Trans Politics, Trans Activism, also 'rolling is this transphobic?' thread

I'm not sure if I had an actual point there or if it's just a bunch of vaguely related thoughts but that's ADHD for you

i think you should watch ceicocat's video, left! i think it's a good video.

ok, i went and watched the video i was talking about

the manga wasn't the manga i thought it was, it was a different one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAA1XtDOuH8

i agree with ceicocat on most things

at this point she's more on the "is x trans?" wagon than i am, though

i kind of agree with her larger point - labels just get in the way sometimes. they're tools. the label is less important than what i _do_ with it.

i don't decide what labels people put on me, though i guess i can limit their ability to do so. what matters to me is not whether Shūzō Oshimi is trans or has gender dysphoria or anything like that. he's unhappy, unhappy with being a man. if you're unhappy with who you are, you know, try something different. people don't, they're afraid, like i was afraid.

i was afraid of a couple of things. i was afraid that it wouldn't... _work_, that it wouldn't _fix_ me. and i was right. it didn't fix me. i understand that fear, but... it wasn't a useful question. people who are thinking about gender shit, a lot of times we get confused and ask questions that don't help. "will this fix me?" isn't the important question. the important question is "why did i think i was broken?" i wasn't. i wasn't ever broken.

and the sad thing is that's what so many of the "gender critical" crowd will _say_, will say "there's nothing wrong with you", and i understand that now. they didn't help me understand that. my experience with gender transition helped me understand that. there's nothing wrong with me, and that _includes my desire to change_. that's what they don't get. it's like when the priests when i was young said there was nothing wrong with _being_ gay, there was just something wrong with _doing gay shit_. a statement like that is hypocritical and incoherent. "queer" isn't an abstract concept. was i born queer? no idea. doesn't matter. i can tell you for sure, though, i have acted myself into queerness, and that is a _good thing_.

but i was afraid of it. that's the second thing i was afraid of. i was afraid that i would _like_ it. that whole bit in the video where ceicocat talks about the autogynephilia thing... why is _liking your body_, sexually, such a taboo? why is it a _fetish_? what on _earth_ is wrong with that?

sexual desire, though, that wasn't the fear... the fear was that i would like it so much that i would have to _change_. and again, i was right. by changing, i put myself in a world of pain, but also i got myself out of a world of pain. i feel like i traded up.

that transmaxxing manifesto at the beginning, the way it starts. "the male gender is broken." i hear so many people saying that these days and i mean... what the hell do i know? what do i know from gender? i know lots of men who are happy being men. i know lots of men for who being a man works. i don't feel like i can make a sweeping statement like that.

all i can say is that being a man didn't work _for me_. i tried really hard to be a man, and i failed, and i walked away. i'm not ashamed of that or proud of that or anything. it's just what happened. i don't think there's anything wrong with me for not succeeding as a man. the male gender? idk, if someone's judging whether the male gender succeeds by the standard of "every single person born with a penis has to be happy being a man"... i think that's an unreasonably high bar. if masculinity was more inclusive, i might have been happier being a man. i might even have not transitioned. some people might see a moral judgement in that, but i don't. there's no right or wrong in that. i wasn't happy acting like a man, being treated like a man. i'm happy acting like a woman, being treated like a woman.

what do people want? do they want me to go back to acting like a man? again, that's just not a reasonable expectation for anyone to have. or do they just want me to be unhappy? i guess that's a reasonable expectation. they can't make me unhappy, but they can make it a lot more difficult for me to be happy. that's probably a reasonable goal, if that's one's goal. not much i can do or say about that one. i can't convince them that's a bad idea. all i can do is try to take care of myself, try to protect myself from people who want to hurt me.

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oshimi. Shūzō Oshimi. here's what he says, when he talks about wanting to be a girl.

