#transmasc history

[genderkoolaid]

I was more or less stunned by what had happened. I had been prepared for criticism and ridicule - I was accustomed to them. But it had never occurred to me that people might want to hound and persecute me for my change in role. I had lived as a woman because that was my social standing, and had been made fun of and called 'half-man', and now when I had faced the situation and righted the grotesquely false position in which I had lived so long, it seemed that the public would damn me because I had once, perforce [by force, by necessity], worn skirts. I tried to get other hospital work. I went to the men who had been my chiefs and told them the truth and asked their aid in securing another position; to a man they turned me down. I tried to get other sorts of work and failed tor the same reason as soon as I gave my name. Then my family employed counsel and instituted proceedings to have my name legally changed; and the medical school from which I had been graduated served notice on us that if we persisted they would rescind my diploma and have me disbarred from practice.

— excerpt from Letter from Alan Hart to Mary Roberts Rinehart, August 3, 1921, on the subject of his transition from female to male and the impact of being publicly outed by a woman who recognized him. Alan Hart was one of the first men to get a hysterectomy in the US, and pioneered the use of X-rays in the diagnosis of tuberculosis, which ended up being crucial to treatment as the disease was asymptomatic early on.

[gender0bender]

Hello! Thought I’d let people know that Original Plumbing, a quarterly magazine that ran in the 2000s and was about trans men’s culture and identities, has a website selling some of their issues and they’re currently having a sale! Some of their issues (like the ones pictured) are going from 9-10 dollars when they’re normally 15-30. So if you’re interested in getting one for yourself I reccommend doing that. You can buy the issues here - https://originalplumbing.bigcartel.com/products

[manichewitz]

one thing abt me is that i think i couldve been born in any time period and any culture on earth and i still wouldve figured out i was trans somehow. if i was amish i’d be posted up doing needlepointing with the other women saying shit like does anyone else want to look like brother jedediah sometimes or is that just me

[transmascrage]

Can't believe I never saw this website before. Can't believe there's an FTM Roman guy. Do you know what this means to me?? Roman history (which arguably isn't my ancestry, but being Italian I still feel a connection to it) is full of cis men of dubitable heterosexuality.

Looking to Classical Antiquity, we can find a few references to the “transformation of females into males,” as the Roman author Pliny (d. 113 AD) wrote about having witnessed. His contemporary, Martial (40 – 102/104 AD) also wrote about a FTM person who played sports and loved women.

Lucian (125 – 180 AD), a rhetorician and satirist who wrote in the Greek language, described a FTM individual named Megilla, who shaved his head and lived as a man “in every way.”

Megilla tells Leaena that [he] is a man named Megillus and that Demonassa is [his] wife. Lucian presents Megilla as a transgender figure of sorts, a man in a woman’s body. “I was born a woman like the rest of you,” she says, “but I have a mind and desires and everything else of a man” (Lucian). [He] expresses no desire for physical transformation… being a man seems to be more about mental characteristics as opposed to the physical. Source

[magicspeedwagon7]

of course there's a difference between historical terfs (cf. janice raymond and friends) and the professional transphobes funded by christians nationalists that we have today but don't act like there was no correlation at all and dworkin and rich would be trans allies nowadays. you're embarrassing yourself...

radfems been calling butch lesbians and transmasc people "self-hating women" since radical feminism existed. search "sex wars" on google scholar. this sex-negative and anti-butch period of radical feminism is well documented by Jack Halberstam ('Female Masculinity' (1998)), Pat Califa (cf 'Public Sex: The radical culture of radical sex' (1994)) and Gayle Rubin. like, in general, listen to transmasc people who've been there back in the days.

[man-squared]

You know radical feminism is one of the reasons you don't hear about transmasc history.

Think about it. A lot of historical figures that are either explicitly trans men or are not specifically identified as such but may fall within the trans (FTM) category are used as leverage against transmascs when we talk about our history.

I have seen people call us misogynistic, "female/lesbian" thieves for talking about trans men like Dr. James Berry.

I'm (and a majority of transmascs) are not against "herstory/"amplifying historically significant women, but it is sometimes waged against us for asking for or talking about our own historical figures.

[dyvyn]

does anyone know of or could point me towards resources about ftm history? specifically the term ftm, but also just history of communities who use the term ftm in general

[st-dionysus]

Gang, I am looking for a photograph I know exists, but I can not find. It is a historic black and white photo of a group of butches/transmen with a sign that say's "Who says there are no boys in Chaigao" (I believe, in reference to the draft)

[kit-catrock]

I just discovered that there was a person who was afab and ended up joining the russian army by the name of Alexander Durov in 1806.

