u/chaucer345

I really wish it was possible to explain to people how absolutely fucked up dysphoria was without literally torturing them.

You can by the way, torture someone into understanding gender dysphoria. It's what happens when you inject cross sex hormones into someone who *isn't* trans. It happened to Turing before. And a few others.

But no matter how many times you show people papers about how your endocrine system is measurably physically different than a cis person's, so many people just refuse to believe you that the agony is real...

Personally, I think there is no compelling physical evidence that trans women on hormones for years have a significant athletic advantage over cis women:

Sex differences and athletic performance. Where do trans individuals fit into sports and athletics based on current research? - PubMed
Body composition and physical fitness in transgender versus cisgender individuals: a systematic review with meta-analysis | British Journal of Sports Medicine
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/109/2/e455/7223439?login=false 

But while we could trade studies about this forever, I really don't think that's the point here.

Folks are asking us to compromise on this issue. A lot. Even a bunch of Democrats at this point.

As a trans woman... why the fuck would any of us compromise for no reason?

I have not heard of any sort of exchange being offered like "We'll do a constitutional amendment that bans you from sports, but makes sure you have housing protections, employment protections, public accommodations protections, and medical coverage and give you IDs that match your gender for medical privacy."

Mostly people just do the whole Reid Technique interrogation stuff where they talk about how giving up on this issue "just isn't a big deal" and offering vague reassurances that "things will go better if you just stop resisting us."

More honest people say "You have no leverage to negotiate any civil rights at all. You live by our whim. Do what we say or else go to prison where we have made it legal to cut off your meds and rape you."

Trump administration plans to end prison rape protections for trans and intersex people

Trump administration asks Supreme Court to allow restrictions on transgender inmates' medical care | AP News

To which I would say. Hello, Nazi! I appreciate that you are at least an honest Nazi, but you haven't thrown us *all* in your rape jails yet and you have repeatedly asked us to be silent on this issue, so it seems that your dear leader hasn't quite seized absolute power over the United States and you genuinely want us to shut up.

When you want something from someone that you are unwilling or unable to get from them through force, that is called "leverage".

TLDR: Make a real deal with us, or try and kill us already like you so desperately want to.

If you intend to do the latter know that we will use every legal form of self-defense available to us.

Peace!

Okay, so this is something that I've been thinking about for a bit. Why are trans people the big attack ad target?

Trans people have the following attributes:

1. A small population size by their nature.
2. A tendency to look conventionally unattractive mid transition meaning gross caricatures are easy.
3. A lot of people find them attractive, and people feel guilty about feeling attracted to them. This provokes vehement denials of the attraction.
4. A medical issue that is complicated enough and understudied enough in some cases that it's hard for people to understand.
5. Crucially, a real physical need that means trans people are forced to speak out and stand up for themselves, which makes it easy to harvest out of context sound bites from their crazies.

They're basically the perfect authoritarian Untermensch.

As a trans woman, it kinda blows.

Now, there is some gray area here, but not much. Having a kid go to therapy for like a year first I can get behind. Having a kid do puberty blockers I can get behind.

Forcing a kid into "gender exploratory therapy" where a kid is repeatedly told how much of a bad thing people are for being trans until they're 18 and they've already suffered through puberty? Yeah, that's fucking conversion therapy.

Yes, gender affirming care improves psychological wellbeing for trans people:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12312132/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S002234762500424X
https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2025/05/22/utah-lawmakers-own-study-found/
https://le.utah.gov/AgencyRP/reportingDetail.jsp?rid=636https://juliaserano.medium.com/gender-affirming-care-for-trans-youth-is-neither-new-nor-experimental-a-timeline-and-compilation-b4bb8375d797https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(26)00012-X/fulltext
Suicide-Related Outcomes Following Gender-Affirming Treatment: A Review - PMC
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26895269.2026.2647048 