"no matter how much you look like a girl, if you've got the mindset of a man, then you're not a girl. even if a man becomes a woman, when he sees his new female body, he'll still perceive it through the eyes of male lust. and would then get further and further away from being a woman. that's not what i'd want. i want... to turn into a woman both body and mind."

and it frustrates me, when i see people saying shit like this. how do you know? you don't know. you haven't tried it. maybe it would be like that for you, because i'm not you, but i _have tried it_ and that is _not how it works_ for me, not how it _works_ for thep eople i know. you _act your way into a new way of thinking_. i don't know _how_ to have the mindset of a man. i have this body and other people see me differently, and i _see myself differently_.

and i guess... i mean, the 4tran people are stupid and absolutist and all of this language they use, it's dumb. it speaks to a fear a lot of us have. i didn't want to be an ugly woman. i thought i'd become an ugly woman if i transitioned, and i transitioned anyway, and i was wrong about that. i mean, you can look at my picture, you can see i was wrong about that.

it's hard for me to say that, though, and it's not because of the imposter syndrome. i had that for a long time, and i have less of that now. i don't feel _desirable_, but i'm absolutely an attractive woman. the people who think differently are... not people whose opinions i care about, generally.

my passing privilege, which, i'm growing to accept, is apparently exceptional, _helps_ with that. it absolutely does. i'd have a lot harder time liking myself as much as i do if i had more stereotypically male features. but.

but. the bulk of the difference is that it used to be i wasn't happy with myself. the body i lived in didn't feel like mine. and now it does. it's not a perfect body, but it's my body, and i've grown to love it. anybody who does that... to me, anybody who does that is beautiful. for whatever that's worth.

if oshimi says he isn't a woman, if he says he's a man, then i absolutely believe him. he's a man. BUT. i believe he could probably be a woman, he could _become_ a woman, _in body and mind_. probably not everybody could do that. like, i couldn't become a man, no matter how hard i tried. but i _did_ try. i tried very hard, for decades, and it didn't work. so maybe i'm wrong. maybe oshimi couldn't ever be a real woman. he's got a pretty good shot, at least, i'd say. someone who feels like oshimi does... shit, it's worth trying. i'd say.

i mean when i was an egg i was very often sad and lonely and struggled with relationships of all kinds. so i guess you could say i was an incel in that i wanted a lot more closeness/human connection than i got

i'm still kinda lonely now but in a different way. since i started transitioning i've been getting out a lot more, my social life has never been so active. however, because i feel so much more extraverted i'm not as comfortable with my own company and alone time is harder for me. i guess it's a better class of loneliness on the whole

for me i wouldn't say everybody who feels lonely and socially isolated and uncomfortable around other people is necessary an incel... personally i feel like inceldom is more of an unhealthy way in which some people choose to deal with that, one that seems to pretty much exclusively be a path open to, or chosen by, people who see themselves as cis men.

"trans" can mean all kinds of things to all sorts of people - there's the "born this way" camp and the "gender is fake" camp. i tend to look at this divide in kind of a dialectical sense, in that there's aspects of both in my gender experience. why _is_ it only people who see themselves as cis men who tend to be attracted to inceldom?

i've been watching this video called "the horror of having a body" made by someone who i guess i'm just going to assume is a cis man. and all through the comments i see posts from what i assume are cis women talking about yes, this is what it's like for me, this is what it's like to be defined by my body. there's this comment by "someonethatexists359" (on-point username):

There's a figure of a womb in our labs at school. I remmember us looking at it and one of the boys going "so women are just corpses for (bearing) children?" he probably said it impolsively without thinking about it, but it still terrifies me that this is the way some people view my body, and by extention, me.

i look at that comment and god it just cuts to the heart of patriarchy. yes, that _is_ how the people who want to control our bodies view us. either corpses for bearing children or, in my case, i guess just a corpse, a walking corpse. that's the horror. and they exempt themselves from that, their _privilege_ is that of not having to think about their bodies, not having to be defined by their bodies like we are.

and.

that's also a symptom, right? a symptom of gender dysphoria. "dissociation". a feeling of _not being connected_ to one's body. cis or not, there's this near-total binary divide, it seems. the incels have this anxiety, an anxiety which Swolesome points out very well is ultimately a product of patriarchy, of men setting standards for men's bodies, that if they don't have the physique of a "chad" that they can never meet women's standards.

