As Much Some Folks Wanna Think It So, My Complicated Relationship With My Gender Doesn’t Make Me Trans.

meadow whispers

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hi, not sure if this blog is active bc im on mobile but you seem v knowledgeable so i hope you are. i have a question if thats ok. ive been id'ing as ftm trans/nb for about 6 years now but havent rlly been able to come out to many ppl or transition at all so im still largely presenting as female. i wouldnt rlly call myself gender critical or anything like that, but i know transitioning is a long & difficult process and im wondering if there is a way to alleviate my dysphoria without going (1/2)

“thru all that. i dont want to transition only to realize that i dont feel better and there was an easier way. in other words, id like to rule out any possibility that im not trans before medically investing in being trans. any chance you have any advice for me? (2/2)”

hey there—still active, if sporadic.

when it comes to healing from dysphoria, there’s no cure-all, no hidden path to healing that you’ve simply yet to uncover. just as there’s no way to guarantee transition will make you happy, there’s no opposite guarantee either. i can only share some of the stuff that has worked for me and some of the hardships i uncovered about living as trans, which i hope you find helpful.

what helps me?

get clear with yourself about what you believe about gender, ideologically. i personally feel, if my beliefs do not stand up to critical thought, if they cannot be supported by rational arguments, then those beliefs are not worth holding on to and i need to let them go. this is what happened to me WRT transness, gender, and all that.

start small—what is gender? is gender innate? do we have gendered souls? how could we have gendered souls if gender is a social construct? okay, so we can’t have gendered souls, so what is gender, if not innate? is gender the social expectations and norms attached to the two sexes? is it possible to break those roles and expectations? does breaking those roles and expectations change anyone’s sex? no—males can behave in typically feminine ways and females in typically masculine ways and that does nothing to change their sex. so what would conceivably make someone (or myself) trans? inhabiting the social roles and expectations of the gender associated with the opposite sex. since we already established that gender isn’t innate and we don’t have gendered souls, there’s no merit in the “born in the wrong body” narrative; it is not possible to be born in the wrong body. we each get one body, no matter how we change it. but if i wasn’t born in the wrong body, why do i feel so uncomfortable with mine, especially with the sexed aspects of it? if you’re female, the likely culprit is misogyny. you don’t actually have to hate women on a conscious level to be suffering from internalized misogyny. we live in a misogynistic world, it saturates everything. if you’re female, it affects almost every factor of how you move through this world—how people treat you, what opportunities you’re given, which behaviors are encouraged for you and which are discouraged, etc. if you are inclined to prefer masculinity—for whatever reason—society will encourage this in males and discourage it in females. having your way of being subtly discouraged all the time can easily lead to feeling disconnected from your body, perhaps even hating it, especially since you know that your way of being would be ENCOURAGED if only your body were male. and that’s when many of us encounter trans ideology that tells us we CAN be male—in fact, we actually were all along! all we have to do is change our bodies drastically with lifelong medication and surgery, all we have to do is trade money and time and health to convincingly imitate the opposite sex—THEN society will finally recognize that our way of being is okay—because we were actually masculine MEN all along, it was simply our female bodies obscuring that. does this feel like a good or healthy trade to you? it doesn’t to me, but i can’t make these decisions for you.

there IS an important caveat, a shortcut that bypasses this bad trade entirely—and that’s realizing that your way of being is ALREADY okay. masculine females and feminine males are healthy and good. it’s not always easy to comfortably BE that way in a society that does not embrace masculinity in women and femininity in men, but the solution is not to change your self, it’s to change the society. and the only way you can do that is by carving out that path—BE a masculine female/woman and you’ll show little girls today that there’s a place for them in this world.

i did try out the trade for myself, however, and i learned a few things you might find useful—maybe these lessons i learned can save you the time and money and pain i’ve already spent.

1) you never actually change sex. you’re always chasing the aesthetic imitation of the opposite sex with transition, but never becoming the opposite sex. in this and so many other ways, transition never ends.

2) passing is conditional. when your sense of self is predicated upon others seeing you a certain way, it can be taken from you in a second. i could be treated like one of the guys for a year, until one of them finds out i was born female. now that he knows, he cannot unknow. now my experience is tied to how he sees me—does he see me as a woman now that he knows? is he comfortable with me in the locker room? it was stressful and uncomfortable for others to have this level of control over my experience of the world and of myself. it’s also out of my control whether he decides to lend manhood to me now—will he use male pronouns with me? will he call me a woman? will he out me to the others? will he sexualize me or sexually assault me based on my female body?

3) as stated above, transition never ends. no matter how well you pass, transition always requires maintenance. you’ll need bloodwork as long as you’re on hormones—that’s time and money you wouldn’t have otherwise spent. you’ll need supplies for your hormone shots—time and money you wouldn’t have spent. there will be instances where you need to disclose your trans status, thus repeating the coming out process infinitely—doctors or EMTs, new intimate partners, friends. this process is exhausting and othering, it’s an ever-present reminder of the fact that you’re trans.

