Some thoughts on abortion (A response that was too long for the comments)

A friend of mind posted an article she wrote on her Facebook feed about men in abortion arguments. It's interesting, here's the link:
https://bowlbysaur.wordpress.com/2015/06/08/rampant-sexism-on-facebook/

Okay so I have a bunch of feelings about this.

Pet peeve out of the way, I'm not a fan of how gendered the whole pregnancy thing always becomes in abortion arguments because transmen/uterus havers who are not women are NEVER mentioned but given the world we live in it's a small thing as we're not there yet. It sucks but trans inclusive abortion discussions are not commonplace yet. Sigh.

On with the opinions.

I think all people should be allowed express their opinions on abortion without being told they should not have a say.

I think the issue many people saying (cis) men shouldn't have a say is one of perspective. I once heard an argument online in reference to child custody arguing that a father should have greater rights to custody because (brace yourself) "If you put a dollar into a vending machine and a coke comes out, is that coke yours? Or the vending machine's?"

Gross.

Both members of a baby making union (be it on purpose or not) have input into that potential child. In a fairer (though less economical) biological circumstance there'd be a 50/50 chance of either party getting a baby in em with every sexual encounter. Sexual politics would be hella different.

But things don't work that way. Cis men don't ever have to walk down the street and have it blatantly obvious that they put a baby in someone. Our society is such that men don't have the same weight of sexual shame placed on women. A cis man will never have to deal with being simultaneously blatantly pregnant AND blatantly male as transmen may (violence against trans people is bad as it is, imagine walking home at night with a life inside you as a neon sign saying "I'm a freak, feel free to brutally attack me". Sorry, I'm trying not to get too emotive but that's a personal fear of mine). Rape also happens and people end up with a nine month reminder of that. And cis men have the option to just skip out. To say "that's your problem" and not have to deal with a baby growing inside someone else thanks in part to them.

My (only cis male) ex was not pro-choice. We had many discussions about this and his main argument was "I couldn't deal with the lost potential, with that person not getting exist because they could have turned out to be anyone". My response was
"That's like asking me to keep a tenant in my apartment for you on short notice. Someone you've heard might turn out to be really great is coming into town and I have to house them. Neither of us get to see them for nine months and we'll all hang out a bunch when those months are up but in the meantime it's my apartment they're fucking with. They're eating food out of the fridge, they're moving things around so I can't find them, they're keeping me awake at night. And regardless of how much you help out by restocking my fridge or doing stuff for me it doesn't change the fact that your apartment is perfectly the way you left it during and after all this. Bear in mind this isn't something I've had time to prepare for. I wasn't able to "surprise tenant proof" my apartment in advance. But you're pretty sure this person is gonna be amazing and it's your right as much as mine to find out who they're gonna be. But it's my apartment. As my time. And my money and my mental health."
I don't know if I ever managed to sway him at all. But you see what I mean, there's an unfortunate disparity there.

So I'm pro choice. I don't deny that pregnancy is potential for life and all that but I don't think anyone should be obligated to keep a baby unless they want to. I think that's detrimental to both the parents as the child. And, if we've learned anything in the marriage referendum debate it's that children have a right to the good care.

A Trans Concerns Venting Session

So, it's been about 6 months since I came out as transgender, changed my name, pronouns, the whole shebang. And, while I'm pre everything medically and in the eyes of the law I haven't yet changed anything (my legal name is still my birth one etc), finally being honest with myself and the people around me has been great for my confidence and mental well-being. That said, there are some things that concern me regarding being trans in the world at large. Not necessarily anything immediately changeable but I'm in a mood to talk about them anyway, to raise awareness. And to vent. Venting is a big part of this.

First, an anecdote. On Tuesday I was at the George (a gay bar in Dublin that has been screening each episode of Ru Paul's Drag Race Season 7 on Tuesdays, as it airs) hanging out with fiends, watching the show and some drag performances, just having a night out. We kind of acquired a hanger on, a slightly older guy (he's 25, we're all late teens/early 20s) and while he'd kind of outstayed his welcome we didn't want to be mean. I found out late on in the night that he hadn't realised I was trans, that he'd perceived me as a young looking cis gay boy. He'd been coming on to me and to let him down easy I told him that I'm more into girls (I'll get back to this fact). He jokingly tells me I'm in the wrong bar. 

Okay, the guy was drunk and harmless but what he said struck a chord with me. It's definitely something I've given thought to and something I'm conflicted about. To clarify things, I am bisexual. I am attracted to my own gender (male) and other genders (female and people who don't identify along the gender binary). However, I spent a very, very long time suppressing and denying my attraction to women. I was assigned female at birth, belonged to a fairly conservative middle class family, went to catholic and/or all girls schools for a very long time. I spent nigh on seventeen years rejecting every inkling that I might be anything other than straight. And so, when I finally came out as bisexual I decided I was going to explore the side of me that I'd so long pretended did not exist. I'd also just gotten out of a year and a half relationship with a guy, I figured I'd give men a rest for a bit. 

