#and for those who are detransitioning for any other reason
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Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.
The tide is turning.
Opinion by Pamela Paul
As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.
Feb. 2, 2024
Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.
Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.
“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.
Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.
At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.
At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.
“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”
Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.
But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.
Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.
And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.
Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.
“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”
A New and Growing Group of Patients
Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.
Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.
“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”
Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.
“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.
For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”
Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”
Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.
They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.
In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.
“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.
Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.
Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.
Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.
Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”
One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.
Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.
Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.
‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’
After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.
The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.
Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”
Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”
But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.
Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.
Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.
In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.
But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.
“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.
Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.
As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”
“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”
When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”
In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.
That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.
“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.
“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.
“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”
Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.
Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”
To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”
“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”
Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.
Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.
Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.
‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’
At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”
“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”
She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.
Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.
“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”
While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”
In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.
Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.
As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.
In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”
But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.
Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”
Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”
The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.
“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”
She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”
Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”
Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.
Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.
Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.
Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.
“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”
Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.
“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.
Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.
A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.
*~*~*~*~*~*
For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:
Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.
The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.
Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.
REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.
Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"
#detransitioners#detransition#gender critical#New York Times#gays#lesbians#trans#trans insanity#long post#article#detrans#transgender#post trans#desisted
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Do you really think its more plausable that a TERF knows the specific details of the Baeddel discourse so well that they can craft the perfect copypasta that refrences all the nuances of internal trans discourse (which I'm sorry but they don't really understand anything about our community) in such a way as to be the maximum level of offensive to the other side than the alternative, that there exists on this site a trans man capable of sexually harassing trans women who disagree with him? I
Are all trans mascs sexual harassers? obviously not. Are you responsible for that guy's actions in any way? No not at all. But I find the inistance that any sexual misconduct or transmisogyny purported to be from a trans masc is an outsider troll to be very off putting from the perspective of a trans woman. I think there is a problem of trans women being treated like sex objects by the broader trans community, (enby's trans mascs etc). The problem will never be resolved if we can't even aknowledge it exists without getting shouted down.
Yes actually because that is what Radfems on Tumblr do and have done and will continue to do for literally the entire time I've been on Tumblr.
Just being completely clear - I mentioned this already but to be extra extra clear - It was not even my original idea that it was probably a Radfem and I've directly said that. I honestly thought it was probably one of the trans guys that white knights extremely hard against the idea of transandrophobia trying to cause shit because of the typing style.
It was in fact my trans fem ex-gf and current very close friend who I still live with, who suggested to me that she thought it was a Radfem. And you know?
Her reasoning combined with my experiences with TERFs actively trying to recruit my friends and I into Radical Feminism because we're actively Feminist trans mascs - it would make a ton of sense.
You have probably not experienced this because you are not a trans masc, but there is absolutely a subgroup of Radfems on this website that try very hard to learn about trans infighting as a way to target trans mascs for recruitment.
Trans masculine people have HUGE targets on our back for Radfem recruitment on this website. It's something I've literally personally seen people fall into and detransition for. Radblr actively loves to target vulnerable, politically vocal trans mascs as recruitment targets, especially doing so by trying to pit us against each other, especially by trying to pit us and trans women against each other.
It's scary as hell. It's also not a new thing by any means. Like, "This has been happening consistently at least since 2015" level of not a new thing. So, I've learned to become very aware of it because I'm a trans masc who is a Feminist advocate who actively studies the history and tactics of Radical Feminism in order to protect myself and other trans people from it.
I'm also sorry, but there was literally an anon like that that went around trans masculine blogs a few months ago. Exactly the same premise but flipped in a "transandrodorks need to be fixed by being impregnated with girlcock" kind of deal. There was an almost immediate "we need to assume this isn't actually a trans fem and assume that it is a troll" response both internally and externally. If any of us had assumed it was actually a trans fem in the same way and projected our pain at trans fems in the same way this is getting projected onto trans mascs...? Could you imagine? The double standard would be insane.
I know this is something coming from a place of our own hurt, but where the hell was any of our support during that? What were we supposed to do besides assume that it was probably a troll? Like those are hypotheticals without real answers, but come on? You know?
Of course anything is possible. No one knows who that anon actually was. And it is an issue the way trans women are sexualized by the community, especially right now on Tumblr. It deserves to be addressed. But not in the weeds like this.
I believe what I believe based on what I know and the thoughts and feelings of people I trust. You can dislike that, you can even disagree with that, but a stranger coming into my askbox with a condescending tone isn't really going to contest my lived experiences or the shared opinion of someone I've known for the better part of a decade that easily.
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I've already written about why male socialization is a myth that needs to be discarded, but in the responses to those posts, I sometimes find tme trans people who concede that yes, the concept of male socialization should be rejected, but refuse to let go of their own supposed female socialization. this always makes me quite reasonably angry, for two reasons:
I dislike it when people hijack my posts about transmisogyny to talk about things that aren't transmisogyny.
rejecting male socialization but embracing female socialization is still innately transmisogynistic.
you might find yourself wondering how that second point could possibly be true. it's true for a lot of reasons, and I'll explain to the best of my ability.
"female socialization" is the idea that people who were assigned female at birth undergo a universal experience of girlhood that stays with them the rest of their lives.
right off the bat, this concept raises alarm bells. first, it is a bold (and horribly incorrect) assertion to claim that there is any universal experience of girlhood that is shared by all people who were afab. what exactly constitutes girlhood varies greatly based on culture, time period, race, class, sexual orientation, and many, many other factors. disregarding transness for a moment, can you really say that, for example, white women and black women in modern day america, even with all else being equal, are socialized in the same way? the differences in "socialization" only become more stark the fewer commonalities two given people have. to give another example, a white gay trans man born in 2001 to an upper middle class family in a progressive city in the north is going to have a very different life than a cis straight mexican woman born in 1952 to an impoverished family and risked her life immigrating to the us in the deep south. can you really say anything meaningful about the "female socialization" that these two supposedly have in common? I think that b. binaohan said it best in "decolonizing trans/gender 101":
Then in a singular sense we most certainly cannot talk about 'male socialization' or 'female socialization' as things that exist. We can only talk about 'male socialization**s**' and 'female socialization**s**'. For if we take the multiplicity of identity seriously, as we must, then we are socialized as a whole person based on the nexus of the parts of our identity and our axes of oppression.
...