it's ridiculous, a ridiculous myth, and its maintenence requires _not listening to women when we talk about what we find attractive_. one of the reasons i find myself attractive is that i look at what i'm attracted to, and what i'm attracted to is not necessarily the sort of people i see on tv. the sexiest man alive is, what... chris evans? he looks ok, i guess, but i'm more into dad bod.

what's funny is that i look back at my body in the before times, and i remember how i felt about myself, and i look good! my body looks good. i'm not gorgeous, but i'm hardly the hideous hosebeast i thought i was. there's a sort of distance i didn't have before, because at the same time i look at the pictures and i don't know who that is. that person doesn't _look_ like me. i don't recognize them as me. it's a weird, confusing feeling. anyway, my body is attractive, but i'm not as attractive as i am now because i'm not _happy_, and it's apparent that i'm not happy. i was talking to one of my friends a month or so ago and he talked about having a conversation with one of our mutual friends, back in the '90s, about how much pain i was obviously in, that i was trying to hide it but they both knew that i was hurting a lot. people who hate themselves just aren't as attractive as people who love themselves, is how i feel.

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there's this trans narrative that a lot of people, myself included, love to hate, and it's called the 'wrong body narrative'. you see it in jan morris' 'conundrum'. the idea is that trans women are 'women trapped in men's bodies'. i can see how you could reduce the idea down to that, but it never felt like that for me. i didn't feel like a woman and my body didn't feel like a man's body. i had this brain that i liked and this body that i hated and i didn't know how to reconcile the two. when i was young i was fat, and i got bullied for being fat, and i got depressed and stopped eating and became skinny but it didn't change anything. i felt people were judging me, were laughing at me behind my back, even though they weren't. and when i got skinny i started thinking about all the clothes i'd _like_ to wear and i felt like there was no point, that i'd just look like a man in a dress. i had this body i hated and i didn't see any way to not hate it.

like, i look at those pictures from before, and i don't have the _wrong_ face. it's my face. it's just not _me_. i don't know whose face it is. and that's kind of how i felt about my body before, it was in a literal sense my body, but it wasn't _mine_. i didn't hate my body. it was ok, i guess, i guess it was nice that someone gave it to me. i just had no idea what i was supposed to _do_ with it. if someone asked me that now, if someone went up to me and was like "so i have this body, what do i _do_ with it?", i wouldn't have any idea how to answer that question. it doesn't make sense to me. it's not something i ever think about. it's like asking "how do i breathe?" it kind of comes automatically to me, i don't know what to say if you don't know how to do it.

i see so many cis guys, who i assume are cis guys, and they just don't give a shit about how they look to other people, in the same way i didn't give a shit about how i looked to other people. cis men aren't actually immune to judgement. their privilege is just that they're not _aware_ of how other people are judging them. i didn't really know how i looked when i walked around with pants so large they looked like clown pants, frayed at the bottoms because i kept stepping on them. now that i'm not one of those people, i see just how many people there are like that. and it's not just men. my ex, who's a cis woman, dressed like that, still wore worn, oversized clothes from when she was in high school twenty years later. the only difference is that people were very quick to judge her to her face, that she didn't ever have a chance to be as ignorant of her body as i was of mine.

this video i'm watching is about the horror of having a body, but for me... i have a body that's aging and breaking down and you know, at some point i'm going to die, and that just... that just means so little to me, because i wake up and i look at myself in the mirror and i just... _feel_ my body, not as in literally touching it or anything, i'm just _aware_ of the sensations in my body, not just the aches and pains but all of the ordinary stuff as well. like, these are the muscles in my arm, this is what they feel like, these are my fingers on the keyboard, this is what they feel like. it's just so amazing. it just feels _so fucking incredible_. it's not that i was in the _wrong_ body and i'm now in the _right_ body, it's that this is _my_ body. it belongs to me. it's part of who i am.

i didn't have that before. i had a meatsack that i had to drag around with me, a meatsack that i hated and wished i didn't have. it did nothing for me, gave me nothing but pain. that's how i felt.

corpses for bearing children. women are treated like corpses for bearing children. that's horrific. that people just _accept_ that, think that's _normal_, that's horrific, having to fight those people, those people in power, who treat my own body like that... it's galling. it fills me with rage. the main thing, i think, that's changed for me is now i feel like i have a body, now i feel like there's something i'm fighting for.