So, for about a year I lived as a queer woman (I first came out in January, figured out trans stuff in November). In that time I got heavily involved in the Dublin LGBT community, going to youth groups and making some truly wonderful friends. I'd found "my people". It was so strange to me to be in the presence of so many people who "got it". Feminism, queer issues, mental health things, people understood the struggles and could relate. This also happened to be the year I properly educated myself on feminism as well. Not in-depth necessarily, I've still to read many of the great feminist essays, but I began seeing the world from a feminist perspective. I started properly taking notice of the social rules and restrictions placed on people seen as female by society. 

And, while I was and continue to be bisexual, my relationship towards men as romantic partners changed. I was no longer comfortable with the typically accepted girl/boy dynamic as dictated by society at large (I do realise that some of this may be down to my not actually being a girl, but I'll make my point anyway). I couldn't imagine sitting back and expecting other people to make the first move, or having to be modest to comply with socially accepted norms. While those aren't things that women should have to do at all, regardless of orientation, I realised that much of this would be the expectation for cisgender heterosexual men. Whether they know it or not (and a great many of them do not, by virtue of never having to think about it) cishet men are fed these images of what a heterosexual relationship should look like. And every relationship has this underlying tension of how well it complies to the quote unquote "standard". I'm not saying every cisgender heterosexual man is in favour of this but under a patriarchal mainframe which establishes them as the indisputably dominant party every relationship that falls short of that is going to be a bit of a disappointment, if even on a subconscious level. It's like the "average man" you see in sitcoms and advertisements who's shown as quote unquote "emasculated" by his wife of girlfriend, despite her requests and desires being generally reasonable. Those images are far from real life but they send a message and a great deal of men feel their impact.

And so, as I settled into my little queer bubble, I became more and more aware of not wanting to leave. Of not wanting to have that concern of "am I going out of my way to make this relationship fit what we've been taught to expect" if I were to end up in another heterosexual relationship. Queer relationship politics, while not free of expectations (the butch/femme dynamic is a real pain in the ass, excusing the pun) in queer relationships it's generally easier to break with heterosexual or past queer community traditions. I found myself in a somewhat privileged position where I could choose to stay in the queer bubble and cast away the possibility of having any future relationships tainted by heterosexual male privilege and the expectations that accompany it.

And then I figured out I was trans. 

Ima make a maybe slightly controversial claim. Realising you are trans is like a Garden of Eden moment; you bite that bloody apple and you know things and you cannot unknow them no matter how much easier that would make things for you. You figure it out and it's like putting the final piece in a jigsaw puzzle you've been unwittingly working on your whole life, you suddenly know what the picture is and you can't pretend that you don't anymore.

You now have the burden of knowing,
learn to lift brah

And it kind of sucks. I feel like I'd had it easy up to that point being bi because there was no huge moment of "you are not attracted to men and you can't change that ever" that may have come with being a lesbian. This was a moment of "Oh shit son, your life is going to be complicated and hard and the most choice you have now is between Continue to lie to everyone and feel like shit forever or Come out and deal with that forever." Biphobia is a real thing and it's shit to have your sexuality constantly dismissed as not real, a phase, or attention seeking but there is an element of "straight passing" and choice that monosexual people (people who are only attracted to one gender eg. gay men, lesbians, straight people) simply don't have. I'd been, frankly, a little spoilt by the choice fate had afforded me and it has come back around to bitch slap me for it. 

But it is incredibly unlikely that I'll ever date a heterosexual man again, so that's something.

We're finally getting to the original point of this rant. I'm in a strange position. I'm stuck in between. Because I now find myself in the position of a bisexual man who has an aversion to dating men for privilege reasons, a privilege that I will likely enjoy someday later in my transition. I don't currently pass well enough (on a consistent basis) to fully have male privilege. However, when I'm on testosterone and my voice breaks and I eventually inevitably try to grow a beard, it'll probably apply. And that's both exhilarating and terrifying to think about. 

Because I'm already cracking down on myself mentally for abusing my privilege, even just doing things I'd have done before I bit the trans revelation apple. Like, my mum was cooking an omelette and she was about to add hot bacon to the egg mix in the bowl instead of pouring the egg mix over the bacon in the pan (putting the hot bacon in the bowl of beaten egg would start to cook the egg around it, compromising the structural integrity of the whole omelette when then poured into the pan, because some bits would be more cooked than others) and I tried to explain this to her and the thought occurred to me "Are you mansplaining?" (For the record, I maintain that she was doing it wrong and I was within reason to explain why) But it was weird because my doing the very same thing before transitioning is just me being my pedantic, annoying self but now it's coming from a place of privilege and I can't change that. 

I get that I'm over-thinking a lot of this but the fact remains: if I start properly passing, making my life easier and lessening my gender dysphoria greatly, I start being perceived as a mostly heterosexual man, will all the bells and tassels attached (figuratively, actual bells and tassels are expensive as fuck). My mindset regarding cisgender men, while now extending to gay men as opposed to straight, is still an inhibitor because to my mind there is still a privilege and perspective gap. 

