Well This Is A New One.

requested by ziraangel

I often see more gatekeeping presented as a way to prevent detransition. And while this wouldn’t necessarily be useless, it’s a bandaid solution. Working harder to root out the “right” people to transition from the “wrong” people to transition isn’t going to eliminate transition regret. To get at why we have to ask, who are the “right” people? Are they the ones are suffering the most or who have been suffering the longest? Are they the most gender non-conforming ones? Are they the ones persistent enough to pass through checkpoint after checkpoint? None of these things insure that transitioning is going to work for someone: that it’s going to improve their quality of life.

When I walked into gender therapy I was suicidal and had been off and on since I was old enough to understand what death was. I was already being regularly mistaken for a boy. I was adamant that I needed this. My therapist called me a “classic case” and still we talked for almost a year before I socially transitioned. I then spent another year living “full time” before starting testosterone and spent my first six months of testosterone on a low dose prescribed by a fairly paranoid pediatric endocrinologist. I met every requirement. I passed every checkpoint. I didn’t take any shortcuts. And still, here I am: a woman, a butch dyke, further from normality than ever, bitter about what happened to me. Because none of those measures addressed my underlying problem.

What we really need if we want potential regretters to not be certain that they need this is a shift in culture. We need environments without misogyny that are affirming of lesbianism and gender non-conformity. We need girls to grow up free from abuse, supported in their mental health and knowing that they can be anything they want to be and anything they are. We need to encourage them to love and live in their bodies and provide immediate solutions if they find that they can’t. Because by the time that many girls step into a gender therapist’s office they’ve already made up their minds, for good reason, that they can’t live this way. 

I think shifting my understanding of dysphoria from something I “have” to a set of feelings that I experience has been really fundamental and important for managing that dysphoria. This for me has meant that I no longer see myself as a person suffering from a condition, but I experience flare ups in dysphoria the same way I experience any other negative emotion, which is that I sit in it and it is uncomfortable and maybe it causes me some pain but that’s fine, and I note the feeling and ask myself what brought that feeling on and then I move on and do my best not to focus unduly on it. I think many dysphoric women especially have traded the constant self watching that is so central to how women are forced to do femininity, for the constant self watching that dysphoria can encourage, and in both cases it is not healthy to be constantly concerned with and trying to actively alter how you are perceived.

Gender Troubles: The Butches

“I’m happier being detransitioned, but saying that people detransition because they’re “not happy” with transition is disingenuous. The truth is that a lot of women don’t feel like they have options. There isn’t a whole lot of place in society for women who look like this, women who don’t fit, who don’t comply. When you go to a therapist and tell them you have those kinds of feelings, they don’t tell you that it’s okay to be butch, to be gender nonconforming, to not like men, to not like the way men treat you. They don’t tell you there are other women who feel like they don’t belong, that they don’t feel like they know how to be women. They don’t tell you any of that. They tell you about testosterone.”

— Cari Stella, @guideonragingstars, Response to Julia Serano: Detransition, Desistance, and Disinformation

New lino print! Based on an old poster that I saw online but the source of which I couldn’t track down. They’re up in my shop if anyone’s interested! (shop link in tumblr header)

the dialogue around detrans people online right now is so fucking awful lmao…. seen threads full of people talking about how they literally do not give a fuck about the struggles of detrans people whatsoever bc we’re “too small of a group” or are “cis so it doesn’t matter”. it’s just like….. so fucked because we literally have all the exact same struggles as trans people? 100% of the same shit? the only line between the groups is one largely of labelling and choices we make w our bodies (which isn’t entirely true, not every trans person medically transitions or stays on hormones and not every detrans person medically detransitions or goes off hormones)

almost every detrans person i know and have talked to struggles with transphobia from strangers on a daily basis. a lot of us are coming out from having been stealth which i have to say has felt exactly the same as coming out the first time. we need the same kind of healthcare that any trans person might need and struggle to receive it for the same reasons. we need the same kind of legal assistance that any trans person might need and often have to go through the same lengthy headache process of getting all our identification changed. we’re at the same risk of violence and harassment for the ways that we look and move through the world. what is the legitimate empathetic reasoning for not giving a fuck about us? and no, “you did this to yourself so you deserve it” is not a legitimate empathetic reason. imo everyone who struggles with gender and presentation socially and/or medically and/or legally is in the exact same boat and we should all be supporting eachother. its kind of hard dealing with knowing that there are tons of people out there actively declaring that they don’t give a shit about me or anyone like me. it makes it difficult feeling comfortable or safe or cared about anywhere 

As a butch who struggles w dysphoria, the temptation to wear compression tanks, get a double mastectomy, take just a lil bit of T to try to get some kind of results that just might last afterwards, even though I know it’s detrimental to my health- it’s crushing sometimes.

And I do have to put myself first and distance myself from butches who encourage doing these things. Because seeing that makes that little voice go, “oh yeah, look how easy that is, you could definitely pull that off no problem.” And no.

I want to fight that unhealthy part of me. I want to accept my body as it is. Breasts and hips and all.

Enough is enough. Sometimes we have to protect ourselves and other women struggling with dysphoria by standing firm in what we believe and keeping our boundaries up.

I know there’s a lot of overlap in the butch and transmasc communities. But I have no interest in interacting with dysphoric women who promote needless hormones and surgeries or harmful practices like binding. It isn’t a reflection on those women’s worth or value- it’s a protective reaction and sometimes fierce anger that more and more women like me are transitioning.

I’m not gonna do it.

I’m going to learn how to live with myself the way I am. I’m not going to lie to myself and say that taking testosterone and getting unnecessary surgeries is okay or something to even be desired.

And it’s an uphill battle every day, but I know I’m not alone, and that I’ll get to the point where I can stop wishing my body and voice were something they aren’t.

if it’s okay for me to ask, can you explain a little further how you “reconceptualized” your dysphoria? how did you go from that to realizing your dysphoria is rooted in internalized misogyny? @tejuina

–Shiro