the cis maternal urge to treat your trans son’s body like an extension of your own body, and to react to said trans son’s physical transition as if they might as well have just started hacking away at your own body with a rusty axe, really is something else.

my mom hasn’t seen my chest post-op at all because the idea of it is so awful to her that the one time we took my bandages off with her present, she ran across the hotel room to hide from it and started crying to my brother about it (yes, with actual tears). she drove an hour and a half with us at 5:30am to my post-op just to sit in the waiting room because she refused to come in and see me after the surgeon took the bandages off. my dad has been the only one helping me with recovery things like changing bandages and monitoring healing because she still won’t look at my chest.

and she says that’s because she loves me and cares about me. love is when you treat the body your child can finally live in comfortably like it’s your worst nightmare. apparently.

Thinking about how queerness in media is, with extremely few exceptions, portrayed as someone leaning towards femininity, and how much that trope hurts every single queer person who doesn't lean fem.

You want to believe the smear campaigns about the coiner of the word transandrophobia and the prominent bloggers who popularised it? You want to find a new term that people will "allow" you to use?

You're fresh out of luck. The transmasc community have already tried transmisandry, transmisia, antimasculism, virilmisia, virilphobia and anti transmasculinity to name a few and people have found "problems" with all of them. Hell, people complain if we try to call it misogyny or just plain old transphobia. It doesn't matter what language we use, people just want us to sit down and shut up.

Some people are now even calling the term transunity racist and transmisogynistic. We can't win with people who hate us. Stop pandering to them.

its absolutely astounding how people can say that transmascs are "silencing transfems" and "trying to be oppressed" without processing what they even just said. transmascs are genuinely oppressed and do not have the power to silence transfems. both groups are oppressed, and transmascs talking about the experiences we face is not silencing. you just want us to shut up.

*ahem*

TRANS MEN AND TRANS MASCS TALKING ABOUT TRANSANDROPHOBIA ARE NOT RACIST OR TRANSMISOGYNISTIC.

MOST OF THE TRANSMASCS OR TRANS MEN I'VE SEEN TALKING ABOUT TRANSANDROPHOBIA ARE POC

Y'all just have some seriously weird hang ups. Get the fuck over it and stop telling use that we don't have problems. Stop trying to shut us up, we're here, we're queer, and we're not leaving.

holy shit y’all i just had The Experience

i was scrolling through pinterest, looking at some queer memes (as you do) and i stumbled upon a post that seemed…a little bit bæddel-y. that’s not super uncommon, but what struck me about this post was that the first part of it could have been said by a terf. had it not had a reply underneath talking about trans women in a positive light.

so against my better judgment, i clicked on it. the recommended posts underneath that were a bunch of pins talking about tras.

VIRILPHOBIA??

pinnochio! 🫵🤣 you will never be a real boy!

i mean pinnochio did become a real boy. that was a pretty significant part of the story. i understand that you’re just being transphobic but pinnochio did very much become a real boy.

it’s so funny to me that people used to try to warn me “if you go on t it won’t make you androgynous it’ll just make you look like a man” because 1) i do want to look like a man, that is famously a major part of being a trans man but also 2) t literally has made me androgynous?? like they were wrong on both counts. i got most of the looking-like-a-man changes that i wanted (deep voice, broader body, hair all over my body including my face) and i also give every single cis person in a five mile radius a stroke every time they try to figure out my gender. the assumption that trans men wouldn’t actually want to look like men and the assumption that cis people are good at correctly gendering us once we’re on t are both weird as hell.

I love you lifelong vaginal atrophy

i love you topical estrogen that treats atrophy and doesn’t interfere with testosterone at all. i love you modern medicine that makes safe and harmless transitions possible. i love you health professionals who explained the risks of taking testosterone to me calmly and told me exactly how we would respond to each one if they ever became an issue because they’re not scary or unmanageable if you have good, competent people on your side.

i hate you terf rhetoric that completely ignores the actual reality of testosterone hrt in favor of portraying it as poison. i hate you transphobes who try to make me scared of the medication that gave me my life back.

the terfs are once again getting upset at a trans boy on testosterone being forced to compete against cis girls as if they’re not the ones who’ve been pushing for trans athletes to only be able to compete with people of their assigned sex. they complain about “performance-enhancing drugs” and “cheating” as if they’re not the ones against letting him compete with people who would have the same testosterone levels. they made their bed and, surprising absolutely no one, they’re really mad about having to lie in it.

because this was never actually about sports or who has an advantage over who. (if it was about that, they would recognize that the trans boy in question here was very clearly beaten by two cis girls.) they make it clear enough in the replies — the solution isn’t finding a place for trans athletes that they think is fair, the ‘solution’ is getting rid of trans people altogether. they’re just mad that we exist where they have to see us and interact with us and, god forbid, face the fact that we might be better than them at some things.

you're gonna detransition in 10 years.

so i get a whole decade of living happily in the body i’m creating for myself now, and then i get to go through the process of metamorphosis and rediscover the joy of chasing gender euphoria all over again? i’ll take it!

i know people like you only see detransitioners as rhetorical tools to use against trans people, but the truth is that detransition is just another kind of transition. why would i be any more afraid of that one than i am of the one i’m in right now? if i was afraid of transitioning, of taking matters into my own hands when the body i have doesn’t feel like home anymore, i wouldn’t have transitioned in the first place. i’m where i am because i truly love this process, because it brings joy into my life, not because i fear it. being human means a life of constant change; none of us are the same people we were ten years ago. i for one won’t run from that change — i intend to greet the person i’m becoming with open arms, however different they might be from who i am now, and i’m sure that whoever they are, they wouldn’t want me to make my life miserable now just so theirs might be a little bit easier.

one of the greatest joys in life is that all of us are capable of change, and capable of enacting that change upon ourselves. i’ve been lucky enough to remold and remake myself once and, should i find myself faced with the opportunity to do so again, i’ll embrace that as the gift it is. there is no greater honor than to be reborn by your own hand.