And as far as dating is concerned, I have some interesting options. I try my luck with straight girls, try to pass, fake familiarity with privilege I've only recently acquired, make friends with straight guys who have no idea how good they have it and hide my trans history at the risk of not being accepted

 OR 

become that dude at the gay bar trying to pick up girls, hang out with the people I probably relate to most right now: queer women and trans people but be acutely aware of the fact that the community will have changed for me. You're in the wrong bar. 

Fun fact: When looking for gifs and pictures for this blog
I generally search "X action gif" look through
 the results, then search "David Tennant X action gif".
What can I say? The man has a great face 

But there are no bars for people in my situation, not really. This is a big question for the trans community: "Does the T really belong in LGBT?" I might write a full piece on m feelings on the subject at some point, of which I have many, but I'll say this for the moment; In an ideal world, trans people would be equally accepted in the queer community to lesbian, gay and bisexual cis people but that is far from the case. Many of us get involved in the queer community under the assumption that we are queer cis people, as I once believed, being trans isn't so common that people jump there when they're having identity qualms. (Disclaimer: many trans people are gay, meaning that they'd have been seen as "straight" before coming out as trans. I'm not sure of the numbers exactly but many trans people I know are sexually fluid because they see the arbitrary nature of gender. But attractions are still attractions, can't change em yo) The way the vast majority of us figure out our identities is through the queer community, we find our people, only to be left feeling like we're out of place if we begin passing as our real genders. I feel like there is definite value in trans people continuing to be a part of the LGBT community but mindsets in the community need to change big time. 

So basically I'm in a weird place. I don't pass well when I'm speaking (which I do a lot and loudly) but my end goal is to do just that. I'm still figuring out how I feel about that. There is no doubt in my mind that I am male, which makes all of this that bit more confusing and scary. None of my transition has involved permanent changes yet but simply knowing feels like the most permanent thing imaginable. I realise that this is the case for absolutely everyone but having to deal with "This is who I am. This is my life and I can't change it" is terrifying. 

I am not ashamed of who I am. But the night is dark and full of terrors, so many of which exist exclusively in my own mind.  

I don't know if this has been interesting, enlightening, boring for the probable heterosexual cisgender majority of you reading this. Well done for getting to the end. Have a cookie.

Embrace the Madness (even when the future is uncertain and you're scared) 

(Also, I realise I've done three posts in a row on queer issues, with the referendum coming up it's kind of been on m mind a lot. I'll hopefully be doing a film review or something more lighthearted soonish)  

An Open Letter the Garden Variety Homophobe

Dear homophobes,

Yes, I mean you. 

You who believe that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people should not have the same rights as you, a straight cisgender person (Housekeeping: cisgender means "not trans". I'll also be referring to LGBT+ people as "queer" because it's an umbrella term and less clunky to type). 

What's that you say? You're not a homophobe? But you don't think queer couples should be allowed to get married? That... makes you a homophobe. I don't care if you don't like the word, I don't care if you are offended, I'm merely calling a spade a spade. This particular spade wants to dig a hole, put queer people into it and leave the rights they ought to have as adult human beings outside that hole and out of reach. You, my friend (and I use the word "friend" as loosely as possible) are a homophobic spade. 

Level of dedication to this blog entry:
MS Painting a homophobic spade
You're welcome

There's been a lot of talk about protecting children. That you don't have anything against queer people, you just don't want them influencing your kids. Well, my naive summer child, what if I told you that your kids have been and will continue to be, for the rest of their lives, influenced by queer people? 

What if I told you that, at least once every couple of weeks, we queers emerge from our underground glitter orgy caves, don our "normal person" masks and stroll around, undetected. We talk to you. We might serve you coffee or wait your table. We might offer you financial advice or sell you your tv. Maybe we're in government, or the school system, or the police force. We might, god forbid, be babysitting your kids, at your own request.

Sure, some of us have the traditional marks of the flaming queer: fashion sense and hand flailing for the men, "edgy" haircuts and tattoos/piercings for the women. But at the end of the day, how can you be sure we're not just hipsters? How can you be sure we're not bisexual, hiding our queerness behind genuine attraction to members of the opposite sex? How well do you know your best friend? Can you spot a bisexual who sticks to straightness to avoid the stigma, or a bisexual who happens to be in a monogamous opposite sex relationship? Can you ever really know another person's latent desires?

Statistically speaking, two or three people in this photo are queer, if not more
We just lurk in our "normal person" costumes ready to strike.

You can never know for sure.

We are everywhere and that always has been and always will be the case. We've just stopped pretending quite so much. You were, as a child, unwittingly influenced by probable hundreds of queers and look at how aggressively, defensively straight you turned out. 

"But if the children know that queer people are a thing, they'll want to try it. You're pushing the homosexual agenda!" you say?

