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Celtic Shenanigans

@celticshenanigans / celticshenanigans.tumblr.com

Face. Elder Millenial. Do No Harm But Take No Shit. Introvert that fakes being human decently well. Larper. Techie. Overall Giant Nerd. She/Her. Bi. PS....I really, really like owls.
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Shit this got me out here cryin in the club

TERFS do not interact

it got an update!!

i’ve been squealing with joy at this for a solid fifteen minutes y'all 😭❤️

I saw the original and I’m so pleased to see the update!

Another small update in the comments! Sorry for light mode lol

[ID: A collection of Reddit posts by u/takeyourmedsbro. They’re under r/MtF, and the first is marked as a discussion titled “To all of you ladies, from a cis man.” It reads:

I hope it isn’t totally out of order for me to post here, as a man I don’t want to take up your spaces so I’ll try and keep this as short as possible. Tw genital mention
I have full permission from my partner to post this and she’s read it all. There is a misconception that the only men a straight trans women can get with, is a chaser. It is very sad that many of you feel that way, and I’m sorry for how men treat you, but that’s not how it has to be. I met my girlfriend when I was 15. She was living as a boy then and was 13. I used to push her around when we played football at school. I thought she was one of the lads. Time goes on, I was never that close to her and we lost touch. Next thing is I meet her again on a fine art course. I didn’t recognise her at all and with her name change and generic surname I never made the connection. I developed quite the crush, we would go on dates and I’d sort of play them off as just hanging out with a friend. I was so giddy around her and I was terrified to tell her I liked her. One day we were going to the movies and I told myself ‘today is the day I ask her to be my girlfriend, and try to kiss her’ We ended up skipping the movie to go on a walk in the local forest. I held her hand and she squeezed mine - my heart was beating so damn fast. We finally kissed and it was like fireworks. I told her I liked her but she cut me off. She told me to stop talking because she needs to tell me something. Now in my mind I’m panicking thinking she’s in a relationship, but she says ‘l used to be a boy. I was at school with you, please don’t be mad I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you ‘and then to my absolute horror she said ‘please don’t hurt me’ She genuinely thought that there was a danger of me attacking her after finding out. This broke my fucking heart. I had my moment of being like wtf - mainly because I’d known this girl for almost 10 years and hadn’t pieced the 2 people together - but then we kissed again, and then again and again and we kissed so much my face hurt by the end. That was 5 years ago and boy this has been a learning curve. I’ve only ever dated cis women before. I am 100% straight and I had to unlearn some internalized shit for maybe a day or so, until I thought what the fuck does it matter who she used to be? Damn I used to be a baby, people change. But I love her the way she is now. I love her smile I love her eyes I love her body her curves her hands her hair and you know what? I love her penis too. I love it because it’s hers. and it gives her pleasure, and there isn’t anything wrong with it. I don’t have a fetish. I just fell in love with a woman and that means I fell in love with the whole package. I’m planning to propose to her on new years eve. I want to spend the rest of my life with her. I want to raise kids with her and I want her to lose all of these insecurities. Just because you can’t carry them, doesn’t mean you won’t be the mother of my children. There is hope, you’re not broken or unlovable or nothing but a kink. You’re a powerful woman.

The second post is titled “Update from the cis guy that proposed.“ It reads:

