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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 24 days

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By: Aaron Terrell

Published: Mar 29, 2024

I started speaking out about the dangers of medicalizing gender in 2019. I had spent the previous two years understanding the subculture that had grown around the notion of transgenderism. Apparently being “trans” was noble. Being “cis” meant you supported the white supremacist patriarchy. Apparently now gender dysphoria was a “cishet invention to pathologize transness”. Dysphoria was something you had to claim to have in order to access your “life saving” hormones and surgery. It was all foreign and confusing and full of contradictions. I felt like it made a mockery of my “real condition”. See I transitioned in 2010. Grateful for the relief it brought me and not interested in tribes or support groups, I got on with my life “as a man” and didn’t pay much mind to the culture of transition. That is until late 2017 when I re-immersed myself as a kind of religious studies student.

In addition to studying the culture that had arisen, I spent a lot of time reading stories from detransitioners. The detransitioners’ stories weren’t foreign or confusing. They sounded like my own. A lifelong sense of ‘supposed to be’ the opposite sex, and then learning this meant they were the opposite sex and transition was the only solution. Except it didn’t work. They felt more uncomfortable on the other side. Some felt like they were living a lie and presenting as the opposite sex was an act they no longer wanted to keep up; mentally, physically, or ethically. Unlike the aforementioned religious zealots, the detransitioners were easy to relate and empathize with.

So why did it work for me? And what does “work” even mean in this context? I have no idea. And certainly not for lack of trying to find the answer. I’ve now clocked over six yeas on a deep-dive into gender, dysphoria, detransition, sexology, psychology, etc. and I still don’t know. What I do know is there was no difference between us that could have been discerned by a “gender therapist” prior to transitioning, even back when things were “more careful”. The activists who came of age since 2010 are not just in the gender clinics, they are writing the guidelines for every therapist. They are told that to ask questions that might get to the root of someone’s gender related distress is “conversion therapy”. That “trans people” know what their gender is and to do anything but affirm them is akin to homophobia. We’re told detranisioners are just the rare few who were confused and got their gender wrong. While sad, sure, we shouldn’t weaponize them to punish “real” trans people.

So I am here as a “real trans person” to call bullshit. No one was “born in the wrong body” and sex trait modification is not “life saving care”. Some of us feel it was a net benefit, but recognize it was a serious medical intervention for what is a strictly psychological issue. There is no difference between a “trans person” and a “cis person” other than declared self-identity. If you are reading this, I’m fairly certain you agree. And yet, while attending the 2023 Trans Health Summit, I asked the trans and nonbinary 30 something doctors writing the American Psychological Association’s “Guidelines for Working with Trans and Gender Expansive Patients” how therapists can differentiate between a “trans child” and a “cis child”. I was told only a transphobe would even think to try.

In 2021, I began working with a friend and early gender clinic whistle-blower, Aaron Kimberly, who likewise does not regret transition. Together we launched the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the Transparency Podcast. The aim of both is to shed light on the experience of gender dysphoria, without all the ideological noise that now surrounds it. Since then, we have gotten countless messages from parents, teachers, administrators, etc. thanking us for speaking out. Jamie Reed credited the podcast with helping her summon the courage to blow the whistle on her gender clinic. People have emailed us to say they decided not to transition or to detransition, crediting our content with them understanding their own motivations better. Mothers have told us their daughters dissisted after being shown the podcast. Personally I suspect that’s because most these girls have no interest in looking like middle-age men and being shown we aren’t cute K-Pop boys has them running from the testosterone. We’re happy to help either way!

However, we have also gotten criticism from Gender Critical activists who feel that by not detransitioning we are advertising transition. I would agree with them on this, if not for the fact of the culture we currently live in. The people with this criticism seem completely disconnected from the realities I described above. We live in a culture that celebrates all things trans while demonizing any investigation into it. There is no shortage of transition encouragement surrounding gender distressed individuals. What there is a shortage of is people telling them the truth from a position of compassion and empathy.

I am grateful to work alongside anyone productively working to interrupt this ideology. But just like how I didn’t need the trans tribes or support groups all those years ago, I don’t need gender critical ones now. If you don’t feel comfortable working with people who do not regret their transition, I completely understand where you’re coming from. I think it’s misguided strategically for the reasons I already mentioned, but I do understand it. I will keep writing and podcasting and trying to sound alarms, alone or with friends and colleagues, and I firmly believe the most productive way to do so is to continue to lean on my standing as a “trans person”.

#Aaron Terrell #Aaron Kimberly #Gender Dysphoria Alliance #queer theory #gender identity ideology #gender ideology #gender identity #intersectional feminism #religion is a mental illness

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kharmii · 2 days

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Probably the most unpopular opinion on the internet but I don’t like seeing all these posts glorifying autism or mental illnesses or see them as some sort of aesthetic or use every possible way to make sure you know they have autism or a mental illness.

As someone who’s been diagnosed with depression and anxiety and has been on meds for decades I kinda feel insulted by the way these conditions have become a quirky personality trait and an aesthetic to people as well as shoving it on all fictional characters.

I do like headcanon of characters having these conditions but it makes me uncomfortable to see characters getting stripped down to their conditions without anything else.

It is relieving to have characters go through similar things and have them react to them but it shouldn’t be the sole purpose to write them that way.

I also feel that no condition should be a free pass to be an asshole to the people around them. In the long run it does more harm than good and it doesn’t make "healthy" people more sympathetic towards their conditions.

My condition is not your aesthetic!

(Youre good for real but I have seen so many people in the submas fandom act like this and that autism is a quirky personality trait and reduce the twins to this it’s just tiring…)

This is all true. When you turn something undesirable into an aesthetic, then it has the disastrous effect of becoming a social contagion that will actually kill people fr. It's not fun to be autistic and/or mentally ill, and I'm sure most people with various neurodivergent dysfunctions would choose not to suffer from them if they could.

I wouldn't glorify suicide. I wouldn't glorify recreational drug use out of fear someone would join the tens of thousands of fentanyl overdoses every year in this country. On that same vein, I certainly don't want to see my favorite male characters with scars on their chests from getting their tits cut off. That results in death by suicide for almost half the people who go through with it. (LOL, complain moar about my 'codependent twincest kink' hurting the chillens when everybody and their grandmother glorifies something that causes the sterilization and mutilation of children).

A mutual over on Live Journal calls trendy autism 'fauxtism' and accuses those people of cosplaying autistic people as an excuse to act uncouth or feel marginalized. The worst thing they did was make an autistic spectrum (similar idea to a gender spectrum) because then people with mental illness comorbidities could jump under the umbrella of being autistic (or trans) because it's trendy.

Are you socially awkward? Maybe it's autism. Overly shy? Autism. The mutual had a falling out with a friend she called 'space case' who worked for NASA but had an 'autistic' daughter who suffered brain damage at one year of age after sucking down a bottle of medication carelessly left out. This mentally retarded daughter would smear shit on the walls and swing from ceiling fans, all while the mother claimed she was 'being creative' or some shite. It's proof you can be a genius working for NASA and also be the dumbest mofo on the planet.

Anyway, I personally have autistic symptoms, but my version of the 'tism comes from profound long-term abuse, -both from my family and from bullying from peers- going way back. I'm like irl Shoto Todoroki. Just look at this guy. You can tell he got the shit beat out him since he was little:

youtube

I can't count how many times I've said to myself, "If I smile then...they'll die?!" for laughs. Guy With Canon Abusive Family doesn't bother masking because he carefully guards his emotions. He comes across overly serious and deadpan, and some people might think he has no sense of humor because of it. Being a 15-year-old, Shoto is savvy enough to know he should be pissed at his abusers, but he isn't emotionally sophisticated enough to shake the deep insecurity that he might do or say something completely innocuous and still manage to make a mess of things or offend somebody.

Side note: That character is especially interesting because he was a product of selective breeding for a specific purpose. I imagine him being toddler aged pushing around a firetruck saying "I don't want to be the #1 hero when I grow up! I want to be a firefighter! Why can't I choose what I want to do!" No free will for him though. He has to hold up to the most impossible standard of perfection imaginable. What will the future hold for him? Will "too hot to handle; too cold to hold" become the #1 someday?

Having that personality type at my age, and I'm just recently realizing that, hey, maybe it's not always me. Maybe it's you people sometimes. If the guy stalking me has to repeat a joke several times so I 'get it' while I give him a thousand-yard stare, maybe it's less that I'm a retard and more that he's an unfunny goober giving me unwanted attention. If the middle aged incel weirdo with no wife and kids tells the same stupid 10-year-old joke again, maybe he shouldn't give me that knowing look when I flatly change the subject. Maybe I'm no fun, but he's an empty loser who has done absolutely nothing with his life, and therefore has nothing meaningful to talk about.

If I bring any of that up, I'm being MEEEEAAAAANNNNN....even if I had to take so much bs to get to that point. I'm the type of person who will take and take and take and take andtakeandtakeandtake before I finally snap. It's so typical of an abuser to have that sense of entitlement where they think you owe them something. -Like they feel they have the inherent right to be treated kindly and with dignity, but they won't reciprocate. Oh no....you are supposed to be a perfect slave who exists to please them and boost their egos.

Enough about me and my dysfunction. Sorry. This anon wanted to talk about Submas I think.....

Okay, so some people have the insulting head canon that Emmet is an asshole and therefore is 'more autistic' than Ingo. Does it have to be autism? Maybe it's more to do with how they represent 'truth and ideals'. Emmet (white dragon) is Truth, and that's why in the original game, he taunts the player when they lose against him. Ingo, (black dragon) is Ideals, and he still congratulates the player for a fun battle, even if they lose.

That's great. Let the truth guy be an asshole because the truth doesn't concern itself with being kind or worrying about a person's feelings. It is what it is. It can be both kind or harsh depending on the situation. Ideals, otoh, is polite and kind because it is always striving for the best. Nobody ever thinks....my ideal world has everything on fire and a lot of dead people in it. If truth and ideals don't work in harmony, however, that's what you end up with.

The head-in-the-clouds ideals guy might be considerate and kind all while walking you over the side of a cliff. The truth guy might say....heyy fuckknuckle! Don't walk over that cliff or else you will die! Okay, so maybe his delivery needs some work. Maybe he's being an asshole about it, but at least you don't end up dead from falling off a cliff. That makes the truth guy kinder in the long run (insert trans analogy in here, LOL!).