I ask you, when you learned about the existence of queer people, did you want to try it? If, in the unlikely event that you did, did you like it? No? Congratulations, you are a heterosexual! If you don't want to have romantic and/or sexual relationships with members of the same sex you can't really do much about it. The same goes for homosexuals. The "gay agenda" wants people to love who they are naturally inclined to love in a safe, consentual environment. 

I mean, sure, we could try to convert as many straight people as possible to our cause by insisting that they date same sex partner after same sex partner until they find one who they can kinda sorta tolerate and bear to sleep with on a semi-regular basis until they settle down and stop having regular sex altogether... but you guys already do that so well in reverse, we wouldn't want to steal your thunder.

On the subject of kids thinking it's okay, though, I do have a few, more serious words. Ten percent of children are queer. Not "will grow up to be queer", not "will choose a queer lifestyle when they're old enough". No, ten percent of children are queer. Statistics say that they will first realise this somewhere between the ages of nine and twelve years old. They'll keep it bottled up for the next five to eight years, on average coming out around the ages of seventeen and eighteen. Many queer children suffer lasting mental health issues thanks to having to keep this secret for so long. Feeling like a freak. Feeling unwanted and doomed to a life of pain and suffering. Many of them would rather take their own lives than grow up and have to face themselves as they are. 

Why, you ask? Why do these children feel like this? Because of you, my homophobic friend (again, take that word loosely). I'm going to google "10 year old child" and bring up some pictures. These could be queer kids, they could not. I don't know. But I don't want to cause any children unnecessary pain.

I even searched for some specifically Irish kids because I thought I'd bring it closer to home 

(though interestingly, this is the search result for "Irish 10 year old" versus just "10 year old")

Would you personally bully any of these kids? Call them names? Hurt them physically? Tell them they don't deserve happiness? No, of course not, you're not a fucking monster. 

But, by perpetuating the idea that openly queer people are somehow detrimental to the upbringing of children, or that children should not learn about queer relationships until they're at least eighteen is harming children. I don't know if any of the children depicted above are queer. I pulled them straight from google. But they could be. And at ten years old they're just starting to figure it out. They're seeing pictures of straight people everywhere. Every book they read, every film they watch, every open couple in their life experience is a flashing neon sign saying "You are not normal. You are different and you don't know why". "Sheltering" children from the reality, that queer people exist, is not stopping them from becoming queer, it's just adding unnecessary obstacles to the road to figuring out who they are.

I grew up like this. I'm a nineteen year old, bisexual transgender guy. I went to a catholic primary school followed by a protestant all girls secondary school (for 3 years) then a "technically Presbyterian but fairly secular" mixed school for the remainder of my secondary education. I was never taught about queer people. I knew I liked both boys and girls from the age of maybe five or six (romantically speaking). I avoided girls where I could because I was scared. This was easy enough for the first three years because we had boys in our class. I played with them. I had schoolyard crushes. It was all fine and dandy because it seemed straight. It wasn't, but it seemed it. Then the boys left. And so began a long period in my life where I knew I liked girls but didn't want to admit it to myself and kept myself from forming substantial friendships because, god forbid, I might fall in love. I had friends in the younger stages, sure, but age twelve to sixteen, the peak time for teenage sexual and romantic feel feeling, I was friendless and hopeless and scared all the time. Things got better when I moved to a mixed school because I could make male friends and pretend to be exclusively straight (which was actually gay because I'm trans but I didn't know that at the time so we'll ignore it). 

Regardless, the Irish education system's lack of queer acknowledgement put me and countless others like me in a position of fear and distress which lasted years and had an effect that can still be felt in my life today. I was never explicitly bullied as much as ostracised and beaten down by my own insecurities and feelings of "you're a freak and everyone will hate you forever". Many are not so lucky. 

It is homophobic attitudes that keep this the norm. Remember those kids from a couple paragraphs ago? The state is bullying them. Or teaching them to beat themselves down. Not to mention that kids, queer and straight are constantly subject to homophobic bullying from other kids. Which is fun because it means straight kids then associate childhood bullying with an oppressed group to which they don't actually belong, meaning they resent queer people for something they never actually did to them. A homophobic system is effectively a homophobe-creating machine. And you accuse us of recruiting the youthes. Worst part? In many schools teachers can't intervene and stop homophobic bullying thanks to religious school policies forbidding mention of queer issues.

This is likely coming as a shock to you, homophobe. You are usually the one thinking of the children. One of the common responses given by parents when asked about the possibility of their child being queer is "I wouldn't want them to be queer because their lives would be harder because of it."  

What if you could change that? You could make that less the case by supporting queer children. By abandoning archaic notions of "the gays trying to convert your babies" or "teachers becing forced to teach about gay sex in schools". Sex ed is lacking in general in this country, you really think we're going to jump straight from "let's pretend sex isn't a thing until they're sixteen" to "Okay, first years, here's how gay sex works"? Homophobia hurts everyone. Your children, be they queer or not, will suffer from the atmosphere created by homophobic attitudes.