Indeed, it gets complex enough that we could assert, easily, that each individual is socialized in unique ways that cannot be assumed true of any other person, since no one else shares our **exact** context. Not even my sister was socialized in the same way that I was.
and while I could just leave it at that and tell you to read the rest of their book (which you should), it wouldn't sit right with me if I just debunked the concept without explaining exactly why it's transmisogynistic at its core.
now, I should preface this by saying that I believe trans people have a right to identify however they want, and I think that trans people deserve the space to talk about their lives before transition without facing judgment. there are tme trans people who consider themselves women and there are trans men who don't consider themselves women at all but nonetheless have a lot of negative experiences with being expected to conform to womanhood. I don't want to deprive these people of the ability to talk about their life experiences. however, I do want them to keep in mind a few things.
first of all, "female socialization" is terf rhetoric. terfs talk all the time about how womanhood is inherently traumatic, which they regularly use as a talking point to convince trans men to detransition and join their side. when your whole ideology hinges on the belief that having been afab predestines you to a life of suffering, who is a better target to indoctrinate than trans people for whom being expected to conform to womanhood was a major source of trauma and dysphoria? the myth of female socialization is precisely why there are detransitioners in the terf movement who vehemently oppose trans rights.
that's why when tme trans people talk about having undergone female socialization, it's almost always steeped in the underlying implication that womanhood is an innately negative experience. even if they don't buy into the biological determinism central to radical feminism, that implication is still present. because, you see, womanhood can still be innately negative because the result of being viewed as and expected to be a woman is that you are inundated with misogyny.
that right there is why clinging to the notion of female socialization is transmisogynistic. it allows tme trans people, many of whom don't even consider themselves women, to position themselves as experts who understand womanhood and misogyny better than any trans woman ever could. that's why I find it disingenuous when a tme trans person claims to reject male socialization but still considers themself as having undergone female socialization; how could they possibly benefit from doing so, other than by claiming to be more oppressed than trans women, by virtue of supposedly experiencing more misogyny?
by being viewed as more oppressed than trans women on the basis of female socialization, they gain access to "women's only" spaces that trans women are denied access to. their voices are given priority in discussions about gendered oppression. people more readily view them as the victims when they come into interpersonal conflict with trans women. they become incapable of perpetrating transmisogyny on the basis of being the "more oppressed" category of trans people.
how exactly could such a person not be transmisogynistic, though? if they believe that gendered socialization is a valid and universal truth that one can never escape from, then what does it even mean for them to reject the concept of male socialization? if they were to actually, vehemently reject it, then they would no longer be able to leverage their own "female socialization" to imply that trans women aren't real, genuine women on account of not having experienced it. and make no mistake - there are very few tme trans people who subscribe to the myth of gendered socialization that even claim to reject male socialization. most of the time, they're very clear about their beliefs that trans women have some "masculine energy" that we can never truly get rid of after having undergone a lifetime of being expected to conform to manhood. and as a result, they continue to treat trans women as dangerous oppressors.
that's why gendered socialization as a concept needs to be abandoned wholesale. there's nothing wrong with talking about your experiences as a trans person, but giving any validity to this vile terf rhetoric always harms trans women, just like it was intended to do from its very inception.
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Something fucking weird happened to me yesterday. A few fucking weird somethings in fact.
I was at a premiere party for a local comedian's special, maybe like 25-30 people in a little art commune backyard space, kinda place with a bunch of art sculptures and free ranging cats and a fun vibey vibe.
This comedian is one of those kinda 'i'm not a terf i just think maybe trans people could tone it down a little' lesbians who i first met through a trans comic friend (who no longer speaks with this comedian over some apparently terfy views) so i'm kinda already on red alert. But there's a few other trans girls there and generally I don't think this comedian is like hateful or even terfy i think she's just kinda catring to a certain demographic of queer people that aren't as progressive or whatever.
not my particular FAVORITE crowd of people or ideology but I'm interested in hearing and hanging out with reasonable people whose views are different than mine, assuming they are pleasant and not disrespectful, yknow, so i went into the party with an open mind.
i was being a social lil butterfly as i'm wont to do and i met this big burly beardy kinda guy, he seems chill, nice enough. Later in the party after a bit of weed and drinks have been slung, he comes up to me and asks if I can help him get some drugs. He asks if I have any Clomid. I haven't ever heard of it, I look it up and he explains it's a fertility drug for cis or trans women, he described it as an estrogen blocker and i guess it makes ovaries OR testicles more fertile if a trans woman has undergone HRT, I guess.
I'm a little dumbfounded and trying to figure out what the hell is going on, why this random dude is asking me for meds i know nothing about, and i'm desperately trying to figure out the context of this request. I'm making him a little uncomfortable with my questions, trying to figure out if this is a trans man, closeted trans woman, detransitioned trans woman, or i dont even know what, and i ask for a little bit of clarity.
he offers up, "well... i was a boy who got raped and spent some time where i thought i was a woman but now i'm on testosterone again and trying to have a baby" and i'm like... okay detransitioned trans woman i guess, and i'm like yeah sorry i have no idea if i can find anyone who could get these meds for you. I asked him why he was asking me and he said "[comedian's name but ALSO his partner's name, so i don't know which person he's referring to] said you were a safe person to talk to about this. Conversation basically ended there and i walked away from it thinking it was extremely strange, not knowing how to process any of what just happened.
Then later i meet another person who's detransitioned, she was 'being a guy' for a while then kinda ended up not resonating with it and is presenting femme again.
the party just kinda started closing in on me at that point, just started feeling like more people there might be detrans, is this the audience of people, is this the vibe of the party, did the comedian mean something else when i made a joke earlier to her along the lines of "yeah looking bad is so hot right now" (just lightly roasting gen z type style and all that stuff which isn't my vibe obvi) and she said "yeahhh you couldn't be more right" in a kind of way that i could have interpreted as being in reference to ME if she was saying something along the lines of 'you ugly man in a dress' if she IS a closeted terf orrrrrrrr
idk. so much of this is spiraling based on a weird experience and also RSD that goes haywire in situations where my transness has even a 10% chance of being related. but also like. maybe my intuition should be trusted and it really was a bad situation? i just wish i had some neutral way to find out what the hell was going on but it feels so fraught
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i do very much like the idea of baby butch lesbian pidge. or futch or however we wanna diagnose what she’s got going on in canon. but i’ve always seen her having a love/hate relationship with her femininity
when she first came out as trans she was veeery little and flocked to femininity like coming home. it was so easy to put on dresses and grow out her hair and play with girl toys. she wanted to!! and katie rolls off the tongue much easier than any other name, but her annoying brother still calls her that old nickname sometimes :/
(but it’s fine. it was pidge from pigeon. it was her first word. for some reason.)
and when she decides to sneak into the garrison detransitioning for the time being made sense. they’re looking out for a girl. with long hair. it’s the best plan she’s got. it’s for her family she can do it. she can do it she can just pick up the scissors… and…
pidge keeps his head down. doesn’t talk much, even to the two (other) guys he’s grouped with. doesn’t talk to them even as they all get launched into space with two more men. just five boys in a giant lion. guys night, right?