#fandumb fail #submas #ranty rant rant #neurodivergent #fauxtism #shoto todoroki #truth and ideals #black and white #srsly tho #social contagion #the usual bullshit #transtrender

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 2 years

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Hi sex witch,

I'm a trans dude, who just hit their second year on T. As long as I've been aware I had genitals and what they were for, I've had issues with my vaginal opening (A gynecologist told me my hymen is unusually thick and inelastic, with an unusually small opening, she postulated I wouldn't be able to naturally accommodate anything wider than a centimeter in diameter, not that i ever really tried because that area is also incredibly pain sensitive and attempting to insert anything has always really really hurt). I've never been interested in penetrative sex and my gynecologist told me that since I wasn't sexually active getting pap smears wouldn't be super necessary. However, now that I've transitioned and am more comfortable with my body, I'm more interested in basically sleeping around; while I still don't plan on being penetrated I'm still aware if I want to do that I'll need to get tested regularly and am afraid my pre-existing vaginal condition, in conjunction with any atrophy that may have occurred over the past 2 years, will make this more difficult/painful. do you have any advice for seeking sexual healthcare that will mitigate discomfort without sacrificing too much accuracy?

hi anon,

first off I want to offer you a Better Sexual Health gold star for thinking ahead on this! considering health concerns in advance and planning accordingly is a great way to demystify the process of caring for your body and exert agency over your healthcare!

now, on to the nitty gritty:

it might comfort you to know that many STI tests don't require medical penetration, but rather rely on external examination, blood tests, cheek swabs specifically for HIV testing, and my personal favorite: peeing in a cup. when you go in to get tested make sure to talk to your nurses about what kind of sexual behaviors you've actually been practicing; it can go a long way towards narrowing down what type of testing is necessary for you and could rule an internal exam right out

now, if it does come to the point where you have to have an internal exam or swab done, you have my utmost sympathies - I also have a bad time with vaginal penetration, and I can't say pap smears have ever been fun for me. however, the swell news is that it does tend to be over Pretty Fucking Fast, and having a conversation with your examiner ahead of time about what the experience will be like for you can help a lot. I always let the folks doing my exams know up front that penetration is uncomfortable for me, that I'd prefer the smallest possible speculum and as much lube as they can reasonably use, and that I may need to pause in the process. the last time I got a smear (earlier this year, what's up) I literally asked the examiner if she could pull out and give me a moment to steady up and recombobulate myself, and it was an absolute non-issue - she put the exam on pause no questions asked, and even complimented me on my breathing.

(cute planned parenthood lesbian doctor with the purple hair - if you are reading this I am single.)

it can also help A LOT for the person performing the exam to understand your discomfort and help talk you through it; while it doesn't decrease the physical pain, it does wonders for my anxiety to have someone letting me know exactly what they're doing and how many more seconds I can expect it to last.

for additional support, some locations may even let you bring an emotional support person back for your exam with you - call ahead and check! - and in really drastic cases, some doctors may be open to the idea of tranquilizing patients for an exam or performing some exams via ultrasound rather than with manual penetration.

in short - the best way to find minimally painful care is to talk to your provider about what that will look like for you.

#sex edventures 2022

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ghostcrows · 4 months

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i know ive made like seventy goddam posts about it...but i have still been ruminating like a mother fucker about like...trans gender issues

as you do

i want to listen to trans women right i dont want to be transmisogynistic and i keep on seeing that there are trans guys who are out of their minds high on terf fumes (whether they realize it or not), although ive known that already bc theres always been trans guys who want...whatever they think they get out of clinging to gender essentialism and the remnants of their claims to womanhood. radfem pussy from a female born womyn that hates you i guess

i also do want people to not brush aside transmasc issues as like, not real, or saying well you're a man arent you, so like, shut up and go get that privilege, that conditional privilege, that highly situational privilege, that goes away in dire straits situations such as um, medical environments....or to like treat us with disdain, or as a joke, which is what i see much more often than pure vitriol (its just like, funny to people to be a trans guy. a little too funny too often)

but we also have to recognize that many of the things we go through closely mirror transfem experiences - even if not all of them do, a lot of them do, and we aren't the sole understanders of trans oppression or misogynistic oppression, thats kind of like, the point right. it is not an inherently ~afab~ burden

i think its fair to want a word that doesnt step on anybodys toes that accurately describes our unique experiences with being treated poorly instead of vaguely gesturing to transphobia in a broad sense- we have consistently failed to find this ... theres a point i keep seeing that i agree with that we shouldnt scrutinize transfems who dont use absolutely perfect language to describe their experiences, i think that should probably also be true for transmascs, but we also do keep choosing like absolutely dogshit terms so...idk? the only one ive seen thats any good is "anti transmasculinity" ive also seen transandrosmia(sp?) but i dont know what that means and it seems to be just trying to replace the root words in transandrophobia/transmisandry. which to be fair was the main hangup because of the implications, to my understanding, but ...im not sure about it

i also see a lot of accusations towards either group that we "just see each other as our agab" which is like, in my opinion, true in the sense that everyone has ingrained transphobic beliefs from living in a deeply transphobic world, and you have to unlearn both the internalized forms and the externalized forms...you have to choose every day to continue to unlearn that stuff, catch yourself. even if you think youve done all the work i mean, no one ever truly has - but also like. so much of this stems from pure insecurity. not only "no one sees me as i am" but also "the 'other' gender has it better in some way" being very mch a thing trans people are inclined to feeling, even after they transition i dont think that always goes away, thats why you see like, someone saying "i hate my agab body" and someone else goes "ugh i WISH i had your body id be so lucky to have your body". absolute last thing that person probably wants to hear but you sometimes feel it anyway

and then like, at the end of the day, i dont feel like any of the ppl leading this current "crusade" are actually people who have a full picture...and i dont think i do either, like, so much of this is online for me, i have to wonder what other people are going through. i overall wish i knew more trans people in real life, i definitely wish i had more transfem friends irl, i know a handful of transmascs irl and that was a freak accident bc we all went to school together. if not for that i'd know basically no one trans near me. tho i have seen more people in public more often but i never say anything cuz im scared -_-

yeah....dk how to end this post. well bye

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incarnateirony · 1 year

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Was not expecting my Angry Old Queer rant to be taken so well. Damn, are we all really being held hostage by the same karens? How deep is this phenomenon. How many of us have literally been fleeing to our reddit gamerdude friends as actually more tolerable about queer issues than supposed actual queer spaces? Cuz I said it and half of you are like, yeah, they're the only ones I can talk to.

Also, when did it become illegal to actually talk about the physiological side of trans issues that used to be very real and very understood? What bored white woman drove that shit under and claimed it was to help us?

"WOW, THIS IS YOU NO-T??? WHAT DID YOU DO"

"I literally just stopped letting them pack me full of estrogen to 'fix' me. This is just my natural T balance."

"Are you sure you don't have an intersex condition?"

"Actually I do, and I've tried to talk about it, but when I went through the origin of the medical nature of my Gender Bender issues, someone decides to come screaming in calling me truscum or transphobe like fetal development doesn't mean anything."

"What. The fuck."

"Yeah. Oh and then some intersex people also say I'm offensive in that I didn't just stay Identified As Intersex rather than accepting my most driving self-aspects."

"What the fuck is wrong with people."

I'm so tired. It just feels like someone intentionally made it as wide as possible so they could personally be included in Something, and now it's gotten so wide we can't talk about the shit that used to be studied, like chromosome activation and neurosciences and shit, because we're too worried we're gonna piss off some fucking fae-kin on tumblr.

#lgbtq

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kdinjenzen · 3 years

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I’m so exhausted. My last few weeks have been some of the worst I’ve had in a long time and the cherry on top was being rushed to the ER because, guess what, I was a few hours away from a potentially life ending scenario and needed surgery immediately.

So I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted because I’m terrified of hospitals, this was my first ever surgery, and it came about so suddenly and I was in so much pain that I couldn’t do anything but cry and scream for help.

I got lucky.

But that’s only one part... if you follow me on Twitter you already saw it but I just want to share this because I’m so incredibly hurt by the responses and the serious bias that rears its ugly head more often than not.

I tweeted that I was rushed to the ER and would need emergency surgery, I asked for good vibes and well wishes because I was scared.

I did get those well wishes, and I love everyone who took time to send me caring words.

But I’d be remiss to not bring up what else happened at the same time...

“Congratulations” messages and dms like “I don’t agree with your choices, but I’m happy for you.”

People assumed that I was going in for “trans related surgeries” ... for no reason other than I am a trans person.

I was mortified that people immediately assumed that me being rushed to the ER and then into the OR meant it had to be “Trans Surgeries” ... despite every part of my tweet pointing toward an emergency medical issue.

Worse, when I pointed out how messed up that is... people argued with me over it.

I mentioned that if I was a cis person those kinds of responses wouldn’t exist at all, and while I’m sure a cis person would still get questions as to the details of it all, they sure as heck wouldn’t get “congratulations” for an emergency surgery.

People said “of course we wouldn’t congratulate a cis person for a surgery like that because a cis person wouldn’t need a trans related surgery” ... as if there aren’t cis folks who go in for elective or cosmetic surgeries at all.

And the fact that I’m seeing folks say “well of course a cis person wouldn’t have THAT kind of surgery” is exactly why I’m upset.

I said I was in the ER and that I was having emergency surgery and folks assumed it was “trans related” immediately... for no reason.

If I was cis that wouldn’t happen, people would see ER and just go “oh this is serious.”

It was almost as if, for those who said these things, they only assume a trans person can only ever have medical issues related to being trans.

And that’s actually a huge issue trans folks face in actually getting the medical help they need even by professionals.

One of my nurses at the ER was insistent that my HRT meds were the cause of all my issues... despite none of them being even REMOTELY related to them at all.

In fact that exact thought process is what made what could have been a simple issue into a life threatening one. I had complained about pain before, but everywhere I had gone and everyone I talked to just went “it’s probably a side effect of HRT.”

Guess what? It wasn’t. Had I not gotten in when I did, made the choices I did, I probably wouldn’t be making this post at all because I’d either be in critical condition or worse.