And you can maintain that you're not homophobic all you want, it doesn't make a shred of difference. If you treat queer people as some kind of threat or corrupting force in this world you are hating a group that is already hate by so many so simply being themselves. We queers have heard it all before. It hurts but we're used to it. We just hope that we can slowly open peoples' eyes to who the real enemy is. The enemy is not you, homophobe. You were made this way by other homophobes before you, and they homophobes before them. The enemy is fear and hatred. The enemy is believing that queer people are some inhuman things, existing only to make your life complicated. The enemy is believing we can't change this system of prejudice for the better. 

It isn't easy, changing long held views. I don't know if this will reach anyone who needs to hear it. In all likelihood it'll be read by people who already believe in equality and they've only read things they already agree with. If it gets around maybe it will reach someone, who knows? Share if you think this might be useful. 

Baby don't hurt me. Don't hurt me
No more

And I know this is the second post in a row on this blog about queer stuff. I just haven't written on here in a while and with the Marriage Equality referendum coming up I'm getting into a lot of online debates over this anyway, thought I might assemble my thoughts in a somewhat articulate fashion. This may have been the first blog entry where I've mentioned that I'm transgender. That's fun. For those of you who didn't know, I'm a boy. Took me 18 years but I finally figured it out. I go by Felix now. I'll update the main description eventually. 

Stay strong, friends. We've made it this far.

Embrace the Madness

Redefining family

On the 22nd of May 2015 my home country, Ireland, will vote on whether or not civil marriage should be made legal for same sex couples.

One of the main arguments being made by those in opposition to the referendum passing is that allowing same sex couples to marry will redefine what it means to be a family. It will undermine pre-existing "traditional" families and heterosexual families to come by showing that the man or the woman in those relationships are redundant, by virtue of there being families without one or the other.

Nonsensical arguments reflective of poorly veiled homophobia aside (But a brief jab before I do: I see no one suggesting that heterosexual widows or widowers with children immediately remarry, nor that single mothers or fathers should be obliged to find a partner lest their children be unalterably damaged. No, that would be absurd. It's perfectly fine as long as they're straight.)  

Ahem. Yes, nonsensical arguments reflective of poorly veiled homophobia aside, I want to talk about redefining family. But first, I'm sharing this campaign video for the Yes side. It deserves all the praise it can get and then some (it's a bit of a tear jerker, you've been warned)

I love it. I love it because it highlights something that members of the LGBT+ community know so well: That we are a family. In a time when the traditional image of the Irish village community seems so far removed from reality. A time when people are living further and further apart. A time when people care more about privacy and security than helping their neighbours.

In a time when community can seem like a relic of the past, groups of people who were traditionally outsiders band together and make their own family. This is far from new. We are constantly redefining what it means to be a family.

I ask you, if the 1987 show Full House was about three men in a polyamorous relationship would it be such a stretch? The show (for those of you who don't know) was about a father (Bob Saget) of three daughters who, after the death of his wife, raises the girls with the help of his brother-in-law (John Stamos) and best friend (Dave Coulier). No one in their right mind would deny that they're a family. And the three main male characters obviously care about each other. I mean, everywhere they look, everywhere they go, there's a heart, there's a hand to hold on to. And when they're lost out there and they're all alone, you'd better believe a light is waiting to carry them home- okay I'll stop.

More recent, examples: Friends. Two and a Half Men. How I Met Your Mother. 

I mean, they were all fucking, it's basically what conservatives think LGBT+
people do but with straight people and on TV for 10 bloody seasons with nary a complaint
(except maybe around Ross and Rachel's "will they, won't they" bullshit, that was ridick) 

People think of the LGBT+ community as analogous to family and jump straight to things like "Rent" or Eytan Fox's "The Bubble" or John Cameron Mitchel's "Shortbus" (not that they don't count). Take a step away from the bohemian "alternative lifestyle" stereotype and its obvious that we have family-but-not-technically-family imagery everywhere. 

So I say let's continue to redefine family.

Let's redefine family as a chosen one. 

Because so many LGBT+ people learn quickly that biology does not ensure unconditional love. On the contrary, that love bears the expectation of grandkids, of the appropriate son or daughter-in-law, of the religion, race and gender of the person and people you will love.

Let's redefine family.

Because biological privilege does not come with a form to fill out. Biological privilege does not insist upon careful forethought, "Are we ready for this? Who will this person be? Who will I be to them? What challenges will they face and can I advise them? Can I provide for this child? Can I protect them?" 

Let's redefine family.

Because we live in a world where some people can bring the most vulnerable of tiny humans into the world by mistake. We have a cultural duty to provide a supportive and tolerant environment beyond the confines of traditional family. 

