The Hind End of Space

tobitastic:

monotremata:

The long awaited.. PRINCE AND THE PRINCESS…

My final project for my book arts class. Hope you enjoy ;o;

I LOVE this!  The art is great, the story is awesome.  I like that the swordfighting princess can remain a princess and still become a knight.

Yet even so, it does bother me how much gender is tied to gendered activities.  My parent’s generation of feminism saw trans issues through this lense.  If I wanted to be a princess, sew, and wear dresses they would have understood that and been supportive.  But they saw that as the only reason to transition - to be able to do things that are denied to you by gender.  From that perspective, transition is the backup plan, but the primary solution would be to dissolve gender restrictions on activities - the “solution” of telling the young princess that princes can sew and paint and wear dresses too!  The thinking is that would remove the need for transition.  That’s more or less what my parents did.  I was allowed to play with dolls, wear pink, and do anything I wanted, and they believed there would be no reason to transition because they would support me to be a boy and do those things.

I do love this story.  I appreciate that the dress wearing princess can be feminine and strong and a powerful leader.  I appreciate she doesn’t just want to do princess things but to be a princess — and that’s made clear by the other princess who’s not interested in becoming a prince.  I just wish there could be a story like this with a young trans girl who wants to sword fight and do archery or whatever it is that’s coded as “boy things” and still gets to become a princess.  Because the more we get sweet wonderful stories about little trans girls who love dresses and little cis girls who don’t, the more I begin to wonder why gender variance seems to only ever be for cis women.  

Even now, I have folks who question my gender because of my butchness.  Gender variant cis (or cis-ish) women get to be tomboys, butches, bois, or masculine of center.  Gender variant trans women only get to fail at femininity.

(Source: monotremataold)