately let yourself get catfished by an insta "girl" just because they'll listen to you and act interested in your life for a while?
Because I haven't.
So many scams start like that
Oh to be clear it was a complete scam. I mean it would've been. And I would've known from the start by searching for the pictures they sent on tineye and finding they were from a former r/gonewild poster. Also the fact that they just messaged a random account out of the blue and were instantly smitten and sending nudes like the next day. And the fact that when I said I'm married they were not dissuaded in the least.
I have no idea if it would've been a blackmail scam or a sympathy scam or a phishing scam. I started out just intending to fuck with them, but eventually found I was looking forward to sharing what I made for dinner or drinks or hearing about their fictitious backstory. I mean they weren't deep conversations, but they acted interested and I could just ramble on about my day or where I like to vacation or whatever mundane shit.
At first I thought she was going to hit me with checking out her OF and I might've even thrown her a few bucks for taking the time to just talk with me. We talked for hours off and on without her asking me for money. I can appreciate establishing a connection, you know? But no. It wasn't OF. It was just a scammer of some variety. Then I let them know they were busted and got to enjoy hearing the sob story about her evil ex who posted her nudes online and all the excuses she couldn't prove it was her in any of the fifty ways I offered.
But sadly our relational ended when she started hitting me with ChatGPT. I don't need a middleman to pretend I'm talking to someone with an AI.
Hypothetically, of course.
I'm sure that's all it is. 😉
Anon is usually bored and chronically online
There's a reason transbian is a word
Any transbian places to recommend?
Тайшет looks like a nice town on the trans-siberian rail line.
Enquiring minds must know: why that place?
i looked at a map of the rail line and picked a random town
Looking at your name I'd guessed trans-alpina ^^
my place? 😏
Yes Please 😊 💖 !
Name checks out
The tale as old as the internet.
Those guys scissored so hard they bought a Subaru together
Literally the first episode of Sword Art Online
You watched a very different SAO
No, when the villain switches everyone's custom avatars to their irl bodies, one girl couple you saw in an earlier scene is revealed to both be dudes to both dude's surprise. I think there's another scene a few episodes later showing both dudes still hanging out with each other. Just background stuff.
Nah, one of them was a girl, the other was a dude:
"Oh my god. What's going on?!?!"
"Don't worry, baby. I'll protect you"
Ah, you're right, I remember those guys.
"I'm okay with this" "Me too" LOVE KNOWS NO GENDER!
There is a bad bitch inside of all of us lowkey. But at least in RPGs I like to be a chick because I usually like the clothing options.
I've always said, if you're going to stare at someone's ass for the next 200 hours...
Baldur's gate made a whole lot of believers; every character in that game is hot as fuck, including the horned demon lady. Especially the horned demon lady.
I love everything about BG3
Proves you can have a gender system that doesn't feel as forced as "Body Type A/B" and in the process accommodate a larger portion of the gender spectrum.
It also shows you can be Pro-Woman AND Pro-Sexuality, you don't need to go the route of "Everyone looks like a guy, and boobs don't exist", you can just have hot chicks fucking hot chicks, hot guys fucking hot guys, turn into a bear and get your freak on...
I get that media's trying to change its tune to be more inclusive because we've kinda just catered to white guys for too long, and gender's proving slightly more complicated than initially believe, but... BG3 did it in a way that's actually fun, inclusive, and awesome, instead of feeling like lazy pandering that doesn't really help anyone outside of Right Wingers looking to get mad about shit.
and for FPS being a bad bitch means you'll have a smaller hit box 😅
Now kith
I feel like there are so many dudes who'd fall in love if only both parties were women, and that's beautiful...
Why is that beautiful? Sounds pretty obvious to me. If some of my dude friends were actually women, I'd love to be in a relationship with them. They're cool dudes.
All the straight boys you know have probably at some poiot been devastated to remember they are tecnnically not lesbians, because dick.
I had someone tell me "He/Him Lesbians" were a thing recently and they weren't referring to FTM Transguys either (Which I was relieved by as that would be a horribly offensive thing to call that crowd since a lesbian is a woman who exclusively is attracted to other women, and FTMs are NOT women.) Somedays I just don't know if I'm getting too old and set in my ways or if the world has just lost the plot.
These days I just kinda "nod" at things and go along with them even if I don't agree or understand, within reason of course. (i'm not going to let anyone take fucking dieting advice from a breatharian)
he/him lesbians is largely a historical teem referring to lesbians in the 1980s scene who would identify as (typically butch) women but go by he/him pronouns (see stone butch blues)
(but it's old enough that some people have rediscovered it)
The way you phrased it makes it sound like more of a sex thing than a gender identity thing
Unpopular opinion : once you start blurring the lines of what gender is, the straightness based definitions of things go out the window.