but soon enough it gets clear this isn’t temporary. this is real. they’re in this together. they have to mind meld and get along and be on the same wavelength twenty four fucking seven. pidge has to come clean.
so she does. she’s a girl. the name has grown on her but she’s a girl she’s she.
and the team accepts it. loves her regardless. hell, even saw through her botched haircut.
so… yay. she’s a girl and they know. but would they be okay with her being… girly? she’s missed the dresses and the hair and pretty flowers. yeah allura is all those things and they all like her just fine but would it be weird if pidge just suddenly gets girly? she likes the masc look too but damn she misses heels sometimes. she hates having to deal with her shortness
one day allura weasels all of this out of her and allura doesn’t take no for an answer. so pidge is dolled up in one of allura’s best dresses, face beat to the gods, hair done in the girliest style they can manage with her… whole situation. and she’s beaming at her reflection
then allura drags her to dinner, hiking up the skirt so she doesn’t trip over herself as she gets into her seat. pidge toughens up and waits for the laughs to hit her. for someone to assume pidge got roped into this and secretly hates it. the “uhh… who are you and what have you done with pidge?”
but none of that happens. shiro says she looks nice. keith likes the hair. hunk likes the dress. lance demands to get dolled up next.
if anyone notices pidge’s immovable smile for the rest of dinner, they don’t comment on it. and they don’t bat an eye when skirts and dresses make their way into the rotation of pidge’s outfits right alongside her pants and overalls
#my femmasc futch girlypop#txt#pidge#headcanon#longer than i thought. and this is the short version#she accociates femininity with being a kid in school and being bullied by those kids. they didn’t bully pidge they bullied katie#and other such thoughts#but allura would murder all of them in her sparkliest gown. so who cares what they think <3
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I think it's interesting that, a decade ago, I saw a lot of mainstream pushback against the very concept of butch flight (loosely, the concept that what proponents claim is an alarmingly large portion of very gnc women were beginning to form new identities in which they no longer considered thenselves women) and especially against the concept that an alarmingly large portion of very gnc women were beginning testosterone use and surgical interventions to cope with their gendered discomfort. I saw with my own eyes many an indiginant person shout that they knew many, many such people, and almost none of them were either forming new identities and/or turning to medical interventions, and that this was proof those changes were only occurring in people who had some inherent need for them. When I spoke with a professor about a paper I was working on on butch identity formations in a particular time period, she gave me a few potential sources and added blithely and presumptuously, "And I'm assuming you don't want to read anything about butch flight or things like that." I took note of these things even as I have been very clear for years that I think there is, in fact, something to see here. Experiences and cultures vary. While I did not see many people who lived in places like myself- big or medium cities, or citylike pockets near universities such as college towns- take so much issue with the concept, but I could not factually know what portion of us was affected, and where, and how.
Over that same decade, I have seen group after group after group of women like myself be affected by what I think is a real phenomenon- the spread of one particular way of coping with gendered discomfort among a population of people riddled with gendered discomfort, for whom entering an Uber, or presenting a passport in another country, or showing up for an interview, or going to a women's spa or changing room, can be nerve wracking experiences loaded with the weight of the quick, often totally unintended but sometimes outright cruel assumptions of other people. I have known one by one by one by one women who've decided, for various reasons, to end their testosterone use, or that they don't have a gender identity in a meaningful sense, or that they do and that identity is "woman." And I've watched as the phenomenon has become so commonplace that I've seen queer spaces shift their language on detransition- from "exceedingly rare" it has become "uncommon" for someone to stop because they changed their mind on continuing, or one totally benign form of identity exploration that a person was simply "wrong" about, and I have not seen the famous 1% "statistic" floated out by them in large pushes, as I used to. I have never argued before and will not now that it inevitably ruins a person's life to decide to stop a medical intervention, or to choose a medical intervention they come to regret. I have never argued before and will not now that looking uncommon for one's sex is a bad thing, or that the scar of detransition lies in one's ability to be accurately sexed by strangers. To be clear, the uptick in detransition and reidentification is not the point of this or my point- it is simply an inevitable consequence. Even if the 1% stat were correct, 1% of 1000 is still more than 1% of 10. That is, it is simply one of many byproducts of the increased change in identity among this population to begin with.
Now, in 2024, I honestly don't think I know anyone in my own country, especially anyone who lives in the kinds of places in it previously mentioned, who will earnestly decry that there is simply nothing to see here, and that the experience I'm detailing here is totally unfamiliar to themself and to any of their friends at all, and they have absolutely no idea what I'm seeing. I know some people who will chalk it up to increased public acceptance of transition leading to increased internal acceptance of transition and trans identity among people who were actually trans the whole time, and who argue that no one's identity has been actually influenced by what they are seeing and experiencing every day. I know some people who will chalk it up to increased information and access to medical interventions, where applicable. I do not buy that such a massive portion of this group was simply truly trans the whole time, but at least this argument attempts to account for the uptick. But I don't know any people who know a large number of very gnc women in similar social situations to myself who claim, out loud, that this isn't happening at all.
And yet the number of people that I see openly discussing the topic is just about the same, and the general hushed tone on the topic is just about the same, among LGBT people now as it was a decade ago, despite the decade of new inormation and experience. I don't individually have the way out of this cultural moment for us, and I admit that there is a real (if minute) possibility that the arguments that account for this by saying this was functionally inevitable/just a matter of more of us accepting that we require these interventions could be correct, but I think it's important that I continue to name the reality that I think I am seeing with own eyes. Doing so does not deprive anyone of dignity, does not deprive anyone of choice, does not deprive anyone of the ability to self determine or make their own medical decisions. It simply means not lying by ommission.
#i actually kind of dislike the term itself but i think it is important that i continue to be open about this#because so so so many people are simply extremely afraid to do so
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not to mention tme/tma is no fucking gender binary, the groups “transfems” and “non transfems; cis men, cis women, trans men, some nonbinary people, etc” is not a binary at all. if you don’t know what the terms mean or aren’t experienced with transfeminism, that’s fine, but don’t act like i hate men because you misunderstood my feminism.
The reblog that garnered these messages can be found here, and part one is here. Sorry if the tone was too sharp; I'm not super comfy playing defense for those who aren't here to defend themselves, but I'm sure as heck willing to do my best. I'd explained at the end of the post that garnered these responses that I am also a trans woman, but I don't mind that you missed it; I just feel that said experience is something to keep in mind.
