Catoblepas

My sibling, what you need is a sun jacket! They’re very light, breathable, and baggy. I got mine at REI but it was kind of pricy since I try to do as close to Buy It For Life as possible, and there are more affordable ones out there.

Don’t you think transitioning reaffirms gender roles and stereotypes?

No, because transitioning at all requires massive amounts of gender transgression that trans people are often severely punished, or even killed for.

I also don’t think it’s correct to blame societal problems (like sexist gender roles and stereotypes) on individuals. If it’s the individual’s responsibility to dismantle gender roles and stereotypes every single day in the way they dress and interact with society, are you doing it? If not, why do trans people carry a higher burden than you?

This also presupposes that trans people all become gender conforming upon transition, when in fact many trans people are also queer and/or gender nonconforming on top of being trans.

I’m probably missing something, but why isn’t being a really effeminate man enough, that there’s the need to take hormones and change your pronouns?

I’m a trans man and not a trans woman, but let’s pretend that says butch woman instead of effeminate man. So why couldn’t I be a butch woman? Because I wasn’t one. Seriously, people did not know what sexuality box to put me in before I transitioned. I clearly wasn’t a straight woman (no makeup, a mix of teen boy clothes and some feminine tops) and I was too feminine to be a butch lesbian, but not feminine enough to be a lipstick lesbian. And I don’t say this to mean ‘nobody accepted me in the lesbian community and I had to transition to fix it,’ because I never got any shit from other queer people over it. (And I’m not attracted to women regardless.)

So, socially not transitioning wouldn’t have made me any less gender-confusing to other people. And on the personal level, I needed HRT because periods made me suicidal, all the effects of T make me happy, and it’s my body and I get to do what I want with it. Male pronouns also feel more natural to me than female, so I see no reason to not use them.

Before I got top surgery (boob removal), being alone in my room with my boobs just there would give me dysphoria. I didn’t really have a way to exist in my body without feeling dysphoria after puberty started (although I felt it at times before then as well). Other people noticing and treating me like a girl made it worse, but being away from them didn’t make it go away. Periods made me suicidal, and that’s not really a public event (unless you’re having a truly terrible day).

Some trans people don’t like the ‘I was born in the wrong body’ explanation because it’s kind of overly simplistic. Not problematic or anything, just at the level you’d explain things to a child. Like, if you were born with a clubfoot or cleft palate you wouldn’t necessarily want an entirely new body, you might just want your foot or mouth fixed, right? Some people feel that way about transition, and I think I lean closer to that myself.

I can only speculate on what I’d be OK with if I didn’t need HRT and top surgery, but I will say a decent number of trans people, even trans people on HRT and who have had/want surgery, are also gender nonconforming for their actual gender as well. Not ‘oh they don’t pass,’ but for example lesbian trans women who specifically choose a butch look, or gay trans men who choose a twink aesthetic.

For me it’s somewhere between that and hearing the name of a dead family member that I had a complicated relationship with.

Neat side note, not all trans people have a dead name. One of my friends had a gender neutral birth name and he just kept it. Some people get all the luck 😂

I want to walk away from Omelas.

People creating anything anywhere are “contributing” (having their work used without permission) to LLM and image generation companies, because these companies don’t actually respect anyone and don’t care about anything except sucking as much money out of you as possible.