So there it is. If a cis person said they were going into surgery, with no detailed explanation, you’d assume it was for a potentially life threatening reason.

But that cis person could easily be having cosmetic surgery yet most folks would assume SERIOUS HEALTH ISSUE first!

However, a trans person specifically saying “I am in the ER, I am having emergency surgery” doesn’t illicit the same response from most people.

The first thing many of you thought was “oh it’s a trans thing” ... and because some DOCTORS think that way too, I could have died.

But people still took the time to complain that I was “upset over people being happy for me?” or wondering why I “even brought up being trans” ...

So hey, yeah, I’m in a lot of pain... physically and emotionally.

Seeing that response hurt me to my core.

#kdin #kdin jenzen #kdinjenzen #long post #gods I don’t even want to think about what my medical bill is going to look like #this fucking sucks #everything about this just... sucks

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a-room-of-my-own · 3 years

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A while before the latest hoo-ha about Judith Butler, I had just been reading her again. Though she claims her critics have not read her, this simply isn’t the case. I read Gender Trouble when it first came out and it was important at the time . That time was long,long ago. She was just one of the many ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers I was into. I would trip off to see Luce Irigaray or Derrida whenever they appeared.

I got an interview with Baudrillard and tried to sell it to The Guardian but they didn’t know who he was so its fair to say I was fairly immersed in that world of theory. For a while, I had a part time lecturing job so I had to keep on top of it. Though Butler’s idea of gender as performance was not new , it was interesting. RuPaul said it so much more clearly in a quote nicked from someone else “Honey ,we are born naked, the rest is drag”

What I was looking for again , I guess is not any clarity – her writing is famously and deliberately difficult- but whether there was ever any sense of the material body. She wrote herself in 2004 “I confess however I am not a very good materialist. Every time I try to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language” .

Butler from on high ,cannot really think about the body at all which is why they (Butler’s chosen pronoun) are now the high priestess of a particular kind of trans ideology. The men who worship Butler are not versed in high theory. The fox botherer had a “brain swoon” at some very ordinary things Butler said. Mr Right Side of history nodded along in an interview. Clearly neither of these men are versed in any of this philosophy and would be better off sticking to tax law and the decline of the Labour Party. Butler is simply a totem for them.

Butler said in the Guardian interview for instance “Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us.”

So yeah? That’s a fairly basic view of the social construction of gender though I take issue with the assigned at birth thing ,which I will come back to and why I started reading her again in the first place.

This phrase “Assigned sex at birth” is now common parlance but simply does not make sense to me. I am living with someone who is pregnant. I have given birth three times and been a birthing partner. I know where babies come from. There is a deep disconnect here between language and reality which no amount of academic jargon can obliterate.

Babies come from bodies. Not any bodies but bodies that have a uterus. They grew inside a woman’s body until they get pushed out or dragged out into the world.

The facts of life that we are now to be liberated from in the form of denial. Only one sex can have babies but we must now somehow not say that. The pregnant “people” of Texas will now be forced into giving birth to children they don’t want because they are simply “host bodies”. The language of patriarchal supremacy and that of some of the trans ideologues is remarkably close, as is their biological ignorance.

There is no foetal heatbeat at six weeks for instance. When a baby is born , doctors and midwives do not randomly assign a sex, they observe it and they do it though genitalia.

There is a question over a tiny percentage of babies ,less that one percent with DSDs but even then they are sexed with doctors having difficult conversations with parents about what may happen later.

Somehow, though when I read the way in which this is now all discussed it is clear to me that the people talking have never been pregnant, never had a foetal scan, never been near a birth , never miscarried, do not understand that even with a still birth babies are still sexed and often named.

If you want to know the sex of your baby you can pay privately and know at 7 weeks ((*49-56 days from the first day of the mother’s last menstrual cycle). A 12 week scan will show it. That is why so many female foetuses are aborted . I have reported on this.

Talking to paediatricians about this is interesting because they do indeed have to think through these things that we are being told are not real eg. that sex is just a by-product of colonialism for instance. Sometimes pre-conception , geneticists will be looking at chromosomes because certain diseases are more likely in men or women. Males have a higher risk of haemophilia for instance.

One doctor told me “When babies are premature, the survival advantage of females over males is well known throughout neonatology. This is sometimes something we talk about with parents when there is threatened premature labour around 23 weeks' gestation and options to discuss about resuscitation and medical interventions. In fertility treatment (or counselling around fertility in the context of medical treatments) it is pretty inherent to know whether we need to plan around sperm, or ova + pregnancy.”

She also said that if she involved in a birth that “assigning” isn’t the word she world use. “Observed genitals a highly reliable observation, just like measuring weight or head circumference which is also done at this time. “ Another doctor said that anyone involved with a trans man giving birth would be doing the best for the patient in front of them.

Sex then is biological fact. A female baby will have all the eggs she will ever have when she is first born which is kind of amazing. It is not bio-essentialist to say that our sexed bodies are different nor is it transphobic to recognise it.

Except of course in my old newspaper ,The Guardian who are now so hamstrung by their own ideology they have got their knickers in such a twist they can barely walk. They completely misreported the WiSpa incident , basically ignored the Sonia Appleby judgement at the Tavistock. Appleby was a whistle blower ,a respected professional concerned with safe guarding. She won her case. The cherry on the cake this week was an interview with Butler, themselves (?) in which they went on about Terfs being fascists and needing to extend the category of women.

Does anyone EVER stop to think that most gender critical women are of the left, supporters of gay rights, often lesbian and that this is not America? We are not in bed with the far right. This is bollocks. Just another way to dismiss us.

As we watch Afghanistan and Texas ,to say Butler’s words were tone deaf is to say the least. But they didn’t even have the guts to keep the most offensive stuff in the piece and overnight edited it out without really explaining why : the bits where Butler described gender critical people as fascist. Perhaps because the person their “reporters” had defended against transphobia at WiSpa turned out to be a known sex offender, perhaps because someone pointed out that Butler was throwing around the word fascist rather like Rik Mayall used to do in the Young Ones.

All of this is rather desperate and readers deserve better. When I left that newspaper I said that I thought and expected editors to stand up for their writers in public. Instead they go into some catatonic paralysis. I may have not liked this interview but it should never have been cut. Stand by what you publish or your credibility is shot.

But this is about more than Judith Butler and their refusal to support women . Butler is not really any kind of feminist at all. What this is about is the large edifice of trans ideology crumbling when any real analysis is applied. Yes, I have read Shon Faye’s book and there are some interesting points in it and I totally agree that the lives of trans people should be easier and health care better . I have never said anything but that.

What Faye does in the book is say that there can be no trans liberation under capitalism so there will be a bit of a wait I suspect.

Yet surely it is the other way round and what we are seeing is that trans ideology (not trans people – I am making a distinction here ) represent the apex of capitalism .

For it means that the individual decides their own gendered essence and then spends a fortune on surgery and a lifetime on medication to achieve the appearance of it. Of course lots of people spend a lifetime on medication but not out of choice. Marx understood very well that the abolition of our system of production would free up women.

Now it is all about freeing up men. Who say they are women. Quelle surprise.

Nussbaum’s famous take down of Butler is premised exactly on the sense of individual versus collective struggle “ The great tragedy in the new feminist theory in America is the loss of a sense of public commitment. In this sense, Butler’s self-involved feminism is extremely American, and it is not surprising that it has caught on here, where successful middle-class people prefer to focus on cultivating the self rather than thinking in a way that helps the material condition of others. “

Such thinking now dominates academia. There is simply an unquestioning rehearsal of something most of know not to be true thus Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex “At birth, bodies are sorted as ‘male’ or ‘female’, though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned.”

What does ‘sorted’ mean here? A tiny number of intersex babies are born. A tiny number of people are trans and decide to change their bodies. The feminist demand to challenge gender norms without mutilating any one’s body no longer matters. What matters now is this retrograde return to some gendered soul. This is not something any decent Marxist would have any truck with . Of course one may change over a lifetime and of course gender is never ‘settled.’ We are complex people who inhabit bodies that often don’t work or appear as we want them to.

But not only is there a denial of basic Marxism going on here , what becomes ever more apparent is that there is a denial of motherhood. Butler said “Yet gender is also what is made along the way – we can take over the power of assignment, make it into self-assignment, which can include sex reassignment at a legal and medical level.”

Self-assignment is key . One may birth oneself. No longer of woman born but self -made. This is a theoretical leap but it also one that has profound implications for women as a sex class. We are really then, just the host bodies to a new breed of people who self-assign.

Maybe that is the future although look around the word and there isn’t a lot of self-assignment going on. There are simply women shot and beaten in the street, choked to death or having their rights taken away. There is no identifying out of this , there is no fluidity here . This is not discourse. It is brutality and do we not have some responsibility to other women to confront male violence ?

Instead the hatred is aided and abetted by so called philosophers describing other women as Terfs. It is utterly depressing.

The sexed body. The pregnant body. The dying body. The body is in trouble when we can’t talk about it . I thought of Margaret Mary O’Hara’s beautiful and strange lyrics and what they might mean. I await my child’s return from the hospital as hers is a difficult pregnancy and thank god they are on the case. The sex of the child she carries does not matter to me at all .

It simply exists. Not in language but within a body.

Why is that so difficult to acknowledge?

#gender critical #feminism #transgender #judith butler #suzanne moore

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wolfstar-in-color · 3 years

Text

July Colorful Column: Remus is a Crip, and We Can Write Him Better.

There is one thing that can get me to close a fic so voraciously I don’t even make sure I’m not closing other essential tabs in the process. It doesn’t matter how much I’m loving the fic, how well written I think it is, or how desperately I want to know how it ends. Once I read this sentence, I am done.

It’s written in a variety of different ways, but it always goes something like this: “You don’t want me,” Remus said, “I am too sick/broken/poor/old/[insert chosen self-demeaning adjective here].”

You’re familiar with the trope. The trope is canonical. And if you’ve been around the wolfstar fandom for longer than a few minutes, you’ve read the trope. Maybe you love the trope! Maybe you’ve written the trope! Maybe you’re about to stop reading this column, because the trope rings true to you and you feel a little attacked!