They say you can't choose your family. It's true. You can't choose your parents. You can't choose your inherited race or ethnicity. You can't choose if your father is abusive, or your mother's a gambler, your granda's a racist, or your sister's a homophobe. Redefining family means providing a community for people connected to hatred and ignorance by blood. Family should mean more than just genes. Family can mean more.

As the old saying goes, blood is thicker than water, but which is healthier? I'm paraphrasing. And I added the bit at the end. Is that a weird analogy? Yes. Yes it is. 

Disclaimer: I'm not saying that traditional families are inherently bad or damaging to children. I'm saying that there should be other options. One's family can be one's friends, one's adoptive family, one's remarried father or mother's new partner's family. Family is a versatile term and there's a whole lot of chaos in the mix. This debate isn't even really about children, or family. Marriage equality is about marriage.

In conclusion, families already look and act incredibly different from one another. Trying to ignore that fact is futile. Trying to act like mixed race families or the families of same sex couples are some sign that "political correctness has gone mad" is idiotic. No one is going to be marrying their grandparents, that's gross and I'm pretty sure there are totally separate laws against it. People are not going to be marrying their dogs. Dogs cannot consent to marriage and at this point you know you're being facetious, cut that out.

I don't know if dogs can marry each other. I feel like the tax benefits would be a little wasted
on them, don't you? Also, I like to think these are both boy or girl dogs. They're fucking dogs, man,
they don't know what marriage is, or gender. Real cute though.

 People are going to marry each other because they want to get married. The LGBT+ community and its allies are not some evil liberal spite cult trying to drag you kicking and screaming into the 21st century. You're already living in it. All this is in your back garden already. "The neighbourhood" has already metaphorically gone if that's how you want to look at it. If you want out, get out, I hear Mars is super homophobic. Like 100% homophobes out there, you'd love it. Buhbie now. 

This maybe got off topic...Eh.

Embrace the Madness  

   

Big Hero 6 or "A Testament to Moderate Masculinity, with Traces of Contrived Evil"

Hey. It's been a while. Um, how're you? *shuffles feet awkwardly* Look, I'm sorry. I've been super busy, I'm in college now and it's very time consuming. I know that's no excuse, I should have at least checked in once in a while, and I was going to, but I lost my nerve and it just... well, it just got worse as time passed, as it inevitably does, gradually getting further and further away from the last time I wrote anything here. I'm bad with commitment, you know this by now. I- I'll try not to leave you for so long again. I can't make any promises but I'll try.

Am- am I forgiven? Can you find it in your collective hearts to pardon my inconsistencies? 

Yes? I'm gonna take your silence as a yes.

For the record, this is my exact "forgive me?" expression.
Internet, you know me so well

Okay, Now that we have that melodramatic apology shtick out of the way, I'm going to talk about Big Hero 6! A film review! Of a popular movie! That's bound to redeem me in the eyes of my readers, probably... maybe... we'll see.

Oh, quick sidenote, somewhere in my absence I hit over 10,000 page views. Here is a celebration gif or two. I guess I probably owe it to you or something.

On the continued subject of my faces,
dis my lady gettin' face

Okay, last one. It's been a while, I've missed this

Right, without further procrastination, Big. Hero. Six!

Let me just start out by saying, I was incredibly apprehensive about this film. I watched a documentary about the phenomenal success of a little movie I also reviewed, maybe you've heard of it, Frozen? At the end of this documentary Disney took the opportunity to plug their upcoming film Big Hero 6. Paul Briggs, head of story for Frozen, puts it thusly:

"Frozen is a story about sisters, and the relationship between those sisters and the journey they go on, and with Big Hero 6 you have a relationship with brothers." 

Other people involved say things on voiceover along the lines of "Its a boy and his robot, it's different to frozen but the strength of relationship is still in there" and "It's a fun superhero film bt there's also a familial relationship angle which is so important". 

And I'm sitting there with my face firmly in my palm thinking, holy shit, are they really saying this is original? Did they take none of the feminist praise of the film to heart? They can't honestly believe that the idea they're pitching is original...can they?

I mean: 

and

This one kinda counts as both a relationship between brothers AND a boy and his robot.
They share a lot of common elements with the BahR conventions (and yes, that was a pun)

(If you're interested there's an entire Tv Trops page dedicated to "Boy and his X" media. There are so many robot and boy duos on there, holy shitballs.)

To summarise my laboured point, a boy and his robot is not an original idea. Japan LOVES that trope. A boy and his brother is not an original idea, if not actual blood relations the buddy cop film/show is the modern equivalent to the "sworn brothers" trope in medieval era romance and the like. These are far from fresh ideas. The success of Frozen was in having arguably two female protagonists and treating them both like people (because Hollywood has a problem with not treating women like a homogeneous group for some reason). 

You cannot say  "This female driven thing was successful, I wonder if trying it with guys would also be successful?" There is no way anyone is so naive. So, I did not have high hopes for this film. Thankfully, it took the idea in a totally different direction. Here on there be spoilers so watch your back.