Since this was split into two messages I'll have to respond in two parts, so bear with me. While I don't have much of an audience, it's important to me to head this off, so I'd appreciate it if anyone who reads this and agrees with my stances here also walks away with the message of patience and solidarity, and doesn't send messages her way for whatever reason. This isn't a callout and I don't believe in callouts; this is just how the inbox function works.
Anyway! Second:
"If you don't know what the terms mean"… I understand that some find comfort in the terms, but "transmisogyny exempt" and "transmisogyny affected" are years old and have gone through a number of phases. While they were well-intentioned at first, TMA and TME swiftly changed from inclusive terms to exclusive ones, used not only by trans women to exclude others from our struggle, but by others to exclude us from their own struggles. In many ways they are bullshit terms adopted and adapted by terfs and their allies, and when I say they are used to reinforce the gender binary, I mean it. They've been used at length to pit trans men, trans mascs, and AFAB nonbinary folk against us in an attempt to make detransition look more practical.
As for whether TMA/TME has any weight: Do you understand how many cis women have been hurt by transmisogyny? You can find stories about women ranging from Michelle Obama and Lady Gaga to Marie MacGowan, an eighty-six-year-old Irish cis woman with dementia who was assaulted and beaten by a transphobe for over forty minutes straight. Even men and mascs, cis or trans, can be hit by forms of transmisogyny if they don't meet the standards of masculinity to which society holds them! Trans men are routinely mistaken to be trans women and attacked by people who misunderstand the situation because only trans women have the spotlight in this patriarchal society! That's not to mention the complexities of growing up intersex, whether or not their lives were changed without their consent by "corrective" surgeries as infants. The binary of "affected" or "exempt" is too tidy to have much use. Fear-based hatred is too complicated.
Transmisogyny is a form of transphobia, which is at its root a form of homophobia, and we have to understand that segregating each other's experiences into exclusionary groups rather than inclusive ones is incredibly unproductive -- and exactly what the terfs, traditionalists, and other fascists are trying to enforce.
On the subject of transphobia as a whole vs transmisogyny, I was trying not to bring this up, but it's the only way I can think of to boil down my point in a way that matters. This is the post that convinced me to respond, in the hopes of sharing some thoughts and perspective.
Okay. This is important for one main reason: Why do you think it would be bizarre or noteworthy for trans men to react negatively to this tweet? I get the point of it, but it's phrased so poorly. Surely you can understand -- maybe you've experienced for yourself -- the feeling that arises when you try to live your happiest life as your chosen gender, only for terfs and their allies to say "You only feel like a X because you're a failed Y." Where does that stem from? Where does it lead? "Trans women are just men who are super gay." "Trans men are just women trying to climb the patriarchal ladder." It's disgusting! Maybe that's not a perspective that occurred to you in the moment, but that's why queer folk from all corners of the community should communicate our experiences to each other, isn't it? If your feminism includes seeing trans men "react bizarrely" to something you didn't understand, and giving them the squinty eyes instead of asking why, then it can't truly be feminism, because it can't truly be about equality.
This whole TME/TMA thing reminds me of the transmedicalist discourse, or of a decade ago when in some circles you weren't considered trans enough and "made the rest of us look bad" if you couldn't, or didn't care to, pass. Butch transfems, a cornerstone of the culture, used to get run out of social groups for being "fake women". It's all about finding the weakest link and cutting them out, over and over until the solidarity of a cohesive queer community becomes a more manageable series of dogpiles against smaller and smaller fragments of GSR minorities. Fuck that. None of us is worth sacrificing, not ace nor kinky nor enby nor queer.
It's been a long pair of long responses. Sorry for the wait, and for the attention. In any case, to boil my thoughts down in the least productive way possible:
"Individually we are weak like a single twig, but as a bundle we form a mighty faggot!"
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A lot of rhetoric in support of anti-trans legislation to restrict gender-affirming care talks about regret and detransitioning.
Some proportion of people experience regret for any medical procedure, from chemotherapy to orthopedic surgery. Nonetheless, we don’t see a plethora of opinion pieces about the awful risks of hip replacements. It’s inevitable that some percentage of people who transition will regret it; the real question is whether the medical care is beneficial on the whole—not whether the occasional person later regrets a medical choice they made when younger.
In 2021, it was found that 13.1% of transgender people participating in the U.S. Transgender Survey reported detransitioning at some point in their lives.
The authors of this study are careful to note “these experiences did not necessarily reflect regret regarding past gender affirmation.” Family and societal pressure are the driving forces that lead many people to detransition – not because people wake up and decide they're not actually trans. All those who took part in the survey still identified as trans, thus it's presumed that the detransitioning was temporary.
Transitioning and detransitioning is complex. You can stop taking hormones and still be trans. You can regret taking steps that alienate you from your family, even as you wish your family would accept you living how you want to live. You can even regret some aspects of a treatment (any kind of medical treatment) while being grateful for the knowledge you gained by trying it out.
Detransitioning doesn't equal regret. Regret doesn’t always mean that people wish they hadn’t transitioned, it just means that there are some parts of the story that they long to change.
What’s clear from this evidence is that the vast majority of people do not experience regret, however defined, after transitioning genders. The rate of regret is still better than other treatments which don’t require national debates over their use, which really begs the question of why the health decisions of this group gets so much attention, and why so many people weigh in even though they have no medical or psychological training and aren't directly involved the treatment of transgender people.
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The study included a sample of the responses of the reasons by those who detransitioned at some point in their life. I think they are insightful.
External factors
Caregiving reasons
“I was caring for my 80+ year old mother who had severe dementia, and it was just too confusing for her.”
Difficult to blend in as identified gender
“I don't pass, even after FFS [facial feminization surgery] etc.”
Financial reasons
“Unable to afford HRT [hormone replacement therapy]”
Lack of support
“Lack of trans community at the time”
“Back in 1997, virtually no one had heard of queergender people. I couldn't find a support system, and I couldn't figure out how to tell people what I was.”
Legal reasons
“Social services legal pressure regarding child custody”
“Forced to by going to federal prison for two years”
“Family court order—part of custody award”
Medical reasons
“Blood clotting from estrogen”
“Pain in binding large chest”
Fertility reasons
“We decided to have kids so [I] went back to testosterone long enough to bank sperm so we can do IVF [in vitro fertilization].”
Pressure from a medical health professional
“Parents took me to a region with hostile doctors.”
“Medical supervisor at federal facility removed regional-approved treatment because I didn't fit his idea of ‘a gay man so gay [he] wants to be a woman so it's easier to sleep with men’ after I had identified as lesbian to him.”
