Ive Spent The Past Few Months Reading Some Radfem And Detrans Related Stuff, Just Curious And Trying

practicing female separatism by being female and being alone all the time always

The Culture Conversation: Guru Jagat x Ayishat Akanbi

do you know any ways that alleviate dysphoria without transitioning? i kinda just woke up from my trans nightmare. i'm female if ur wondering. if you don't know, could you redirect me to a blog that does?

Hey anon, so, i had written down my own advice, and also asked my friends, many of whom are detrans and have suffered from dysphoria.

But first I want to say that I'm glad you woke up. It's hard to leave and change a mindset that felt right with our feelings even if not with our common sense.

Forst are my friends' advices. I'm copying it as they are, without paraphrasing (only certain replacement, [like this]. My own advice is below my friends', as i believe theirs to be more experienced.

Without further ado, here are all the advices:

——

— Hello!

It's been a LONG time since I've experienced dysphoria(I detransitioned).

It feels like your mind doesn't belong in the current body you're in and that you want to just rip [your] skin off. (Mental health issue)

For me, I wished I could just close my eyes and never wake up. Or be "reborn" a male instead of female and just some...other thoughts along the lines.

How did I "get over it"?

I...guess I surrounded myself with more positive influences. I grew up in an abusive household that held sexist views. When I left, I could think clearly for myself.

I suppose my suggestion for her would be to try and find some positive influences(ex. Could be as simple as hangout out with loved ones, finding role models,etc) in her life and think critically(ex. "Why would you feel better if you transitioned to male?")

I realized I wanted to transition to escape my life...and also because I had internalise misogyny to where I did not think I was "allowed" to do certain things because I was born a female...

— Something to have her consider is that what she likes, and who she is doesn’t change what she is. She is female. A woman. A girl. Zero percent of her outside world or her mind can impact this. I hear a lot of young women trans [recte transition] because they feel like they enjoy masculine things. Well, if a woman does it it’s a women’s thing. Gender tells us women should only pursue and enjoy certain things and not others. This is just simply, False with a capital F.

Another help is recognizing that the way porn and indeed most media presents women to the world is also False. That is not what and how sex is. You don’t have to like it or accept it to be a woman. It is at odds with womanhood.

To reconnect and learn to love your body and accept it, a trick I learned a long time back is to focus on what your body does for you. Rather than how it looks while it does it.

Look at your bones and muscles working together so you can walk and stand and pick things up. Dance. Run. Your throat and lungs do this cool thing where you can speak. Sing. Your heart, keeps your body supplied with nutrients from your digestive system. Digestive system all on its own without any prompting, turns food into fuel for this amazing robot suit that is your body. Brain can interpret every single impulse from every nerve in your body. In real time. It allows you to connect with the outside world and experience it. But you also get to control it. Meditation, therapy exercises, physical exercise, these things have an impact on your brain. And you choose to do them.

Your body and your experience in it is really remarkable.

Thighs aren’t fat. They’re strong for carrying you around. Arms aren’t skinny. They are perfect for hugging loved ones. Eyes aren’t too small, they allow you to see the world around you. Focusing on what the body does takes that focus away from what it doesn’t look like. Breasts? Nourish new life in a way nothing else can. Don’t want children. That’s ok. Just recognize what your breasts can do. They don’t have to do it. Uterus and ovaries? Literally creates a human life from two single cells. You have the power of creation in side you. Whether you use it or not. Period? This amazing way your body protects itself from non viable pregnancies and keeps your body safe. Periods are the ultimate cleanse. And your body does it for you. All on its own.

These are the thoughts that help me deal with having a female body and accepting it.

— The thing that helped me most was radical body acceptance. Just 'this is me and I accept that I am the way I am'. Idk how effective it would be for that individual but it was foundational for me overcoming my dysphoria

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My advice:

~ it's sometimes impossible to look at the mirror. The body feels bad and ugly and overall just wrong. But it's ours. It's ours to keep, and not to destroy. Expose yourself to yourself gradually. Especially the parts that make you at most unease. Treat it like a phobia, or some forms of allergies. Gradual exposure can help. First, love the parts you can't see — your heart, your lungs, dammit, tell your tendons you love them (!) because they're part of you.

Slowly reach parts you feel most dysphoric about. You'll already know how to love your other parts. Your hands that let you touch loved ones, hold them, rub a cute cat or dog. Your mouth and your stomach that tear apart these nutrients into the most basic units. Your skin that protects you and that lets you feel sunlight and raindrops. And then, when you know how to love these more or less basic parts of you, reach the complex ones. You don't need reasons at some point, but you have the love to give and it's enough. You don't need any reason besides it's yours.

