trans

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Not Your Poster Child

CONTENT WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS DETAIED DESCRIPTIONS OF INTERNALIZED TRANSPHOBIA & INTENTIONAL MISGENDERING

“Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist.”  – Susan Stryker

A human is born
A life has begun
Is it a boy or a girl?
You must pick one

“It’s a girl!” they exclaim,
Teeming with joy.
But what if that human
Is really a boy?

“Sit like a lady” they say,
Your knees must touch;
“Just put on the dress” they said,
“Stop making a fuss.”

Tomboy! Tomboy! Tomboy!
It’s all she hears.
Losing her femininity
Is something she fears.

Fear of losing the attention,
The praise and the love,
So she puts on clothes
That fit her like a glove.

She grows her hair out
Year after year,
Because deep inside her
Is the fear

That one day they’ll call her
A tomboy again,
And she’ll lose her femininity
Before she really can

Grapple with the fact
That she’s not a girl,
And that this gender façade
Makes her want to hurl.

Until age fifteen,
She puts on an act,
Until she knows
For a fact

That this act
No longer works.
Inside her,
This feeling lurks.

But he knows his body
Will never conform
To social ideals
And so he’s torn.

Does he put in the effort
To be seen?
(And what does that
Even mean?)

It means he struggles
Day in and out,
And his mind
Is filled with doubt.

Transness is beautiful,
Transness is great;
But as a trans man,
I’m filled with hate.

I’m tired of keeping quiet
With nowhere to speak up,
I’ve hereby decided
I don’t give a fuck.

Political correctness
Gets you nowhere in life;
I’m not a poster child,
I don’t determine what’s right.

I’m allowed to be human,
I’m allowed to make mistakes.
I’m now living my life,
And I refuse to wait.

Autism and the Prevention of being Trans
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Autism and the Prevention of being Trans

There’s a problem with anti-trans activists trying to deny gender-affirming care to someone diagnosed as autistic. While it isn’t impossible to receive gender-affirming healthcare with an autism diagnosis, some people have reported issues with being denied on the idea that autistic people do not know their own mind or bodies.

This is becoming a concerning issue when you have to either choose to be autistic or choose to be transgender. I do not mean that you have to choose which one to identify with, as I consider myself to be both, I mean in accessing healthcare. There’s been a trend between transgender people having to choose between gender-affirming care or mental healthcare. James Pisani has noticed an issue where trans people sign up for insurance with good transition care, but terrible healthcare. While it wasn’t discussed in the article I read, when it comes to making a choice, you face mental health issues either way. If you choose good transition care, you get more gender euphoria, you face less personal and public issues regarding how you present yourself, even if it’s at the cost of mental health care and autism support. Say you aren’t the majority of people who made the previous choice, and you instead sacrifice gender-affirming care for mental healthcare. Even if you have the best mental healthcare possible, you will still face the dysphoria or other issues that come from being trans. Being transgender is already a toll on mental health (for most people, I think).

A slider image, with one side showing someone in therapy or similar location with another person holding a clipboard (This is meant to represent choosing healthcare). The other image is someone sitting on top of a car, wrapped inside a rainbow flag (meant to represent choosing transgender care).

Moving on, there’s already been a consistent problem in trying to deny trans identity for a long time. Especially when it become regarded as a “trend”, instead of wider visibility that made people consider their own idea. This exact thing occurs with autism, where some people see the rise in autism diagnoses and consider it to be a trend, rather than the fact they were always autistic and just never had the knowledge or resources to know beforehand.

Correlation between being gender-diverse and being autistic is still under-research. Some researchers, and myself, think that when someone identifies as genderqueer or autistic/ND in some way, that they are less concerned with fitting into society, and are more willing to consider their identity.

I want to wrap this up by the idea that although there’s an overlap in being genderqueer and autistic, that doesn’t mean either should be taken less seriously. I think there needs to be a pushback against the idea that autistic people are incapable of understanding themselves. Thank you for your time 🙂

Sources:

Autistic transgender people are being pressured to choose between gender-affirming care and mental health care
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Embracing Suppression: Gender Stereotypes & My Experience as a Trans Person

