#so im only left with yaoi but still very much a lesbian so it gets boring after they get together but like it's Fine i know i am a guest in

[fox-steward]

hi. i hope you don't mind me asking this but i need some advice.

i was born female, and ive always been a tomboy, sometimes in the most stereotypical way. i was also a little lesbian who didn't know it yet. but after my younger sibling came out to me as trans, i started second guessing everything about myself.

for the sake of my sibling, who im closer to than anyone in my life, i learned about what theyre going through to support them and ended up getting taken in myself. i consumed all the yaoi and gay fanfiction they did, i read up on all the identities that were within the trans umbrella and eventually i started to think i wasnt a girl at all, but my infact a feminine transboy.

i never was able to transition on account of my family but the growing inner hate i felt for myself made me want to because deep down I knew that no matterr what i said or believed, id never be the cis gay boys i, essentially, fetishised and craved to be. it made me miserable, but i wanted to be accepted so badly that i stuck with it. but then i fou d your blog and others like it, and reading through it, whole reevaluating myself made me realise how misguided my mindset was.

despite realising that me being a tomboy is perfectly fine, i cant help but cling to that idea of being a boy, even though i have no idea what it means to "be a boy" or "feel like a boy". all i know is what the media portrays boys, feminine boys and gay boys to be like, and i clung to that idea for so long that i believed it to be my identity.

i just wanted to ask, if i can, how can i get over this mindset? i feel terrible because my younger sibling still identifies as trans without a shadow of a doubt, and my questioning of myself makes me feel awful, but i also feel bad because... i dont know who i am really now. how can i just be me again?

sorry this is long. any advice would be very very much appreciated.

it sounds like you’ve been through it, anon. whew! i just wanna acknowledge what a mindfuck you’ve been through, and it’s normal to feel no so great.

i actually think you’re grieving, strange as that sounds, but hear me out. being female is not easy, being a masculine woman comes with its own set of challenges, and imagining yourself as a “gay transboy” was an escape from all that. you could imagine a future for yourself where you grew up to be a gay man, not a gay woman. it’s worth noting relationships between men are the only sexual/romantic pairing that isn’t party to misogyny within the relationship itself.

it’s intoxicating to imagine we could have that ourselves, huh? it happened to me too, and i’m not even actually attracted to males at all, i was really just seduced by the idea of a relationship of equals.

but this. is. a. fantasy. one we as female people can never achieve.

so you’re grieving the vision you had for your future. your grief doesn’t care that the thing you promised yourself is impossible.

you’re undergoing another shift in the way you see yourself, the way you imagine yourself moving through the world. that’s hard, anon. being a tomboy, while absolutely lovely and perfectly fine, can be really difficult in our misogynistic society. it’s like that dworkin quote i’m about to butcher—something something absolutely excruciating to be fully aware of the misogyny all around us. you get the gist. and she’s right, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.

so idk, i don’t have any specific advice, but i do know a lot about grief. with grief, you gotta accept you’re gonna feel shitty for a while and absolve yourself of the responsibility of ~fEeLiNg HaPpY~ for now. i’m being flippant because happiness is a mirage anyway. we get pricks of joy, moments of brightness or laughter, flow and contentment, enjoyment, pleasure, and these fill in between other moments of discomfort or monotony or tedium or malaise or or or. and if we’re lucky we are aware when the good stuff is happening, so that we can pause and say, gee this is nice. and if you get enough of then and you’re aware enough as they’re happening, perhaps you can tie it up in a bow of hindsight and call it contentment.

tangent, sorry. practically, keep yourself busy and tire yourself the fuck out, tbh. when my wife left, i started just going and doing things, anything i didn’t actively NOT want to do. dancing, concerts, art class, bike ride, walk a friends dog, cooking class, sit in a field and listen to music.

just do anything. i know it’s hard during covid, but it isn’t so much WHAT you do but THAT you do. take the field example—you have to travel there (that kills time!) and maybe you walk or bike (that is physical activity) then you do the thing you planned to do (takes more time) and you have to travel home (more time and activity) then you have completed something you set out to do (an achievement/free endorphins).

i also took up running when she left (tire myself the fuck out) and that changed so much for me. with grief, rumination and sleeplessness plagued me; running took both those out of the equation. so my sleep improved, i got stronger and my cardiovascular fitness improved, i ate better, i got to see myself improve and achieve goals, got to build an identity separate from who i was in my marriage. so i cannot recommend running enough.

