[tw: contains transmisogynist and dyadist slurs]
do not refer to female characters with penises as futa. do not refer to them as traps. we are not shemales, ladyboys, or any other fucking gross terms people came up with. all are incredibly disrespectful and transphobic and really fucking shitty thing to call someone.
do not draw ‘herms’. do not refer to femme characters with dicks as ‘herms’. do not draw someone with a vagina with a dick arbitrarily attached somewhere above it. it actively shits on intersex people and is a really shitty fucking thing to do.
by all means, you can draw smut of trans and intersex people. there needs to be more acceptance for positive nsfw art of both. if you want to draw it, just check with someone thats trans/intersex to make sure its not unrealistic or disrespectful and youre good to go! and queer people will be happy to enjoy your art and youll likely reach a larger audience.
but stop referring to us with slurs. were all fucking sick of it, and altho we dont really have a way to talk to mainstream porn producers, we can still talk to you on here a bit. dont ignore us or act like were trying to defame you or something.
avoiding doing this shit is really easy. do so and youll gain a lot more respect as an artist from a lot of people.
(this will reblog as a link if you dont force it to stay text, fyi)
I would add to this: “hermaphrodite” is generally considered a slur by the intersex community. This means that unless you are yourself intersex, you don’t get to throw the term around in public. And being trans doesn’t give you any right to use the term. It is solely for intersex people to reclaim (or not) at their discretion.
Why are “herm” characters so offensive? Because while you’re jerking off to characters with a mixture of sex characteristics…..real-life intersex infants, children, and adults are being forced into surgeries and hormonal treatments they don’t want or need, told their bodies are defective and disgusting, lied to about their physical realities, and generally abused and pathologized solely for existing. Many intersex people have trauma (surgical, medical, sexual, emotional, or otherwise) solely as a result of being intersex in a violently dyadist and binarist society. These experiences are not fun or exotic or sexy. And it can be painful to see so many people using bodies like yours for funtimes or wank fodder when actually HAVING a body like that can be so difficult.
This isn’t to say that you’re a terrible person if you like imagining aliens or fantasy species for whom a mixture of humanoid sex characteristics is normal. For many, this can be a form of self-affirming escapism: we want to imagine some other way of being in which certain bodies are seen as normal, desirable, and good.
But be careful of the language you use. Be careful of only using characters like this for sexual scenarios. Be careful of fetishizing or minimizing actual trans and intersex experiences for pleasure. Be willing to self-examine.
Really good addition by my boyfriend. Especially the part that it’s okay to fantasize and engage in fantasy – but it’s important to be aware of language and fetishizing and the impact these things have on real people.
I think something that should be added to this conversation is why hermaphrodite is considered a slur. I looked through other comments on this post, and it is something that is really hindering peoples understanding of this issue.
Me personally, I keep thinking of greek child Hermaphroditus. So you know, mythicism, ripped greek bods, duality, awesome.
Or just the scientific application to animals that are hermaphrodites by nature (containing both funtioning male and female reproductive organs).
So i did some google research…
Turns out, it’s a case of the Victorians screwing us over again. Early medical science described intersex individuals as either true or false hermaphrodites. Which feels rather dismissive to me, and kind of has some weird exotic feel too.
To make it even worse, some institutions still use some variants on the word hermaphrodite to diagnose intersex people to this day. Talk about putting salt on the wound.
Key and Teeth 