BBC series I Kissed a Boy decision "homophobic in the extreme" - LGB Alliance

Yes this this has been a long reported (and much discussed) phenomena in the gay community, especially gay men. mumsnet objected to a previous post that included some links to articles, but you can easily find them by googling "straight men are going on Grindr looking for trans men"

It's actually resulted in gay men facing hostility on an app ostensibly made for them, since the above mentioned straight men are often not shy about objecting strongly to being solicited for sex by other biological men.

Yes. I think this verbal vs visual aspect of it is a big part of why people discount the impact fanfiction has on the developing sexualities of so many teen girls. It doesn't seem as 'hardcore' as the porn the boys are watching, and it doesn't involve real people, so it gets dismissed as something a bit silly and not worth looking into. Just the fevered imaginings of young girls.

Honestly, I think part of the reason this is overlooked is because a lot of women interested in feminism like to think there is a kind of female moral superiority over men with regards to pornography.

I don't think there is, I think "romance" novels in the past, and fanfiction now, play an almost identical role for women and traditional pornography does for men. It doesn't have the issues that the film industry does with exploitation of actors and such, but it has most or all of the same negative psychological effects on consumers.

You make some great points with the fanfiction analysis Snoopy. It’s made me think of Red, White and Royal Blue which was on Amazon in the last couple of years. It’s about two gay male characters falling in love but it’s very much a film for women. It was originally a book, written by a woman who identifies as queer and non-binary, natch.

I can't remember if I've watched that before or not. I may have done! I've definitely seen something with Helena, I do remember her.

Your point about the mood boards is very true, and another example of where I think people outside the fan sphere, like therapists, would benefit from keeping tabs on the goings-on within that space. Because that "moodboard of my gender" behaviour is rooted in fandom. It's evolved from making a moodboard of your favourite character, which used to be a popular activity in fandom. If you knew that, you'd be equipped to recognise the red flag of a young person self-inserting into fandom as a means of escaping their reality.

The same with certain male names that become popular among these girls. They might mean nothing to a therapist and be overlooked, but if you know what you're looking at, they could tell you a certain boybander / fictional character is the source of the patient's fixation.

That's important, because if you're a fifteen year old 'trans boy' telling your therapist "there's always been a boy inside me called Steve", it would probably help them to know you've been fixated on Stranger Things since you were 13, and that just so happens to be the name of the character you have pinned all over your bedroom walls. They might look at the whole thing very differently, if they knew that. Especially if they also knew you're reading a lot of fanfiction that pairs Steve with a boy, because actually it's a big no-no to write this straight character with a girl, in fan circles. It's just not allowed for some reason, and you'd be a bad person for doing it.

If a therapist knew that, and knew they were dealing with a teenager very susceptible to being influenced, I imagine they'd change their approach quite drastically. The conversation might then shift towards unhealthy attachments to fictional characters, or helping them stand up against peer pressure.

The therapist who doesn't know all that, on the other hand, is going to an attempt an in-depth conversation about gender and might even wonder if they're dealing with a closeted lesbian. And will end up wildly off-course.

This is very true, and was always a problem in fanfiction. It's a fascinating subject, because it's very much a window into how women try to 'process' male sexuality.

In some cases, they write men as they want them to be. Essentially, male bodies, female minds. It's wish fulfillment.

In others, they're writing what they have absorbed heterosexual relationships to be. One brutish, dominant partner, and one sweet submissive one, as you describe. They've made them gay men in an attempt to escape that, but it comes through anyway. You can really tell that this is how they see the world. Fundamentally. It's very uncomfortable.

The apex (or the nadir) of this is the omegaverse. It's this flat-out animalistic depiction of male sexuality, where he will go into heat and forcefully take his partner because he can't control himself, he can't fight the biological urge! Often this ends up paired with mpreg. If you wrote this as a piece of fiction with straight characters, it would be appalling and no reader would encourage the woman to stay with the man. But it's usually written with gay men instead, so it gets a pass. I won't comment on the homophobia inherent in that, but it really does show how many women have internalised the idea that male arousal = love, and being forcibly taken by a man = passion, and the female role in a relationship is to be submissive and breedable.