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ok abigail thorn has ruined me for this body horror video. the guy making this video is talking about the philosophical concept of a hammer. he is illustrating this concept with stock footage. it's perfectly serviceable but goddamit i want to see a 360 degree panning shot of this guy holding a hammer while wearing a latex dress. this. this is the difference between how the patriarchy views men and how the patriarchy views women.

interesting post from Left

glad i made it past a minute in that video, Kate, where it was revealed they're reading from some incel manifesto ... i was seriously like wtf, this is supposed to be insightful?

Today is the 50th anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association's vote removing homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Frank Kameny, the main advocate for depathologizing homosexuality, described it as "the day we were cured en masse by the psychiatrists".

The APA has continued to struggle to come to terms with recognzing queerness. Transness wasn't even recognized by the DSM until the DSM-III in 1980, which listed "transsexualism" as a disorder. The DSM-IV, in 1994, was the first edition to replace "transsexualism" with "gender identity disorder", which was then revised again with the DSM-V to "gender dysphoria". (I remember reading about gender identity disorder in the DSM-IV. I didn't meet the criteria. "Oh well," I said. "So much for that idea.")

As far as I know the DSM still lists "transvestism" as a disorder. Ray Blanchard was a key member of the working group which defined this "paraphilia", and incorporated the idea of "autogynephilia", a baseless and pseudoscientific idea he came up with, as one of the criteria. In response to criticism that this contributed to stigma against the trans community, Blanchard said, "How many people who make a joke about trannies consult the DSM first?"

One of my favorite movie bloggers did a review of the 1911 Louis Feuillade one-reeler "L'orgie Romaine":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SUpYd3GLlw

I was talking about the film, which covers the notorious reign of Elagabalus, with one of my friends yesterday. It's mostly... it's frustrating the way historical queerness is framed. The author isn't a Roman history nerd but does a decent job summarizing the popular conception of Elagabalus.

The popular conception is that Elagabalus was demonized for his "perversions", which he was. The popular conception is that the "perversions" in question was a reference to his having sex with men. He did have sex with men, and this was in all likelihood a major factor in his being executed.

What frustrates me is that this framing tends to ellide one of the biggest reasons Elagabalus was despised - not for homosexual acts, but for effeminate behavior.

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Elagabalus is a figure from ancient history. Ancient historical sources are fragmentary and frequently unreliable. Mary Beard, in her lecture on Elagabalus, argues that when we are talking about Elagabalus, we're not talking about a historical figure as much as we are about a _myth_. The myth of the Bad Emperor. This means that the question, for me at least, is less "what did Elagabalus actually do", but _why_ people thought they were the Worst Emperor.

I don't know ancient Latin and don't know its approach to pronouns. I'll henceforth be attempting to refer to Elagabalus using they/them pronouns. (I might fuck up. I'm bad at pronouns.) The narrative I outlined as the "popular conception" above is, I think, fundamentally a valid one. Seeing Elagabalus as a man is fundamentally valid. The thing about myths, though, is that they're narratives, they're stories we tell. They're interpretations. The popular conception doesn't _accurately_ represent Elagabalus as an emperor. Neither, I think, does the narrative I'm giving here. I'm not telling the truth about Elagabalus. Ancient historians were interested in less than facts and more in constructing a narrative. Good Emperors. Bad Emperors. All judged by the morals standards of the writer in question.

What fascinates me about history is less "great man" history, but how people _at the time_ felt and acted. How are we different from the people of Rome in the 220s CE? How are we similar? That's what interests me. People change, _conceptually_. I've seen it in my lifetime. The idea of "transgender" identity, as we know it now, didn't exist when I was born, barely existed when I was 20. That's what interests me about history. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, as Ovid didn't say: "Times change, and we are changed with them."