and as for identity, finding out “who you are”—identity is a trap. don’t cement yourself to any one thing because everything changes. don’t define yourself by externalities, just be open and curious about your inner life, your qualities (which are also able to change btw) and start to strengthen the ones you like, like training a muscle. i practice (literally practice) kindness and discipline, which are important qualities for how i see myself. i also practice at compassion and i like how these things make me feel and how i show up in the world when i’m practicing at them. what qualities will you train in yourself?

you’re not defined in relation to your sibling, btw, and they aren’t defined in relation to you. you can question transness while still loving them.

you’re gonna be just fine, anon. you have plenty of time. grieve the future you can’t have, even though it’s truly for the best, and cultivate a person in yourself you’re excited to be. good luck.

[safetyqueenofhell]

Uh, News?

((its ‘pume rants about life” time))

So uh...hi guys. Funny story. I started out this blog because I loved the headcanon, but was at first hesitant to because of my gender identity or rather, I felt shitty for putting the words in the mouth of a transgender character when I myself was cis. This is a feeling I’ve pretty much always had about the transgender community. I always liked to think myself supportive of this community, but because of a certain rhetoric that plagued me as a kid I never really felt as though I was allowed to relate.

My older sister was a bitch. I dont know if she is now, all I know is that she doesnt wanna feel like ‘the bad guy’ anymore so I’m not allowed to bring it up. She used to draw pictures of me dying in horrible painful ways and talk about how happy thinking of me being mutilated made her. She used to take pictures of me in the shower and show her friends. Eventually convinced mom to force me to watch her shower and let her sleep in my bed with me. Her reasoning to my mother was that she was afraid of serial killers and didnt want to be alone. What she told me was that if someone were to attack she wanted someone else for them to go after, and she loved mom, my dad, and my little sister too much to hurt them. I was expendable.

She also really liked yaoi. There was pretty much gay porn always on the search history of the family computer whenever I tried to look up kingdom hearts or naruto characters. She would causally joke with her friends that she she would trade me for a cute little uke brother in a heartbeat. 

When I was 13 I realized I was totally into girls. I (very famously) announced over the dinner table that I was a lesbian while asking my grandma to pass me the potatoes in the same sentence. My older sister was furious. She’d take every opportunity to tell me that I was making it up. That I wasnt really a lesbian, and in fact I was a horrible person for pretending to be a lesbian and invalidating the real struggles of the LGBT community.

This is not the first time I would hear shit like this from her. 

Also around this time I started bringing duct tape to school with me. Every day I’d sneak the tape into my backpack, then go to school and strap my breasts down in the bathroom. I didnt really know what it would accomplish, but I liked it. I liked seeing my breasts disappear under my shirt.  It wasnt the same as being allowed into the boys locker room like I wanted, but it was close enough. 

I started reading books about girls dressing up as boys going on adventures. Not just ‘Mulan’ shit (in fact I came to resent the movie because it is by far the most well known but also the worst depiction of the trope) but also Leviathan, Song of the Lioness, and to a lesser extent The Monstrous Regiment (which is hilarious & gay as all fuck 100% recommend) More then anything I wanted to pass for a boy, even before I knew what transgender was. I cut my hair, I wore the boys school uniform when I left home to go to boarding school, I fantasized about kindling a romance with my roommate. This wasnt to be, alas, (even tho Missa is a literal perfect human being and I love the shit out of her) but I did get to experiment with girls in the form of my first girlfriend ‘E’ and the girl who took my virginity, ‘C’. 

When I went home for the first time it was like returning to the darkness. I didnt realize how much I hated my home until I went back that first winter break. I would talk about my experiences (And since I had 0 shame) would also talk about girls. My sister wasnt having it. She’d shut me down in front of my own parents, insisting that I wasnt Bi because she’d never seen any of my girlfriends. Mom wanted us to repair our relationship so she’d make me drive around the street in circles talking to my sister as she repeatedly beat me down. 

