I Often See More Gatekeeping Presented As A Way To Prevent Detransition. And While This Wouldn’t Necessarily

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

TERF Tips #270

For dysphoria:

Keep telling yourself that you can’t escape your biology! That definitely won’t lead to any suicide!

Forget about your dysphoria!

Keep telling yourself that technically all womynly womyn have dysphoria! And that they all overcome it somehow! Yeah, like my mom knew what the hell was wrong with me when puberty hit me 10× harder than other kids!

Punch a hole through the wall, and pull out that sword that you’ve kept hidden for centuries, and pretend to slice it in half, so that it’s now dead.

from the detroit gay liberator vol. 1 no. 6, december 1970

requested by ziraangel

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

can ppl like……… stop having a concept of me in their head ……… no object permanence here…..i only exist when im right in front of you….. no memories allowed. thx for understanding. 

i really do think that we, as a whole, are becoming more and more disconnected from our bodies. 

we’re being encouraged to view our true self as separate from our body—the body is a collection of disparate parts, to be discarded at will or exchanged for new ones, separate from our mind or soul. instead of viewing our bodies as something that developed alongside our minds, they’re an object of scrutiny and judgment; if you don’t like your nose, your fat, your breasts, your labia, your forehead, your lips…don’t worry, because you can (and should) change those things. 

go under the knife and reveal your new self, molded into the vision in your mind’s eye for only thousands of dollars and an ultimately unimportant risk to health and life.

adopt a strict new diet. obsess over an idealized form of yourself. shift the goalposts of what “perfect” looks like so the chase is never complete. hate every natural function of your body. devote all your time, money, and energy to an idea.

stare at your breasts and hate them. hate them so completely that you decide that you need new ones, or to get them removed so you never have to look at them again. never try to come to terms with how they look—that’s settling, that’s giving up, that will never lead to happiness. stare at your genitalia. hate it. daydream about something that would look better, feel better, be less objectified, be more acceptable, be more featureless, look more male, look more female, look different.

your body is not you; it’s just a vessel. and it’s your right to customize your vessel with anything that you want—whether it’s drugs, surgery, injections, or extreme diet restriction, it’s not you. you’re not doing it to yourself. you’re doing it to the flesh that formed around the real you. so how can that be wrong? 

how can your idea of what your body should be, in complete contrast to what it is, be wrong? how could it ever be influenced by a complex combination of factors when it’s not even you, when it’s barely even connected to you?

how could dysmorphia, dysphoria, body image issues, or a desire for extensive cosmetic surgeries be misguided when you can neatly separate the mind from the body?

Framing Lesbian Fashion (1992), dir. Karen Everett

It perturbs me when I see people write that detransitioners “were just confused cis women”. At best, it’s a stunning lack of empathy or understanding of our experiences. But often than not, it’s an attempt to neutralize and silence women who are getting too loud or causing trouble.

At no point during my transition or detransition was I “confused”. I was many things, but confusion wasn’t part of the equation. If I had to only one word, it would probably be something like, “deliberate”, “driven”, or “ambitious”.

The insistence that detransitioners are helpless or confused is a two-pronged attack, both a shutdown and a theft. If a detransitioned woman is painted as confused, it implies that she is unable to make a sound choice, and/or can be easily manipulated by an outside force as a result of her confusion. It removes her agency from her story, and casts her in a secondary, inactive role in her own experiences. It renders her story open to reinterpretation by ideologically motivated parties of all kinds (be it conservatives, ROGD moms, doctors/surgeons/psychiatrists, trans activists, people across all parts of the political and moral compass). It’s an old trick; it has been used against women for ages.

Every step of the way, I was doing my best to make careful decisions that were in my best interest. I had a boatload of problems, and when presented with my options, I used what I knew at the time to address those problems as best I could.

I made lifechanging decisions at a young age, with limited information, incomplete knowledge, like all people do. Many of those decisions are not ones that I’d repeat or recommend to anyone else. Many of those decisions led to outcomes that I am not satisfied with, even if other people are satisfied with similar results. I’m especially dissatisfied by the parts of these experiences where I enlisted the aid of outside experts, who ended up causing me more harm than help – real harm, real physical and mental and financial harm. I’m especially dissatisfied by the broader social context I made these decisions in – I’m dissatisfied by things that were outside of my control, and sometimes beyond of my awareness. None of this means that I was “confused” or unable to think critically.

Both then and now, I’ve wanted the very best for myself and those on similar paths. I yelled back then, and I yell now, because we deserve better!

We aren’t confused. We have demands. We want freedom, agency, safety, respect. We want quality medical care. We want improved, honest information made available to people. We want people to listen and actually incorporate our experiences into their workflows, learn from the things that have harmed us, so that they don’t keep happening. We want apologies from those who have caused us harm. We want peer support, actual allies, not just people looking to indoctrinate and use us. We want to be taken seriously. We want these things and more. We want so many things. We wanted these things then, and we still want them now. We haven’t stoped wanting, and therein lies the problem. Nobody likes an unsatisfied woman.

Enduring a trip to hell and back doesn’t make a woman confused, it makes her resilient and pissed off.