Hey ladies. I’ve been asked by a few of you to share an update. Here is my previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/MtF/comments/e95hgx/to_all_of_you_ladies_from_a_cis_man/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
And here is your official soppy post warning - beware…
Soooo on exactly 00:00 new years (ok I was probably out by a couple minutes but I did try to time it) I proposed to my beautiful girlfriend (who also happens to be trans, hence why I’m posting on here) and she said YES
I don’t know if I can fully articulate how happy I am. I wanted to keep it lowkey and between the 2 of us so she didn’t feel any pressure, so I cooked her favourite meal ever (I would have liked to cook something fancy and elegant but honestly she would much rather eat spaghetti bolognese with garlic bread and then a loaded ice cream sundae for dessert ANY day of the week) we ate, played board games and did a competition to see who could make the best vehicle out of old egg cartons and toilet roll tubes. Then we decided to make cupcakes which were fucking vile because we forgot to add the sugar of all things. Not typical romantic evening but I felt all the love and when I dropped down on one knee she just wept. I didn’t even know I had a yes at first because she was crying so much. I actually got really scared I’d freaked her out so I stood up and hugged her and said I’m sorry and she finally told me yes yes yes and explained that she was crying because it was always beyond her wildest dreams as a youngster that she would ever be able to be a wife. This is not something I can relate to, but I think I do understand, as best as i can as a cis man. We literally just held each other for a bit before we both realized she hadn’t seen the ring yet! I’m not a wealthy guy at all so I was afraid she would be disappointed in my grandmothers wedding ring as her engagement ring (I will buy her a new ring for the wedding) but I did want her to have it as my grandmother always told me she wanted my future wife to wear it. Luck was on my side though people because the ring made her cry all over again, happy tears, because she said it made her feel like the fairytale she told herself as a child has finally come true. I think there maybe was something affirming about the fact that this ring was left from my grandma for me to give to the woman I want to spend my life with.
Ok I don’t want to bore you all to death with the ins and outs but I haven’t stopped smiling since she said yes. The fiancee (I love saying that, so exciting) has been obsessively wedding planning which is mighty convenient for me considering I have no clue on how to organize a wedding. It’s like the child in her has come out to play and its very endearing. She missed out on all the typical girly activities as a child so she’s making up for lost time. She ALREADY has a scrapbook for the wedding and she’s already browsing dresses!
I’m sorry for being all cliche and cringey. I know its insufferable to many and I do understand. I just feel drunk in love, and i did want to update and not leave people hanging! Other than my mother, my family does not know she is trans, because frankly it’s none of their business and my fiancee hasn’t wanted to open up to them about that part of her life. She confided in my mother because my mother knows a transgender boy and so it came up in conversation. As far as the rest of my family are concerned, it’s totally irrelevant to them and they will only ever know if she chooses to tell them. So I was wondering if incorporating rainbows anywhere in the theme at all would be too obviously lgbt pride themed? Or can I get away with some rainbow tokens and such just as a discreet acknowledgement of how far she’s come? Obviously I don’t want people to think of this wedding as anything other than what it is, a straight marriage between a man and a woman, so are rainbows risky? I’m just so damn proud of her and want to show that in some way. I was thinking of wearing rainbow cufflinks or something? Anyway sorry for the damn essay but I hope the new year goes well for you lovely ladies and sorry for being a cringe lord. I just can’t believe I’ve found my queen
in MtF by takeurmedsbro

Third is another post, which reads:

Also we have decided that on the big day, I will wear pink cufflinks and she will wear either blue eye makeup or a flower, and then the theme will be that classic white sorta theme. The colours of the trans flag, thanks to your suggestions. Like so subtle that only me and her will know it means anything at all. Hopefully that will work out tastefully but we also like the pink/blue/white elements of the cake idea. I showed her some of these comments and god damn it you lok she is now exploring sooo many more ideas and concepts, I didnt think she would expand past the scrapbook, but we now have a wedding ‘mood board’ of all things… takes up half the wall in our room. I proposed only 3 days ago! I love her enthusiasm but I’m finding it hard to rate all the dresses she shows me, when I cant tell the difference between any of them… a white dress is a white dress, but she says that’s typical male bullshit and she’s probably right there. But she can wear a bin bag to our wedding and still look perfect so I’m not worried about which compliments her body more, but then I do want her to put a dress on and have that feeling of ‘this is my dress’ and I have the feeling that could be a long process… anyway, the kindness means everything x. End ID]

the white suit tho

Great thought, but for those unaware, Kate Mulgrew’s gorgeous tux from The Killing Game was 100% a reference to Dietrich’s suit in Blonde Venus (1932) with Cary Grant, a pre-Code film directed by Josef von Sternberg. It’s hard to tell in Killing Game, but Mulgrew’s lapels are also sequined. So is the stripe in the trousers. It is basically a replica of Dietrich’s suit, no question.

Okay, so I have a PhD in queer fashion and media. So this is something I happen to know a lot about. So let me explain a few things.

For starters, You cannot get a more explicitly queer-coded woman than Marlene Dietrich.

Cary Grant (another closeted Queer in Hollywood) is also in Blonde Venus, and although their chemistry is great, their romance is unbelievable because it’s very clear that they are both absolutely queer. Hattie McDaniel appears in this film, another Queer in Hollywood (and the first Black person ever to win an Oscar). In both Blonde Venus and Morocco (1930), Dietrich flirts with both men and women. Dietrich was considered a Drag King in her day. She famously proclaimed, ‘I am a gentleman at heart.’

