I shared this 3 years ago today before my egg even cracked...
And honestly, rereading it is chilling a true. I never experienced dysphoria before transitioning, but I definitely felt that those were not my spaces or my people.
On top of that, when around other women I was incredibly self conscious... in the spaces that felt the most natural, the relationships that felt the most natural, I felt like I was intruding.
I was so intimately aware of the threat of men and because I thought I was one I was so terrified of being threatening and making the women around me feel unsafe... because doing so would mean being feared and ostracized by the people I felt most natural with.
For the longest time I thought this was maybe just because I was autistic, and even then I still couldn't understand why I felt natural around women and those socialized as women... It was a sticking point in my mind constantly because I know I wasn't socialized female and I have a bio-brother who lived through similar circumstances and didn't remotely turn out the same way.
And honestly as I finally found true family... I was low key terrified for the longest time because the people I adopted were almost all women (at least, we thought so at the time... funnily enough most turned out to be trans-masc sometime after adopting them, but that didn't change the terror...)
All this is to say we're not men who decide to become women... we're women who decide to stop pretending to be men. Who grew up being forced to pretend to be someone other than who we are, and being told that the idea of being who we are is impossible, gross, and wrong. And even after we have to live in terror of people accusing us of pretending to somehow abuse other women.
it’s infinitely more accurate to characterize a trans woman as a woman pretending to be a man than it is to say she’s a man pretending to be a woman
Reply by valkyriethunderbitch
This is such an important point, and it hits at the crucial problem that even when cis people do genuinely try to wrap their brains around trans people, they tend to have trans men and trans women entirely reversed.
When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.
Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.
Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.
Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?
If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.
Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.
Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.
A trans woman cannot be a “man pretending to be a woman” because by definition we aren’t men and never were.
Reply by thecuckoohaslanded
“exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around”
So many people have no idea how true this is. Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.
One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.” This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).
There can be benefits, here and there. But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.
Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces. That does not mean we belong in them. Or feel comfortable anywhere near them. Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying. Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying. You are in a constant state of panic around men. And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family. We NEVER feel safe. And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men. They’re horrifying. What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk. Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this. I have never been an athlete. My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable. I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports. The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING. Men don’t see women as less than human. They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.
Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them. Your LIFE depends on whether they notice. That’s not safety. That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place. Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.
We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people. Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe. Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity. We have to lie to get them. We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are. We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.
Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make. If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:
Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.
Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.
For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces. But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women. Everything else is social. Everything else is acting. Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die. We can never really be anything other than female.
Womanhood is not the thing trans women have to fake.
Why does my dumb ass keep bouncing around these platforms instead of just using them consistently? new posts should be novelty enough to let the dopamine flow why
Hands down the worst most bullshit thing about Friendica...
No notifications for moderation reports. Only way to know if something has been reported? Gotta manually go check the list (oh and no way to clear items from the list, or do anything with them at all...)
Few months ago I had a rude awakening to this, and then apparently it's been a minute since I last checked (I try and check every time I think of it).
Thankfully the only recent report was a remote server but eww... I hate that it took me that long to block that server.
The funny part is that the (not actually a) crossposter I'm using for Fedi/ATProto stuff is that it natively has quote posts. Friendica has had quoteposts forever, I suspect other AP software has had quoteposts forever, yet Mastodon refuses to implement them.
I'm feeling really grateful today and just wanted to share that feeling.
I'm grateful for... * Living in a time when HRT is available * Having easy access to it even though I live in the state of Texas * Being blessed by the boob fairy (46B after 6-months when most trans-femmes are lucky to hit A-cup after 2 years... insert suspense tone for what that means for later) * HRT absolutely demolishing body/hair growth and making everything very manageable * Liking pickles before HRT so it's not as confusing * HRT feminizing my face enough that I feel comfortable going out without makeup * My hair, which was just a short mess before... now just magically grew into a cute bob with zero effort (and this is it's maximum length... I do lament not having longer hair though) * Having an incredibly supportive adoptive family * Skirts, dear god the skirts I've got now are so damn comfy * Randomly knowing how to adjust my voice properly so I skipped voice training entirely * A work from home job that allowed me to easily transition before ever worrying about work * A Christian boss (also owner of the company) who was baffled at the idea I even had something to worry about with coming out at work... in a traditionally conservative industry * Being born it Illinois which makes it trivially easy to update my birth certificate (just waiting on the legal name change documents first so I can do both at the same time)
* being a grower and so small that I don't need to tuck in 90% of cases and couldn't if I wanted to * being grey-ace and not phased by the shrinkage * not really having bottom dysphoria... that shit's expensive AF
I don't 100% love the platforms I'm on 100% of the time but calling one or more of them evil seems inappropriate/disproportionate? I don't get people who think Fedi or Bluesky should fail.
My first post. Been looking into Friendica lately so decided to give it try. My post will be mostly related to TV and Movies, climate issues, food security. Personally I have a nihilistic view of the world, do not think the future is bright...
