i’m already a child of divorce i can’t handle this 😩

Video by ErinInTheMorning on TikTok

[Transcript (there's captions on screen but in case you can't turn on audio):

Erin: "File this one away for the transgender history books, whenever they write about our history; today Lindsey Spero, a trans man, stood in front of the Florida Board of Medicine, which was about to vote to medically ban all gender affirming care for trans youth.

He stood there to deliver his testimony, he delivered a little bit of it, but then he took the remainder of his testimony time to stand there and inject his hormone therapy in front of all of them in stunned silence, and then he turned around and raised his fist. Watch this."

Lindsey: "My name is Lindsey Spero, I'm 25 years old, I'm a resident of St. Petersburg, Florida. I'm also transgender.

I am someone who was subjected to treatments that have been questionable, that were mentioned by people like that woman who came up and spoke, I can tell you for a fact that her child is going to grow up hating her.

I'm sure you've heard many stories that sound like mine already, over the last few months my trans siblings and family members have stood before you, put their hearts on full display and vulnerable pleaded with you to listen to our stories and perspectives.

The American Academy of Pediatrics has condemned your actions and our federal government has spoken out against the actions you seek to take regarding the necessary health care for trans youth.

I could stand here and tell you about the times I attempted to end my life because I didn't have access to gender affirming care but I know, I know you don't care. I see you sneering at us while we come here and talk to you.

Instead I'm going to take the rest of my time to demonstrate the sacred and weekly ritual of my shot in front of you, in this body.

My medication is life saving, I will use HRT for the rest of my life, your denial of my need for this medication, doesn't make my existence as a trans person any less real.

I will be giving myself my subcutaneous shot in my stomach. If you have a needle phobia, please look away."

Lindsey injects his T-shot in silence, helped by another person who passes him a needle and the testosterone in its vial.

After finishing, he raises his fist and turns around to the audience.

Lindsey: "Tomorrow and forever."

The crowd cheers and a few people get up to clap.

Erin: "That, that is what I'm talking about! Good job Lindsey! This is the kind of resistance that matters!"

End transcript.]

(As a sidenote, it seems that Lindsey identifies as nonbinary, not necessarily (or exclusively, anyways) as a trans man. Some articles identify him as transmasc but all of his socials state nonbinary.)

I saw some dumb shit on reddit and after being down voted to all hell made some memes to express myself

If I can take a moment to share my experience as a trans woman on the internet

My experience is by no means unique, it's just one experience in the plethora of trans feminine experiences and not unique to only tumblr. Though, I'll mostly talk about what I've experienced here. In the light of recent events, the reaction of "the ceo," and the comments he contributed regarding dog pile harassment; I simply wish to share my experiences that I have had to juxtapose the dynamic of his statements against a lived experience.

This account started as a way to document my social transition and eventually my journey with HRT. Tumblr had always had a large lgbtqia+ community. The queer people here inspired me and gave me hope. What I didn't know, but soon learned, is that there were people here who hated me for being trans. Being early in my transition I was a prime target. TERF groups would plan raids on my account. What this entailed was: rebloging my selfies into circles that would say the most vile things about me, threaten to kill, tell me I was ugly, tell me that everyone I knew thought I was a joke, I was a monster, my family hated me, that I should kill myself, they'd download and edit my photos into caricatures or depictions of violence. They would fill my ask box with hundreds of asks detailing how they'd kill me, call me slurs, describe the ways that I should kill myself, and pretty much everything else I mentioned above with the reblogs. Their words were carefully curated to try and break me, break my spirit, break my will to live. I tried reporting it. But it was impossible to keep up with, and like many others I saw no real response. Eventually I learned that I had to block all of them. 100's of blogs, eventually 1000's of blogs. My block list these days is incredibly extensive. I had to wade through their blogs, traverse sickening hate speech and imagery to eliminate entire circles of people harassing me. I became jaded to the hate speech, hardened to it. But mind you, I shouldn't have had to expose myself to all of this just to be at peace here amongst my community. I received no help, I was left to my own devices to protect myself. The people who hurt me never saw consequences. It was painful, it was unfair, and no one else should have to put the hours upon hours of effort and exposure to hate in to protect themselves like I did. But again my experience is not unique.