Dietrich often refused to wear trousers, and openly declared that she had plenty of women lovers. She is an iconic staple for queer sexuality even today. She famously kissed a woman in Morocco whilst wearing a tuxedo- with an audience watching and cheering. She then kisses a man, the audience applauds, and she exits. This scene (below) was added at Dietrich’s own behest. The scene was extremely controversial, and they had to defend it against the censors for months.

This very scene is one of the many reasons The Hays Code was enacted (rules from a super-Catholic man who bribed his way into Hollywood and forced the religious ideologies onto the screen), and this scene was one that The Hays Code often pointed to as ‘immoral’ and ‘perverted’ and ‘sexually explicit.’ You can thank the Hays Code for the split beds Lucy and Ricky had, for rules that a kiss must not last longer than a certain amount of time, that, absolutely, NO queer ANYTHING could be acknowledged to exist. Everything had to be subtext, and that’s why so many old black and white films feel really queer.

But Dietrich openly proclaimed herself queer, dressed in men’s clothing, kissed women on screen- and became a Queer icon not just in fashion, but in sexuality, decadence, and identity. The so-called famous ’Dietrich’s Sewing Circle’ (of which Hattie McDaniel was a member) was essentially every Queer woman in Hollywood who all had affairs with each other. Books have been written on this. Here’s a brief article about one of those books that goes through some of the basics.

Okay, Queer Fashion Film Academic, what’s your point?

The point is that by wearing a duplicate of a Dietrich suit- one where she openly flirted with women, no less–Janeway is 100% coded as queer in The Killing Game.

Especially with that tuxedo scene and the way she’s talking to Seven. In fact, most of the scenes in those episodes where she is talking to Seven, you will notice that Mulgrew plays Janeway with a bite- her eyes linger on Seven just a bit longer, her body language is just a bit more open and fierce than usual.

Even in Paris, for a woman to wear what Mulgrew/Janeway is clearly coding herself as a Queer person through that specific outfit. She is wearing a giant billboard that says I AM QUEER.

By putting Kate Mulgrew in a replica of a Dietrich 1940s tuxedo, Janeway is visually coded as queer through replication and imitation of one of the most Queer icons in cinematic history. That suit is too famous, too iconic, too specifically loaded with subtext and text of queerness through Dietrich.

I am convinced that the costume department 100% knew what they were doing, and part of me wonders if Kate Mulgrew herself had pushed for that suit. Why? Because Kate Mulgrew herself was the one who pushed for Janeway to have a same-sex relationship.

Watch Blonde Venus. Watch Morocco. Then, watch Kate Mulgrew in The Killing Game. She imitates Dietrich’s body-language, her mannerisms, the smirk, in that opening scene. There is no question- Janeway has been possessed by Dietrich’s characters.

Funnily enough, for the rest of those two episodes, Kate Mulgrew is also very clearly imitating another Queer woman through her voice intonation and mannerisms, general fashion and hairstyles: Katharine Hepburn.

Because of her absurd visual and voice similarity to Katharine Hepburn (another Queer in Dietrich’s sewing circle), Mulgrew once played Hepburn in Tea at Five.

Like Dietrich (bisexual), Hepburn was very clearly Queer coded, as she was a lesbian. She was also famous in Hollywood for her male-coded attire, though she preferred regular suits to Dietrich’s tuxedos.

She, like Dietrich, had the same problem whenever they teamed up with Cary Grant- watch Philadelphia Story and tell me that the real ending of that movie is not Hepburn’s character, Grant’s character and Stewart’s character all ending up in a thruple together. The movie makes no sense if that’s not the real ending.

Hepburn wore trousers on film sets and this upset the studio so much they literally stole her trousers, trying to force her into a skirt. Hepburn just walked around in her knickers, refusing to wear the skirt. Eventually, the studio gave her back the trousers.

Okay, I’m going off tangent. Here’s your takeaway:

Kate Mulgrew, (because she’s an absurdly amazing talent), is very heavily is influenced in mannerism, voice, accent and appearance by two of the most Queer-Coded women in cinematic history in The Killing Game. Through fashion and performance, she embodies Dietrich’s Blonde Venus and Morocco characters, and through appearance, voice and body language, she gives that image an additional layer of of Hepburn’s fierce, Queer persona.

Conclusion: Arguably throughout all of Voyager, but specifically In The Killing Game, Kathryn Janeway is visibly Queer.

By the way, although she never got credit for it, the person who wrote Blonde Venus was Dietrich herself. Both she and von Sternberg were suspended for several months because the movie was considered too salacious by the Hays code, and it caused production problems for over a year.

