r/honesttransgender

If I’m constantly being held responsible for whatever bizarre idea an awkward teen posted on TikTok, I at least want the cookies and milk from the weekly committee meeting of the single, consolidated Trans Community™.

The constant "Why does the trans community do X?" posts are just people digging up isolated cringe and projecting it onto millions of strangers so they can play the pick-me or the "real ally". "Look at me, I’m one of the normal ones, unlike THOSE weirdos."

It’s bad enough when it’s cis people fishing for a virtue badge. But it’s genuinely tragic when it comes from a trans person groveling for normative validation. The bigots will come for us all no matter how much anyone tries to appease them. They are NEVER going to accept any of us, and throwing some of us under the bus just weakens our resistance to bigotry.

People need to stop intellectualising dishonest cowardice as "respectability politics" and face the reality of where they are at so they can grow. This desperate posturing for people who will always hate us will never work.

As for the "they reflect badly on all of us" argument, we cannot allow bigots to set the terms of our existence or sense of community in the first place. In the end all this is achieving is ruining trans people's lives.

Hey, so ... Estrogen makes my brain go brrrrrr.

Dissociation gets better, I feel more present and seem more alive. Great.

Wife isn't on board with me going through changes.

Inlaws are conservative Iranian/Taiwanese.

Two kids.

I'd need FFS and VFS.

I would want to pass, for myself more than anything. Need to.

Ok, cool, so I probably should.

But I can't blow up my whole life to be a hon. I'm not even sure if I want to transition.

At the same time I hate the idea of being a bald old man.

I don't like the idea of being a man in general.

I guess right now I'm just a disembodied consciousness driving this meat machine on autopilot as I just watch.

I've 'set a new standard on what it means to be an involved dad'.

I get recognized in places I barely go because they remember how I was with my kids.

I can't do this to them.

I can't do this to the wife. My family. Her family.

I'm not even sure I can do it to myself.

So how do I deal with that? How do I scoop up this egg and throw it out?

How do I come to terms with myself, and learn to know myself, to like myself, and maybe one day love myself?

“We should come up with a hand gesture!”

“No we, should have a secret code!”

How about you mind your own business? Like how many trans people are there that genuinely enjoy being clocked by other trans people?

I get wanting connection with similar people, I have been in an environment where I was the only trans person there for three years. But if you see someone you think is trans and you want to connect, what is the problem with just coming up to them and starting a normal conversation?

So I've been wanting to get some new sex toys for a while, but I'm not sure which ones will be the best for euphoria purposes (if that makes any sense). What suggestions do my fellow MtF folks have?

The great Irony of gender critical discourse is that detransitioners themselves prove an extremely strong argument for an internal, sexed body schema.

Take FTMTF detransitioners as an example They constantly describe their deep repulsion to the aesthetic effects of Testosterone, the deep voice, thick hair, masuline facial structure and the general switch towards male dimorphism as something that they hated. And how they regret and abhor masculinizing their bodies and losing their feminine features.

Note that a significant part of their complaints are not about functional losses or health effects but about change to their bodies phenotype and how wrong it makes them feel.

But this is precisely what the gender-critical model struggles to explain. If we do not have a sense of the sexed schema of the body we ought to inhabit then why is this such a nigh universal complait among detrans ppl.

The obvious implication is that people possess an internal representation of their own bodies, including their sexed characteristics, which can come into conflict with their actual physical development. And if this representation can lead a female-born person to experience testosterone-induced masculinisation as intolerable, there is no principled reason why a male-born person could not possess the same kind of representation, with the opposite relationship to their natal sex.

You cannot inisist that sexed body phenotype is completely irrelevant to a humans self perception except insofar society and societal pressure teaches us to care for them while at the same type time treating aesthetic changes as a huge violation.

I know this might just be a "me" problem. I just want to talk about this with somebody. Maybe someone else feels the same.

I struggle a lot with my appearance. I get so self conscious about going out in public and standing out that I've been going weeks without going outside. I'm scared of going to the grocery store, of going shopping for clothes, of asking the gas station attendant for 10 bucks on the pump, of interviewing for jobs. All because I have this fear that everyone in the cis world is getting pumped full of trans hatred and they're on the look out for anyone who might be an "other"

So it really sucks when I try and find comfort on reddit, when I've gone out of my way of unsubbing and hiding every subreddit that reminds me of how bad things are, of how much scrutiny there is on womens' appearances in particular, and I'm seeing this woman's face everywhere and people making fun of her and calling her all this horrid stuff.

I'm no fan of Trump or his coterie by any means but it really scares me when people say "It's wrong to say [X] things about people" but then reveal how they're really thinking when someone meets whatever their arbitrary criteria is for throwing that out the window.