There’s a struggle at the very heart of my experience as a trans person. The struggle of trying to navigate a society that heavily reinforces the gender binary in ways that most cis people don’t even think about, while also trying to do away with this outdated notion. A prevailing notion on how one does gender is through their performance. Our appearance & the way we use our body signify to others what gender we are. There is nothing in one’s very nature that makes her a girl, it is how she’s been taught a girl looks & behaves that determines her performance as such. I’ve discussed gender in the abstract, but how does it apply to me? How do I experience gender? Well, I am a demigirl, an identity within the non-binary umbrella where I am a girl, but also partially outside the gender binary. Despite this, in circumstances where I have to interact with mostly cishet people, I desire, but do not achieve, to present as femme as possible, to only be seen as a girl, as I don’t trust the general society to grasp that nuance. If someone even for a fraction of a second thinks that I’m a guy, it’ll create gender dysphoria. So if I’m basically trying to present as a girl, this in a way could be perpetuating the gender binary, by erasing the non-binary aspect of my identity in my presentation. But then how does one present as non-binary? There is a misconception that non-binary inherently means androgynous, because you are neither a boy nor a girl, you must not lean towards looking like either. This just creates a gender trinary, which I feel like is only an improvement from the gender binary in superficial ways. It allows for the expansion of gender in so far as it doesn’t mess with the existing structure too much. In other words, as long as it doesn’t challenge the patriarchy. But then, how do I do my part in transforming society such that the general notions of gender match how diverse it actually is? The only satisfactory answer I’ve been able to come up with is for others to be educated about the nuances of gender. After all, I don’t feel that same pressure in queer, especially trans, spaces. In those circumstances I know I’m around people who have the same or similar enough experience & knowledge of gender that I don’t feel obligated to live up to gendered pressures that are thrust upon me. When I’d go visit my ex-boyfriend, or my ex-girlfriend before that, who are both trans, I knew it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t feel up to looking as femme as I could manage, as they’d still see me as the gender I am. So through my experience with other trans people I know it is possible to live in a society that doesn’t require strict adherence to gendered stereotypes. But I can’t really give a presentation on gender to every passerby on the street, so all I can really do is wait, & until then, hope I’m seen as a girl.

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A Passing Failure

hand waving a white flag against the backdrop of a sky

I am in a classroom, or perhaps at a party, but it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that I am speaking, and maybe what I’m saying is funny or profound but even meaningless words will bring eyes and thoughts around to the body producing them. After I am done speaking, another voice starts. “As HE said…” The “HE” rings loudly in only my ears though, and to everyone else in the room my passing and my failing go by so quietly as to be unnoticed.

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Flunking Bio(logical sex)

The concept of “biological sex” is bullshit. When talking about trans people and the sex they were assigned at birth, the terms “biologically female” and “biologically male” are often thrown around without any critical interrogation into their meaning. They’re a fallback for a lot of people who are aware that saying “born female/male” is reductionist, but who haven’t yet done the work to find more accurate terminology. (The terminology I use and recommend is “assigned male/female at birth”). For a variety of reasons, “biological sex” is a faulty concept, rife with scientific inaccuracies, that subtly undermines and invalidates trans identity. Like a pointillist painting, the closer you examine the concept, the more you realize it’s just a cluster of meaningless points of observation, designed to trick you into seeing a complete picture that was never really there in the first place.

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Coming out as queer to various loved ones (Pt. 2)

TW: transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, dysphoria

“I fell in love with a woman,” I distinctly remember my (then) fiancé saying. That was back in early 2019 when I told him I was beginning to question my gender identity. I mentioned that I might consider taking testosterone someday in the distant future, and that’s when he blew up. If I wasn’t going to be a woman, then he didn’t want to be with me, he said. Soon after having that unpleasant interaction, I received a package I had ordered, which sounded like they could be pills. “Is this testosterone?!” he accused angerly. The exceptional fury took me by surprise. I told him that, no, it was not in fact testosterone pills (do such things even exist?), and opened the package to show him.

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Coming out as queer to various loved ones (Pt. 1)

TW: transphobia, homophobia, biphobia

To put my queer experience in a nutshell: I came out as bisexual in 2018, and trans in 2019/2020. In my family, my mom is the only one who knows either. Since coming out and being out to most people, I have felt like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I can finally be true to myself and stop living a lie around close people in my life. That does not extend to my father or any part of my extended family. When I say family, I am referring to birth/biological family, but as I say: blood, genetics, nor genes mean shit about who is really family.

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Trans Doubt and Acceptance (9/25)


TW: dysphoria

I am trans… or am I??? Part of me knows that I undeniably am. I have had dysphoria for years, although I did not know what dysphoria was or even what being transgender meant. But even still, that tiny voice in the back of my mind likes to sow seeds of doubt in my thoughts. Maybe it’s denial, internalized transphobia, fear, or some other mix of emotions.

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A pass on passing
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A pass on passing

I am a nonbinary trans woman. Within the first year of being out as transgender I was constantly plagued with people asking “When are you going to go on hormones?”, a question which has & still does annoy me to this day.

The dialogue that every trans person must, or should, inherently want to seek medicalized transition, is a deeply flawed & even toxic viewpoint to hold.

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