Elagabalus' _identity_ doesn't interest me. "Homosexual", as a noun, and "transgender", as an adjective, are both anachronistic present-day constructs. Used in historical terms, they're constraints, limitations. They take something complex and make it more understandable. They also necessarily distort. They leave things out.

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One of my favorite works of Roman literature is a poem known as "Catullus 16". It is infamous in classical studies, and was for a long time considered unprintable. This in itself is a sign of values dissonance between the late Roman Republic and more modern times. In this poem, Catullus responds to two men who have condemned his character for writing "soft" poetry. He says, in the first and last lines of the poem, "I will fuck your mouth and ass".

His poem doesn't map very well onto present-day understandings of sexual orientation. If one man accuses another of being "gay", we wouldn't necessarily consider it an affirmative defense if the accused responded with "I'll fuck you in the ass!"

In Roman culture, it wasn't _homosexual acts_ there were stigmatized. The stigma was around _bottoming_. This was an act seen as effeminate and inferior. Roman culture seems not to have had any equivalent to our contemporary concept of "topping from the bottom". Many prominent Romans are chronicled as having engaged in homosexual encounters. For a man to top was not harshly morally judged. For a man to _bottom_, however, was the worst of all evils.

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The print of "L'orgie Romaine" I've linked to has this as the first intertitle:

"Elagabalus created an empire of female domination of the courtesans amidst whom he felt comfortable and happy"

This is a _crystal clear_ moral judgement. Elagabalus has, since shortly after the end of their reign, been viewed as the Worst of the Bad Emperors. This is what Roman culture viewed as evil in its purest form. Elagabalus felt _comfortable and happy_ among women, and these women were _dominant_.

This horror is, in fact, a key factor in Elagabalus becoming ruler in the first place. Elagabalus, like their immediate predecessors, was a teenager. 14 years old at the time they ascended to emperor. Elagabalus and their predecessors were all, per the historical record, puppets, puppets of Elagabalus' grandmother - Julia Domna. Julia Domna, of course, could not become emperor herself. She was a _woman_.

These are the fruits of patriarchy. These are the fruits of Roman culture, of imperialism, domination, conquest. These are the values that have shaped the West up until today.

What changed, between 218 and 1911? Many things. What did _not_ change was the belief that women were inferior to men. Unfit for power. Unfit, even, for _self-determination_.

Elagabalus' effeminacy was a direct threat to the supremacy of men. Patriarchy requires that manhood and womanhood be distinct. It is not relevant what those distinctions are. Those distinctions can often be utterly arbitrary. What matters is that there _are_ distinctions. Elagabalus, through their effeminate behavior, flouted the deepest moral principle of patriarchy. They lived _among women_ as a _woman_. All of the other evil acts they committed - and according to all accounts, they committed a number of very evil acts - are secondary to this greatest of all offenses.

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Today, 112 years since 1911, these are my principles: Nobody can be said to be superior or inferior based on their sex, their gender identity, or their presentation. Sex is not gender. Gender is not _presentation_. Love is love. All of these things feel natural, true, _right_. I fear no one's judgement for holding these beliefs, for living these beliefs.

I am also a woman who feels comfortable and happy amidst effeminate people. Why is it so terrifying for me to say this aloud?

patriarchy

really great post though

I am fascinated by the roman penetration binary and wish we knew more about how gender worked in those societies- it would be so cool to know what people who weren't male roman citizens thought about sex and gender and sexuality. what was really going on in some of those mystery cults? what if anything do accusations made to discredit elite roman men tell us about how non-elites and non-romans behaved, how they were assumed or expected to behave, or what they desired?

I am fascinated by the roman penetration binary

It's not that uncommon, though, right? Isn't that how it works in some pockets of contemporary Latin American and North African/Middle Eastern societies? I feel like I've read about that in Paul Bowles. Also: prison.