I just want a little bit of peace when I'm trying to relax on the computer. Why is it so hard

Tbh I'm some what in my puberty js started, I turned 14 this year, personally at least dyphoria is not much of a problem DPDR is a much bigger problem.

And my emotions and feelings are very blank and feel fake including dyphoria(due to DPDR), for me it's like a headache but without the pain, nausea or irritation if that makes sense, being hurt is something very hard for me to feel.

Please share you experiences with puberty and how it effected you even if it made you more unfeeling(According to articles it should make my DPDR wayy worst), I feel like I'm not ready for it?? I can't really feel fear so that's the best I can say I can feel but let me know your thoughts

I want to forget the dysphoria, the wrong puberty, being born in the wrong body, going through the wrong puberty, being exorcised, undergoing conversion therapy, crying because I don't have a penis and testicles, To stop crying because I didn't have a normal childhood, to forget that my parents don't accept me, that I'm demonized, that I chose this, that I'm going to hell, that God hates me, that I'm not a real 'man', that my parents will never accept me, my siblings, my family and that I will always be seen weird.

I want to forget about all this, I want to have a family, I want to forget that I'm trans, I want to live like any other man. I don't want my life to be the subject of right-wing politicians. I want someone to love me and see me as a man. I want to receive all the affection from someone who loves me and sees me as a man. I don't want to be seen as an abomination, I don't want to be reminded that I am one, I don't want to be seen only as a demon. I don't want any of my descendants or relatives to be trans; I don't want them to go through the same hell of being born in the wrong body.

I just want to be and prefer to see me as a cis man who had the misfortune of being born in a body that developed as a girl and nobody believed you and now I'm fixing it. But even that won't help because I won't forget the trauma of puberty, I won't forget the rejection, the dysphoria, the conversion therapy.

I don't want to be a passage from Leviticus, Corinthians, or some other crap. I didn't choose any of this. I've been striving to fix myself since I was a child. Fuck whoever said that I need to pray harder, I need to want to change, that I am acting like "God will fix me in one second", when He HAD MY WHOLE LIFE.

To hell with anyone who says I chose this, that I'm going to hell, that God hates me, etc. Apparently, screaming until your throat is sore and crying for hours isn't a good enough sacrifice, and it's not enough effort for God? That all my screams are my fault for not searching God, that it is the demon, and not the fault of being wrong In the wrong body, for going through conversion therapy.

If that's really what they want, that I should be cured and be a woman. I wanted to see if they could see that their cure would turn me into a woman, but a completely depressed, aggressive one, who turns to drugs or alcohol to forget and ends up giving her body to just forget that she is alive and in the wrong body!

How can God allow pedo, rapists, murderers, Could thieves and corrupt politicians be born in the right body, be forgiven, and go to heaven? Especially murderers, pedophiles, and so many others on the same level. But I, who didn't choose to be trans, have to go to hell because I need to transition so I don't kill myself and can have a good life? What kind of garbage metric is that? And if I don't"chose" this. It would have been better for me to have lived a miserable life until I died or to kill myself, according to them. I had a better chance of being born a cis man, or something else entirely, but I was born trans. What a shit luck.

It literally just ragebaits me. Ive contemplated blocking *that* sub so many times because its always a post like "Im cis but Im only attracted to trans men that look like women with big boobs under their tomboy binders and trans women who love talking about their big gocks and being on top of me! I only like men who look like women and women who look like men! Am I a chaser? I-I-I dont wanna be a chaser! Waaah! I'm an ally!"

What the fuck is the point. I struggle not to blow up in the comments every single time because its just not worth it. Sexual preferences are always a difficult conversation because you *cant* police it no matter what or youre scummy trans propagater that wants me to pretend like your genitals arent what they are!! Youre oppressing me and my preferences!! Preferences arent a crime!! This is why everyone hates you guys!!

So why do people keep making these fucking dumb posts asking if theyre chasers. If you are one then are you going to what? Change your preferences on the spot? Just dont talk about it at all like every other fucking fetish. Youre not a "good one" for recognising that you push your fetish onto other people who dont have the same. Why is it that in other subreddits you dont see people being like "I only want to date people from this group. Hello people from this group. Is it wrong I fetishize you?" What do you expect. Im tired of babying cis people and trying to be the nice calm trans. If youre a chaser you will always be one so keep that bs to yourself on your twitter timeline, nobody wants to talk about that shit with you in public.

do you see us as the same as you?

below you?

does the sight of us make you uncomfortable?

is it a challenge to gender us correctly?

do you pity us?

think we're lazy?

do you think it's our fault that society overwhelmingly disapproves of trans people?

other thoughts?

a curious mind wants to know. it's been a busy day and this is what bubbled to the top of my head when I finally sat down.