I have had to repeat this process of preemptive blocking periodically once a new circle discovers me. Blocking them all before they can start the process of hate all over again. A process of hate that seems to be hitting my community with rapidly increasing fervor as of late.

I've seen others experience far worse than me. The TERF circles will hunt down their personal information and doxx them. Expose their home address, telephone numbers, names of their family members. I can't begin to imagine the terror my queer siblings must feel when someone tells then that they want to murder them all while showing them that they know where you live. This is not a new thing, not a rare tactic, it happens. And we've all seen the news stories of trans people being murdered by people who planned it and were vocal about it.

I know this is depressing. And it doesn't reflect all of my experiences. I've had wonderful experiences here, met amazing people, made close friends, found inspiration, found hope. I found a community.

And it's my community, and I never want to let it go.

I do have fear that making this statement will get me banned. But, I wanted to say it. I wanted it to exist in the world so that everyone who doesn't know our experiences has a chance to understand and with luck empathize.

I'll part on these words and hope for the best both for myself and for every member of the community.

"Glamour UK launched its digital June Pride cover this week featuring a pregnant transgender man. 

The cover features transgender activist and author Logan Brown standing topless with a suit painted over his chest and his pregnant belly on full display. 

“I am a transgender pregnant man and I do exist, so no matter what anybody says, I literally am living proof,” Brown told the magazine. 

Glamour UK, an online women’s magazine published by Condé Nast, launched its Pride cover issue on Thursday, coinciding with the start of LGBTQ Pride month. The magazine has previously showcased prominent figures in the LGBTQ community, such as Grammy-award winning artist Kim Petras and "Queer Eye" cast member Antoni Porowski.

This year’s issue “celebrates the allyship between women (cisgender or not) and transgender people through our shared experiences — in particular pregnancy, healthcare and childbirth,” the magazine explained.

The cover interview, which was conducted two weeks before Brown, 27, gave birth to his daughter, Nova, recounts the cover star’s experience with an unexpected pregnancy and navigating the medical system as a trans man...

Despite the backlash, the cover star expressed his desire to educate those who may hold misconceptions about transgender individuals.

Brown shared with Glamour that he is working on a children’s book and an autobiography that highlights his pregnancy, and hopes it will serve as a resource for other transgender people. 

He added that he would also like the book to reach people who aren’t transgender but “are curious and want to know about the situation,” referring to trans pregnancy."

-via ABC News, June 2, 2023

-

Especially heartening to see this coming out of the UK, given the dramatic rise in transphobia and TERFism there the past few years.

Right now, it can be a really stressful and heartbreaking time to be trans. Widespread change takes time that it often feels like we don't have. But we're here, and we will always be here, and despite what it may feel like, we have made unbelievable amounts of progress in the last 20 years alone.

I promise you this: the transphobes are going to lose.

Why on earth is anyone taking this shoddy cass review seriously?

I'm sorry but it's baffling how an actual government is uncritically taking this review at face value. It literally only comes to the conclusion it does because it ignore literally all other evidence. They excluded a shit ton of studies because they didn't have enough controls, which sounds reasonable but in order to have those controls they'd have to unknowingly give patients placebos instead of the hormonal therapy and puberty blockers they asked for.

That would be an extremely unethical thing to do, and would achieve nothing because the effects of hormonal therapy and puberty blockers are extremely obvious.

Just let that sit with you for a moment. All that clinical evidence completely thrown out the window because they didn't do a horrific and unethical test on their patients. All that clinical evidence ignored because the study was ethical. This is an extreme oversight at BEST and deliberate misinformation at worst. Either way, it makes the review extremely unreliable.

That's just one issue. But the fact that the vast, VAST majority of research was completely ignored due to a ridiculous and unethical requirement should be enough for you to oppose anyone using this as evidence for anything other than why queer people need to be included in scientific discussions about our communities. Because this review is being used to roll back LGBT rights.

The thing is, most people (in the US and Western countries at least, that’s where my experience is from) have some forms of privilege some forms of oppression. This isn’t saying everyone is equally oppressed and privileged, but most people have privilege in at least one way and oppression in at least one way.

And if you experience oppression in some ways and privilege, it’s much easier to see your oppression then you privilege.