The BFI has a great write-up on Dietrich’s queerness and fashion, you can read it here: https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/my-best-girlfriend-queer-dietrich-screen

That white suit means so much more than you thought.

sex workers fought in the street for you to be able to celebrate pride. sex workers rights should be an essential part of the pride celebration. I'm dead the fuck serious.

I love that so many people have mentioned Marsha P. Johnson in the tags, or made comments about black trans sex workers bc I know that includes Sylvia Rivera, but this post isn't just about them. This post is also about the kids who worked the streets of Greenwich Village who fought until the wee hours of morning on the first night of the stonewall uprising, even though THEY WEREN'T THE ONES THAT THE POLICE WERE TARGETTING THAT NIGHT. this is about those of us who have been fighting new censorship laws tooth and nail, the same laws that are now being used against trans and queer kids across the country and around the world. This is about the sex workers who tirelessly educated the public about safe sex methods during the AIDS crisis, when the government wouldn't even acknowledge that it is a sexually transmitted disease. Sex workers have fought for liberation from the very beginning and have CONTINUED to fight. we don't get to forget that our lives are considered "deviant". we are faced with that reality every single day, but many of us keep fighting for all "deviants" to be free to love, fuck, and live.

Every deviancy law that has ever been closed has been closed by a dog pile of sex workers tirelessly working to do so. Men, women, enbies, old sex workers, eighteen year olds who are homeless and angry, abled, disabled, black, white, latine, every race or ethnicity you can think of, but they all dogpile together on shitty laws and shitty authority figures and FIGHT for you. No cops at pride, keep the sex workers: cuz family friendly means you take care of the family that takes care of you, not sterilizing a protest for marketability.

"family friendly means you take care of the family that takes care of you, not sterilizing a protest for marketability."

fucking. this. thank you. 💜🌈

Not "I always knew I was different", not "I thought it was normal", but a secret third thing: it never occurred to me to think about whether it was normal until I was forced to, usually in a cruel way

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.

This needs to be reblogged today.

Consenting to see adult content doesn’t mean you should have to see a bunch of shit romanticizing incest and pedophilia you walnut

Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.

You walnut.

This is the most beautiful thing that I have seen about ao3

Have I mentioned how much I love Nick Offerman?

Nick described masculinity as an 'accusation' - "I'm often accused of masculinity. And, you know, I was born looking like this and I sound like this. You know, I did not cultivate [this]. I don't go to the gym. I'm not chasing masculinity. And so it's always seemed a little strange to me as a mincing theater artist to be accused of being manly. I am pretty handy at splitting firewood or changing a tire, but so are the women in my family. And so I use it as an opportunity to encourage people to try and loosen their ideas about genderizing everything. I know ladies that are great woodworkers and I know men that make an amazing quiche and everything across every spectrum in between.” (source) And this is his reaction to "having his man card revoked"

He is free now!

I’m making an effort to use Joanne Rowling’s biological name, and not the ridiculous fabrication she devised to sound more like a man and sell more books

Unfortunately for Ms. Rowling I live in the US, which does not recognize defamation judgments from other countries unless they meet the standards of free speech and expression established in US law, which UK libel laws do not. Sad!

while i understand where people are coming from i think its funny when people romanticize the old internet

"the internet now is so damaging to kids"

remember when it was like extremely easy to accidentally stumble upon beheading videos

i love the tags on this post because it's a mix of people acting like im exaggerating and people being like "i watched 1 guy 1 jar at a slumber party when i was 10 years old"

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Speaking with the benefit of having been exposed to both beheading videos and 2girls1cup as a tween, I don’t think anyone is arguing the old internet was some kind of halcyon age with no problems- it’s that the problems were different, and they could largely be avoided by developing good habits on an individual basis

I, for example, learned not to click links from unfamiliar sources, and that if I did, I might see weird porn. And if I didn’t feel comfortable potentially seeing weird porn, I didn’t click unfamiliar links. Also, I didn’t know a single adult who thought the internet was safe for kids. When I got left alone with the computer it was because I got old enough to sneak around

The modern internet is largely bad in institutional ways that are impossible to avoid without a doctorate in computer security or becoming a mole person. The way data harvesting and algorithms damage kids, the way parents have been conditioned to think parts of the internet are somehow ‘kid-friendly’- I think there’s a clear difference between those things, and I know which one worries me more