Now, let’s get one thing out of the way right now: I am not saying the trope is wrong. I am not saying it’s bad. I am not saying we should stop writing it. We all have things we don’t like to see in our chosen fics. Maybe you can’t stand Leather Jacket Motorbike Sirius? Maybe you think Elbow Patch Remus is overdone? Or maybe your pet peeves are based in something a little deeper - maybe you think Poor Latino Remus is an irresponsible depiction, or that PWPs are too reductive? Whatever it is, we all have our things.

Let me tell you about my thing. When I first became very ill several years ago, there were various low points in which I felt I had become inherently unlovable. This is, more or less, a normal reaction. When your body stops doing things it used to be able to do - or starts doing things you were quite alright without, thank you very much - it changes the way you relate to your body. You don’t want to hear my whole disability history, so yada yada yada, most people eventually come to accept their limitations. It’s a very painful existence, one in which you constantly tell yourself your disability has transformed you into a burdensome, unworthy member of society, and if nothing else, it’s not terribly sustainable. Being disabled takes grit! It takes power! It takes a truly absurd amount of medical self-advocacy! Hating yourself? Thinking yourself unworthy of love? No one has time for that.

Of course, I’m being hyperbolic. Plenty of disabled people struggle with these feelings many years into their disabilities, and never really get over them. But here’s the thing. We experience those stories ALL THE TIME. Remember Rain Man? Or Million Dollar Baby? Or that one with the actress from Game of Thrones and that British actor who seemed like he was going to have a promising career but then didn't? Those are all stories about sad, bitter disabled people and their sad, bitter lives, two out of three of which end in the character completing suicide because they simply couldn’t imagine having to live as a disabled person. (I mean, come on media, I get that we're less likely to enjoy a leisurely Saturday hike, but our parking is SUBLIME.) When was the last time you engaged with media that depicted a happy disabled person? A complex disabled person? A disabled person who has sex? No really, these aren’t hypothetical questions, can you please drop a rec in the notes?? Because I am desperate.

There are lots of problems with this trope, and they’ve been discussed ad nauseam by people with PhDs. I’m not actually interested in talking about how this trope leads to a more prevalent societal idea that disabled people are unworthy of love, or contributes to the kind of political thought processes that keep disabled people purposefully disenfranchised. I’m just a bitch on Tumblr, and I have a bone to pick: the thing I really hate about the trope? It’s boring. I’m bored. You know how, like, halfway through Grey’s Anatomy you realized they were just recycling the same plot points over and over again and there was just no WAY anyone working at a hospital prone to THAT MANY disasters would stay on staff? It's like that. I love a recycled trope as much as the next person (There Was Only One Bed, anyone?). But I need. Something. Else.

Remus is disabled. BOLD claim. WILD speculation. Except, not really. You simply - no matter how you flip it, slice it, puree it, or deconstruct it - cannot tell me Remus Lupin is not disabled. Most of us, by this point, are probably familiar with the way that One Canonical Author intended One Dashing Werewolf to be “a metaphor for those illnesses that carry stigma, like HIV and AIDS” [I’m sorry to link you to an outside source quoting She Who Must Not Be Named, but we’re professionals here]. Which is... a thing. It’s been discussed. And, listen, there’s no denying that this parallel is a problematic interpretation of people who have HIV/AIDS and all such similar “those illnesses” (though I’ll admit that I, too, am perennially apt to turn into a raging beast liable to harm anything that crosses my path, but that’s more linked to the at-least-once-monthly recollection that One Day At A Time got cancelled). Critiques aside, Remus Lupin is a character who - due to a condition that affects him physically, mentally, emotionally, and intellectually - is repeatedly marginalized, oppressed, denied political and social power, and ostracized due to unfounded fear that he is infectious to others. Does that sound familiar?

We’re not going to argue about whether or not “Remus is canonically disabled as fuck” is a fair reading. And the reason we’re not going to argue about whether or not it’s a fair reading is because I haven’t read canon in 10-plus years and you will win the argument. Canon is only marginally relevant here. The icon of this blog is brown, curly haired Remus Lupin kissing his trans boyfriend, Sirius Black. We are obviously not too terribly invested in canon. The wolfstar fandom is now a community with over 25,000 AO3 fics, entire careers launched from drawing or writing or cosplaying this non-canonical pairing. We love to play around here with storylines and universes and races and genders and sexualities and all kinds of things, but most of the time? Remus is still disabled. He’s disabled as a werewolf in canon-compliant works, he’s disabled in the AUs where he was injured or abused or kidnapped or harmed as a child, he’s disabled in the stories that read him as chronically ill or bipolar or traumatized or blind or Deaf. I’d go so far as to say that he is one of very few characters in the Wide Wonderful World of media who is, in as close to his essence as one can be, always disabled. And that means? Don’t shoot the messenger... but we could stand to be a tiny bit more responsible with how we portray him.

Disabled people are complicated. As much as I’d like to pretend we are always level-headed, confident, and ready to assert our inherent worth, we are still just humans. We have bad days. We doubt our worth. We sometimes go out with guys who complain about our steroid-induced weight gain (it was a long time ago, Tumblr, okay??). But, we also have joy and fun and good days and sex and happiness and families and so many other things.

Remus is a disabled character, and as such, it’s only fair that he’d have those unworthy moments. But - I propose - Remus is also a crip. What is a crip? A crip - like a queer - is someone who eschews the limited boundaries placed on their bodies, who rejects a hierarchy of oppression in favor of an intersectional analysis of lived experience, who isn’t interested in being the tragic figure responsible for helping people with dominant identities realize how good they have it. Crips interpret their disabilities however they want, rethinking bodies and medicine and pleasure and pain and even time itself. Crips are political, community-minded, and in search of liberation.

Remus is a character who struggles with his disability, sure. But he’s also a character who leverages his physical condition to attempt to shift communities towards his political leanings, advocates for the rights of those who share his physical condition, and has super hot sex with his wrongfully convicted boyfriend ultimately goes on to build community and family. Having a condition that quite literally cripples you, over which you have no control, and through which you are often read as a social pariah? That’s disability. But using said condition as a means through which to build advocacy and community? Now that’s some crip shit.

Personally, I love disabled!Remus Lupin. But I love crip!Remus Lupin even more. I’d love to see more of a Remus who owns his disability, who covets what makes him unique, and who never ever again tells a potential romantic partner they are too good for him because of his disability. This trope - unlike There Was Only One Bed! - sometimes actually hurts to read. Where’s Remus who thinks a potential romantic partner isn’t good enough for him? Where’s Remus who insists his partners learn more about his condition in order to treat him properly? Where’s sexy wheelchair user Remus? Where’s Remus who uses his werewolf transformations as an excuse to travel the world? Where’s crip Remus??

We don’t have to put “you don’t want me” Remus entirely to bed. It is but one of many repeated tropes that are - in the words of The Hot Priest from Fleabag - morally a bit dubious. And let’s face it - we don’t always come to fandom for its moral superiority (as much as we sometimes like to think we do).

This is not a condemnation - it is an invitation. Able-bodied folks are all but an injury, illness, or couple decades away from being disabled. And when you get here, I sincerely hope you don’t waste your time on “you don’t want me”ing back and forth with the people you love. I’m inviting you to come to the crip side now. We have snacks, and without all the “you don’t want me” talk, we get to the juicy parts much faster.

Colorfully,

Mod Theo

#wolfstar #disability in fandom #disabled remus #crip remus #please write me some crip remus #I beg of you #fandom meta

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doberbutts · 3 years

Note

Sawbones podcast just put up an episode on sex and gender (called just that) and it was very thoughtful! I'm curious your thoughts if you listen to it. Have a great day!

So as you know I'm not usually a big fan of the McElroys again as always it's nothing to do with anything ~problematic~ they've done (honestly I don't know of anything problematic about them) and everything to do with not really liking their sense of humor BUT you [specifically] rarely have bad recommendations so I figured I'd take a listen.

Also out of all of them Justin is probably the one that grates me the least mostly probably because he did Taako and that was my favorite character from TAZ: Balance.

ANYWAY I'll record my thoughts as I have them since I have the day off and can devote some time to this:

So it seems like on first impression they're going to talk about intersex conditions which like, yeah we gotta bring those up because a lot of people aren't willing to talk about the spaces between "absolute male" and "absolute female".

Blah blah chromosomes- I don't actually know my chromosomes, I assume XX because if I do end up having CAH [likely] then with how much it's affected me I should be dead because the symptoms would present differently in XY babies and typically kills them. Most people don't know their chromosomes, as she says, so it's difficult to make the absolute statement that XX = female and XY = male because there are XY people who were born completely female-appearing and [rarely] sometimes with functioning sex organs capable of ovulating, menses, and live birth and XX people who have enlarged clitorises that look and function nearly identically as penises with the exception of urination and ejaculation who knows.

I did like that she brought up the difference between the label DSD, which is more medical, and intersex, which is more individual/referring to the actual person, and also added that it is up to the individual as far as which term to use and it's better to ask and adjust on an individual basis rather than assuming the community prefers one or the other.

I ALSO like that she brought up clinical examples of various people who have had children and late in life discovered they were intersex- the father of four children who presented with a hernia age 70 and found a uterus and a fallopian tube when the doctors went to surgically fix it. This may not be overly common, sure, but it does happen, and multiple cases state that you may never have a reason to guess that anything is different about you until you're surprised one day looking for answers to a completely different medical scenario. Like how I discovered my [probably] testicle and had to come to terms with the fact that that means I'm [probably] intersex overnight while coming down from the panic that I needed emergency surgery for a ruptured appendix that turned out to just be an angry ovarian cyst.

I ALSO like that she brought up that external is very different than expected as well- how babies are assumed one or the other at birth based on genital presentation and then puberty can just change things and she did bring up brain sex, which has a bit of a checkered history medically, all of which are good points.

Also typical talking points: 1.7% population re: red hair and green eyes, which is true, but you know people have been plugging their ears on that for ages. Also brought up not being able to using external genitalia or chromosomes to determine things like locker rooms, bathrooms, sportsball teams, etc because honestly it's true... where would people like me fit in with that? I got boobs and something that super doesn't look female in my pants and none of that has been medically augmented, in fact a lot of it was medically suppressed by way of forcing me to take estrogen, so would I have been allowed on the girls team or the boys team?