Who did the penetrating vs who got penetrated obsessed the Greeks too; for damn sure the latter couldn't be an older man.

at what age was a boy/man supposed to give up anal stimulation? did they actually give it up or just pretend they did in public?

with the romans it seems like the crudest possible version of this where the entire empire comes off like a sort of violent phallic cult that needs to keep fucking but can't survive being fucked even a little

the roman empire fell because they allowed themselves to be penetrated (by goths, "immigrants", wokeness, whatever you like)

According to Foucault, sometime before marriage. xpos

the roman empire fell because they allowed themselves to be penetrated (by goths, "immigrants", wokeness, whatever you like)

― Left

no, it was because they stopped penetrating. the roman empire is only as good as its last hard-on. when a thousand years old you are, have rock-hard erections all the time you will not, hmmm?

is fascism like viagra for imperialism?

fascism is a parakeet playing jenga badly

I am fascinated by the roman penetration binary and wish we knew more about how gender worked in those societies

at what age was a boy/man supposed to give up anal stimulation? did they actually give it up or just pretend they did in public?

it's about renaissance florence but recommend michael rocke's forbidden friendships

there's some kind of issue with a transphobic... tiktok... mortician? i feel like that last sentence was generated by an ai. probably it just means i'm old. and there are lawyers involved. i don't know. tiktok is like three generations younger than me.

Idaho's trans health care ban was struck down by the courts. I had to email my boss this morning to find out how this impacts my job — like, if we have to send out letters or something. No word yet.

An interesting New York Times interview with Eddie Izzard: comedian, marathoner, aspiring politician. (Free link; I'm a subscriber.)

Thanks for the link. Holy shit @ those marathons, my god!!!

Thanks for sharing the link unperson! I'm really glad I was able to read it. There are lots of media narratives about trans people, not always positive, and paywalls frustrate me because here are all these cis people saying all this shit about us and I have no idea what it is because I don't subscribe to their newsletter.

This is good to read because it is a trans person telling her own story, and I'm in favor of that. It's also more complicated... she's being interviewed by David Marchese, a celebrity interviewer who is, to the best of my knowledge, a cis man. Also, as the end of the article notes, "This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations."... and it's in the New York Times. My experience is that the NYT's editorial policy towards trans issues favors showing "both sides" of the "trans debate". This is in contrast to the editorial policy of the Washington Post, which from what I've read is pretty unambiguously on the side of "trans rights are human rights".

It's good for me personally to read because Izzard (who I thought was going by Suzy last I heard? But I'm not always up to date on these things) was very much a role model for me... she helped me to understand myself and accept my transness. I do want to talk about how, though, because the way Izzard describes her life in this story is very different from the way I understood Izzard when I was growing up. It's complicated and very much gets into the whole "gender as social construct" thing.

Izzard talks about having known she was trans since 5 and having come out and the article talks of her having coming out publicly as transgender in '85, but that's not how I understood it. There's a little.... I'm gonna blame the Times on this, actually. This is bad and biased framing. Now, admittedly I'm making an assumption here, but I find it _extremely unlikely_ that Izzard got up on a stage in 1985 and said "I'm transgender". No, what I heard her saying in specials like "Dressed to Kill" is that she was an "action transvestite". Which isn't the same thing as being transgender! Transvestites _can_ be transgender, or trans, or anything else. That's wasn't the understanding in '85. The word "transgender" technically existed by '85, I think, but the concept of being "transgender" as we understand it today did _not_.

It's important for me to say this because of my experience the first time I tried to come out, in 1996. I wasn't able to understand myself, much less explain myself. All I could say was what I was not. I wasn't a "transvestite" because I wasn't a man who dressed in women's clothes. I wasn't a "transsexual" because I didn't want to get my dick cut off. (Other people might frame GRS different ways. That's the way I framed GRS at the time.) I was... well, I didn't know what I was. I just kind of felt like a girl?

The way Izzard influenced me was that she challenged the framing I grew up with. Not in the '90s, but later. For a long time I thought of "transvestites" and "transsexuals" as being distinct categories with nothing to do with each other. So when I found out that Izzard, who I thought of as a "transvestite", a cisgender, heterosexual man who just liked dressing in women's clothes, actually identified as _transgender_, it was really liberating. It helped me to understand that these weren't rigid categories that defined who we were, who we were allowed to be. That wasn't until around 2019, though. It was one of the many things that helped me understand myself as trans.

