I am still very early in this whole process, and there is still a lot of self doubt, so I am reading a lot of literature on “Am I trans” and dysphoria.
One concept that people often like to propose in these ressources is the button that makes you the opposite gender, and, crucially, also makes everyone else believe that you have been that way forever.
I don’t really like this, because my time as a boy/man is part of who I am. I would not be me without it, and despite all of the problems I had and have due to my gender, it is still part of who I am. I fought through all of this and worked to find out who I want to be by myself. I wouldn’t wanna be cis, and I also don’t want to cease being the me born out of this struggle.
Yeah those questions made me doubt my gender for over a decade
hmmmm, i’m not familiar with the literature (or that trans experience, i’m like a cis gay guy) but I wonder. would you say that the question fulfilled a purpose, in a way? i mean in the sense of leading you towards the conclusion that your personal history as a person is still a crucial part of who you are?
fwiw it sounds to me like you’re working through things pretty well.
I mean, that is my take on it, but the times I have seen it, the obvious expected answer was, that a trans person would push it. No 4D chess, or anything.
fwiw it sounds to me like you’re working through things pretty well.
Thanks a lot, there are good and bad times. I rely on a diary to remind myself of what I want, and who I want to be, in the times I feel good.
(I’m not trans myself so I have an outside perspective)
I remember watching a video that basically said that gender essentialism (“born trans”) is something you tell conservatives to accept you. The radical stance on the other side is “gender isn’t something you are but something you do” if that makes sense. So in your case, you did a lot of male and now you want to do female. There is nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to say that your former life was a lie nor that it defines what you are.
This isn’t against people who say they felt it since they were little. So they did the other gender without showing.
I hope that makes sense. It’s my outside perspective and I’m willing to learn. I can look up the video if you ask me to.
Edit: I took the time to rewatch the video and it is worth it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4r0CoXsGmk
Y’all were born men and women? I was born a baby! /s
Seriously though, it sounds about right to me. Thank you, I needed this.
Edit to clarify: I’m pretty confident that I’m trans at this point as weird as it still sounds to say it (not in the bad way like calling myself cis though in a not ironic egg way lol) My dysphoria didn’t start until early puberty and I’ve actually got new dysphoria after giving myself permission to be trans. Giving myself permission to try more out without worrying about if I’m really trans enough (very trans thing to do) is a good idea.
I think you hit the nail on the head here in pointing out that we definitely shouldn’t gatekeep being trans on dysphoria — getting euphoria from switching should be enough, and even cis people should get to experiment too!
“I actually got new dysphoria after giving myself permission to be trans”
Same, lol
There is nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to say that your former life was a lie nor that it defines what you are.
It does raise the question of where dysphoria would come from, but I think it’s possible to explain it in a non-invalidating way with this framework- I’m just tired rn
Maybe it is comparable with kids being conditioned to follow into their parents footsteps and at some point being like “I don’t want to a baker but a bus driver”. It’s not that driving busses or baking bread is a being but that doesn’t mean that people should be forced into it.
Anyway, I put the video I was referring to, into an edit of my first comment if you’re interested.
The radical stance on the other side is “gender isn’t something you are but something you do” if that makes sense.
This isn’t “radical”, it’s literally just an attempt to uphold the status quo by reinforcing gender norms as fixed things.
What is a gay femboy doing? Is he doing the female gender? In all ways in every aspect of his life he is behaving withing feminine norms, and having sex with men. All aspects of his behaviour, of his everyday life, are indistinguishable to others as the same actions that a transwoman might perform.
Is he doing female gender? No he’s not. He’s just being outside of typical social norms.
Gender is not defined by behaviour.
A woman can be a bodybuilder, that dresses masc, that behaves masc, and still be a woman. She’s not “being a man”.
The premise of gender being defined by behaviour is just a conservative attempt to reinforce social norms that they wish to uphold because they’re trying to preserve patriarchy and various other social pillars they view as essential to preserving the existing hierarchies of power.
Gender is not something you do. Gender is something you simply are, and it is incongruence with what you actually are and what you’re socially perceived as that produces feelings of discomfort. Which is precisely why acceptance is absolutely crucial to positive feelings, and why suicide and depression rates in trans teens pre-op and pre-hormones that have a fully accepting social and familial network (basically their whole lives) drop to essentially near cis levels. The social factor is extremely significant.