The gender stuff honestly is about the same typical stuff that a lot of trans people talk about buuuuut it does make me concerned for the same reasons because we are approaching discussions of gender from a very Western and Colonist point of view and it makes me... I guess a little leery, because we are inherently approaching these views as an outsider looking in and we need to make sure that we are representing these cultures appropriately and accurately without just saying things like "well other cultures have other genders".

Many of these cultures have very strict gender roles and when individuals did not align with those strict gender roles then others were grouped into a different category- often intersex individuals or those who were wlw or mlm were forcibly grouped into these categories, at times eunichs and infertile women were grouped into these, and sometimes it was simply what we would consider gender non-conforming. And, other times, it was/is an understanding of gender that was/is simply different from what we in Western society think of it, and I think she actually managed to explain that nuance fairly well and how it's really tempting to fall into that trap because honestly if you're not part of that culture and you're not trying to learn that culture then yes, you're not really understanding why these different genders exist and also like... if you don't have that sort of nuanced understanding then you have really no place to say whether these are "real" genders or even genders that would apply to [general] you.

Also discusses some of the problems with current gender understanding and gender roles as they are in the US and systems of how these power and oppression came to be, which is nice, especially for understanding how it happened within this country.

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missdrarrydawn · 3 years

Note

This blog is why we need post-birth abortion rights for women. Your mother would have made the right choice.

yes wow darling very smart you sound incredibly intelligent for sending this yes yes quite an outstanding achievement you got there, amazingly brave too, yes such courage to go on anon and insult people, wow i applaud your bravery truly

my blog is a HP blog with ocassional diverse content, you're getting mad at a joke post that's probably 4-5 days old by now (i'm not sure about this exactly as i lose track of time easily) that described a real medically documented experience a lot of trans women have been observed to go through as their transition and therapy continues which i said is similar to a period of a cisgender woman because of the very real similarities between the two processes

i very clearly stated twice that they are biologically different but still similar enough to warrant validation

i support trans women and i always have and i always will, they are real women just as much as i am. i also understand, unlike most of you getting mad in the notes of the post, that women are not walking talking uteruses and i do not reduce nor define women by that one thing alone because that would be ridiculous and hurtful, since there is more to being a woman than just having a uterus

i don't really see why everyone is so upset (transphobes gonna transphobe i suppose) that i called a trans woman's cycle period like or a pseudo period, when that is the most accurate term that exists for that process as of right now.

what else would you call hormonal fluctuations of estrogen and progesterone (because guess what? trans women do in fact receive estrogen and progesterone injections as part of feminizing hormone therapy) and other symptoms (abdominal cramping, headaches, acne breakouts, hot flashes, dizziness, mood swings, pain, nausea etc.) happening every 5 weeks and lasting for 6-7 days? that's right, everyone would call that a period, it's just the most accurate way to describe the process.

trans women can not menstruate, they can not bleed because they do not have a uterus (something i very explicitly stated in my post explaining my point but transphobes can't read apparently) but, like I said in my original post, the bleeding is honestly the least important byproduct of a period, or better yet, the entire cycle, because it is just that - a byproduct, a consequence of the uterine lining shedding. it is not the one defining staple of a cycle, a lot of cis women don't menstruate but you don't go around calling them fake so. the bleeding is not the goal of a monthly cycle, it is not the end result your body wants to reach (the end result would ideally be pregnancy), just a consequence of the process, and i argue it is the least important part of it, its nothing more than another symptom, just like the cramps and pain are

do you want to know what your entire argument sounds like? let me demonstrate:

person A comes in with a fever, a sore throat and a runny nose. their doctor tells them they have a cold.

person B comes in with a fever and a sore throat but no runny nose. their doctor tells them they're faking their cold and should stop pretending to have a cold because it is insensitive to people who have real colds since person B hasn't presented every single typical byproduct and symptom having a cold produces unlike person A did

yea? isn't that ridiculous? that's exactly what you sound like

'trans women experience every other symptom of a period i do, on a monthly basis like i do, lasting about a week, like mine do, but they don't experience this one specific symptom that i typically do which is bleeding therefore they're fake'

obviously the cycle of a trans women isn't going to be the same as the cycle of a cis woman, i have not once contested that nor have i equated the two, what i have done however, is defend the fact a lot of trans women do in fact experience their own form of a monthly cycle that actually presents all the symptoms of PMS (if we're going to be super picky about it) and I've stated that there is nothing wrong with a trans woman calling her own cycle a period, even if she does not experience the bleeding.

you all are just incredibly transphobic (i checked out some of the blogs replying and found them to be terfs, ew) and i don't want to cross into your territory any more than i've already ended up doing, and i will not be responding to any of your notes or anon messages anymore because i've moved on from that post and you should too, because it is obvious you will never understand what i'm trying to say and i will never understand the hatred you spew

it is telling though that terfs and transphobes came across my post which was in the 'pro trans' tag, i assume while casually browsing there for people to start fights with? very telling indeed.

i will be a doctor by the end of the year and i do not have time to argue with transphobes online over matters of trans health they know nothing about (my knowledge is far from perfect either because i am not transgender but i have listened to trans people and read about what transitions can be like because i wanted to learn and feel comfortable stating what i have). ive seen y'all constantly talk about indigestion and diarrhea which have absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand and seen some people bring up endometriosis which also has nothing to do with the matter at hand, no one is talking about disordered periods or other health conditions, we're talking about just the regular period of a healthy person

people have asked me to provide proof i'm attending medical school which i don't think i can provide without giving out my personal information which i am not inclined to do to strangers on the internet and a lot of people didn't believe me but honestly that is not my problem

i know who i am and what i stand for and the thing i said is a true factual experience that many trans women go through as their transition continues and calling that cycle they experience a period hurts no one and only helps trans communities

of course terfs and transphobes don't care about that, which is why i urge everyone to go their separate ways. i do not want your transphobia on my posts and you don't want my activism on yours so if you're itching to comment and get pissy with me or send me anons, kindly don't because i truly couldn't care less about your opinion on matters you know nothing about and don't care to learn about either

coming from one cis woman to another, just scroll past me and any of my posts from now on and i'll do the same for you so that we may never have to interact again in any way shape or form

i'm closing my end of the discourse of the post right here with this and i stand by what i said. i believe you are wrong for invalidating the experiences of trans women and transphobic for wishing ill upon the trans community in general and i do not wish to ever associate with any of you ever again

i have said my peace

goodbye

(if any trans woman or trans person in general wishes to correct anything wrong i stated here please feel free to do so, because i am cisgender and you will of course know more about your transition and experiences than me no matter how much reading i do :)) remember you are valid and loved and pls stay safe <33)

#pro trans #positive trans #again i reiterate #PRO TRANS #THIS IS A PRO TRANS BLOG #A SAFE SPACE FOR TRANS PEOPLE #trans health #trans women are real and valid #i am not having this argument anymore #i don't like fighting and i don't care what transphobic women have to say #trans support #this cisgender women stands with the trans communities

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star-anise · 4 years

Text

An ask I got recently:

hi so i’m a transmed and i’m not sure if you’ll answer this because of that but i saw your post about transmedicalism and was wondering if you could expand on that? you seem like a genuinely kind and judgement-free person, thank you darling x

My response:

Heh, you call me “judgement-free” and ask for my opinion on a topic I’ve formed a lot of judgments about… I get it though, I’m not into attacking people for what they believe so much as providing FACTS. As a cis queer, my insight into transmedicalism isn’t really about the innate experience of trans-ness so much as using my education and professional experience to talk about social science research, diagnostic systems, and public health policy.

This ended up really long, so the tl;dr is, I think transmedicalism as I understand it:

Misunderstands why and how the DSM’s Gender Dysphoria diagnosis was written,

Treats the medical establishment with a level of trust and credibility it doesn’t deserve, at a time when LGBT+ people, especially trans people, need to be informed and vigilant critics of it, and

Approaches the problem of limited resources in an ass-backwards way that I think will end up hurting the trans community in the long run.

TW: Transphobia; homophobia; suicide; institutionalization; torture; electroshock therapy; child abuse; incidental mentions of pedophilia.

So first off I’m guessing you mean this post, about not trusting the medical establishment to tell you who you are? That’s what I’m trying to elaborate on here.

I have to admit, when you say “I’m a transmedicalist” that tells me very little about you, because on Tumblr the term seems to encompass a dizzying array of perspectives. Some transmedicalists believe in what seems to me the oldschool version of “The only TRUE trans people suffer agonizing dysphoria that can only be fixed with surgery and hormones, everyone else is an evil pretender stealing resources and can FUCK RIGHT OFF” and others are like, um… “I have total love and respect for nonbinary and nondysphoric trans people! I qualify for a DSM diagnosis of dysphoria but that doesn’t make me inherently better or more trans than anyone else.”

Which is very confusing to me because according to everything I’ve learned, the latter opinion is not transmedicalism. It’s just… a view of transness that acknowledges current diagnostic labels and scientific research. It’s what most people who support trans rights and do not identify as transmedicalists believe. But I kind of get the impression that Tumblr transmedicalism has expanded well past its original mandate, to the point that if a lot of “transmedicalists” saw the movement’s original positions they’d go “Whoa that’s way too strict and doesn’t help our community, I want nothing to do with it.”.

Okay so. Elaborating on the stuff I can comment on.

1. DSM what?

The American Psychiatric Association publishes a big thick book called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, called the DSM for short. This is the “Bible of psychiatry”, North America’s definitive listing of mental disorders and conditions. It receives significant revision and updates roughly every 10-15 years; it was last updated in 2013, meaning it will likely get updated sometime between 2023 and 2028.

The DSM lists hundreds of “codes”, each of which indicates a specific kind of mental disorder. For example, 296.23 is “Major depressive disorder, Single episode, Severe,” and 300.02 is “Generalized anxiety disorder.” These codes have information on how common the condition is, how it’s diagnosed, and what kind of treatment is appropriate for it.

Diagnostic codes are the key to health professionals getting paid. If there isn’t a code for it, we can’t get paid for it, and therefore we have very few resources to treat it with. The people who actually pay for healthcare–usually insurance companies or government agencies–decide how much they will pay for each code item to be treated. They’ll pay for, say, three sessions of group therapy for mild depression (296.21), or they’ll pay for more expensive private therapy if it’s moderate (296.22); they’ll pay for the cheap kind of drug if you have severe depression (296.23), but to get the more expensive drug, you need to have depression with psychotic features (296.24).