Pressure from a mental health professional
“Mental health professional told me I am not transgender and thought I was just crazy.”
“In those days you couldn't be diagnosed trans if you were also gay or lesbian.”
Pressure from a parent
“Moved home after college. Had to conform for parents.”
“I was facing being pulled out of school by my family.”
Pressure from the community or societal stigma
“With the high level of transphobia that exist[s], life gets very lonely.”
“I live in a very conservative place and was afraid for my safety.”
Pressure from my employer
“There are times when my current job requires me to present [as] female.”
I had trouble getting a job
“I flip flopped genders because of needed employment.”
Military-related reasons
“Military forced me to detransition while in service.”
Pressure from friends or roommates
“Staying with people I knew would harass me”
Pressure from unspecified or nonparent family members
“Visiting conservative extended family for the holidays”
“I temporarily detransition during visits with my in laws.”
Pressure from religion or a religious counselor
“Religious pressure (Mormon)”
“Pressure from religion”
Pressure from school
“School staff harassed and abused me daily for my gender expression.”
“Exclusion by Peers in School, No Mechanism for Getting Preferred Name on School Rosters”
Pressure from a spouse or partner
“I began to really clearly identify as transgender … but I realized it was pushing my marriage apart. At the time, I decided to try living as my assigned gender and set these feelings aside, but they kept cropping back up.”
Wanting to find a spouse or partner
“My partner of 4 years and I split up and I felt that I would always be alone as a trans person.”
“Difficult to find lovers, dates”
Sexual or physical assault
“Traumatized by corrective rape so recloseted”
“I have become frightened of the police since being sexually molested by an officer.”
Sports-related reasons
“Playing competitive sports”
Travel or relocation
“North Dakota is not a friendly place for anyone outside the gender binary. When I go back home, I butch up.”
“I was studying abroad in a country hostile to LGBTQ* people (Russia).”
Unable to access gender-affirming hormones
“Living in rural area, couldn't get hormones”
“I lost access to HRT and stopped passing.”
Internal factors
Psychological reasons
“Wasn't emotionally ready, I was scared of my identity.”
“Transition had to be put on hold due to mental health issues.”
“suicide attempt”
Uncertainty or doubt around gender
“Unsure of my exact gender identity”
“Thought I might have been wrong/confused”
Fluctuations in identity or desire
“My gender feels complicated and changing all the time.”
“I enjoy having the ability to go back and forth between genders.”
Note: internal factors can be the result of external factors (e.g., self-doubt regarding one's gender identity in response to being persistently misgendered or rejected).
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@[REDACTED] because you heathens can't let someone fucking LEARN. op, I intend this kindly, but I can tell you would not be a friend to terfs and this whole thing is rooted in terf brainrot. I'm choosing community today and going to explain why this is terfy shit fucking over trans mascs.
so the core of the terf belief system is that there is a bioessentialist Quality Of Men that makes them fundamentally an Oppressor who can never face marginalization, right? we disagree with that because we love trans people--both women and men. if men are Fundamentally Oppressors, you can't Change Genders. here's the thing. under the premise of "transmasculine oppression does not occur at any axis so they can't have this word", you have removed the bioessentialist aspect but still accepted that there is a Quality Of Men that innately makes them an Oppressor that can never face marginalization.
now the next logical step that we've taken from "men can never be oppressed or have a -phobia term" is that because the "base model" or cis men aren't oppressed and don't face what would hypothetically be "androphobia," trans men cannot create the term "transandrophobia" to describe their real experiences of pain and oppression. despite this weird semantic caveat, we both fully and entirely agree that trans men/mascs do face real oppression specifically due to being Trans Men/Mascs that is different in nature from the cruelty and oppression that Trans Women/Femmes face. so we fully agree that the phenomenon is real, but you and many others are for some reason saying they cannot have a word to describe it. they can't have a word to describe their real experiences because the "base model" doesn't face oppression and we hate the base model so much they specifically do not and can never have a -phobia word.
what is the point of this? who does this help?
it helps terfs keep trans mascs isolated is who it helps. i just. i think the toxicity of the idea is really represented in action right now. because we are talking about a group of men/masculine people who are actively specifically marginalized. they are telling us they are being targeted for detransition and conversion therapy. they are trying to tell us something and we aren't listening because we're playing semantic games over what words they're allowed to use. because they aren't oppressed enough to "be at an axis." in practice right now, it seems like "be at an axis" has turned into "have a real voice in the community." there needs to be room here, conversations where "trans masc" isn't a performative placeholder for "passing trans men," more fluid boundaries between "Man" and "Woman" and how people identified within those categories face marginalization, less hatred for Men and more love for queer life and liberation. not just to be inclusive of nonbinary people who also exist and face weird mixes of both of these real things--transandrophobia and transmisogyny-- but because right now we are denying solidarity to members of our community and limiting our own discussion and understanding in favor of forcing a Very Harassed Group Of Us to endlessly workshop the term over petty semantic grievances.
and I'm sorry but i really. just need us to collectively take a moment and reflect that the grievance is "this word could be broken down into another word we wouldn't like." and i don't really know what to do with that. there are a lot of good reasons to use the term "transandrophobia" not the least of which is because it's immediately descriptive under the language rules we all know (the marginalization/hate that trans men face) but because it fits in with all of the other queer terms--biphobia, homophobia, lesbophobia, aphobia, queerphobia--we generally went hard in terms of "phobia" terms. trans-andro-phobia seems perfectly reasonable to me to describe the hatred of trans men. i am really really sad that "'andro' can't be in a 'phobia' word because men can never be oppressed" became the dominant discourse on this because it really is just. mean. it's just mean-spiritied. 'misandry' already exists. if whatever you were scared of was gonna happen, it already would have. i really cannot comprehend the preferencing of some nebulous possible harm of "androphobia" over and above our ability to describe real problems facing members of our community.
again i ask you, who does this help? trans mascs are our community and they are being attacked brutally and quietly and we aren't talking about it because?? men can't be oppressed because they're not on an axis? they are asking us for solidarity. and they need it.
trans men are asking us to see that terfs weaponize murderous language against trans women but they are no less genocidal in their aims of targeting trans men and mascs for de-transition, conversion therapy, and corrective rape. "lost lesbians" and "lost daughters" and "irreversible damage" are rallying cries and money makers among the far right--they say "keep your daughters daughters, keep them in the ontological category of victim before they become a predator."
the hostility to the term transandrophobia because "men can't be oppressed" is the internalization of the terf belief that men are fundamentally and innately predators and oppressors instead of people reacting to their position under the system of patriarchy. it's a belief that never allows for the destruction of the patriarchy. it says you can never be a gender-traitor unless you're the right gender--a feminine gender (woman) fighting against the innately violent masculine onslaught (men). there are straight cis men who fight against toxic male gender norms and face violence for it, too. this model cannot articulate that violence beyond "homophobia" and it cannot articulate the violence against our trans brothers beyond "transphobia" and that is a failure. that is not ideological purity-- that is an active failure to real and living members of your community. we need to articulate it.
transandrophobia is a perfectly serviceable term to describe a real problem that needs a term. trans men and mascs face specific violences. your response literally agrees that it's real. we have both stated on multiple occasions that agree that it's real. so we need to be able to talk about it. so we need a word for it.
i would encourage you in general to prioritize people's wellbeing over and above linguistic purity. especially right now when things are getting worse and worse and worse for ALL trans people.