@Shiri Bailem thank you for the warm welcome. I am still trying to figure out how to use Friendica , as the info is not displayed like in Mastodon or Pleroma. Any good clients for iOS?
Original post is too long for Bluesky. Click this to read.
Someone on fedi decided that they'd use their Fedi account as a syndication feed for their blog and switch to Bluesky because nobody (t)here respected her boundaries, which is sad but perfectly understandable. Then some clown replied that they would be blocking her now because Bluesky is pure evil or something and it's like bitch that's what she was talking about. That's the boundary violating behavior.
I was reading a Bluesky post by Roxane Gay about how Rx drug commercials are weirdly upbeat and that unearthed the memory of this haunting commercial for heart failure meds that used old folks singing "Tomorrow" from Annie and that activates my fight-or-flight response to this day.
You know what's great to learn at 38, right before bedtime one night, after a whole life time of struggle...
That your mother traumatized you with ADHD to the point where actually pushing myself against ADHD is a trigger... making it so no amount of coping skills can help me push myself for any real length of time...
I'd try and do something that requires a push, even a little one... and be crying... and I thought it was just the feeling of hitting my dopamine... but nooooo... now I'm unpacking that it was me getting triggered at the feeling of pushing my reserves at all...
That explains so damn much and makes me feel so damn hurt and angry...
I was forced to push myself so far so often as a kid and she didn't ever relent when I was critically over-extended on dopamine... usually around cleaning. I'm remembering so many times crying and sobbing on the floor because she demanded I clean to an extreme standard and I wasn't allowed to do anything else until I met her approval...
And I've been running my whole life fucking kneecapped by this... I thought I just had it worse than most (with ADHD) on my ability to push myself on tasks... but no... it's because I realize now I can't fucking push myself at all because my fucking brain just jumps straight to that extreme pain and trauma right away...
Now I'm fucking crying when I should be trying to sleep...
i spent a sizeable portion of my childhood shut in my room with "you're not coming out until it's clean!" And without guidance on how to clean it.
I push through hard things like this as an adult with the mantra "something is better than nothing" and just chip away at things.
And I sit with my kids when cleaning their room, talk through my process and coach them. That's been really healing, coaching my kids and also my ADHD friends; it's like re-parenting myself!
@contradogma friendica definitely follows more of the facebook format style, one of the reasons I chose it for this instance. That and the fact that it is basically the swiss army knife of social, attempting to support everything it possibly can.
Biggest downside is the poor UI and that's the entire reason it's not my default recommendation for the fediverse.
@contradogma it's mostly things being in weird places, easy to get lost... if you're even a little bit of a tinkerer it's no big, but for the casual computer user it gets really frustrating really fast.
ie. try and find where to go to change your profile picture.
It's 0130. I'm trying to confuse my brain into letting me sleep by looking at a directory of radio stations. I click on the page listing ones out of Denver, Colorado. I scroll down to the Internet Only section and become curious. I clock the link to it, thinking it is a normal webpage. I let the tab launch itself. Soon my eardrums are assaulted by the autoplay. I'm scared shitless even though I have earbuds in because what if the other people in the house heard me jump? I'm able to kill the tab and return to what I was able to listen to, but now at a much lower volume.
So, fellow butterfles, remember when I mentioned Friendica yesterday? Instances running the latest version let you post to ActivityPub, the in-house DFRN protocol, and ATProto. You'll have to give it access to a preëxisting BSky account but there you go.
You can also have multiple sub-accounts as well as puppet accounts for a variety for platforms (say if you want to also use Tumblr), let me know if you have any questions!
After one of the owners died, work has been struggling with not having admin access to some of our systems, namely Google Workspace.
We finally got that access... so now I've sent the email to my boss about my name change. I verified with my boss a month or two ago that he's not going to fire me for being trans (it's actually a cute story...), that way I could safely start the legal name change process... but I've been holding off on otherwise being "out" at work because of this account thing...
So finally sent an email to my boss about the new name... it's the last place where I wasn't out!
I made something to scratch an itch that's been bugging me for years... will save me a lot of time and trouble on some of my work (and possibly personal) projects...
(For anyone wondering my current use case, I have a tool I wrote for work that's sitting on top of peewee and sqlite and it's been a massive pain to expand it out... this isn't something super special, but for the 20k-40k or so entries this should do just fine searching/querying/etc, even before adding indexing... and it'll make rebuilding my toolkit faster as well as easier to maintain since there's no firm structure to the resulting database)
Want to learn real quick that "leftist" does not automatically mean "good person" or "free from bigotry"?
Call them out on body shaming or misgendering monsters.
It's also a painful reminder that so much "acceptance" is just performative.
If you think I'm valid for being fat, but then insult a monster for being fat, it tells me that you never actually saw me as valid.
If you think my gender transition is valid, but then purposefully misgender an awful trans person, it tells me that you never saw my transition as valid.
Because if these things are true and valid, then being an awful person wouldn't matter!
Jolene (Meoww) :heart_trans:
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