I rewatched the video and linked it in my first comment. Got watch it and let me say that this is not denying gender dysphoria. It is real and should be treated as such.
For me this viewpoint of “gender as a doing not a being” helps me to accept trans and non binary people. In the past, it helped me to think of trans people as “born in the wrong body” with a brain of their identified gender. But when I encountered more and more trans people, I felt like “would all of them pass the brain test?” and “is non-binary really a gender identity or a political statement?” If gender is a doing not a being, removes the burden of prove from trans people.
This doesn’t mean that there is no truth in the “born that way” narrative. The guy who made the video says that it still resonates with him. You are free to disagree with me and I guess “more radical” is the wrong word. These are different viewpoints that can simultaneously be true.
I felt like “would all of them pass the brain test?”
When I first read the mention of differing brain scans the first thing I immediately thought was, “I probably wouldn’t have those scans so I’m not genderqueer” or something along those lines. It’s an absolutely disheartening feeling.
This isn’t “radical”, it’s literally just an attempt to uphold the status quo by reinforcing gender norms as fixed things.
I think that’s only if you assume that the binary definition of “gender actions” is correct, which it isn’t. It’s actually doing the opposite in any other case, I feel, because it calls into question the idea that binary gender ever existed in the first place.
All of your examples involve an implicit “doing” of actively thinking of oneself as a specific gender. That’s a pretty big thing that doesn’t require a simplistic “born this way” narrative that also invalidates swathes of trans people to exist.
Have you heard of this theory of gender as behavior before this? The only context i’ve seen it brought up in is in trying to undo patriarchal norms by purposely changing one’s behavior. It’s not something a conservative would want to admit or argue.
Have you heard of this theory of gender as behavior before this? The only context i’ve seen it brought up in is in trying to undo patriarchal norms by purposely changing one’s behavior. It’s not something a conservative would want to admit or argue.
Yes it is. You’re just only applying your thought through the western lens.
Conservative liberals in several middle east and asia countries are the complete and total opposite. It is a virtue to them to change your behaviour to be in congruence with social norms if your internal view of yourself is not in line with your external presentation. Adapting and fitting into society by changing oneself is the conservative position. They rather view any deviant-from-norm expression as radical and something to oppose, such as anyone trying to be outside of strict gender norms like a feminine man or a masculine woman. Changing oneself to adapt to the collective and fit in is conservative to them because it preserves the social norms, it preserves the power hierarchies, and it does the opposite of challenge the existing systems. Rather than undoing patriarchal norms they see it as simply getting the trans person to fit into the existing binary and blend in.
It’s very important to get perspectives on this from more than just western culture. Viewing it through a single lens can and will blind us to what true liberation should look like. It becomes clearer that this isn’t clear cut when viewed from the international perspective rather than a national western one.
Why do you think Iran is cool with trans people at an official level and pays for transition and surgery? Certainly not because it’s un-conservative.
A lot of thos sorts if questions and stuff are a holdover from a bygone Era of 10 years ago. Jokes aside things have changed so much so fast in the last decade that a lot of the legacy trans culture feels increbly archaic and wrong. This is because for a long time, for lots of reasons, there really wasn’t a “trans community” within which to have large scale dialogs. A lot of this stuff wasn’t meant to help other trans people, it was meant to try and justify ourselves to cis people. So yeah a lot of this stuff is just weird and bad, especially laden with transmedicalism. If you want a real laugh check out this stupid shit:
https://www.transsexual.org/cogiati_english.html And this was for trans women to help trans women. Can you rotate a cube in your head comrade? Lol
Thank you. That test is absurdly funny, didn’t expect to get as much enjoyment out of it as I did.
You are at a meeting. Everyone at the meeting is the same sex as you. The leader of the meeting announces that it’s time for hugs all around! How do you feel about this?
I would hate this
You are parking your car. You must reverse into a somewhat narrow space to park. What do you do?
Is this implying that driving skills are related to gender identity?
Yeah because only male brains have spacial reasoning dontcha know! Pink lady brains can’t do hard stuff like math or imagining cubes. Like this shit was what us closeted messes were interacting with back in 1999. And I must emphasize, this was 100% serious and meant to help trans women.
The sincerety and care shows, there is probably a lot of effort put into this. I can appreciate it for that. It is still very funny though. I like the question on HRT, like at that point the case seems pretty clear, especially if one managed to clesr the barriers that probably existed in the 90s.