It's one of those tropes I just don't understand, and consider a bit of a red flag. It suggests a very warped view of gender and relationships. Especially given these are overwhelmingly presented as love stories. Not some sort of alternate horrorverse everyone is desperately trying to break free from 😂

I've delved into AO3 a bit, but I'm not massively familiar with it, and I'm not familiar with a lot of the fandoms. Sometimes I wonder about particular fandoms and why they strike a chord with girls. Daria fandom is quite niche these days, and it's never going to compete with Harry Potter, but I do remember fanfic from 25 years ago shipping Daria and Jane, which I suppose is natural for a show about two straight girls with a very close platonic relationship. I wonder if that kind of lesbian fanfic has disappeared.

I've seen some data analysis on this, @SionnachRuadh and I think lesbian fic in general is a tiny minority of fanworks on the site. Which is sad but perhaps not surprising. It reflects what a female-dominated environment we're dealing with. Despite it being the trend for everyone to deck themselves in rainbows since about 2015, I think these figures represent the truth - that gay people are a minority. I can't imagine how head-shredding it must be to be a young lesbian in fandom now, and be surrounded by more self-identified 'queer' girls than you can shake a stick at, who blatantly don't experience same sex attraction. It must be so alienating.

I've seen the argument that femslash is so under-represented because lesbians prefer writing male fic. And I've known a few that did. I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But I also think that before it became cool to identify as gay, back when I was a teenager in the 00s, that's not what the young lesbians were doing. They were writing femslash. If there was a scarcity of source material to draw from, they were doing what you describe - taking something that had strong female relationships in it and making it romantic in their fiction. Even the ones that wrote slash ships tended to baulk a bit when penis entered the picture, and avoid getting into too much detail. Nothing like you see today.

There comes a point where if somebody has written fifty sex scenes reverently describing the joys of penis, and is claiming to be a lesbian, you really do have to wonder. What usually happens is they do a slow morph into non-binarism, then pansexualism, then come full circle and start identifying as gay men. (So, the straight women they probably were all along.) It's a bit strange. I tend to think of these as the "captured by Tumblr" types. They came out as gay back when it got them clout on Tumblr, and are terrified to admit they were appropriating the identity, even to themselves. They've got caught in a lie and now it's bigger than them. Now a convoluted process of cope is required to get them back to square one.

I think this social dynamic of "I declared myself something online and now I don't know how to walk it back" is responsible for a proportion of the 'gay trans men'. I haven't been involved in fandom for a few years now, and wasn't heavily involved even at my peak. But I was seeing the above trajectory so often, for a while there, that it became a kind of joke. It must be a factor.

Yes. I think this verbal vs visual aspect of it is a big part of why people discount the impact fanfiction has on the developing sexualities of so many teen girls. It doesn't seem as 'hardcore' as the porn the boys are watching, and it doesn't involve real people, so it gets dismissed as something a bit silly and not worth looking into. Just the fevered imaginings of young girls.

The problem is that those of us who grew up in those spaces can see the impact it's actually having. We see the rise in 'gay trans boys', who are clearly girls trying to full time larp their fantasy world. We see the way all these reskinned, published fanfics are bringing fanfiction elements like BDSM into the mainstream. Just look at all the shock Fifty Shades of Grey generated. All the discourse around it. But in the fanfiction world, that would have been considered an unremarkable work - tame compared to what's out there - and would have inspired no feminist discourse at all. Most readers would have absorbed it uncritically, and judged the work solely on how hot the sex scenes between Bella and Edward from Twilight (as they were originally) were.

It's the wild west. And that's fine until you realise many young women spend more time reading fanfiction than actual books. But there is a culture of no critique around these fics, that is vastly different to engaging with mainstream pop culture. Just look at the Twilight books, and how much debate was generated over Edward's stalking of Bella. Teen girls still loved the books, but even friends I speak to today, who look back on them fondly, do so with their eyes wide open. They can acknowledge his behaviour was creepy and controlling, and that they're choosing to look past it to enjoy a work of fiction. None of them would want a partner who replicated that behaviour in real life.

