Briar Rolfe 🏳️‍⚧️

Seeing as I successfully managed to put out a total of 2 Substack newsletters in 2023 after migrating from MailChimp 🙃🫠 I guess it is no sweat to migrate again

For 2023… it’s already too late

Lord in 2024 grant me the wisdom to remember to hand-wash the cat vomit off my weighted blanket BEFORE getting my covid booster

If you are despairing about the state of the world, me and 120 other members of my union have been talking about solidarity actions we can do in our cities to oppose the genocide in Palestine. We have been doing this because one person put us all in an email thread. The revolution WILL be reply-all

It’s how we exchange custody of the brain cell

Nice to know I’ll be on their books as incredibly onbrand. Answering all the onboarding questions like yes uh, my job is graphic designer and cartoonist and author, my blood pressure normal, my heart rate abnormally high from how much I hate fascists. Yeah. This is what we’re working with

I went to a new doctor today and when the nurse took my blood pressure she noted my pulse was weirdly fast. We spent some time trying to figure out why, until I remembered and had to say “oh, um, I think this is still the adrenaline from hurrying to deface a swastika before my tram arrived”

I have not been checking Bluesky mostly because if an app on my phone does not load instantly, I give up. Whenever I think about this I become embarrassed for actually having the attention span that the You Kids And Your Phones activists have always insisted social media will give us

SFF writers in/from aus/Aotearoa, we are looking for short fiction, poems and comics!! check out the subs call longtrek.xyz/submissions

progressing from my "magneto was right" era to a healthier, more dynamic "magneto was softcore" epoch

unfortunately the dune movie fired me as music supervisor. villeneuve rejected my vision of gradually making “sandstorm” by darude louder and louder

🍀 snake man cat friend

There was a period of time where I was seriously just contemplating sending all this art just to you specifically. Posts For One Person Mainly

Apropos of nothing but I’m BEGGING artists (younger ones especially!) to go into their sketchbooks free-hand.
No laying down pencils or NOTHIN’.
It’s an invaluable test and will improve your confidence putting down lines and understanding form.

It’s important to create a brand

A character sheet for Alden, a they them warlock with a little bit too much bloodlust probably. They’re a ginger and they’re dressed sort of like if you put 1960s menswear in a blender with 16th century Scotland.

Alden looking like the tormented protagonist of a gothic novel with a ghost behind them, both her hands on their temples. I did literally edit a gothic novel cover for this

For dungeons and also dragons, I’ve created a warlock whose job is being tormented by a spectral milf

A scribbly diary comic for the 4th of august, my birthday: me with my hands clasped in devout prayer saying “please god for my birthday kill all landlords and let the property market collapse, amen”

A humble request out of mustard seed faith

All this to say that the category of nonbinary is increasingly hostile to occupy. On one hand: constant, exhausting discrimination. On the other hand: well-meaning people telling me to stop moping because (based on evidence from places I’m too poor to access) things are better now than ever before!

A slight increase in nonbinary visibility makes it look like we really are starting to be Included and Accepted. But the visibility is mainly to show us the kinds of gender presentations that EARN Inclusion and Acceptance. Those presentations are: a non-threatening aesthetic with a high price tag

Hours later, the thing I want to add is that there’s incredibly high levels of hostility towards gender nonconforming people worldwide right now. I don’t think nonbinary people are actually meaningfully privileged in any way, which is why this slow push away from being/looking trans is so dangerous—

I’m now in a position where I look too trans (and perhaps too queer) to be a “good” nonbinary and like. That’s weird, right? It’s so weird that it’s been impossible to figure out how to talk about it. It kind of exists on the boundary of what I have language for.

We’ve been talking about the risk of a gender trinary and being made a marketing demographic for a long time, but,, now it’s happened. So now it’s like… how do we talk about being alienated from a category that is supposed to include every gender expression, on account of our gender expression

I think nonbinary people get accepted by/ assimilate into straight culture by serving as an object lesson for how masculinity and femininity are outdated… but can be discarded without losing your Great Taste as a Consumer!!That thing about “not owing androgyny” is in fact a warning to not pursue it

All of this to say that I still like not existing within the gender binary, but I’m noticing things like: I experience more discrimination at work than my nonbinary coworkers who are middle class and not on hormones. And that extra discrimination is always due to the disruptiveness of me being trans

There’s this expectation to be gender nonconforming in a middle class chunky earring wardrobe-from-Gorman way. You’re not meant to experience discrimination aside from being invalidated by your superannuation not having Mx as a title option, which is why of course you will swap to Validation Super™️,

I’ve been talking a lot about this with a beloved friend—the more visibly trans we have become, the less welcome we are in places that are ostensibly for any and all gender expressions. There seems to be this unspoken duty for nonbinary people to prove that (medical) transition is irrelevant?

This has been in my Twitter drafts for about a year and a half and I decided it will not debut there because portions of my audience are Not Ready

Nonbinary is no longer enough… I need to become a gender that can’t be commodified by a corporation

with LGBT+ you get to be gay without any of the ads

A very fluffy black and white cat sits in the sun with her eyes closed, on a rainbow woollen blanket.

She’s so photogenic… I can’t handle it