Healthcare companies, especially in the USA where the system is very very broken and the DSM is written, are cheap bastards. If they can find an excuse not to fund some treatment, they’ll use it. “We think this person who lost their job and can’t get off the couch should pay this $1000 bill for therapy,” they’ll say. “After all, they were diagnosed as code 296.21, and then saw a private therapist for five sessions, when we only allow three sessions of group therapy, and you’re saying they haven’t had enough treatment yet?”

A lot of the advocacy work mental health professionals do is trying to get the big funding bodies to pay us adequately for the work we do. (This is a much easier process in countries with single-payer healthcare, where this negotiation only needs to be done with a single entity. In the USA, it needs to be done with every single health insurance company in existence, as well as the government, sometimes differently in every single state, and then again on a case-by-case basis as well.) Healthcare providers have to argue that three sessions of group therapy isn’t enough, that Medicaid needs to pay therapists more per hour than it costs those therapists to rent a room to practice in, or else therapists would lose money by seeing Medicaid clients. DSM codes exist a tiny bit to let us communicate with each other about the people we treat, and a huge amount to let us get paid. The fact that their existence lets people make sense of their own experiences and find a community with people who share common experiences and interests with them is a very minor side benefit the DSM’s authors really don’t keep in mind when they update and revise different diagnoses.

So when it comes to convincing insurance companies to pay for treatment, humanitarian reasons like “they’ll be very unhappy without it” tend not to work. The best argument we have for them paying for psychological treatment is that it’s economical: that if they don’t pay for it now, they’ll have to pay even more later. If they refuse to pay, let’s say, $2000 to treat mild depression when someone loses their job, and either refuse treatment or stick the person with the bill, then that person’s life might spiral out of control–they might, let’s say, run low on money, get evicted from their apartment, develop severe depression, attempt suicide, and end up in hospital needing to be medically resuscitated and then put in an inpatient psych ward for a month. The insurance company then faces the prospect of having to pay, let’s say, $100,000 for all that treatment. At which point somebody clever goes, “Huh, so it would have been cheaper to just… pay the original $2000 instead so they could bounce back, get a new job, and not need any of this treatment later.”

Trans healthcare can be kind of expensive, since it often involves counselling, years of hormone therapy, medical garments, and multiple surgeries. Health insurance companies hate paying for anything, and have traditionally wanted not to cover any of this. “This is ridiculous!” they said. “These are elective cosmetic treatments, it’s not like they’re dying of cancer, these people can pay the same rate for breast enhancements or testosterone injections as anyone else.”

So when the APA Task Force on Gender Identity Disorder (a task force comprised, as far as I can tell, entirely of cis people) sat down to plan for the 2013 update of the DSM, one of their biggest goals was: Treatment recommendations. Create a diagnosis which they could effectively use to advocate that insurance companies fund gender transition. Like when you go back and read the documents from their meetings in 2008 and 2011, their big thing is “create a diagnosis that can be used to form treatment recommendations.” So that’s what they did; in 2013 they made the GD diagnosis, and in 2014 the Affordable Care Act required insurers to provide treatment for it.

A lot of trans people weren’t happy with the DSM task force’s decisions, such as the choice to keep “Transvestic Fetishism,” which is basically the autogynephilia theory, and just rename it “Transvestic Disorder”. The creation of the Gender Dysphoria diagnosis, basically, was designed to force the preventive care argument. They didn’t think they could win on trans healthcare being a necessity because healthcare is a human right, so they went with: Trans people have a very high suicide rate, and one way to bring it down is to help them transition. One of the major predictors of suicidality is dysphoria. The more dysphoric someone is, the more likely they are to attempt suicide (source). Therefore, health insurers should fund treatment for gender dysphoria because it was cheaper than paying for emergency room admissions and inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations.

I have spoken to trans scientists about what research exists, and my understanding is: The dysphoria/no dysphoria split is not actually validated in the science. That is, when you research trans people, there is not some huge gaping difference between the experiences, or brains, of people With Dysphoria, and people Without Dysphoria. Mostly, scientists haven’t even thought it was an important distinction to study. The diagnosis wasn’t reflecting a strong theme in the research about trans experiences; that research showed that trans people with all levels of dysphoria were helped with medical transition. The biggest difference is just that dysphoria is a stronger risk factor for suicide. Experiencing transphobia is another strong risk factor, but that’s harder to measure in a doctor’s office, so dysphoria it was.

(I’ve seen some transmedicalists claim that dysphoria’s major feature is incongruence, not distress. And I’ll just say, uh… in psychology, “dysphoria” is the opposite of of “euphoria”, literally means “excessive pain”, and is used in many disorders to describe a deep-seated sense of distress and wrongness. As a mental health professional, I just can’t imagine most of my colleagues agreeing that something can be called “dysphoria” if the person doesn’t feel real distress about it. If you want a diagnosis that doesn’t demand dysphoria, you’d need Gender Incongruence in the upcoming version of the ICD-11, which is the primary diagnostic system used in Europe, published by the World Health Organization.)

2. Doctors are not magic

Medicine is a science, and science is a system of knowledge based on having an idea, testing it against reality, and revising that knowledge in light of what you learned. We’re learning and growing all the time.

I don’t know if this sounds painfully obvious or totally groundbreaking, but: Basically all medical research is done by people who don’t have the condition they’re writing about. Psychology has a strong historical bias against believing the personal testimonies of people with conditions that have been deemed mental disorders, so researchers who have experienced the disorder they’re writing about have often had to hide that fact, like Kay Redfield Jamison hiding that she had bipolar disorder until she became a world-renowned expert on it, or Marsha Linehan hiding that she had borderline personality disorder until she pioneered the treatment that could effectively cure it. Often, having a condition was seen as proof you couldn’t actually have a truthful and objective experience of it.

So what I’m trying to say is: The “gender dysphoria” diagnosis was written and debated, so far as I can tell, by entirely cis committee members. The vast majority of psychological and psychiatric research about LGBT+ people is written by cisgender heterosexual scientists. Most clinical and scientific writing has been outsider scientists looking at people they have enormous power over and making decisions about their basic existence with very little accountability.

And to show you how far we’ve come, I want to show you part of the DSM as it was from 1952 to 1973. It shows you just why so many older LGBT+ people find it deeply ironic that now the DSM is being held up as definitive of trans experience:

302 Sexual Deviation This category is for individuals whose sexual interests are directed primarily toward objects other than people of the opposite sex, toward sexual acts not usually associated with coitus, or towards coitus performed under bizarre circumstances as in necrophilia, pedophilia, sexual sadism, and fetishism. Even though many find their practices distasteful, they remain unable to substitute normal sexual behavior for them. This diagnosis is not appropriate for individuals who perform deviant sexual acts because normal sexual objects are not available to them.

302.0 Homosexuality 302.1 Fetishism 302.2 Pedophilia 302.2 Transvestitism […]

Yes, really. That is how psychiatry viewed us. At a time when research from other fields, like psychology and sociology, were showing that this view was completely unsupported by evidence, psychiatry thought LGBT+ people were fundamentally disordered, criminal, and incapable of prosocial behaviour.

My favourite retelling of the decades of activism it took LGBT+ people and allies to get the DSM to change is from a friend who did her master’s thesis on the topic, because she leaves in the clown suits and gay bars, which really shows how scientific and dignified the process was. The long story short is: It took over 20 years of lobbying by LGBT+ people who were sick and tired of being locked up in mental institutions and subjected to treatments like electroshock training, as well as by LGBT+ social scientists, clinicians, and psychiatrists, to get homosexuality declassified as a mental illness. And that was homosexuality; the push to change how trans people were listed in the DSM is very recent, as seen in the latest version listing “Transvestic Disorder”, a description very few trans people ever use for themselves.

Here are a few more examples of how people with a condition have had to take an active part in the science about them:

When HIV/AIDS appeared in the USA, the government didn’t care why drug addicts and gay people were dying mysteriously. Hospitals refused to treat people with this mysterious new disease. AIDS patients had to fight to get any funding put into what AIDS is, how it spreads, or how it could be treated; they also had to campaign to change the massive public prejudice against them, so they could be treated, housed, and allowed to live. Here’s an article on the activist tactics they used. If you want an intro to the fight (or at least, white peoples’ experience of it), you could look into the movies How to Survive a Plague, And the Band Played On, and The Normal Heart.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is a little-understood disease that causes debilitating exhaustion. It’s found twice as often in women as men. Doctors understand very little about what it is or why it happens, and patients with CFS are often written off a lazy hypochondriacs who just don’t want to try hard. There are basically no known treatments. In 2011, a British study said that an effective treatment for CFS was “graded exercise”, a program where people did slowly increasing levels of physical activity. This flew in the face of what people with CFS knew to be true: That their disease caused them to get much worse after they exercised. That for them, being forced to do ever-increasing exercise was basically tantamount to torture, so it was very concerning that health authorities and insurance companies began requiring that they undergo graded exercise treatment (and parents with children with CFS had to put their children through this treatment, or lose custody for “medical neglect”). So they investigated the study, found that it was seriously flawed, got many health authorities to reverse their position on graded exercise, and have made strides into pointing researchers to looking into biological causes of their illness.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare but debilitating disease that isn’t researched much, because it affects such a small portion of the population. The ALS community realized that if they wanted better treatment, they would need to raise the money for research themselves. In 2014 they organized a viral “ice bucket challenge” to get people to donate to their cause, and raised $115 million, enough to make significant advances in understanding ALS and getting closer to a cure.

A common treatment for Autism is Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), which is designed to encourage “desired” behaviours and discourage “undesired” ones. The problem is, the treatment targets behaviour an Autistic person’s parents and teachers consider desirable or undesirable, without consideration that some “undesired” behaviours (like stimming) are fundamental and necessary to the wellbeing of Autistic people. Furthermore, the treatment involves punishing Autistic children for failure to behave as expected–in traditional ABA, by witholding rewards or praise until they stop, or in more extreme cases, by subjecting them to literal electric shocks to punish them. (In that last case, they’ve been ordered to stop using the shock devices by August 31, 2020. That only took YEARS.) Autistic people have had to campaign loud and long to say that different treatment strategies should be researched and used, especially on Autistic children.