I liked Big Hero 6. It's a fun movie. But it has some gaping problems that really should have been spotted and remedied. Butt first, ima talk about the strengths. This film is great for minority and gender representation. Among the team of six superheroes there is only one (human) white dude. In fact, I almost there WAS a white dude on the team because he looks like this when suited up:

Spot him? No? He's in the dragon suit.

I barely count it at all to be completely honest. Apart from generic skater, nerdy white guy we have two distinct female characters; Gogo (yellow suit) the adrenaline junkie purple hair "cool" chick and Honey Lemon (pink suit) the unabashedly feminine but also really smart science girl. Then we have Wasabi (green suit) a large black man who is obsessed with planning, precision and order, and Hiro Hamada (purple suit) fourteen year old genius, trouble maker and team leader. Baymax (or, as I refer to him in my head, Bae-max) is in red and he's a robot so he doesn't have a sex though his designated gender is male. I'll probably rant on the gendering of robots some other day. It bothers me. But I'm not about to go off on a tangent right now. 

The colourful and creative cast of characters is well done and doesn't lean too heavily on stereotypes (with perhaps the exceptions of Hiro and Gogo, but I'll get back to that), and all of the voice actors are actually representative of the characters they play; Hiro, his brother and Gogo are played by Asian voice actors, Wasabi a black actor and Honey Lemon Hispanic (it's not made particularly clear while watching the film but I think Honey Lemon is supposed to be Hispanic or have some Hispanic genes. She has a slight accent at times and a tan but it's never referenced explicitly. For the most part, she's white passing.) Hiro and his brother Tadashi are also mixed race, they live with their aunt who is white after their parents died (this particular snippet of information revealed to us in the most wonderful piece of clumsy exposition I've heard in a long time; 

Hiro frustratedly yelling at Tadashi "They died when I was three, remember?!?").

I'll admit, I was a little annoyed at just how white the Hiro looked, having an Asian american lead in a modern Disney film would be amazing as there haven't been any in their films since Mulan in 1998, almost twenty years ago. Yes, there was Jake Long in the tv series American Dragon and some argue that Russel from Up looks vaguely Asian but that's not at all clear. Big Hero 6 is set in the futuristic San Fransokio, (a mashup of San Francisco and Tokyo). Explicit references are made to Asian culture and technology. I understand that San Francisco and Tokyo merging into a megacity is about intermingling, the "melting pot" principle and all that but could they seriously not have had them live with an Asian american relative? Did they have to establish that they had a white parent implicitly as a weird sort of racial "no homo" equivalent (I'm not even gonna try to coin a terms for that phenomenon, I'm sticking with "racial no homo"). I highly doubt it was unconscious. I'm disappointed that our protagonists still need to be at least a little white in order for film producers to feel comfortable with it.

Hiro as a character suffers from a major case of "Protagonist traits". You know the ones. He's young and skilled but arrogant and reckless, but in the end he's going to pull together to lead the team to victory. Ash from Pokemon has this. Naruto. TJ from Recess. Most Red Power Rangers. Luke Skywalker. Harry Potter in the early books. The writers gave Hiro the most generic traits available and it just feels lazy. I swear I was expecting a scene like this:

It doesn't get much more clichéd...

Then there's Gogo. In general I felt like the supporting cast could have been given more screen time but in a 100 minute film things do need to get cut (and I'm satisfied with the amount of time given to Bae-max so I'll let it slide mostly). However, Gogois probably the least developed character in the supporting cast. She likes to go fast and also she's "cool". I honestly question whether the creators saw The Lego Movie (which I will review eventually, I promise) because Gogo is EXACTLY the kind of character Wildstyle was satirising.

You can tell she's the "cool" one because she wears leather and has a coloured streak in her hair. She's sarcastic and she doesn't care what you think. Did I mention she chews bubble gum constantly?

Yeeeeeeah... it's laughably clichéd and played DEAD STRAIGHT.

I love picturing the Big Hero 6 design team, halfway through their movie, sitting down to check out The Lego Movie and collectively having it dawn on them that their oh-so-original character design is so common that it was canonically thought up by an eight year old in one of the most popular movies of the previous year. Followed by a collective, "Well, shit."

Character qualms aside, the other large problem with this film is pacing. Don't get me wrong, some scenes are done really well. The first scene with the bot battle hustling, the scene where Bae-max is on low battery (seriously, click that link,it's wonderful), some of the emotional hard hitters early on and then near the end of the film are beautifully paced. However, much of the rest feels incredibly rushed.

The most gaping case of this is the twist villain. (Spoiler Warning here on in) Because Frozen did it, Big Hero 6 need a twist villain, sense-making be damned! Alas, where Frozen spent a decent amount of time establishing Hans (their well executed twist villain) as a character, the twist villain for Big Hero 6, professor Callaghan, gets a measly two scenes of introduction and development, and short scenes at that. What do we know about him, really? We know he invented the technology that Hiro uses for his battle bot. We know that he works for the university at which Tadashi studies, and that he serves as some kind of mentor figure. We also establish that he has a problem with Alistair "Big Business, that shit" Krei profiting from scientific discoveries (You know, because scientists don't need funding or anything silly like that). Other than that, we're given very little set up to the big reveal that, shock horror, Callaghan is actually the man behind the mask.