4) medical transition is expensive in terms of money and heath. taking hormones is always a risk. there’s potential for: cardiovascular risk associated with testosterone, vaginal atrophy and sexual side effects, changes to mood (some for the better, some worse), not liking how hormones change your body. then there’s the financial aspect. in the USA at least, this costs money—money for doctor’s visits, money for the hormones themselves, money for the supplies to administer them. there’s risk in any surgery—risk of death or serious complication, loss of function and sensation, improper healing, chronic pain. and of course, the monetary cost associated with surgery. removing the uterus can have lifelong consequences—early onset dimentia, lifelong need for synthetic hormones, osteoporosis.

5) there is no “actually trans.” there’s no meaningful distinction between “true trans” people and others. trans people transition and identify as trans. their dysphoria isn’t any different than mine was. there’s no method for parsing “real dysphoria” from something else. transness is an ideology. i liken it to religion. there are no “real christians” and fake christians, there are only people who believe and those who don’t. that’s the salient difference between myself (detransitioner) and trans people—belief. and if something requires me to believe in it to be real...well that’s a good indication it probably isn’t.

good luck out there. these are heavy questions and weighty struggles. there’s no harm in focusing on other aspects of your life when you’re having trouble answering Big Gender Questions. rooting for you.

This may be the oldest known drawing of a supernova, found in the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan. Scholars found this odd rock art with two “suns,” and dated it to 3600 BCE, which roughly coincides with supernova HB9’s explosion.

requested by ziraangel

I saw that you mentioned butch dysphoria ... can you please post resources or just any knowledge that you have? Im trying to figure out who I am.

Hey there, that’s a huge question, but I’ll share a little of what I’ve learned as a dysphoric butch person myself. I know that plenty of butches experience dysphoria to varying degrees, including women who readily identify themselves as cis — it’s way more common among non-trans people than I think most people realize, especially among gay people (but certainly not limited to them)! You are definitely not alone, and you’re also not doing gender “wrong” if you experience discomfort with social roles or gendered aspects of your body but don’t identify as trans. And if you do determine that describing yourself as trans is the best and most accurate way to frame your experience in the world, that’s an ethically neutral decision despite The Discourse™️ suggesting otherwise. Feeling dysphoric also doesn’t mean you need to commit to any one specific course of action to alleviate your discomfort, whether that means binding, using HRT, or getting top surgery, and it also doesn’t mean that you’ve just got some internalized misogyny/homophobia to unpack and once you do your dysphoria will magically vanish overnight with sufficient therapy. It’s complicated and none of have the one “right answer” for what to do about dysphoria and how it shapes our concepts of ourselves!

It definitely does help to do some serious thinking about your dysphoria — what tends to make it flare up, what body parts or social situations it seems to be attached to, how it impacts your daily life — and then work from there to address it a step at a time. I’m dysphoric about my chest, and don’t bind regularly any more due to compression-induced nerve pain (which can and does happen even with high-quality binders), but I’ve done a lot of mental/emotional work on body image to push back against negative self-talk, wear clothing that conceals my chest without actively compressing it (hence that post on 80s fashion, though I dress like a Winchester brother rather than Marty McFly), and do physical activities that help me refocus on what my body can do rather than what it looks like, such as hiking and swimming. Friends with dysphoria (of various gender identities!) report that this combination of mental reframing of your body as Not A Bad or Wrong Thing, distracting yourself from your image on bad days, and doing positive and enjoyable body-oriented activities helps a lot, even when they’ve had surgery, taken HRT, or otherwise mitigated dysphoria physically. Hang in there! You don’t have to have the answers yet (or ever, honestly), but it helps to remember that you are you, fundamentally, and that any realizations you have and decisions you make about how you occupy your body and the language you use to describe it is just part of your continuing evolution as a human being.

I had a whole thing typed up but not in the mood. The original post was a butch women talking about her discomfort with people placing expectations of femininity on her. She never passed judgement on anything. And every post I see of this sort has other users butt in with "it’s okay to be feminine” which gets a bit galling since popular culture already says that all the damn time. It feels a lot like this. I’m sure you mean well but there is a time and place for these things.

being a girl and hitting puberty is so traumatic. you go from being a genderless little free thing to being hit with shaving and makeup and growing breasts and skincare and menstruation and suddenly being sexualised when like a few years ago you could take your shirt off to play in the stream and trade yugioh cards with the boys and come home covered in mud and not even think about it. and then you spend years hating being a girl and hating everything puberty did to you and wishing you could be a boy or be completely genderless again and it takes you Many years to come to terms with yourself Or you simply try to Lean In to everything and do makeup tutorials on YouTube and claim it’s for fun. like how can this be treated as normal

When Adrienne Rich said “our minds and bodies are inseparable in this life, and when we allow our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger”

Gender Troubles: The Butches

My Cat, Keiko Hiratsuka Moore.