Privilege is largely invisible to those who have it. Oppression grates against you all the time. So it’s much easier to see the forms of oppression you experience then the forms of privilege.

That’s why it’s so important for us all to listen to each other and not play Oppression Olympics. You can face very real oppression that really affects your life, and still learn a lot from other people who face other forms of oppression that you don’t. We have to listen to each other. In the queer community especially I think this is important, because there’s so many different ways to be oppressed and to be privileged.

schools, teachers, every educator in the world needs to understand that no amount of lgbtq posters in the hallways or speeches about inclusion and safety will make a trans student feel safe if they:

continue to misgender the student, no matter how many times they've been corrected.

never take transphobic abuse from other students (AND TEACHERS) seriously

i am DONE with performative activism

today, the supreme court of russia declared the non-existent "international lgbt movement" extremist. today, the supreme court of russia declared all russian queers to be extremists. they declared love and freedom illegal, extremist, and criminally punishable. some time before that, "gay propaganda" was banned in russia. this concept includes even the simplest manifestations of love. we cannot talk about ourselves, we cannot save ourselves, we cannot love, feel loved and protected in our country. if we fight for ourselves, we will go to jail. we were forbidden not only to love — they banned us. ordinary people who simply do not fit into their concept of "traditional" and "correct". so please

talk about us. hear us out. help us if you can.

actually yeah i would like to talk about how other queer people specifically were the reason it took me so long to come out as a gay trans man

(this is really fucking long, but especially if you’re not a trans man or trans masc, i’d like you to read it all the way through.)

as a preface, i’m not a kid. i’m a fully fledged adult who has been in the queer community for about ten years now, both online and offline. most of the queer people i know irl are my age or older. i turn 30 next year. also before you use the words ‘chronically online’, consider the fact that the things people say online are what they actually believe and will take out into the world with them. 

anyway.

when i try to talk about transphobia directed at trans men and mascs from within the queer community, or lateral aggression from trans people who are not trans men or trans mascs (this is not just trans women and femmes, this includes any trans people who aren’t trans men or mascs. i have heard some vile shit out of the mouths of other ‘afab’* trans people), people often respond with “but cishets are the real enemy!!! they’re the ones causing all the actual damage and oppression!!!!!” and while i get the sentiment, that is where you’re wrong my friend. the thing causing my oppression isn’t cishets, it’s the cisheteropatriarchy. cishets tend to be the ones that chug that koolaid most readily, but queer people, even other trans people, have gleefully gulped down gallons of the stuff, and that specifically is what made it so difficult for me to accept myself and come out.

*i fucking hate the term ‘afab’ but this post is already so goddamn long

when i first entered the lgbtq community, it was on facebook in the early 2010′s. before that, i’d been stuck in a conservative small town and didn’t even know that not being a girl was an option. so obviously when i encountered a bunch of people that were like me, i was ecstatic and wanted to be a part of their community. because i still thought i was a girl at the time, i was immediately funneled into sapphic spaces. for the most part, they were great and lovely, i just felt left out because i couldn’t relate to the way they talked about their love of women. but i knew i was some sort of fruity, which meant clearly i was just repressing my attraction to women, so i needed to try harder to like women. some of this came from the things i’d heard in those groups, but a lot of it was just pressure from myself to deal with a reality that didn’t make sense.

the longer i spent in those groups, though, the more i ran into rhetoric like ‘men are inherently incapable of love and respect, it is impossible to be in a truly fulfilling relationship with a man’ and ‘masculinity is inherently evil and femininity is inherently good.’ some people tried to have nuance, but a lot, especially cis women, didn’t. in those groups, people were mocked for being in relationships with men, they were told that if they had a boyfriend they weren’t even allowed to mention it in the group because the group needed to be a ‘space completely free of men’, people were told that if they were being abused by a man then it was their fault because they should have been dating a woman instead, they should have known better. i was one of those people who was blamed for my own abuse.

as i started to realize that shit maybe i’m not a girl, there was a lot of pressure for me to make sure that i always stayed within the confines of ‘non man.’ because the second i slid over that line, it was over. i was lost. does that rhetoric sound familiar? it’s terf rhetoric, and the irony is that all of these spaces explicitly condemned terfs.