The thing that is most disappointing to me is to hear that Izzard is an open defender of J.K. Rowling's statements about trans people. Izzard's statement that "I don't think J.K. Rowling is transphobic"... I don't take that as the opinion of a trans person who I happen to differ with. Her statement is an untruth. It saddens me to hear trans people who are speaking from a position of relative privilege making false statements of this sort. Rowling isn't just a transphobe. Her transphobia is causing a great deal of harm to trans people. So this I think is one of those instances where a trans person is aligning herself with transphobia. I'm always saddened to see that happen, but it's particularly painful when it's someone who has been a role model for me, who did help me to understand myself as trans.

So yesterday I happened across a reference to a Mythbusters spinoff called the "White Rabbit Project" from 2016. Turns out one of the things they talked about was a supposed plan by British intelligence to, well, trans Hitler. Yeah, apparently somebody at some point had the idea of putting E in his food and, I guess, force femming him? This is one of those things that gets described as "unbelievable but true", and for me, the jury's out on the "true" part... the only source seems to be a guy named Brian Ford, who wrote a pop history book on "World War II Secret Weapons", and doesn't provide a source for his claim. So, grain of salt on that one.

What I was more interested in is how this 2016 show would approach the legend. It's fascinating to me because nobody on the show (which was presented by the old Mythbusters build team) seemed to have any concept of the possible relevance of this to trans people. They talked about the possible effects of it and they said things like "well it could cause nausea" which is... not really a major side effect of estrogen. Nobody mentioned gender dysphoria. It was all "he'd get boobs and his weenie would stop working". It was never stated outright that the gendered assumptions underlying this idea were bullshit, but yeah, look, Hitler probably didn't start World War II because of gender dysphoria. Sounds like an absolute waste of estrogen. There were so many people in Britain who really could have used that estrogen, but noooo, _they_ can't have estrogen, only Hitler gets estrogen. Fuck you Britain.

But also like. The world has changed so much in the last EIGHT YEARS. It's fucking wild.

I have kind of come back a lot to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" over the, I don't know, year or less since I've become aware of it. It's this... I guess the best I could call it "ambiguously trans". I like the ambiguity in these stories, their resistance to providing clear, straightforward trans narratives. That's probably why the least interesting character in "Bokura no Hentai" for me was the girl who's just a straightforward trans girl. The character I connected more with was Parou, the more "otokonoko" character, even though I was never anything close to or resembling the "otokonoko" trope myself.

Anyway, this video on "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" I thought was really good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illSp1oVXzA

First off I kind of love the weird way it's structured, to where it just takes ten minutes in the middle to have someone review some of Hibari's outfits. That's so much of what makes the show for me, she has just really amazing outfits... Hibari just has just a vibrant _style_. A lot of trans wish fulfillment is just thinking about all the cute outfits that would be possible. That gets put down a lot and treated as superficial... like, it's not specific to transness... under patriarchy to be concerned with fashion whatsoever is kind of dismissed as sort of vain and image-obsessed. The sad truth is, as much as I was actively hostile towards my own appearance pre-transition, I didn't really stand out. I'm there wearing ten year old pants that just look like clown pants because I'd lost fifty pounds since I bought them, and I see plenty of cis guys out there who are just that slovenly. It's not remarkable. Male privilege is kind of a double-edged sword... as a passing trans woman in her late 40s, a lot of my passing privilege is that I have the option of not being perceived in the same sense that cis women in their 40s aren't perceived, aren't seen as _suitable objects of desire_. Which sucks because being desired is kind of personally important to me. I don't want to not be perceived - invisibility for me is about as hazardous to my health as silence - but I do at least have the option of looking _unremarkable_.

The main thing, though, that I connected with is how Pyramid Inu talks about... the cost of doing this representation that aligns so closely with present-day trans experience, of depicting with startling accuracy both how trans women _behave_ and the way trans women are for a lot of us aspirational figures, the cost of that is that the show can't ever reach narrative closure, not in that era. Kousaku can't wind up with Hibari... it's not a product of a world that can see a cis guy and a trans girl get a "happy ever after" kind of ending. It's, like, literally unimaginable. That's a lot of what transness was for me, growing up... literally unimaginable. I think that's what strikes me about these sort of amgibuously trans figures from this era... they're sort of visions of a way that transness could exist in a time where I just _couldn't_ exist as trans. It makes me feel less, I don't know, invisible. Maybe.