Wait I thought that if you could rotate the cube it meant you were trans though. I’m pretty sure us trans girls are the best mental cube rotators, that’s why they banned us from competition
god this is funny
i was a category 4 transexual, i assume because i am autistic and have a hard time remembering people and that’s feminine
I feel this super fucking hard. Wanting to feminize my body is not the same as me wanting to be a cis woman. Like, NOT AT ALL. I do not want to be cis, that is completely irrelevant to my transition process. There’s cis women that look more masculine than pre transition me (which, btw, is completely ok, no shade here), the entire idea of linking transition progress to being more cis like is transphobic, mysogynist bs. I do not even care about passing anymore, i’m fine when people can’t tell if i’m a boy or a girl, it’s actually hillarious that some of the cissies break so easily that they need to know this. That i keep transitioning further is (apart from one procedure i have deeply personal and to a straight guy forever inscrutable reasons for), more of a quality of life update at this point, because HRT is fucking magic and has done things unimaginable to me, in spite of not making me the tiniest bit more cis. If i keep getting blasted with lasers on top of that is now a question of how often i need to shave and how much concealer i need to put on, no longer one of stalling the body horror that sprouted from my upper lip. None of that has anything to do with being cis, either. I could press the button and always have been a cis woman that is able to grow a beard that connects, something which i have never been capable off in this life. That’s a thing. That’s actually something some cis women have to put up with, i have cis friends who went through as much laser hair removal as me. The button does fucking nothing but giving you menstrual cramps, uncontrolled hormone levels and the risk to get preggers when your goth GF cums inside of you. As hot as my goth gal pal is, neither of us is fit to raise a baby, i’m sorry but that’s how it is. And let’s not even begin on the binary nonsense that is “the opposite gender” that has been sneaked into the wording of the question as the rotten cherry on top. My gender is and actually always has been something like “transbian mailbomber witch”, what is the opposite to that? Jordan fucking Peterson on dubious testosterone supplements? A gay frog? A new type of male somebody on 4chan just made up? Who fucking knows?
And yes, i feel you on my past being part of who i am. Surviving when people tried to break me and shoehorn me into the boy role, finding my gender nonconforming niches to weather the storm until my egg was ready to crack, going through the questioning process and understanding gender in ways that just aren’t accessible to cis people, living my wild and wonderful and weird experiences as a nonbinary transfem lesbian are what has made me the communist monster woman i am today and i’m fucking proud of all of that. It wasn’t the happiest life, but it’s mine and if i’m being honest, it’s cool af.
The button test conflates basic comfort and survival needs like not wanting to feel dysphoria or not being exposed to transphobic hate crimes with the asinine, unattainable and actually undesirable idea of wanting to be cis. It is the pure distillate of the conditions under which gatekeepers struggle to reconcile the clinical reality of us existing and sitting in their practice with their need to keep believing in the actual existence of two neatly seperated boxes named MAN and WOMAN. Fuck. That. Noise. Gender is made up nonsense, even biological sex is just the reification of a loose cluster of optional characteristics, we are just blessed by the accident of our birth as trans people to realize that and be free to live the way we want to.
Let me tell you something: If i could choose between two buttons, one that instantly transforms my body into the likeness of Tailor Swift and one that instantly makes all transphobes shit themselves to death in agony, i’d immediately opt to live in a world with still just one Tailor Swift, but zero J.K. Rowlings.
The button test conflates basic comfort and survival needs like not wanting to feel dysphoria or not being exposed to transphobic hate crimes with the asinine, unattainable and actually undesirable idea of wanting to be cis.
Yeah, this is kickass, true, and also reveals the horror in those (CW: extreme transphobic language meant to hurt people)
spoiler
“you’ll never be cis” hate comments some people make. They’re trying to do the same thing and conflate being cis and feeling dysphoria, etc, and they are doing so specifically to threaten you with discomfort and dysphoria. Transphobes are literally physically threatening people, but because we’re so entrenched in this idea that cis is better, we don’t even notice it unless we’re both trans ourselves and have gone through all of this analysis. Sure, we can feel hurt and feel the pain of being told we’re never going to be cis, but the most malicious part of those statements takes so much digging to realize that most people probably never do
Also I’m scared??? Did my gf start using Hexbear and listen to my rants more than I thought?? Are you her account?
