#reblog delete personal‚ a tag to keep frank quiet

[itsbenedict]

if you're waiting for 'if the state of medical transition improves' then you're already trans, Lucia ❤️

please do not do this. that is not how it works.

you probably thought this was a nice thing to say, because being trans is Good and you thought you were assuaging anxieties about not being Good enough trans enough. that is not where i'm at, and it's pretty rude to call someone by a name they aren't going by. there are more relationships to gender in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

i would kind of not like to get into the specifics, because my own feelings on my own gender are like, borderline transphobic, and if interpreted as generalities would imply things that would get me in trouble.

but i guess it's not a great life strategy to bottle feelings up indefinitely in case they would make someone mad at you? so, uh, under a readmore, please only continue if, like, you don't have an emotional need to block the "transphobia cw" tag or similar. i'd tag it as such but this is not a post i want anyone finding via search.

Where to start? Uh... there's terms of art, I guess- "cis by default", "magic button trans", but they kind of miss the core of it.

When I was a teen, I was violently dysphoric. I hated my body, I hated the gross thing attached to my crotch, I hated the social expectations on me to be a Man who Provides For The Household, I hated all of it and I desperately wished I could be a girl instead.

And I did have the internet, and so obviously in desperation I googled everything to try and find out what options I had. And I found the options! I found the stuff online saying "oh, yes, we know exactly what you're going through! if you want to be a girl, you can just be one! here is some literature on gender and personal identity!"

And I read it and went "...well, this is useless." None of it solved my problems! I wasn't going to escape the social expectations of the male gender role by declaring my way out of it- even if I could think myself into it, there was no way I was going to think my conservative parents into playing along, much less pay for hormones and surgery.

And even if I could... "spend years taking pills that very very slowly transform some parts of your body and not others, become infertile, put on gobs and gobs of makeup, and then maybe if you've got the right body type, random strangers on the street will have a decent chance of thinking you're a girl until the moment you open your mouth" didn't seem like an attractive option. "Hire a voice coach and train for ages, and best-case scenario you'll maybe plausibly sound like a particularly deep-voiced cis woman with a cold" didn't cut it for me.

Because...

Like, I couldn't give less of a shit about being perceived as a particular gender by strangers! Pronouns mean nothing to me! Sure, I could put years of strenuous effort in, and eventually reach a point where strangers are momentarily confused, evaluate some conflicting signals, and more often than not conclude "yeah, it's probably safest to say 'she' about that person"- but that has zero value to me!

What I wanted was any of the actual benefits of being a girl. The ability to be cared for by someone else and not have it be a mark of shame! Looking in a mirror or opening my mouth and seeing/hearing something cute and pretty! Meeting beauty standards without going to the gym! Not having all my damn hair fall out at the age of 27 thanks to my dad's inescapable genetics! If I could have all those things, and everyone in the world still called me "he", I would not have a problem!

And of course the current state of the art in transition doesn't get me any of those things- either because it medically can't do certain things yet, or because they're social things that hormones can't touch.

Now,

it's not like these are issues other trans people haven't faced, and wanted fixed- but the currently agreed-upon slate of solutions feels really unsatisfying to me. It's all brute-force "insist very loudly that social norms change" stuff. Where bodies don't match desired social behaviors and expectations, we say "ignore bodies, change social behaviors and expectations", on the basis that bodies are hard to change but social behaviors and expectations are easy.

But... they're both very hard, and so much of the messaging is saying "no, it's not hard, only bad people think it's hard, it's actually very easy and if you're having trouble then there's something wrong with you". If it's hard for me, someone who has every self-interested reason to change those behaviors and expectations, how hard is it for people who aren't so invested? How can you trust anyone's social behavior around gender, in this kind of omnipresent climate of emotional blackmail?

I feel like so much of this zeitgeist is going to evaporate when biomedical science reaches the point where people can just, have the kind of bodies that line up with their desired set of social behaviors at will. There won't be nearly so much need to chant "trans women are women!" when it's like, yeah, obviously. Would you chant "people with glasses can see!"? Like, duh, they went to the optometrist. Why are you making a big deal out of it? Who's saying they can't?

Anyway,

I feel like by the time either transition medicine gets to the point of working well enough to give me what I want, or the impossible happens and the climate of emotional threat somehow resolves into genuinely changed norms, I'm going to be old enough that most of the relevant benefits are pointless, so I'm currently not planning to transition unless we solve biology or get uploading way sooner than expected.

(might do a vtuber thing if i can find a really good voice filter, though)