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So I recently played a decent chunk of Snoot Game because of how many people I saw who claimed it's the best VN ever and the fact it was made by 4channers to spite Goodbye Volcano High for having fair working conditions and queer representation totally doesn't taint it at all. I can confirm that those caveats definitely taint the game A LOT more than those fans make it sound. It's a good game if you're a teenager who thinks Family Guy is funny and has never played a VN that wasn't a boring slice of life dating sim where the goal is to click the right dialogue to get the sexy CGs with the hottest waifu. However, if you have any criteria for tastes higher than that bar, you probably won't enjoy it.
The entire game exists purely to be able to say it's possible to make a good VN in one and a half years without doing a bunch of delays, but Snoot Game is a straightforward VN made in the easy to use Ren'Py engine while GVH is being developed in the much more complicated Unity engine as a pseudo-VN/rhythm/adventure game with a large branching storyline. It's really not comparable. Even so, it's just a weak point to criticize a game for taking a long time to come out. Delays are frustrating in the moment, but once a game is released, it usually ceases to be relevant. On top of that, the point is kinda negated by the mere fact Snoot Game is bad. The early parts are downright repulsive and it only starts to become tolerable around the point most decent players just adapt to its shittiness.
On top of that, even from what we know about GVH, it's clear its story is more ambitious overall. GVH is about a group of high school students going to school while knowing a meteor is coming that will kill them all. Adults are making them go along like nothing is wrong while the central cast use the opportunity to grow up in the ways they wouldn't really get the chance to if they had any futures to think about. It's a really great premise with a lot of promise.
But Snoot Game? A human goes to a high school of dinosaurs and falls in love with a classmate. The twist? The human is a 4channer and his love interest is a non-binary "girl" who he tries to convince to detransition for him and if they don't, they become a homeless drug addict or a school shooter. And in case you are wondering, you can donate to the development team using Crypto. Oh and the meteor from GVH just doesn't factor into the story. Granted I haven't played through all of it, but even if it does factor in, the fact it doesn't come up at all for as long as I was playing is a seriously bad indictment of the game that it thinks its most promising narrative device should be taking a backseat to the teacher who looks like that fat dude from Aqua Teen Hunger Force (did I mention this game is extremely unfunny?)
And even for a Ren'Py VN, there's just a lot of better games to play, especially furry VNs. There's Adastra, Echo, Arches, Remember the Flowers, Burrows, the Smoke Room, and Where the Demon Lurks to only name those I've played. I legitimately do not see a single reason why one would enjoy Snoot Game unless they are queerphobic, hate the idea of game developers having good working conditions (because GVH is made by a workers' co-op), or have their sense of humor completely ruined by 4chan, especially for enjoying Snoot Game over the many other far better furry VNs out there. If you're a veteran of furry VNs and want to know how bad Snoot Game is, it's like every single pet peeve about furry VNs stuffed into one game with all of the most obnoxious bigoted jokes and outdated pop culture references caked into it that doesn't even have any furry hunks to thirst over, unless you're really into scrawny scaly dudes drawn in MS Paint
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from dickevandyke
The other day a friend of mine said they hardly even consider me detrans because I "didn't really do anything to detransition". I didn't ask what they meant by that, because they're not really the kind of person I can have that sort of conversation with. I didn't want to have to explain to them why I detransitioned. I didn't want to have to justify finally feeling okay with myself after spending my teenage years being miserable and stressed about being trans.
It's kind of a fascinating mindset, though. I think it gives really wonderful insight as to how their brain works. Like, I stopped taking testosterone. I stopped asking to be referred to by male pronouns. I "came out" as a woman, and I Came Out as a Lesbian after also spending most of my teenage years trying very hard to repress my attraction to women. This person doesn't view that as doing anything. Why?
I imagine it's because I dress fairly masculine - as Butches generally do. I wear still wear, mostly, "boyish clothes". I didn't start wearing make-up. I didn't let my hair grow out long. I haven't done any voice training, or really made an effort to make my voice higher pitched like it was before. I haven't gotten breast implants. I rarely correct people when they call me "sir". I don't need to do any of those things. A stranger calling me "sir" doesn't mean I am not a woman. Not having breasts anymore doesn't mean that I'm not a woman. The point of my detransition was not to turn myself into a stereotype or to dive head-first into femininity.
The point of my detransition was just that I am finally comfortable with myself, just as I am. That doesn't mean that I love my body, but I am okay with it. I am at peace with who I am.
Do I regret getting a mastectomy? Yes. There was no other reason to remove my breasts, they were perfectly fine, they were small and didn't cause me any back pain, I didn't have any medical issues related to them. Do I regret wearing a binder? Absolutely. It has screwed up my ribs and back so severely that I am probably going to be living with chronic pain for the rest of my life. Do I regret going on HRT? Sometimes, sometimes not. Honestly, it didn't really change much for me outside of my voice and making my body hair slightly thicker. Do I regret social transition? Absolutely. I dug myself into such a deep hole of self loathing and repression that it took me three years to finally crawl out of it. So after going through all of that - after putting myself, my body through all of that, why would I want to do it all over again in the opposite direction, when there is absolutely no need for it?
I "didn't do anything to detransition" because I don't need to do anything to be a woman, I just am one. Woman is my natural state. I "didn't do anything to detransition" because I already put my body through three years of cross-sex hormones, five-ish years of binding, and an unnecessary mastectomy which has left me unable to feel most of my chest more than a year post-op. I don't need more unnecessary surgeries or expensive treatments to make myself into a woman, I never really stopped being one. Getting breast implants wouldn't make me more of a woman because I don't need breasts to be a woman. Voice training to make my voice a higher pitch again won't make me more of a woman because a high pitched voice was never what made me a woman in the first place. Wearing make-up, growing out my hair, wearing "girly" clothes wouldn't make me more of a woman, because femininity does not make a woman.
