rage

[kindkit]

If any of you who have me friended agree with this secret from today's fandomsecrets, would you please defriend/unsubscribe me now?

Especially if I have you friended/subscribed/granted access back.

I don't want to associate with people who think I'm a liar who's just pretending to be trans in order to get male privilege.



(No, I haven't resumed reading fandomsecrets. But I saw this linked to, and foolishly followed the link, and now I am simultaneously enraged and horrified at the possibility that the OP, or one of the agreeing commenters, could be someone I know.)


ETA: My head aches and I'm tired, so I'm going to crawl into bed with a book. I mention this so you know why I won't be answering comments for the next 12 hours--it's not that I don't appreciate your support and general coolness.

Comments

[dingsi]

[Warning: comment might be tldr; and I guess I'm also preaching to the choir here. But I hope both you and kindkit understand that sometimes one needs to get it off one's chest and it's so nice that I have an environment (via friends/Dwircle/flist) where I can say all this without feeling nervous or vulnerable.]

it holds out the idea that there is a "right kind" of transman, and if you just jumped through all their hoops...

The "right kind of trans*" thing is so... it's a wall-banger for me but sadly very pervasive. Most people even seem to have problems realising that, hey, access to hormones and surgery is MOSTLY OUT OF OUR HANDS. We could be the nicest, willingest, our-body-hatingest trans guys on earth but we still need to have a trans-friendly medical insurance, available therapists, money, time, mobility, other medical resources available, the goodwill of all the gatekeepers involved, and if/once all those boxes are checked we also need to be healthy enough to be ready for treatment (some trans people have allergies or chronic health conditions that prevent them from ever leaving the pre-hormones and pre-op stage).

Even in cases where they ARE aware of all this, then they usually remove their support when confronted with trans men who don't completely hate and detest their body every waking* minute, or who say they would like having biological kids, or who complain that having to have one's ovaries and uterus removed to be considered male (even though you cannot see them on the outside and they have stopped functioning due to testosterone) is violating their rights to bodily integrity. I've tried so many times to explain but it's like talking to a brick wall.

And what hurts the most is that this policing is coming not just from cis people, but from other trans folks, too.

* which reminds me: the "requirements" are so overwhelming and the trans narratives usually so narrow that I often felt guilty if I dreamed of myself in a female body instead of the male one I craved. They even police your SUBCONSCIOUS. How fucked-up is that.

[lilacsigil]

Policing your subconscious is thoroughly fucked up, and I hope that the next generation of trans* people get a chance to learn from the current generation's narratives and realise that there is more than one path. Not that that necessarily helps when medical and legal authorities are trying to push everyone into being just one, easily observable kind of trans* person!

I'm cisgendered, but a lot of the gatekeeper/not real rhetoric overlaps with language and power structures around illness and disability, so it's not necessarily unfamiliar to me.

[dingsi]

but a lot of the gatekeeper/not real rhetoric overlaps with language and power structures around illness and disability

My personal knowledge is limited, but I've noticed some similarities too. The infantilizing, for example ("you can't know what's good for you, WE do"). Or how people have to walk a tightrope between being ill enough to "deserve" treatment but not so ill that they can't jump through the hoops as required. And don't get me started on unwanted advice...

[kindkit]

As usual, I'm nodding along to everything you say.

I often felt guilty if I dreamed of myself in a female body instead of the male one I craved

So that's not just me, then? *laughs hollowly*

[dingsi]

... whew, I'm glad I'm not alone in this. Seriously, I read those blog posts and such where people said "but when I dreamt I was always [true gender]" and positioned that as a valid detail to suggest transness (because of the [false] assumption that your subconscious can never lie to you] and I felt like a failure. I used to beat myself up over it or feel doubtful and confused whenever I dreamt I was female without also hating it in my dreams.
Of course, I also dreamt of being male sometimes. Or flying. Or the apocalypse. *shrug*

[kindkit]

Or the apocalypse

Yeah, I have tons of dreams that are about my anxieties, not my desires. So the fact that right after I bought my first men's clothes, I had two different dreams about wearing dresses . . . that's not my subconscious telling me I'm not trans, that's fears working themselves out.

I am SO TIRED of the "I always knew" narrative. I mean, if that's someone's experience, great. Yay them! But it's so past time for that to stop being the normative kind of transness. I'd love to see people who are in a place of relative safety (not, for example, in danger of losing access to medical treatment if they don't tell the right story about their identity) talking openly about having gone through uncertainty and self-doubt.