Compare that to something like, say, choking during sex. The teens who are exposed to this in fanfiction don't know if this is supposed to be normal or not. Anyone who tries to have that conversation with the creator will be shut down and told to leave the fandom space, because they're being disrespectful. Treated like a troll and a prude, who is 'shaming' others. So what does the thirteen year old girl reading these fics come away thinking? Without the life experience and discernment of an adult, she probably accepts what she's being told - that sometimes a loving partner puts his hands on your throat and chokes you during sex. And this is a normal and desirable thing to happen, that makes sex hotter, actually. Unlike the girls who read Twilight, and had the benefit of a cultural conversation to teach them that discernment, these girls come away thinking they should want a boyfriend who acts like this in real life. Should expect it, even.

Then they meet the boys raised on Pornhub and get a taste of the reality of how frightening and degrading it feels to be assaulted by a partner during sex. But they don't realise they can say no. They think there's something wrong with them, actually, and they need to learn to like it. Never realising none of this stuff ever belonged in reality.

If fandoms want to take the "100% freedom of expression" route, that's a valid stance. But I do think the current efforts to shield young readers from inappropriate content are half-assed at best and non-existent at worst. We need to either put some guardrails on the whole thing and segregate content like we used to. Or else the adults in fandom need to stop being so selfish, and start moderating their own content. If the space has to be a free-for-all (I'm not convinced it does) then do the decent thing and tone it down a bit. The wildest and most depraved recesses of your imagination don't always have to be put on the internet for public consumption. Some things can be kept just for you! Shocker, I know. But it's true.

Gender: A Wider Lens had a very interesting episode with a de-transitioned FtM 'Gay Boy' about this. I definitely recommend listening, as it covers a lot of what we're currently discussing.

Stella says something quite penetrative towards the end during a topic about mood boards. A lot of these young girls who present themselves gay boys don't actually behave like boys, and it's quite obvious to anyone but them. Their interests and how they express themselves through these hobbies are incredibly girlish. It's a total lack of self-awareness that I would normally think of as harmless, but with the medicalisation of these identities in addition to situations like the Lars one, it's become increasingly worrisome how all of this is manifesting amongst young teenage girls; the warped sense of entitlement it breeds, and the appropriation of identities. (There's no such thing as a lesbian with a penis!)

M/M is predominately written by women, for women. There's a lot of romanticisation and idealisation that seeps heavily into the narrative and character dynamics of these stories. It's projection, so it's no surprise that these characters often don't accurately depict gay men and actual gay relationships between men. It's very much like the impression women might get upon reading lesbian love stories/smut written by men. In M/M, it's a lot of woman psyche expressed on a male form.

Anyway, I wholly recommend giving this episode a listen if you ever have the time, @SionnachRuadh @SnoopyPajamas @Seethlaw

@SionnachRuadh

"My fear is that any woman doing that will end up reproducing the "lesbian" porn that men make for men that bears no resemblance to lesbian sex."

Yeah. I suspect that's very much what's happening.

Which wouldn't bother me if it was clear to everyone involved that it's just fiction, that it's just fans playing around with characters to have fun and/or explore sexuality from a "safe", if completely unrealistic, point of view. But that's pretty much never the case...

Though to be fair, I'm much more worried about the toxic ideas about straight romantic and sexual interactions that those fics indirectly describe and support. When you start with two supposedly equal characters and you still end up with a massive power differential, it poses a whole lot of scary questions.

@Seethlaw I've dabbled a little in fanfic, in some niche fandoms, but overwhelmingly m/f and less commonly f/f. I know enough gay men to know that gay male sexuality is a very weird thing that women and girls probably can't understand. My fear is that any woman doing that will end up reproducing the "lesbian" porn that men make for men that bears no resemblance to lesbian sex.

I'll make an exception for when a straight man finds himself in an unexpected m/m situation with a particular individual, and says "I wouldn't normally do this, but it's different if it's you" - but I suspect that IRL this is much more common with women.

This transman who writes m/m fanfiction is obviously very interested in the latest turn the discussion has taken 😛I don't necessarily agree with everything, but more importantly, I'm surprised nobody's brought up one of the main problems with m/m fanfic: its very heavy heteronormativity.