Born a woman, Nadezhda Durova (birth name) ran away from home and joined a light cavallery regiment dressed as a man.

After his identity was uncovered, the russian tsar summoned him to the palace at St. Petersburg, where he impressed the tsar so much that he awarded Durov the Cross of St. George and promoted him to lieutenant in a hussar unit.

He always referred to himself as a man and was upset when people called him a woman.

He signed letters with his male last name.

He expressed feelings of disgust towards his sex and how that worried him a lot.

He never married willingly and adopted many dogs and cats.

He only danced with women when attending a ball.

He asked to be buried under his male name Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov but the church did not agree to that.

I never saw him in "historical transmasculine people" compilations and only discovered his story coincidentally.

Unfortunately, historians still adress him with female pronouns, although he did not want that.

Let's remember him together. We won't allow him to be forgotten.

I'll probably add onto this post later or make a better one but you can read a lot on this wikipedia article:

[laurelmelisa1]

You like my panty bulge?🥵

[starnosedmoles]

Occasional Trouble Passing…

“What do you mean I can’t go in there? You can just suck my sock, buddy!”

found in “FTM Newsletter”, 1990s

[genderkoolaid]

As Green describes it, the WPATH revision effort was being protested by trans men, who noted that the guidelines were only written to cover trans women’s medical care. Green was part of the crowd of protesters, and he was also a recognizable face, which led to him being selected to advise the board pretty much by fiat. After the protesters had beaten down the doors and charged the room where the WPATH committee was meeting, Green says, “The guy who was in charge of the revision effort pointed at me in the audience and said, ‘All right, you can look at the draft over and give us some feedback.’ Me? I wasn’t even a member of the organization.” Nonetheless, Green went over the proposed guidelines with a group of trans men, and wrote a 12-page document giving feedback on things like hysterectomy (which trans men sometimes require for medical reasons other than gender, but which doctors could withhold simply because they were trans). He stayed up for 24 hours straight to meet the deadline. When the WPATH revision came out, it contained none of his suggestions, but it did have his name on the front— essentially, trying to avoid activist critique by saying that a trans man had looked at it.  In 1999, when the WPATH performed its next round of revisions, Green’s changes were incorporated, but his name was nowhere to be found. “Did I get any credit for that?” Green says, sounding audibly frustrated, before biting it back. “You know, that’s okay. The most important thing was to get these changes.” 

— How Jamison Green’s visibility paved the way for a generation of trans men by Jude Ellison S. Doyle (emphasis mine)

[gender0bender]

Another thing I found when looking up Bobby Gene (transmasc cartoonist who drew the strip I reblogged and who designed the FTM International logo) is that he wrote an articlein Transgender Tapestry that was reprinted in GenderTrash from Hell, alongside this sweet thing.

Transcript:

BOYHOOD by Bobby Gene There's something special about being a boy. I'm talking about the "wonder years." The pre-pubescent years, when a boy is a being one and apart from anything else. He's not a man, not a girl… just a boy. And there's something unique about the way the world looks upon his boyhood. A boy is endearing, sometimes obnoxious and selfish, but always filled with the magic only boyhood provides. His innocent charm and mischievous nature are the subjects of volumes of Twain's imagi- nation, Disney's fantasy.

And us, the men of today and tomorrow, who were the invisible boys of yesterday, known only to ourselves, we watched the boy rituals move about us, all around us, without us, excluding us from what was also rightfully ours but not granted. So now we discover we can be men. We travel the road to our lifelong dream of trans- formation. Our own boyhoods camouflaged and brief, having to be mixed with the respon- sibilities of adulthood we've acquired over the years. We feel the same boyhood now that we only watched before. It's okay. Put down your pen, your quar- terly reports, turn off your computer, push yourself away from your desk. Kick off your wing tips and tie on your Nikes. Slip out of that suit for a while. Exchange it for your favorite pair of old jeans, which now fit more the way you've always dreamed they should. Take a moment to live the boyhood you missed in the wonder years. Climb a tree. Go fishing with Huck. Take it, it's yours now. --Pinocchio 1992 Bobby Gene

End transcript.

[hello-is-anyone-there]

Me and the boys on Dunsinane Hill

[kissycore]

i really love this more than anything

from FTM Newsletter. 1994.

[chainmail-butch]

I started reading Roland Betancourt's Byzantine Intersectionality because it has a chapter on transwomen, but it turns out that the book is heavily focused on transmasculinity and race in the Byzantine world.

Specifically I wanted to show you this discussion on artistic representation of top surgery and the likelihood that this actually represents top surgery.

Anyway this is really fucking cool