So I mean… I get that the medical model can provide an element of validation and social acceptance. It can feel really good to have people in white coats back you up and say you’re the real deal. But if you get in touch with most LGBT+ and transgender groups, they’d say that there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to researching trans issues and getting scientific and governmental authorities to recognize your rights to social acceptance and medical treatment.

Within a few years, the definition you’re resting on will turn to sand beneath your feet. The Great DSM Machine will begin whirring into life pretty soon and considering what revisions it has to make. You’ll have an opportunity to make your voice heard and to push for real change. So… do you want to be part of that process of pushing trans rights forward, or do you just want to feel loss because they’re changing your strict definition of who’s valid and who’s not?

3. Scarcity is not a law of physics

One of the major arguments I see transmedicalists push is that there’s only a limited number of surgeries or hormone prescriptions available, so it’s not okay for a non-dysphoric person to “steal” the resources that another trans person might need more. This makes sense in a limited kind of way; it’s a good way to operate if, say, you’re sharing a pizza for lunch and deciding whether to give the last slice to someone who’s hungry and hasn’t eaten, or someone who’s already full.

When you start to back up and look at really big and complex systems–basically anything as big, or bigger, than a school board or a hospital or a municipal government–it’s not a helpful lens anymore. Because the most important thing about social institutions is that they can change. We can make them change. And the most important factor in how much the world changes is how many people demand that it change.

I’ve talked about this before when it comes to homeless shelters, and how the absolute worst thing they can have are empty beds. I used to work in women’s shelters, which came about when second-wave feminists started seriously looking at the problem of domestic violence in the 1960s and 70s, It was an issue male-dominated governments and healthcare systems hadn’t taken seriously before, but feminists started heck and did research and staged demonstrations and basically demanded that organizations that worked for the “public benefit” reduce the number of women being killed by their husbands. Their research showed that the leading cause of death in those cases were when women tried to leave and their partners tried to kill them, so the most obvious solution was to give them someplace safe to go where their partners couldn’t find them. Therefore the solution became: Women’s shelters. When feminists committed to founding and running these shelters, local governments could be talked into giving them money to keep them running.

(Men’s rights activists, the misogynist kind, like to whine about “why aren’t there men’s shelters?” and the very simple answer is: Because you didn’t fight for them, you teatowels. Whether a movement gets resources and funding is hugely a reflection of how many people have said, “This needs resources and funding! Look, I’m writing a cheque! Everyone, throw money at this!” In other news, The BC Society for Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse does great work. People should throw money at them.)

When the system in power knows there are resources it wants and doesn’t have, it finds a way to make them appear. For example, in Canada, the government knows that it doesn’t have enough trained professionals living in its far North, where the population is scarce and not very many people want to live. Doctors and teachers would prefer to live in the southern cities. But because it’s committed to Northern schools and hospitals, they create incentives. For example, the government offers to pay off the student loans of teachers or health professionals who agree to work for a few years in Northern communities.

Part of why trans healthcare resources are so scarce is that for a long time, trans people were considered too small a part of the population to care about. Like, “Trans people exist, but we won’t have to deal with them.” Older estimates said 0.4% of the population was trans, which meant a city of 100,000 people would have 400 trans people. A single family doctor can have 2000 or 3000 clients, so the city could have maybe 1 or 2 doctors who really “got” trans issues, and all the trans people would tell each other to only go see those doctors because all the rest were assholes. And the cracks in the system didn’t really seem serious. A couple hundred dissatisfied people not getting the healthcare they needed? Meh! Hospital administrators had more to worry about!

But the trans population is growing. A recent poll of Generation Z said 2.6% of middle schoolers in Minnesota were some kind of trans. which is 2,600 per 100,000. That’s enough to make hospitals think that maybe the next endocrinologist or OB/GYN they hire should have some training in treating trans people. That’s enough to make a health authority think that maybe the state should open up a new gender confirmation surgery clinic, since demand is rising so much.

Or well, I mean. Hospitals have a lot on their minds. This might not occur to them as their top priority. They’d probably think of it a lot sooner if a bunch of those trans people sent them letters or took out a billboard or showed up by the dozens at a public meeting to say, “Hello, there are a fuckload of us. Budget accordingly. We want to see your projected numbers for the next five years.”

When you’re doing that kind of work, suddenly it hurts your cause to limit your number of concerned parties. Sure, limited focus groups or steering committees can have limited membership, but when you put their ideas into action, to protest something or lobby for political change, you need numbers. If you want to show that you’re a big and important group that systems should definitely pay attention to, you don’t just need every trans or GNC or NB person who’s got free time to devote to your campaign, you also need every cis ally who can pad out numbers or lick envelopes or hand out water bottles or slip you insider information about the agenda at the next board meeting. You need bodies, time, and money, and you get them best by being inclusive about who’s in your party. Heck, if it would benefit your cause to team up with the local breast cancer group because trans women and cis women who have had mastectomies both have an interest in asking a hospital to have a doctor on staff who knows how to put a set of tits together, then there are strong reasons to do it.

Basically: All the time any marginalized group spends fighting over scraps is generally time we could spend demanding that the people handing out the food give us another plate. If you don’t think you’re getting enough, the best answer isn’t to knock it out of somebody’s hands, but to get together to say, “HEY! WE’RE NOT GETTING ENOUGH!”

That kind of work is complicated and difficult! It’s definitely much harder than yelling at someone on Tumblr for not being trans enough. But if you do any level of getting involved with activist groups that fight for real systemic change, whether that’s following your local Pride Centre on Twitter or throwing $5 at a trans advocacy group or writing your elected representative about the need for more trans health resources, you’re pushing forward lasting change that will help everyone.

#staranise original #transmedicalism tw #transphobia tw #homophobia tw #my problems with sj let me show you them

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trutimeline · 3 years

Text

idislikecispeople, The Most Infamous Dyscourse Blogger: Part 1.0, Rumors

idislikecispeople, also known as many names throughout her time on Tumblr (such as Adele, Kat, Mami, Samantha and Sayaka), was a former Tumblr blogger who became infamous for coining the term "tucute", among many other controversial things she has posted on her blogs. This was supposed to be one, very long masterpost about her, but Tumblr's post editor is a bitch and won't let me do that.

In this post, I'll be debunking or confirming rumors commonly spread about idislikecispeople. The rest of my posts about her will each be dedicated to a specific controversial belief she held or situations she got into. For simplicity's sake, I'll be referring to idislikecispeople as Kat for the rest of this post and future ones.

Rumors

Kat Coined the Terms "Truscum" and "Tucute"

Verdict: Partially True

Kat coined the term tucute, but she did not coin the terms truscum or transmedicalist.

Here's a screenshot of Kat's original definition of a tucute:

Transcript:

What is Tucute?

What does tucute mean?

Tucute is basically just the opposite of truscum, it’s a term and community for trans, nonbinary, and/or non-cis individuals created to separate anti-truscum from truscum and to serve as a safe place from truscum and from cis people, where they believe that being trans requires dysphoria, we do not,where they think that being trans is a medical condition, we do not,and where they deny numerous gender identities on the basis that it “discredits the trans community” we do not.

What are the prerequisites to be a part of the tucute community?

You have to be trans, nonbinary, and/or non-cis in general

You have to accept all pronouns and gender identities

You haveto believe that dysphoria is not necessary to be trans

You have to dislike truscum

You cannot side with truscum or believe in their ideology

You cannot misgender anyone no matter how mad they make you

You cannot be an ableist whatsoever

Did you invent the tucute community? Why?

I indeed did coin the tucute term and community and anyone who says otherwise are creeps who are trying to steal it from me and redefine it for their own nefarious doings. I started this community so anti-truscum could separate themselves from truscum and cis people who are a part of the truscum community, it serves as a safe space from both truscum and cis people.

I’m cis, can I be tucute if I believe in your movement and want to help?

No, you can’t be tucute if you’re cis, you can only be a tucute ally, and you need to be sure to never speak for or over a trans person.

I see a lot of tucuties being just as harmful as truscum, what will you do about it?

There isn’t much I can do to them other than ask them to stop aligning with the tucute community, and of course, that doesn’t mean they will. Also be noted that truscum and cis people will pretend to be tucute just to tarnish the name of the tucute community, so tread lightly, you might be talking to a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Spread the word, use the tag #tucute and join the army today!

[A digital drawing of Sayaka Miki from Puella Magi Madoka Magica in her magical girl form, with a banner underneath her reading "Tucute 4 U!"]

(source) (source)

Kat Was a Cisgender Woman Who Lied About Being a Transgender Woman

Verdict: False

This rumor primarily comes from a post on Kat's oldest known Tumblr blog, chromaghost, where she claims that she wasn't MTF and only tagged a selfie as such because she thought that transgender people were "cool".

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: are you a mtf? i seen it tagged on one of your photos.

No lol. I wanted to post it to the tag because transgender people are cool :3

(source) (source) (source)

However, Kat addressed this post and made it clear she very much was a transgender woman multiple times on her later blogs. This claim can also be confirmed with nude photos Kat posted online, which I don't feel comfortable spreading, so you'll just have to trust me on that one. I also don't feel comfortable directly encouraging you to go and dig up those nudes, as most of her nude photos were either taken when she was a minor, spread without her consent and/or were uploaded because people pressured her into posting nudes to "prove" she was a transgender woman.

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: you bound with ace bandage in one of your selfies. i don't know what to think about you anymore. according to some people you're a 27 year old cis woman scamming us, but you say you're a 22 year old trans woman. i want to trust you but i don't know if i can. i'm sorry.

Rest assured I’m not 27 years old lol. What you’re referring to is a less than graceful ~art piece~ we did (”Playing a Boy” or something) on deviantART when we were 16/17 (?) and really ill-informed. I ask you to not take that as how I stand currently – as I have learned so much more since, and I have a penis and I was designated male at birth because of it (feel free to purchase a passcode to our nsfw blog to see for yourself). At the time we were developing breast tissue but still had to appear as a ‘boy.’ Don’t bind with Ace bandages, kids, it can damage your rib cage, something we didn’t know at the time.