I'm in a dead fandom, so basically I can do whatever I want, nobody's going to tell me off. But I have a friend who is in a slash sub-fandom of Harry Potter, and she regularly wails in private to me about how so many supposedly male/male fics are in fact male/female fics with the bottom guy written almost exactly like an uber-stereotypical girl: loving, empathetic, compassionate, listening, self-sacrificing, and of course, always giving in bed. In the meantime, the top character gets to be mean, violent, self-centered, manipulative, and always taking and taking, and the relationship is seen as romantic because the bottom "saves" and 'loves the top so much!"

So I would argue that yes, on the one hand, gay fanfic may wrongly encourage some girls to think of themselves as gay guys, but on the other hand, it also very much reinforces the worst stereotypes of straight relationships.

Even when it doesn't, I'd argue that most of the girls and women who write gay fanfic definitely don't think like gay guys and don't care one bit about actual gay sexuality; they are just exploring heterosexuality from a more remote, more detached point of view.

And then there's the omegaverse...

@SnoopyPajamas Absolutely, there's a lot to unpack there. I suspect that a lot of the difference between the sexes is boys being visual versus girls being verbal.

I've delved into AO3 a bit, but I'm not massively familiar with it, and I'm not familiar with a lot of the fandoms. Sometimes I wonder about particular fandoms and why they strike a chord with girls. Daria fandom is quite niche these days, and it's never going to compete with Harry Potter, but I do remember fanfic from 25 years ago shipping Daria and Jane, which I suppose is natural for a show about two straight girls with a very close platonic relationship. I wonder if that kind of lesbian fanfic has disappeared.

I think trends are going to go very differently with boys. We're used to Pornhub introducing them to all sorts of exotic fetishes that boys a generation ago might never have thought of. Probably the coming thing is going to be AI art, and the ability to create any erotic scenario you can imagine.

I have a lot of sympathy for them, but it is hard not to laugh at the way they carry on. I don't know if you've ever watched Days of Boyhood on youtube, but she nails it

I don't want to derail the thread too much, but I really think fanfiction is the key to unlocking much of the FTM explosion of the last few years. (Specifically the 'gay boy' variety.) Obviously the rise in misogyny and porn are factors. They're what these girls are fleeing when they try to escape into 'manhood'. But their whole concept of manhood comes from fanfiction. It's one of those generational divide things, where if you've been in that environment, it's clear as day what's happening with these girls, and if you haven't, you only half understand it.

We've got a whole generation of girls whose sexuality has been moulded by AO3, in the same way their male peers have been moulded by Pornhub. These girls have all these warped ideas of what gay men are, and that's been their outlet for masturbation, from a formative age. It's absolutely a factor. It's driving their sexual tastes and altering their self-image as sexual beings. In many cases, these (young, female, virgin, autistic) writers will start consuming gay porn, in the interest of writing more 'accurate' sex scenes. And then because it's much easier to self-insert into fiction than other types of pornography, even acts that might have repelled them if just seen on a screen, start to feel alluring. Like choking. And so they slip on down the slope.

The thing is, I'm not anti fanfiction. I'm not here to laugh at it. At its best, it can be great. It's a creative outlet, like any other, and a predominantly female one. But the fan writing community has the same problem as the gay community. Because they're so used to being mocked and put down by outsiders, they place a high value on being welcoming to anyone inside the tent. If you shame someone in the fanfiction community, you're practically JK Rowling. You're practically Hitler.

The result is that there is no quality control, and no real attempt to shield younger members of the community from being exposed to inappropriate content. The mentality is very much that if you chose to ignore a tag and click in to a fic that has an explicit warning, that's on you. The author did nothing wrong in posting their father-son incest noncon vore fic - you're the problem for clicking on it! Which is fine, but only works if you ignore the fact that much of the site's user base are not rational adults making rational adult decisions. They're kids. Kids are curious and impatient and often won't understand what they're clicking through to see, until it's too late. They may not even understand what all the different tags mean, if they're new to the site. It's a very disingenuous argument.

The AO3 model is the equivalent of giving your 12 year old the tv remote and saying "I'm trusting you not to watch that 18 rated horror movie". Then being shocked when they give in to curiosity and end up having screaming nightmares for the next six weeks. Like, really. What did you expect the 12 year old to do? Are you really going to blame them in this situation?