I cringe severely every time I hear the phrase "I identify as" or any similar phrase. It's got to a point where I don't even like the phrase "gender identity" anymore despite it being ubiquitous in the queer community. The idea that I'm a woman because I identify as one just pisses me off now for some reason.

Why? well I'm not exactly sure but I'm going to try and explore it through writing.

Definitely part of it is how it gets meme'd on by cis people and just generally how the phrase comes off to anyone outside of hyper-woke queer spaces. It seems to carry the connotation of insincerity. Like you can only identify as something that you're not. Trans people identify as their genders, cis people simply are their gender, they don't have to identify as anything. That's how the average unwoke cis person sees it.

Now if you're a bit more educated you might know that to identify as something is just to say you are that thing and people do that for things that they are all the time. But rarely does identifying as a thing automatically make you that thing. The counter example I often hear to this is being a fan of a certain sports team. If someone identifies themselves as a Cubs fan you generally assume they really are. But there are always debates about who is a real fan and who is a fake fan and they're not all nonsense. Sometimes people really do fake being a fan of something. Like say I'm a Cubs fan but all my new friends are White Sox fans so I hide all my cubs gear and identify as a White Sox fan to fit in. At this point the identity advocate will probably introduce a notion of "sincerity" into the equation. So you have to sincerely identify as the thing to be the thing. But how do we measure "sincerity then? Doesn't the notion of sincerity mean we are referring to something besides identity?

The way I see it the only way it's possible for there to be sincere and insincere identities is if we are actually referring to something besides stated identity, something more internal, less verbal. In the previous example perhaps you could hook me up to a machine and measure my excitement when the Cubs are winning versus the White Sox. But now we've gone a step back form my identity as a fan. This is because language is always a sign of something else and if we're always talking about our language and never about that something else then we might not be saying anything meaningful at all.

This is the problem I encounter: within queer discourse "identity" is used to refer both to the deeply felt inner self and the language we use to describe that. The general population only sees the verbalizing of identity, they know nothing about the deeply felt inner self and they mostly assume it doesn't exist. If we keep conflating the language with the deeper truth then they will continue to assume that deeper truth doesn't exist because we've tacitly implied that with our rhetoric.

I'm sure some of you will want to say that I shouldn't abandon this language just because of how cis people perceive it and to that I say firstly that I think this attitude may secretly exist within the queer community itself and second that I feel this language is personally unhelpful to me.

To the first point I think about xenogenders. From my possibly ignorant perspective xenogenders mostly seem like a way to play with language and deconstruct concepts of gender. I have no doubt that many are invented without the intention of reflecting any internality but rather to playfully dissect language and gender on a conceptual level. I'm sure that some people make xenogenders with the intention of reflecting their internal self and I don't mean to begrudge anyone who is into them but in general they seem very contingent, labels that can be taken up and discarded on a whim rather than a stable sense of self.

I have also unfortunately become aware of something call therians. These are people who identify as nonhuman animals and many of them are trans themselves. They use the same identity phrasing to describe their connection to their animal. To me it seems obvious that none of these people sincerely see themselves as a nonhuman animal. Rather I think they feel some kind of affinity for whichever animal and perhaps that affinity is deeply personally important to them but that does not make it comparable to being trans. When I say I am a woman I don't mean I have a strong affinity for being a woman I mean I'm a goddamn woman. So in this case and other I think many queer people are not using "identify" to talk about a deep true self but rather playing fast and loose with language to describe what amounts to a hobby.

To the second point I think even if it weren't for all this the identity framing is still very unhelpful to me and my own self-conception. Do I identify as a woman? Yes, technically because I say that I am one. Is that what makes me a woman? I don't see how that could be or else why did I start identifying as a woman in the first place. I think I was already a woman before I identified as one.

Lately I've been using the "woman in a man's body" trope to think about myself in the past and that feels the most true to me. When I was first coming out around 2017 everyone in trans spaces said this was a dated phrasing that no one really used anymore and it seemed like they had pretty much traded it for identity language so I neve thought of myself that way. These days it feels like a disservice to myself to think of myself any other way, because no other framing accounts for the continuity of that inner truth. I was a little girl and I repressed myself because everyone told me I was a boy, I let my body and personality be mutilated beyond recognition and I feel like I'm only now rebuilding it. Identity language can never account for that reality because back then I strongly and insistently identified as a boy, but that wasn't the reality.

Language was only ever the tool I used to get at that reality. Of course I would still respect anyone's identity but I don't actually care about the identity itself, I take it as a sign of the reality I assume is behind it.

So that's my rant on identity language. This somehow ended up really long, philosophical and a little emotional but I hope you like it anyways.