No, conversion therapy doesn’t work:

https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-lies-and-dangers-of-reparative-therapy
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7349462/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33206024/ 
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2021/03/change-gender-identity
Full article: “The worst thing I’ve ever experienced” – comparing experiences of affirmative and non-affirmative healthcare provision for trans adolescents in the UK
https://goodlawproject.org/new-data-shows-surge-in-trans-kids-suicides-following-healthcare-rollbacks/
https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-whether-conversion-therapy-can-alter-sexual-orientation-without-causing-harm/ 

Trans Bathroom Bans do not make cis women safer:

https://transequality.org/issues/resources/transgender-people-and-bathroom-access
https://glaad.org/fact-sheet-misleading-narratives-about-transgender-people-and-restrooms-locker-rooms-and-other-single-sex-spaces/
https://kentuckylantern.com/2023/06/06/baseless-anti-trans-claims-fuel-adoption-of-harmful-laws-two-criminologists-explain/

In before "Lying to a person by letting them leave the category I have narrowly defined for them as impossible to leave with current technology is never okay! Even if letting them leave that categorical forever doom prison (that I emotionally need to exist) makes them feel not suicidal, a better solution is locking all of them up in mental hospitals where we know they will be in constant pain but we can prevent them from killing themselves."

They may put those plans on hold to maintain their power, but the second they get the chance they will rain hellfire down on the innocents they perceive as threats.

All power comes from the capacity of those with power to hurt those without it.

For a brief moment in history, some people with power were restricted from doing whatever horrible thing struck their fancy, but that moment is over. The monsters learned how to play the game better and have dodged all accountability.

They are too entrenched in their positions with their machine eyes and propaganda networks now, so that moment of hope where the common people who care for others had a say in their fates will never come back.

This is an attempt to determine if astroturfing has taken place in support of this rule. They make a strong argument that it has.

You, bigots reading this, is this really what you want? For a woman who wouldn't hurt a fly to be humiliated as she tries to go on a god damned business trip?

For someone who no one would ever know was trans to have her private medical history outed because you just can't fucking deal with someone like her existing?

How do you fucking sleep at night?

I despise my height, my male bone structure, all of the things people say give me an insurmountable athletic advantage over cis women are things I absolutely fucking despise and never would have chosen.

Seriously, hearing them talk about how disqualifying all that stuff is feels like people in a social club for virgins rejecting me for having been raped.

I didn't choose this.

So, this is one of those things where I find myself being a bit of a lazy rebel. Shaving your legs and underarms is one of those things that was basically just brought to us by advertising firms trying to sell shaving supplies, so I don't really do it. Especially because it's a lot of work and I get ingrown hairs easily.

And yet, when it gets really hot, sometimes I'll shave my legs so I can wear shorts without showing off hair in public. Even though it's perfectly normal to have hair there and I recognize it's all just some BS marketing stuff that changed the beauty standards in the 1910s I still feel like I'll be judged if I show it off and find myself wearing leggings more often because of it.

I don't know, how do you folks handle the stress?

Like scientific racists before them, scientific transphobes take papers with small effect sizes and low-quality evidence that say trans people are bad or wrong in some way and just beat you over the head with it them

The trouble is, I was in the research world for a bit, and I still try my best to question my assumptions and preconceptions all the time when approaching new papers and data. Which is a double-edged sword when dealing with "scientists" who's goal is to exclude trans people from life.

Sometimes they'll give me a paper that says trans people have a higher incarceration rate than cis women (explainable by enforcement and poverty), or a higher than the general populations suicide rate even after transition (explainable by discrimination and trauma), or that we just exploded onto the scene relatively recently (explainable by legal victories, better knowledge of our healthcare and the growing panopticon making it harder to hide your past) and I just don't know how to respond to their bad faith interpretations that say we're some sort of inherently violent aggressively recruiting cult of lunatics pretending that HRT helps us when really it does nothing.

They're determined to see us in the worst possible light. I get that. But they are very good at twisting data to support their narrative. And it creeps me out when they claim I do the same. Because I really want what I say to be as accurate as possible and cite sources that hold up to scrutiny and when they tell me that my data isn't good enough no matter what I do I just feel miserable.

I fear my own biases too much, and do not sufficiently weigh theirs when speaking with them.