AO3's main selling point has become that they will not enforce censorship on their writers, no matter what. Some other aspects of the way the site is structured have exacerbated this, but basically, it's resulted in a race to the bottom. The site is swamped with poor quality works, because the most shocking and sexual content is rewarded with clicks. So authors keep churning that out, and burying the better stuff that updates more slowly.

A frequent complaint in fanfiction spaces is how hard it is to find "gen" fics - stories that are just about the world and the characters. Or stories that aren't solely "fluff" (tooth-rottingly sweet happy endings) but don't contain explicit sex scenes either. Both these things used to be common before AO3 became dominant. On most other fanfic sites, there was a limit in how explicit you could be, and fics would be removed if they failed to meet that standard. Mature rated fics were hidden from the main page of works, and you had to opt in to see them. A sex scene might be permitted in a fic rated as mature - but things like BDSM, bestiality, and most of the 'kink' content that now proliferates on AO3, would not. Obviously there were times when this safeguarding butted heads with censorship. But it made the entire space feel much safer for teens.

Given that teen girls are probably the biggest audience for fanfiction, I'd say that matters. Teen girls are being affected by the lack of safeguarding in this space. I respect the aim of AO3, to be a user-funded archive that preserves fanworks. I even respect their anti-censorship stance. But you can still have that content, if you put it behind a wall where only users who know where to look will find it. It shouldn't be accessible to visitors who don't even have an account with the site. It shouldn't be all over the main page for a fandom, with the responsibility resting on the (often underage) viewer to scroll past or filter it out.

That was a bit of a digression, sorry. But this is a fascinating subject, and an overlooked piece of the puzzle when talking about female transitioners. I'd love to see studies on it. Helen Joyce touched the tip of the iceberg in Trans, but if she ever wanted to write another book, there is so much to explore and unpack in this topic.

By the way, is this tranman contestant one of the 6ft tall bearded body builders we keep hearing about lately?
Turned out not so (surprise!)
Lars is tiny next to Reuben and still small next to the other contestants.

Yikes! I headed over to BBC to see if the final episode is out and 'What it feels like for a girl' has popped up in recommendations.

That's one for a different thread.

I called Ella as trans from the first moment of screen time!

However, on the honeymoon s/he was in a bikini and no make up at one point and the difference was wild, the male facial features and body shape were so much more evident.

@GermaineBloodyGreer This is really fascinating, thanks so much for sharing. Courtney is such a smart and engaging young woman.

A lot of what she says reminds me of Kath Stock talking about immersive fantasy. But in the literal fiction consuming sense. I think there are certain fandoms that provide a safe space for kids who might be ND or just kind of misfits without many friends, many of whom grow up to be lesbian or gay or have trans identities, and who still remain superfans well into adulthood. I believe that's so with HP fandom, hence the rage at JKR, and it rings a massive bell with me in terms of Doctor Who fandom.

There may be elements of the immersive fantasy that are older than we think, but now they've got a chance to blossom online.

@SnoopyPajamas
She pretended it was a crochet mushroom, of course.

😂😂😂😂

A sentence I never expected to read today but I might take that idea to my next crafting session.

@SnoopyPajamas It is, isn't it? Just one big happy LARP. I've also noticed the prevalence of the women calling each other 'dude', 'man', 'bro' et cetera. An abject parody.

@SionnachRuadh Here's an interesting video of a de-transitioner discussing her autoandrophilia. It's quite fascinating and, in my opinion, a look into a growing number of young trans-identified girls that spend a lot of time in these online fandom and fanfiction spaces and have come to believe that their interest/hyperfixation on slash fiction is informed by the belief that they are really 'gay boys' trapped in female bodies.

One of the concerns about all of these shows is that its really promoting the idea that no one should have any sexual boundaries.

The show from way back, with straight men being tricked into competing for a man who thinks he's a women, framed the idea that these men were really homophobic for not being happy when it was revealed. So they were being shamed for being straight.

I think since then, there is a lot more consent written into the programming. Either contestants know in advance or are told during filming. So the participants arent being educated, but the audience is.