i was in a group for ‘non men’ and when people in the group came out as trans men, they were asked to leave. the network of groups that this one was connected to was of the mindset that trans men oppressed all nonmen, including cis women. the reasoning given was ‘it would be misgendering!!!!!!!’ but behind closed internet doors, the actual reasons were very clear. on a scale of ‘oppressed’ to ‘privileged’ it went trans women -> cis women -> trans men -> cis men, with nonbinary people being inserted into whatever category was most convenient for argument’s sake. 

after that, i stuffed my doubts down for years, terrified of crossing that horrible threshold from ‘nonman’ to ‘man.’ even now, i still cling to the term ‘nonbinary’ because it makes other queer people view me as a more complex person. as soon as i started tentatively using the word ‘man’ to describe myself without all the disclaimers of ‘but don’t worry i’m not actually a man!!!!! i’m still a person!!!!!!!’, the way people interacted with me changed drastically.

i was the exact same person, still non-passing, still gender noncomforming, still someone with a very complex relationship to gender because of my sexuality and being autistic, but because that word ‘man’ was there, suddenly people felt they had the right to silence me and speak over me. cis women who were being blatantly transphobic dismissed me saying ‘i don’t argue with men’, queer people dismissed me saying ‘stop mansplaining’ and telling me that regardless of my presentation, regardless of how i was treated out in the world, i was still privileged because i identified with the label of ‘man.’

i made a video on tik tok about how traumatic it was to come to terms with being a man as someone who has been hurt by cis men, and an old mutual of mine started tagging me in cis men’s videos about unlearning toxic masculinity, telling me i needed to watch myself if i was going to be a man. another mutual also shared in that trauma, and theirs was exacerbated by a racial element. i tried to make more videos about my experiences, documented by journey with top surgery, but as soon as i started speaking loudly about including trans men and mascs in the fight for abortion rights, everything went downhill.

terfs started to find my account and get my videos taken down. queer cis women claimed i was ‘silencing women’ and used the ‘trans man’ in my bio to claim ‘mansplaining’ despite the fact i am nonpassing and the world sees me as a woman. a trans femme stitched one of my videos to chide me for saying that repealing roe v wade affected trans men and mascs, because i should have been talking about how it affected trans women and femmes and the rest of the queer community, not ‘centering men.’ a trans woman commented on their post in my defense, and they deleted her comment. after that, cis women reported by account by the dozens and i was eventually banned. 

that’s when i realized, men hadn’t caused me trauma. the cisheteropatriarchy had caused me trauma. the system that had allowed my abusive ex to treat me the way he did, that allowed my friends to watch and say nothing, that allowed a woman who was a bystander in a public domestic violence incident to complain to us that we were ruining her day at the mall and threatening to call the police on both of us rather than standing up for someone who was literally publicly being physically attacked. the system that allowed cis women to say, quite literally, that because trans men and mascs were a numerical minority of the people who would be affected by the repealing of roe v wade that we shouldn’t be in the spotlight, that cis women should be centered, that it was somehow ‘misogyny’ to point out that anti-abortion laws quite literally would affect trans men and mascs more severely and in more ways than cis women.

women and other queer people may not have been the ones hitting me or writing these bills, but for years they were the ones telling me my abuse was my fault, that i was morally incorrect for being a man, that i could never love or be loved if i was a man, that i should sit down and shut up, regardless of how much my community was hurting and dying. that i would always be an afterthought, if even.

i think very often about two tik toks i saw of a trans masc person talking about transition, and one said “you spend the first half of your life being subjugated by the sins of men, then you transition and you spend the rest of your life paying for the sins of men” and the other commented about another user’s video saying “a beard, facial hair, stands in the way of this person being perceived as innocent and being perceived as capable of roofieing your drink.”

and i realized that’s part of why i’m terrified to go on t. completely separate from the fact that i have a career which relies on my voice so going on t would absolutely nuke that, i have already experienced so much aggression and isolation based on just identifying as a man. i cannot even begin to imagine how much worse it would get if i started to look ‘like a man.’ i have lamented the fact that i’m forced to lose my softness, whether i want to or not, that the very community that wants to break down barriers and liberate people are the ones who are forcing me into a box for the sake of convenience in online arguments.