“trans men don’t have any real safety concerns to worry about” i can’t wear a mask when i go into public bathrooms even though i’m higher risk and bathrooms are some of the easiest places to get sick because i don’t reliably pass when my facial hair is covered and i can’t risk not passing when i use the men’s room, but i also can’t just use the women’s room for safety anymore because i don’t reliably pass as either binary gender anymore. so my only options are to risk getting sick, take my chances with the consequences of not passing, or just never use the bathroom in public (which has its own health risks).

and today, it almost didn’t even matter that i was putting myself in danger to ensure that i passed because, thanks to a faulty lock and a man who didn’t think to knock, i came very close to having my half-naked body exposed to a bathroom full of cis men. if i hadn’t been holding my coat on my lap because there was nowhere in the stall to put it, every single guy waiting in the (very crowded) bathroom would’ve seen that i didn’t have a dick. how well do you think that would’ve gone for me? my money’s on Not Well At All.

some people will really see elliot page simply existing and feel like it’s their right to say the weirdest shit about him. it’s really incredible (and i mean that in the most literal sense of fucking unbelievable) how openly these people admit that they think we exist solely to benefit them — no lives of our own, no autonomy. as far as they’re concerned, we’re just here to look pretty and have their babies, to decorate and populate their world.

this is why i really just have to laugh when someone tries to argue that transmasculinity is anti-feminist. can’t you see how much our mere existence makes the misogynists short-circuit? how much our transitions go directly against all of the expectations they put on us? transmasc transitions are in such direct opposition to their worldview that they resort to just treating us like we’re dead because our lives simply are not compatible with their version of how the world should be. we make ourselves so egregiously and irrevocably unfuckable to them that they’re actually going around unironically mourning the “loss” of our bodies.

local cis man makes a “joke” tiktok that excludes trans men from the phrase “trans people” and mocks the music we make based on a stereotype that’s already been mocked to death, then makes a follow up video directed at the trans men who told him it wasn’t a funny joke or just made them feel shitty where he just doubles down and says the joke was fine because it “wasn’t serious” and that the trans men who didn’t like it are “directing their energy in the wrong place”.

maybe one day cis people will learn that 1) most trans jokes simply are not for them to make, regardless of how funny they think the joke would be, and 2) it’s not for them to decide if the trans people they chose to joke about are allowed to be upset that the joke was made. i honestly wouldn’t have even bothered making a post about this if it was just the original video because a lot of trans people also make jokes like this (which i still don’t think are funny or fair) so he could be forgiven for thinking no one would be upset, but the doubling down really rubs me the wrong way.

like, if we can’t even trust cis people to listen to our feelings on something as silly as a joke tiktok about music, how can we trust them to listen to us when it really counts? you can say it’s not that serious all you want, but when it’s already been demonstrated that you don’t always know how something will actually affect trans men, can you really expect us to trust that you’ll know when it is that serious?

because the message that response sends is this: “i find you fun to laugh at, but i don’t think you’re worth the trouble of caring about your feelings. i would rather enjoy myself and entertain others at your expense.” and is that the kind of message you want to send to anyone, especially a group of people you seemingly interact with enough to be familiar with the jokes made about them in their community? even if it wasn’t anti-transmasculine, it would still just be mean, and it’s certainly not a message that will make us see you as trustworthy when shit gets bad.

in light of recent events, i want to take a moment to speak to all of the lovely people who are on t, want to be on t, or are considering going on t.

no matter what anyone tells you, please remember: t is not going to turn you into a monster. it’s not going to make you violent. it’s not going to make you hurt people. it’s not going to make you a bad person. it’s not going to make you someone people should be afraid of. it’s not going to make you lose control of yourself in some awful way.

i’m so much happier on t than i ever thought i could be. i went from having incredibly volatile and overwhelming emotions that could take over my entire life pre-t to being calmer, more in control of my emotions, and more frequently happy than i have been in years.

like any hormone, it affects everyone a bit differently. it might not change your emotions that much at all, and you might find that the physical effects are much more prominent for you. it might cause some mood swings for you, and you might have to adjust things to lessen them or find strategies to help you manage them. or, if you’re like me, you might find that it makes your emotions much more livable and makes your mind a much calmer, more pleasant place to be.

either way, i can promise you, it will not make you a monster. testosterone is not evil, it’s not poison, it’s not making good people into bad people or kind people into violent people. it’s just a hormone — morally neutral and totally natural to have in your body — and if you need to give yourself a bit more of it to live your happiest, fullest life? never let anyone make you feel ashamed of that.

i love testosterone. i love my fellow trans men and transmascs and every single trans person on t. i love how we find joy and peace in helping our bodies be more comfortable homes for us. i love you. i love us.