So many of them being so steeped in fanfiction is... interesting and a bit disturbing. I'm still not sure whether autoandrophilia exists, but if it does, I think that's where it would come out.

I find FtM spaces online to be a mix of the sad and the (maybe inadvertently) funny. On the one hand young women with obviously very poor mental health, who are very similar to the eating disorder cohort.

On the other hand, those threads that remind me of teen girls larping as boys, which seems to mean putting on their brothers' clothes, lots of belching and crotch grabbing, and saying things like "dude, let's talk about beer and cars and chicks". I wonder if they compete about who's got the biggest packer.

Oh, wow, that FTM subreddit is . . . something else. The thread you linked to was barmy. I clicked around to a few others out of morbid curiosity, and it's a bit sad, really. These women are everything you'd expect them to be.

The first thread I landed on was a woman sharing the 'relatable story' of how TSA found her packer at the airport, and pulled it out in front of her family. She pretended it was a crochet mushroom, of course. Because it's one thing to be a grown woman walking around with a rubber penis in your pants, pretending to be A Real Boy - but the idea that you might be honest with your family about this fantasy is just too wild and crazy.

The second thread contained many grown women debating if someone would be unreasonable to cut all friends who watch the new HBO Harry Potter show out of her life. The majority opinion was that OP was being perfectly reasonable in her desire to virtue signal herself into social isolation. The thread quickly devolved into an earnest debate about whether pirating the show might be acceptable. Because then the big scary evil JKR might not make any money from it. There were many sadly pathetic elements to this thread, but the saddest, to me, was that I don't think OP had even read a word of JKR's posts. The way she talked about "learning of" Rowling's great unforgivable evil made it clear her information came solely through the jungle drums of trans twitter. This woman is cutting off real friends because they won't shun JKR, and she doesn't even really know why she's supposed to hate her. That one was genuinely a bit sad.

So I moved on to a more light-hearted thread. One of those in which the women call each other "bro" a lot and larp as just guys being guys, dude! This one featured a woman who has some sort of packer you can pee through. It had fallen out in the bathroom and bounced across the floor in the sight of other men! Cue much forced laughter from the 'guys'. My favourite contribution to this thread was something along the lines of "bro, my ADHD ass forgets about my dick all the time 🤪". No-one pointed out to this woman that she doesn't have a dick, and it's not "ADHD" to forget you put a lump of plastic in your pants, if you do it every day.

In another thread, one of the women wants to share the moment she realised she'd attained true manhood. Are you ready for it? It was when . . . drum roll please . . . she was writing lesbian fanfiction for Grey's Anatomy! See, her usual preference is for writing 'depraved' gay male fanfiction. But she suddenly felt empowered to write lesbian fic, when she realised she was no longer fretting about whether or not her depiction of the women in it was "male gazey". Transition had given her the ability to objectify women with ease! And write Meredith Grey having 'mommy issues' sex (whatever that is) with another woman in a lift, without the slightest shred of guilt! This was mind-blowing stuff to our OP, and she was duly affirmed by the rest of the thread. Apparently, this is a common road to Damascus moment for trans men. And the fact that so many of them are interpreting their "gender identity" through the lens of fanfiction, rings no alarm bells for anyone.

The cognitive dissonance is so extreme, the whole subreddit is like a strange exercise in self-parody. Except no-one on it seems to have the faintest idea how they're coming across. It's mildly fascinating, actually.

I mean - if a transman is looking for a gay man to hook up with, what is the actual differernce if it's with a straight man? Other than said straight man is actually interested?

Anyway - as far as the television show, I am pretty all in with acting, in that I don't care if actors "match" the sexuality, sex, ethnicity or race, of the role, I only care if I believe they character is who they are supposed to be.

OTOH, I hate agenda casting and I think it's usually a kind of bigotry.

I've been watching IKAB and the most fancied man on the show has now decided he fancies the transman the most. I guess he must be bisexual. None of the other men seem remotely interested; even the one who feigned interest initially.

According to a gay male friend, there are many straight and/or marriied men on Grindr, who are on there for vicarious or forbidden thrills. I find it difficult to conceive they are there for women who identify as men, though. He also says that many gay men enjoy wearing women's underwear