(source) (source)

Transcript:

[A picture of two prescriptions, estradiol and spironolactone, both prescribed to Adele Sheffield.]

grandtran still gonna think I photoshopped it or what

(source)

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: In other words, you aren't gonna cough up the pics because you know you can't fake that shit because you're actually cis. Cool. BTW why do you keep changing your story about the blog, and if the blog was run by you when you were in denial about being trans because of self hate, why were the pics tagged mtf and you were constantly saying trans people were cool?

Yeah I’m not gonna do something for y’all and get nothing in return except more doubt from you, you see how one sided that kind of request is? Also its technically considered sexual harassment, just because its on the internet, you’re a coward (whats your username btw?), and you think I’m cis and you want me to prove time and time again to you that I’m dmab doesn’t justify sexually soliciting someone when they’re not comfortable in being solicited – for free no less.

At first I genuinely had no memory of that blog, it was only active for all of 2 months and for some reason I moved onto a new email and new tumblr, and I haven’t the foggiest why. As for the whole “me claiming to not be ~mtf~” I don’t have any memories from that time, I can only assume it was a lot of dysphoria fueled self-hatred and wanting to be seen/pass as a cis girl lesbian.

If you’re really gonna solicit nudes from a trans woman (a second time) as they do sex work to try and stay on their feet without offering anything in return just so your transmisogynistic ass can get off to trying to tell me my dick is fake isn’t classy at all. I perish the thought of what you’re parents would think of this behavior from you. But yeah, feel free to send some money to my paypal so I can get the gender markers on my records changed because that’s gonna cost a lot apparently, and I’ll definitely send you the dick pics you want. :)

(source) (source) (source)

Transcript:

[A picture of a a hospital bracelet on Kat's wrist. The patient's name is Adele Sheffield and her sex is labeled as "M".]

(source)

Kat Lied About Having Diabetes To Get Money From Tumblr Users

Verdict: False

This doesn't need much commentary from me, just view the screenshots below.

Transcript:

To the people who keep harping on me buying a $15 video game for my mental health 7 MONTHS ago “with my donation money,” well, here you go, some proof, links and screenshots provided

So for everyone spreading misinformation about me spending $15 on a video game for my mental health, here’s a full list of reasons why there is no way, shape, or form I spent my paypal money on it:

Yes, I spent $15 of my own money after selling one of my possessions, not denying it:

[A screenshot of a Tumblr post by Kat where she shows off a copy of Fall Out: New Vegas, marked with a price of $14.99. The date of the post is marked as July 21, 2014 at 06:28.39 PM.]

Be sure to look at the date, July 21st, 2014 6:28 PM. Now lets look at my first donation post asking for help:

[A screenshot of a Tumblr post by Kat where she asks for donations to be able to afford insulin because she has no insurance. The date of the post is marked as July 20, 2014 at 08:14.00 PM.]

Hmm, one day before the purchase of said game, July 20th 2014 at 8:14 PM. Now, I’ve never heard of a video game store — much less a non-chain video game store accepting payment for video games in the form of virtual Amazon gift cards, have you? Oh, but you’re gonna say, “well you bought the game with your paypal donations anyway!” Well, here’s exhibit C:

[Another screenshot of a separate post made by Kat where she is also asking for donations to be able to afford insulin. The date of the post is marked as July 23, 2014 at 12:27.46 PM.]

Again, looking at the date of this posting which is the original donations post, you can see it was posted on July 23rd, 2014 at 12:27 PM, a full 2 days after I had bought the game. Now, if there’s no way for me to use Amazon gift cards for a real life video game store, then how can I go back in time a minimum of 2 full days to give past me $15 to buy said game, hm? This isn’t even accounting for the fact that I didn’t even have my own bank account associated with it until over a week later, and it surely doesn’t account for the fact that it takes up to 5 days to transfer from paypal to your bank account. All the dates are linked to the original unedited posts so you can see for yourself, and for added measure my first deposit was on August 14th, 2014:

[A screenshot of a deposit made by Kat. The date is marked as 08/14/14.]

Oh but yeah, anti-sjs, truscum, and the like took damniwishidthoughtofabettername’s postthey used to gaslight us with misinformation and you all bought it. Tell me how I could misuse donations that I could not use outside of Amazon and money I didn’t even start receiving until a full two days later, let alone the fact that there’s no way I could have transferred said money and used it two days prior as of the date of the paypal donations post.

I hope some of y’all could reblog this and get the word out, I’m sick and tired of people buying into that misinformation that person did solely to gaslight me as a means to try and disrupt my donations drive.

(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source)

Transcript:

[A selfie of Kat holding up a vial of Novolin to the camera.]

Hey anon, I don’t feel comfy giving you my receipts (because doxxing is a thing) but here you go, a selfie with my most recent insulin purchase. 👽

(source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source) (source)

Transcript:

Anonymous asked: Getting desperate for money again I see. How is your fake diabetes lately. I bet your blood sugar is like 800 this time and you're still able to be alive somehow.

You got me, I’m ~totally faking~

[A selfie of Kat. In the background several items used by diabetics are seen such as insulin syringes, glucose tablets, a blood sugar tester and test strips.]

[A picture that gives us a closer look at the background of the previous selfie.]

[A selfie of Kat holding up two vials, one of Lantus and the other of Humalog.]

Gee, must be one dedicated faker, right? To have hundreds of dollars of insulin equipment and insulin itself. Hmmm… Insulin syringes, glucose tablets, a blood sugar tester and test strips.. oh and insulin, hmmmm….

Oh and because you didn’t learn from last time you don’t die instantly when your blood sugar goes over 600 lol, something anyone who studies endocrinology can tell you, and I would know, being a diabetic, having to be hospitalized numerous times for ketoacidosis where the blood sugar has been too high for too long. Things you clearly do not know and you’re just jumping on the disableist bandwagon. I have an idea of who you are anyway, just doing this for future reference.

(source)

#idislikecispeople #dyscourse #transmed #truscum #tucute

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diamondsableye · 3 years

Note

“Depressed? Just be happy!!

ADHD? Just pay attention!!

Autism? Socializing isn’t that hard!!

Gender dysphoria? Just be happy in your body!!

Y’all do realize like... that’s not how things work right?”

Hi. You left the above comment on some anti-gender post and I just want to let you know that you’re fucking stupid and you have no clue what “TERFs” think if this is what you have to say. We’re not saying “be happy in ur body uwu self love” we’re telling you that a woman’s only criteria for being a woman is her femaleness. Mental illness sucks. Depression sucks. Anxiety sucks. OCD sucks. Gender dysphoria sucks. None of these are things guaranteed to be cured by just sheer force of will and 99.99% of (real) feminists agree. There’s no magic cure for any of these, not even altering genitals or taking HRT will cure gender dysphoria. The best we have is therapy and meds to help. But even if you’re taking ADHD meds, you’re still a person with ADHD. Even if you have gender dysphoria, you’re not magically the opposite sex, and gender is a sexist social construct. Maybe you should stick your head out the window every once and a while and see how not black and white the world is.

Listen I just found out that my cat has cancer so I really don’t want to have to deal with you more than I have to. I came back onto this app to quickly chat with a friend and I’ve got work to do so this response is gonna be very short.

First of all, stop treating medical transitioning with such disregard. Of course they don’t “cure” gender dysphoria but these procedures are a huge advancement in medical technology and they’re extremely effective at reducing gender dysphoria in a myriad of ways. So don’t phrase it as some nilly whilly thing.

Secondly, you do do realize that sex is measured through the observation of 5 different traits correct? Chromosomes, gonads, hormones, and internal and external reproductive anatomy/the primary and secondary sex characteristics. You can change your hormonal sex through HRT and you can get surgeries to alter your primary and secondary sex characteristics as well as modify or remove your internal reproductive organs. Really the only thing that can’t truly be changed in some way shape or form are your chromosomes. So like... unless you’re gonna argue metaphysics here along the lines of “once your birth sex always your birth sex”.... you’re kindof... incorrect here? Sure you can never be cis, but biological sex is modifiable to various degrees. Again, if you’re gonna challenge this you’re arguing metaphysics when we’re discussing biology.

Also you do realize that currently it’s impossible to determine accurately how intrinsic gender is to the human condition right? You’re kindof making an assertion here without any evidence. We live in an incredibly gendered society and unless we’d be willing to subjugate humans to little or no contact to the outside world or other people starting from birth, we’re unable to truly determine how much of gender is purely socially constructed, how much of it is internally produced, or how immutable it may be. Are gender roles sexist and should be done away with? Of course. Is gender identity completely created through society or is it more innate? We don’t know and we can’t tell for sure.

Anyhow all that aside, even if I was wrong on every single point here, my initial argument is still valid. If you recognize that gender dysphoria is harmful and can severely damper a person’s ability to pursue a meaningful existence in certain cases, but the only words of sympathy are “yeah well it sucks but you’ll never be a real woman/man” then...???? You’re just... leaving people to themselves and expecting them to get over it. Many if not all trans people have an irrepressible need to be the gender they identify with and internally are, that need demands that they be seen as their gender within social contexts, and causes great harm when that need is not met. It would be like if you told me, an autistic person, that “sure it sucks that you’re an aspie, but you’ll never be a neurotypical” and I’m saying yes! I know! And that fact does distress me because people on the spectrum often face great negative stigma in society, and that’s maybe 1/100th of what trans people go through! You’d still be doing absolutely nothing to actually help and if anything you’d be making me worse if you kept insisting that no matter what I’d never be mentally healthy! It might be true but it’s totally uncalled for and ignores a fuckload of broader needs!

If you’re doing absolutely nothing to help, and if the most prominent leaders of your movement are doing their best to revoke the rights of health and safety that trans people need, while also denying them their identity, a key component to their health and happiness, then how is that any different than telling them to “get over yourself, just be fine as your agab”??? Like I’m very baffled that you don’t see the demonstrable harm you guys are doing to trans people, either that or you just don’t care?? Either way, you’re not helping, you’re hurting people, and EVEN IF my analogy was flawed, maybe stop perpetuating ideology and supporting movements that demonstrably hurt trans people instead of focusing on a fucking reply I left on a goddamn post.

@terf-tips @reptile-lesbian

If you all would like to add anything feel free, I need to finish some last minute college assignments.

#ask #answered #reply #terf tw #fuck terfs #terfs dni #transphobia #trans discourse #tw trans discourse #text #anon

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