A much better twist would have been
"Hey, Ammon escaped from the Avatar universe and is wreaking havoc in other worlds!"

It turns out that Callaghan's daughter was the test driver for a teleportation machine which wasn't ready for human trials. It worked perfectly fine for other things but put a person through and explodey-chaos-not-good-stuff happened and she was trapped/killed. Callaghan, despite being perfectly fine with the test before it went ahead, blames his daughter's disappearance and probable death on Krei and his greed and steals Hiro's science project, commits arson on his place of work and allows a promising student of his to die, all to enact his vaguely thought through revenge plot. 

It's... super contrived, is what I'm trying to say. 

For comparison's sake, let's take a look at another "promising scientist turns villain" example: Doctor Otto Octavian AKA Doc Ock. In Sam Raimi's Spiderman 2, Octavian plays a similar mentor role to Peter as Callaghan does to Tadashi. He also loses a loved one (his wife) in a scientific experiment gone wrong and goes on to wreak havoc on the city. The difference? It's established that the mechanical octopus arms are connected to the Doctor's cerebral stem and that the inhibitor chip has broken. In English: they cause him to go mad. There is no such clause in Callaghan's case. Now, it is unclear how long it's been since the accident, how long he's had to mull over what's happened and let the hatred and lust for vengeance ferment, but I'd wager it wasn't long, considering that Abigail does get saved in the end (spoilers and stuff). 

I also find it really hard to believe that a grown ass man would have such a rash reaction to this. Yes, grief is powerful, but it's hardly "throw your entire life away for revenge" powerful. The idea that someone could turn violent and murderous over the loss of a loved one is supposed to be one of the central themes of the film. Hiro, after reprogramming Bae-max to turn them into a fighter robot, tries to have them kill Callaghan on learning his identity. Then later, when we figure out Callaghan's motivation, it's supposed to be a parallel with Hiro's reaction. 

But this doesn't work. Hiro is a hormonal fourteen year old boy. The testosterone is pumping. He's been brought up on movies and video games which teach that violence is a rational reaction to pain. He doesn't yet have the life experience to know that this isn't feasible. He's been established as naive, this all makes sense for his character. It doesn't make sense for Callaghan, who is forty years or so his senior. Callaghan flat out would not react like this because he's not a teenage boy. He's a grown man. He would probably call in the lawyers. No one wants to see that in a kid's action movie, but that's what would happen.

To finish on a more positive but still related note, I like how this film deals with masculinity. I've already mentioned how I like the gender representation. Three central female characters in a cast of ten or eleven is pretty good for modern Hollywood (I do feel like saying that is a cop out, letting Hollywood away with a lot but it does show progress. If this film was made five years ago I'd wager we'd get one or two and they wouldn't share any scenes. Maybe I'm lapping up table scraps but it's a step in the right direction at least). Callaghan plot contrivances aside, I like the different types of masculinity we see here. Hiro is the stereotypical, emotionally inexpressive, proud teenage boy. Tadashi is a much better rounded character. He cares openly about his brother, about his friends, about his studies, and about people in general. He builds Bae-max, a comprehensive healthcare robot, to help people. Tadashi is a great example of modern, moderate masculinity. He is the other side of the coin to Hiro's insecure bravado. Wasabi and Fred are similar examples of modern men. Wasabi likes order but he is not made a constant punchline for it, where in other media he might be (*cough* Big Bang Theory *cough cough*). Fred is a comic book loving slacker (who comes from old money..?) who, like Tadashi, is unashamed and unridiculed for loving what he loves and being himself. Hiro is young and shown as a stark contrast to these older men, secure in their own interests and masculinity. 

Then there's Bae-max themselves (By the way, I'm using gender neutral pronouns for Bae-max. I'm anti-robot-gendering). Bae-max is the voice of reason for Hiro, a sort of continuation of Tadashi's calming presence after his death. Bae-max, being a robot, is free of the social constraints imposed upon men and boys by our society. They have no shame in discussing the tough issues, like puberty, and they recognise the healing effect of a good hug. They have a surprising human reaction to the violence that Hiro wants from them, rejecting it as toxic and ultimately futile. And they're adorable. Did I mention they're adorable? Because they are. Very. Cute.

Overall, Big Hero 6 is worth a watch, for the characters if not the plot. And it's always great to see women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields represented in kid's movies. Though this film is overwhelmingly male centred it's fantastic to see this generation growing up watching movies where female scientists aren't even a question. I was pleased that there wasn't a "...for a girl" to be heard in the whole running time. Hiro even gets told to "Girl up", an interesting subversion by our "cool girl", Gogo.  Check it out if you have the time.

Embrace the madness.