and people can mock me and go on about ‘toxic masculinity’ all they want, but this is a hard truth about the community that we really need to start talking about, because i have absolutely no doubt that experiences like mine are what contributes to trans men and masc’s astronomically high rates of suicide, self harm, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc.

i feel more like myself than i ever have in my life. and i also feel more isolated than i ever have in my life. there was a moment where things finally clicked for me, and for a fraction of a second i was so excited. i wanted to share my revelation with my community and be celebrated. but then i thought back about the way people had talked about men, trans men, masculinity, loving men, and that little tiny moment of celebration was brought to a screeching halt. i realized that every other time i’d seen a gay trans man or masc come out and talk about their gender and sexuality, the responses had been peppered with ‘sorry for ur loss’, ‘ew lol’, ‘so u chose to become a man?????’, ‘omg u have to date men and be a man????? i feel sorry for u lmao.’

and now as i delve into the dating pool as a gay trans man, i see that all this online bullshit isn’t just ‘chronically online,’ it’s manifested in real life too. the way queer trans men and mascs are treated as entitled for wanting to date cis queer men, the way people respond if we say we’re unhappy with just being a hookup or a fling because we should be happy anyone wanted us in the first place. the way we’re treated as fetishizers and freaks, the way people specifically search through the ‘ftm’ tag on grindr looking for ‘sissy boys/femme bottoms/etc’ then get angry when you don’t respond to them. the way other queer people respond to you when you try to talk about this. the way trans men and mascs who can’t go on t are treated as less than men but also aren’t allowed to talk about their experience of someone perceived as ‘less than men’, the way testosterone is spoken about in queer communities as a poison, as something that makes you ugly and disfigured and gross and dirty when for so many of us it’s literally lifesaving medical treatment. the way we can’t talk about the things we go through without random cis people dragging trans women and femmes into it when, even though there are some concerning trends of lateral violence that need to be discussed, most of the aggression comes from cis queer women.

so when trans men make posts or host events or just do anything to celebrate trans manhood and masculinity, and your first reaction is to make fun of us, project your frustration with the cisheteropatriarchy, or respond with “we don’t need positivity for men”, i want you to think about the number of trans men and mascs who kill ourselves, and i want you to think “maybe i should not say this, maybe i should just do this one thing to make life a little easier for them, even if i don’t get it.”

Tell me this isn’t reminiscent of Nazi Germany. It’s not even making the national press and people who read this will just shrug instead of being outraged.

🤬

Here’s to the closeted LGBTQ+ people who have to spend their Christmas tolerating their relatives’ bigotry. LGBTQ+ people who were dead named, called the wrong pronouns, forced to listen to homophobic jokes and judged for their identities.

“Well, I would like to talk about that story with the Oklahoma State Athletic Commission and the warning they issued against AEW when we featured Nyla Rose on a show in Oklahoma City last December.  I was really surprised by this; it was not something I was expecting and of course, I was disappointed by the commission’s position by that warning, I don’t think we did anything wrong. I’m really, really shocked by it.

I don’t think there should be discrimination against transgender wrestlers or transgender people at all. They have rights, and to that end, I absolutely stand by Nyla Rose. AEW stands by Nyla Rose and all transgender people who want to play sports. And this is wrestling, there was nothing wrong with it.

Nyla Rose is a great wrestler, she’s a great world champion and I love Nyla. I love working with Nyla and she’s been a great part of our history, she was the first transgender world champion ever, and she’s a great part of the AEW Together program. She does a ton for the community, she’s a great person with a great heart.

She’s very supportive of the other wrestlers, one of the funniest people on social media; I’ve personally nominated Nyla to TBS for the best social media presence on more than one occasion over the years. She’s an AEW original, she’s been part of this team since 2019, going back to the first year of AEW, the first shows, and the first Dynamite.

And look at everything Nyla has accomplished, and to just put that label on her, it’s just not right. She’s much more than that. She’s a great athlete and I hope everybody can look at Nyla and see that she’s a great wrestler and she deserves the same chances as everybody else. And if the AEW locker room — which consists of people from all over the world, all kinds of different backgrounds, beliefs — if everybody in the locker room can embrace Nyla, I would hope that the Oklahoma Commission could do the same thing.”

-- Tony Khan