An FTM and MTF relationship is something alright. None of my business.
but, linguistically speaking, I don't think straight as a label applies to it, even though it's male + female.
it ties into the difference between someone being pansexual, and bisexual.
Seriously though
The feminine (and, by extension, lesbian) is constantly portrayed in such a sweet and gentle way and masculine us always so rough that I can't help but say "lesbian relationships to me, please"
And I'm a guy.
Where tf did we lose those cute gentle hetero relationships and representation? Okay there's GFD, but barely anyone notices it and it's strictly about women taking the lead and mostly sexual, which is only one side of the story.
This is the meet cute for a bi rom com, right?
I'm just gonna leave this here in case it changes somebody's life: https://medium.com/the-identity-current/plight-of-the-transbian-4ab1a048b09b
This was a sweet, wonderful read, thank you
I am a happily being a guy but I identified with Samuel in that story more than I ever would have guessed would have been possible. I have always been jealous of how easy it is for women to make friends and how tender their friendship are. I have never gotten along with macho guys and multiple times in my life people thought I was gay (I am only attracted to women, I just want tender friendships like women have with each other)...
https://farside.link/scribe/the-identity-current/plight-of-the-transbian-4ab1a048b09b
Deleted
also some minor mental illnesses but we don't talk about that
honestly when i was a kid i always picked male characters (despite being afab) because "the clothes looked better", fast forward a couple of years, i transitioned to male and i realised i used video games as my main escape from worsening gender dysphoria
I knew a guy who used that exact same reasoning to play female characters. It's funny how the way you want to look in a videogame can sort of tap into subconscious desires sometimes.
"Obviously I couldn't dress like that IRL because of gender rules, but since I can choose my gender in this game..."
It's sort of like The Button thought experiment.
same as an amab I always used to play women cause they got better clothes. I am not trans tho, I mean probably not.
Girls just have better clothes in general. I like clothes shopping with my daughter all the outfits and dresses are so cute and fun, theres so much variety! Clothes shopping for my son is such a bore :/
For reference I am dad, and theyre both in elementary school.
Men's clothing has better pockets tho. We need to normalize big pockets on all clothing. Also normalize pink men's clothing to make it less boring
To make it less boring, what we need to normalize is men's clothing in more shapes and multi color patterns.
great insight and so fucking true
I don't like to call it "mental illnesses" because it makes it look like it's a property of the person; however, it is a property of society:
I often play RPGs as a female character, as a means of stepping outside of myself and actually, you know, role-playing. But I seldom play online games, and do not try to convince anyone that I'm a woman irl.
Still, it's interesting how people assume that because I've chosen to spend my game time watching a female avatar run about, I must be a woman. I've been in some sticky situations, but none thus far involving anyone claiming to be lesbian.
"If I'm gonna stare at an ass for hours it may as well be a hot one" is a reason I've heard.
The last descendant seems to be leaning hard on that demographic as well. The outfits are... Basically shovelware mobile game coomer shit.
That used to be my personal reason, but nowadays, I end up picking female characters even in games like Terraria where there isn't exactly much sex appeal going around. Turns out I like the sounds too, and not just dialog. I prefer hearing a girl grunt instead of some big macho man when I'm jumping or getting shot or whatever.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Haha. If you wanna jork it then go for it. The gameplay doesn't look bad either but the grind is somehow worse than destiny 2, and optimal builds are more complex than borderlands.
Also unfortunately most of the coomer skins are premium macrotransactions.
Honestly I'm not really an arse enthusiast so there's not a great deal of that going on in my case. It does make me laugh though when gamerdudes moan about the "gayness" of having to play a female character.
how sticky are we talking about
Exactly as sticky as you're imagining, I'm afraid. I was sent photographs.
Yeah, when I play an RPG and I create a character, I'm creating a whole character, not just a self-insert one. That character has a name, a backstory, a way of thinking, skills, experiences. When that character decides to join the Stormcloacks, it's not because that's what I would do. It's what the character would do.
Some of those characters are women. Some are nonhuman. It's a character, it's not me.
🥚
I play girls in 3rd person mmos and my wife place huge dudes.
Fake: anon would not pretend to be gay up through the point of lesbian cybersex
Gay: I don't see how this story could possibly be any gayer
How did it end? Did they date then?
yes and they're lesbians now
Many such cases.