~ i suffered (and still sometimes relapse) from body dysmorphia, and well, music and self reminders helped me a lot. I drew on my skin with pens and sharpies, soccer teams logos, random lyrics. My reminder to myself, before i started giving myself good reminders was "don't fear death"" but to not fear death,,, i needed no more reminders of that. then I realized, i can remind myself more important things, of better things. Birthdays, my favorite teams' wins, my most hated teams' worst losses. Then it went to 1238 "grammar teacher said something grammatically wrong", "x mathematical axiom", drew emojis and flowers. I did so to remind me to smile, to breath clean air (as clean as possible at least). At this time of self isolation, you can leave the notes at your house. Sticky note with "the only parabola that matters is the smile" or some other body positive puns. Dysphoria is a different hatred of your body, but all self hatred can be fought with self love.

~ a feeling I still feel a lot is hat i don't deserve to live, i only take too much space. It's what brought me so quickly into dysmorphia. Try to find what brought you to dysphoria pull out the source, or face it so you know how it looks like when it sneaks up to you. Recognition and acknowledgment means you can deal with it better as it won't shock you. You'd be able to throw it out before it attacks you.

~ surround yourself with positive influences, and also avoid negative influences. If your close friend group is sexist and/misogynistic, then distance yourself from them. A lot of the self hatred comes from what we've been taught for years about ourselves. Female role models, positivity, cute little notes, etc, and surround yourself with actual body positivity.

~ creativity: Maybe start a cute bullet journal or something similar. Create things and surround yourself with your own creations. Bullet journals are a fun way to keep you busy while also help you be more productive in school and/or life. You can fill it with quotes and pretty pictures and fun doodles.

~ you and your body are not different entities. It's part of you, part of your life since birth, especially because you're female. It feels a bit degrading at first, but in reality, we are our bodies. When were stressed, our body reacts physiologically. When we see someone we love, our heart beats faster.

I remember reading something another woman wrote, saying her dysphoria is at its worst during her period, she got panic attacks every time she started getting it. We're told that our period is what makes us gross but also what makes us women/feminine, but it only makes us women, not feminine, and it's part of our physiology, it made us have lower social standing but only because men decided so. Some women don't get periods, but all those who get periods are women (and I'm not talking about TiM "periods" but real ones). It's one of the parts that can be the hardest to embrace, but it's also a reminder that we, women, are actually the most ideal creation of mother nature regarding humans. Long lasting, unrelenting, strong and (usually) the actual creating power. We're the power of creation as a means for creation, and men? Most of them only create as a means for destruction.

~ healthy lifestyle: a lot of things start looking better when we start a healthier lifestyle, especially life. Add a salad to one of the meals

~ lastly but most helpful for me was writing all my negative feelings down and then just tearing the paper apart, and afterwards throw it to different trashcans, like you'd do with an old credit card. It helped me during some of my most depressive episodes.

Framing Lesbian Fashion (1992), dir. Karen Everett

i think it's so funny we invented dogs to do so many specific chores (hunting, herding, tracking, etc). i couldn't imagine looking at my cat and being like what if your granddaughters could fold my laundry...

If you aren’t detransitioned yourself, you don’t get to tell people the “reasons” for detransition with any kind of authority on the matter. You don’t get to tell detransitioned people how they must have experienced dysphoria or say that it wasn’t “severe” enough if they were able to find other means of coping than continuing to transition their bodies. 

I’m tired of watching non-detransitioned people try and speak over us, try and erase the variance in stories because some of them don’t fit a narrative they like, and consistently belittling our experiences. 

People who transition are only helped by having information on the varying outcomes that may come from it, no matter how small of a chance it may be. My doctor didn’t have me ignore the fact that my nipples could fall off after having surgery just because it was a less than 1% chance, they certainly shouldn’t have been telling me not to research about detransition for the same fucking reason.

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”

“I’m happier being detransitioned, but saying that people detransition because they’re “not happy” with transition is disingenuous. The truth is that a lot of women don’t feel like they have options. There isn’t a whole lot of place in society for women who look like this, women who don’t fit, who don’t comply. When you go to a therapist and tell them you have those kinds of feelings, they don’t tell you that it’s okay to be butch, to be gender nonconforming, to not like men, to not like the way men treat you. They don’t tell you there are other women who feel like they don’t belong, that they don’t feel like they know how to be women. They don’t tell you any of that. They tell you about testosterone.”

— Cari Stella, @guideonragingstars, Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip (Belgian-Dutch, 1821-1909, b. Amsterdam, Netherlands, d. Ixelles, Belgium) - Playing Cats, 19th c. Paintings: Oil on Canvas

that reblog saying ‘If you don’t want to be a girl you probably aren’t one’ like.. if you don’t enjoy feeling like a sex object aged 10 you’re probably not a woman like WHAT. I think you guys need to like.. talk to more women :(