I didn't argue with them when they said that because, to be honest, I don't want to hear what they think makes a woman. I don't want to hear them trying to justify why they barely consider me detrans because I have not tried to turn myself into a feminine stereotype. It just really struck a chord with me, because if I'm not really detrans to them, am I really a woman to them? Or do they see me as some kind of "failed" woman because despite explicitly and openly accepting my womanhood, I am not their picture of what a woman is suppose to be?
thinking of detransition? you are not alone
#detrans#detransition#ftmtf#detrans ftm#detrans female#1st#butch#lesbian#actually detrans#actuallydetrans
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I remember seeing someone say that the only questions you should be able to ask in order to correctly identify real gender dysphoria is to ask “do you feel like your life/sense of self is in poor quality” and “do you think any of those would improve if you were the opposite sex”.
Combined with the questions I’ve seen in another ask about asking why people don’t feel like they were the sex they were born as + why you don’t feel masculine/feminine enough and who said so, I feel like there would be a lot less misdiagnoses of gender dysphoria and less “trans children”.
I’ve also wanted to ask, why do you think that there isn’t any medication for true gender dysphoria yet (besides money)? One of the things I’ve read actually made me think that, if it’s classified as a mental illness, then why isn’t there any research for creating a medication for it (like bipolar depression, ADHD, etc.)?
I feel like maybe those are the only types of questions being asked considering the amount of people identifying as trans now. It's a shame because since the treatment for gender dysphoria is so drastic and life altering it's really dangerous to have such vague qualifiers for determining if someone is actually experiencing it.
About a month or so ago I responded to someone else who was also asking why I think there might not be medications for it or more attempts to create one so I'll just repeat what I said then. There’s a lot of reasons I think could contribute to that. First, mental illnesses are hard to treat and often a medication doesn’t do much other than alleviate symptoms. Therapy is probably the best option for any type of dysphoria in my opinion because dysphoria can go away and most of the time does if you actually seek therapy and treatment rather than “affirmation.” I’ve seen studies done on detransitioners and the main reason given as to why they detransitioned was they realized their dysphoria was related to “other issues” which is something people typically find out in therapy. Another reason I think there’s not much headway in a medication for gender dysphoria is financial incentive. Medical and gender affirming institutions get a big check for every one child who transitions and they’re more interested in making money than anything else. It’s not healthcare at this point. It’s just activism.
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i came out to my family about wanting to detransition! i still id as trans, specifically agender. but i'm comfortable allowing people to see me as a gnc woman and keep my gender identity personal to close family and friends. there's this weird sense of relief i feel now, like i can finally breathe. my loved ones have always been supportive but i live in the south... being myself when i was a trans man had always been terrifying. being a woman is still scary but for reasons i'm already accustomed to.
also being a system, we have a collective identity we agree to present as, since we aren't out as a system to very many people. being a gnc woman feels like a great compromise, we're all content with that identity. i as the host am agender, and it also feels weirdly validating that our collective identity doesn't perfectly match any specific alter's identity.
idk i wanted to tell someone, but couldn't think of anyone who would understand how i could be trans and detrans at the same time. i figured you would understand though, so i decided to tell you.
you are so fucking cool, holy shit
i just wanted to say thank you for feeling comfortable and brave enough to announce that. that's a hard thing to come out and say to others and i'm really proud of you!
i'm really glad that gnc woman and agender are identities that feel more comfortable and safe to you all! the experiences of those who are pushed into binary transition only to realize later on. actually this isn't who i am really, really need to be heard, and i'm glad you're able to admit that that was not right for you
being a gnc woman is awesome, i love being one, too! and the agender experience is definitely very unique and doesn't benefit from outsiders forcing you to transition in ways that are uncomfortable to you all. you all should have total say in what being trans is like for you all, and what those experiences with gender are like for you! not for anyone else
i'm glad you felt safe enough to tell us this, i'm really happy for you all! i hope everything goes well in connecting with this part of yourself and feeling more like who you're meant to be! super happy for you! feel free to stop by again!
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The reason that transandrophobia is a real, systemic oppression is because both transphobia and misogyny are forces of systemic oppression that greatly affect the lives of transmascs. Misandry need not exist for transandrophobia to; what I call transandrophobia is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that affects transmascs, as well as anyone perceived to be transmasc or transmasc-adjacent.
I would also argue that transandrophobia usually refers to the way that a combination of transphobia and misogyny are used to speak over transmascs, take away our autonomy, and treat us like objects who don't have opinions on everything that affects us. It's the way that some of us, usually those of us who primarily date cis women, try to be "one of the good ones." It's the way that everyone is immediately suspicious of us being incels, especially if we aren't attracted to women.
It's the way that we are constantly forced into the role of a woman: how we're expected to put up with forcefem "jokes," detransition "jokes," corrective rape "jokes," and other such "jokes." If we don't let people walk all over us, calling us feminine terms, reminding us of our place, that's toxic masculinity. We can't have any relationship to womanhood, either, or else we're creepy men invading women's spaces. But if we reject womanhood entirely, if we exist as men who only love other men; then we're basically the same as MGTOW guys! /s
The difference between us and MRAs is that MRAs are straight, white, and usually able bodied and neurotypical. Meanwhile, transmasc-centered feminists tend to be neurodivergent and/or disabled gay trans men, and there seems to be a good mix of different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds speaking up. The MRA comparison doesn't work because when MRAs don't want to take women seriously, it is from a place of misogyny and often straight privilege. Gay trans men that don't worship cis women in every way are just guys who are tired of being forced to be women. There is a big difference here.
A lot of this new discourse is very much "gay men are more likely than straight men to be misogynists because they don't even like women!" repackaged, except it's not even repackaged. You just added "trans" to the beginning of everything! I don't know why I have to explain to queer discourse Tumblr in the year 2023 that not being attracted to women when you're a man doesn't inherently contribute to misogyny and patriarchy.
Gay trans men aren't making a choice to leave the Good Pure Women's Team and join the Horrible Evil Incel Faggots. Kill the radfem in your brain that believes that queer male identity and sexuality is inherently oppressive. Kill the homophobe in your brain that believes gay men need a woman in their lives to prevent them from going off the deep end. Kill the biphobe in your brain that believes that the only moral thing for an m-spec man to do is to date a good pure woman.
Transitioning is not a calculated choice for the vast majority of transmascs. I do not owe any cis woman the rest of my life spent in emotional pain due to dysphoria in order to make her happy that I'm not one of Those People. No one owes anyone else suppression of their personal identity and desires for gender expression in order to serve someone else's political framework. If your social or political framework does not include someone's identity, that is a problem with your framework, not their identity.