The next couple of years at school were pretty much blended together. I became something of a “Come Out Kid” in that, for some reason, I was the first person a lot of people told when they started having homosexual or gender divergent thoughts. Particularly girls who didnt know they liked girls until they met me. Coupled with my sister’s abuse, this kinda gave me a fucked up sorta ego that makes other people uncomfortable to this day. I almost force myself not to believe so many people came out because it seems like it couldnt have happened, how could the disgusting leech of a person my sister convinced me I was have so many people be attracted to her? Even still, a fucked up multi-faceted ego is still very much an ago, so I had the confidence to date both boys and girls. I dont wanna get into it now but was also molested by both boys and girls. One of my best friends ‘A’ made her transition, and around senior year I began to suspect that I might be on the agender side as well. My other best friend ‘M’ told me that I only wanted to “Join A on the bandwagon” and I believed him instantly because that was the kind of fucked up person I was. 

I came home for break one year and saw my little sister had no contact with any boys at 13, which I found strange considering me and my older sister only hung out with boys at that age. my little sister’s dance studio was run by an entire staff of lesbians who were always incredibly supportive of sexuality and self expression. I thought it only natural that if my sister were gay then she’d probably be open about it. I suggested it to my mom. she threatened to disown me. when i said that was homophobic, she called me a monster for daring to call her such a horrible word. No, she wasnt homophobic. what she was was a mother of a confused 13 year old girl, and would not stand for me trying to police her young, undeveloped sexuality by saying the word ‘lesbian’ in front of her. 

That very same summer my older sister harassed me in a public restaurant making fun of the time “grace thought she was gay but was only faking for attention” and I looked into my mothers eyes as she said nothing. 

Cut to freshman year of college my older sister was graduating, and I was experimenting with my gender. My sister was ironically a psych major and graduating that year. Since I was forced to care about her again mom tried to force us to love each other by (you guessed it) more stuffing us in a car together and driving around. I admitted that I might be a boy. When I talked about wanting to look and fit in with boys she said if I ‘need to rely on societal norms to justify yourself you’re an anti-feminist and hate yourself for being a woman’ when i said that it just felt right she once again demanded ‘proof’ and went in idiotic circles from there until she slammed the breaks and said she said that I just hate myself and am desperate to be anything other then myself and I’m incredibly pathetic for doing so. She then said that if I were really a boy she’d love and accept me. But I’m not. she said that she forgives me for being such a horrible little sister and its high time i love myself too. she went on to say I’ve been faking my mental illness and I’ve always hated her for no reason and im ruining her life blah blah blah whatever. 

Tragic backstory unlocked you get it. 

Cut to now. Cut to making this blog. Cut to having the upmost respect and adoration to anyone who is able to come out of the closet. Not disgusting fetishists like myself, real people with real problems to overcome. I loved trans marco and related to her greatly, and made this blog. but soon people started asking me questions. asking for advice. and how the hell could I help? i had no idea what it was like to be trans. All my life I had only pretended to be LGBT so boys would pay attention to me. what could I possibly tell them? I started to look up terminology. I started to read memoirs. I might be a horrible fetishist who spits on the struggles of people who suffer by my mere existence, but goddamnit if anyone is looking at this blog I’m going to do my best to help them through their struggles. I’d agonize for days any time i got an ask about trans issues, trying to make the wording perfect to make up for the fact that i was cis scum capitalizing on the ‘fad’ of trans issues.

and you know fucking what. everything i found. everything i read. all of it i related to. all of it validated me. I thought about it, wrote down my feelings, talked to friends, and pretty much everyone agreed that why the fuck would i even lie about something like this? what could i possibly have to gain?

this is a whole lotta rambling for a whole little payoff. I guess what I’m trying to say is that...like. 

I think I’m a boy. I think I’ve always been one. 

I dont know if thats the same as being MtF or where the divergence between the experiences lay but. Every time i get mistaken for male i just get this flower of happiness in my heart. thats literally the image that comes to mind. just. happy. happiness rushing through my veins like glittery as fuck happy.

Idk what I even hope to accomplish with this. maybe I hope that, since I cant really come out to my family, I just want someone to...witness me? i dunno. But, Trans!marco helped me, even though I dont share any of her internal conflicts directly. So maybe someone else is reading this too. maybe someone else has been told they’re a faker. maybe someone else’s mother accused them of just trying to ‘get a reaction’ maybe someone else heard that mother bragging to her friends at dinner parties about how brave caitlyn jenner is and patting herself on the back for supporting her. but thank you everyone who has sent me asks. Thanks to all of you. I havent been paying much attention to this blog, and maybe the hiatus is gonna go on a little longer, but thanks to all of you for sticking with me. I love all of you. bless.

-Pume