Gay trans men are not predators. Putting "trans" in front of your homophobia doesn't make it less homophobic.
#wentz.txt#transandrophobia#long post#homophobia#this isn't directed towards anyone in particular#just a few thoughts i've been having + someone asking a question in the transandrophobia tag a bit ago#also i'm just one guy so take this with a grain of salt
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Thank you for having anon on, you must get a lot of hate, but i'm a hidden recently deprogrammed ex-TIF and i appreciate being able to... confess to being a woman without being hung for it. i know that when i come out with this i will lose most of my friends because my detransition will "invalidate" them all. they will push me out so they can remain "gay men".
i wanted to ask what you think about ex-TIFs? and if you've seen how it plays out when we (re)integrate into womanhood, from the side of women. i've only seen it from the side of TRAs and it's an excommunication and violent rejection. i'm going to lose my community, and i have (since i started looking into it) fully agreed with most radfem core beliefs you see here on tumblr.
i took testosterone for years, but i also stopped in 2019 because it made me so angry. i have no breasts and a deepened voice. i wonder how radfems might see me. will i seem like a returned traitor?
will other women be interested in me still? i'm bisexual, but was pushed to mainly date men as a TIF because those relationships were "gay" and dating women was hetero and "lesser" love. i don't want to center men anymore. but i have no breasts, and i have no woman's voice. do women care? i don't know.
i ask you because you are older and maybe you would know. my best wishes to you. thank you.
I keep anon on for just this reason, because I remember how insane I felt when I found the courage to stop pushing aside those thoughts that, surely, everyone knows we're making all this up and just being nice, right?
It's an unfortunate part of human nature that it's easier to con someone than persuade them they've been conned. Once the con is taken up, it's agonizing to admit it and pull away from it. You have to live with the harms you've done along the way, which I admit to and which will eventually weigh on you as well. It's not easy, especially when your immediate friends will be harsh with you. If they don't cast you out, you might find yourself self-isolating to pre-emptively remove yourself and spare yourself the pain.
I'm not going to lie, you will encounter women who regard you as a traitor because they, themselves, have not come to terms with the harms they've done, or they've been lucky enough to not have been tested on this crucible and can't believe that anyone can be turned so upside down as we have.
However, you're not alone. I have no statistics but in meeting younger lesbians I'd guess at least 1 in 3 of them are detransitioners from varying stages of identifying as trans. If you are same-sex attracted or gender non-conforming in any way, today's society will digest that as 'trans?' and without saying a word you will find yourself being they/them without ever asking, and transition will be suggested if you suffer from so much as a bad period cramp or any frustration with your body. As women and as lesbians, we experience so much pain that society ignores, and the most powerful articulation of that anguish in our time is 'this can't be the body I'm meant to be in.' Like anorexia, dissociative identities, cutting and other expressions of female despair, we are permitted to lash out destructively as long as we bring down that rage on our own bodies. We continue to inhabit these scarred battlefields long after the fighting has moved on.
I guess the main thing to know is that you are not alone. In fact, I suspect that the 'part of my story where I was convinced I was trans' is going to be part of the coming-out pantheon for lesbians in the future that is as common as having a crush on a straight friend and have the talk with your parents. I don't think having breasts or a deeper voice will condemn you to loneliness, I don't think anyone can blame you for what's happening or being swept up in it. If they do, you can ask them why they didn't stop you, why their voices didn't reach you when you needed it most, and why - now that you've found your own way home with very little help from anyone around you - they aren't appreciating the courage and effort it took for you to find your way.
Welcome home, sister.
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I have a few things to say about Bridget's story in Guilty Gear.
For those of you who don't know, Bridget's background was originally that she was born the younger of twin boys, in a society that believed twin boys was a bad omen. Her parents didn't want to kill or banish either of their children, so instead they decided they would raise Bridget as a girl in order to avoid the stigma the society had. Once Bridget became old enough, she left her town and became a bounty hunter, openly stating that she was a man, yet still wearing feminine clothing. Her time as a bounty hunter and being revealed that she was male broke her hometown's belief of the danger of twin boys. In Guilty Gear XX, her first appearance, Bridget's stated motivation was to become more masculine, more in line with her male identity at the time, rather than the femenine appearance she had from her childhood.
Then, she came back in Guilty Gear Strive, and her story was redirected, from trying to become more masculine to being a trans woman. This revelation comes after several encounters with Goldlewis Dickinson and Ky Kiske in arcade mode, who encouraged her to be true to herself.
Many people are mad about this direction for her to go in for one simple reason: they are transphobic. They keep trying to come up with simply nonsensical excuses such as "it's a mistranslation of the complex japanese meaning" or "because she was raised as a girl, becoming a girl is actually detransitioning" (paraphrasing). The truth of the matter is that Bridget is trans, and that representation can help a lot of people feel seen. Many people see Bridget is trans, and appreciate that there is an openly and directly stated trans person in media, and that can and has encouraged people to try to join in the game, larger series, and even the fgc as a whole, who probably wouldn't have otherwise. It is definitely part marketing or arcsys's part, but it's also representation that isn't seen in a lot of other places, and representation is just good in general. It helps grow the community and is a step towards inclusion that not many other game studios have taken.
Now, there is another side I want to discuss. I want you to think about what would have happened if they hadn't made Bridget trans. I see three possibilities:
1. Bridget is never added to a future guilty gear game (which is theoretically possible for any character)
2. In line with their character arc, Bridget is turned into a very masculine man, and people lose their beloved femboy
3. Their arc is stalled and incomplete, as they remain a femboy and never make progress towards their goal of becoming masculine
None of these things are very good. As Bridget was highly requested to be put in a future game before Strive, but wasn't, I personally think it's because arcsys didn't really know where to take her character arc back then. So they stalled for time, not putting her in until they knew what the best course of action was for her character. They wouldn't make the unpopular move of making her a buff super masculine man, nor would they give her an stalled and simply bad arc that never made any progress. They made her trans. This is simply the best course of action for her character, as it avoids all those other problems that may arise, as well as filling in holes from previous games.
I want you to think about one more thing: Bridget's story in XX is that she wants to become more masculine, and she has the freedom to do it, now that she is a well renowned bounty hunter. So then, why does she still wear feminine clothing, that is clearly shown to confuse people about her gender identity? I know that you don't need to wear clothing in line with your gender, obviously. However, when her clear and stated motivation is to become more masculine, then it seems odd that she would present femininely. Perhaps it is because, deep down, she always knew she was a girl.
#bridget#brisket#bridget guilty gear#trans#transgender#guilty gear#guilty gear strive#guilty gear xx
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