BTW it's a fucking tragedy that there was never a manga or anime of Guldeen: The Future Wanderer. Trans mecha directly inspired by "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!"? Oh my God that this doesn't exist is proof positive that we live in the worst timeline.

I don't think, honestly, it would be possible to remake or do a sequel to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" today. A lot of it is dependent on the culutural role of gender non-conformity. Because today somebody who presents and acts like Hibari does in that show and you can just say oh, wait, that's a trans woman... and as soon as you do that you have to kind of deal with the reality of what it's like being trans in 2024. One of the things that really clicks with me about "Hibari" is that it's a work that _feels_ authentically trans but is at the same time escapist fantasy. Trans escapist fantasy just isn't something that's narratively _accessible_ in 2024. It's unimaginable to me in the same way that Hibari and Kousaku winding up together was unimaginable in 1983. At the same time, it's something I really desperately need, something I'll take wherever I can find it. I think that's a lot of what draws me to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!".

ok i know we probably have another trans thread but youtube keeps recommending me more and more niche trans-related weeb videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca5B1DxdkZw

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/01/trans-people-england-more-likely-mental-health-condition-study

i wonder why, the guardian

important to note that a majority still don't appear to have long-term mental health conditions. the stigma that trans people are just fucked-up headcases must be overcome too. these results back up the notion that under conditions where they're not treated like scum by the majority of the commentariat they'd have similar mental health patterns to the population as a whole

those seem like low rates of depression & anxiety for trans people if anything given how the uk is

No, what I heard her saying in specials like "Dressed to Kill" is that she was an "action transvestite". Which isn't the same thing as being transgender! Transvestites _can_ be transgender, or trans, or anything else. That's wasn't the understanding in '85. The word "transgender" technically existed by '85, I think, but the concept of being "transgender" as we understand it today did _not_.

You're correct - she made a big point of saying she was a tranvestite and not a transexual in his early shows! I used to know almost all of Dressed to Kill and being an executive transvestite was a huge part of it. She is going by Suzy but I also read that she doesn't mind Eddie or other pronouns since she knows that how most people have known her for decades.

*her* early shows obv whoops

those seem like low rates of depression & anxiety for trans people if anything given how the uk is

― ufo

i think that if i were in the uk i would feel a lot more pressure to... act like i wasn't mentally ill, to mask (i don't think of my autism or ADHD as "mental illnesses", i'm just borrowing the framing here). because like imago says "the stigma that trans people are just fucked-up headcases must be overcome too."

my being trans is strongly correlated with my being a fucked up headcase! for the first 40 or so years of my life i believed, because i was _taught_, that my wanting to be a woman meant there was something deeply, deeply wrong with me, that i was probably secretly a serial killer or something, and that i could never ever tell anybody about it. that shit didn't just _go away_ the second i started taking estrogen. it wasn't just like "oh i'm a girl everything's fine now and i have no problems".

and yeah UK media outlets like the guardian centering the trans "debate", the idea that it's legitimate to question the validity of my existence as a human being, that kind of thing does have a tendency to undermine a person's sense of self-worth. one of the things i struggle with is this constant pressure to be one of "the good ones". i'm not one of the "good ones" because there are no "good ones". like oh sure, being trans is fine as long as you're not also mentally ill or communist or polyamorous or kinky or, you know, _queer_ in any meaningful way. in a lot of ways that's what "passing privilege" boils down to, i have the ability to look like i'm _not obviously queer_ in certain contexts.

living in the us, in a trans-supportive environment, i have kind of a different challenge, which is communicating to people that i'm a fucked up headcase _because_ of systemic transphobia, when the assumption has historically been that the whole "trans" thing is in itself the mental illness. like i think there _is_ causation in a lot of cases, it's just the exact opposite of the direction a lot of people assume it is.

*her* early shows obv whoops

― Benson and the Jets (ENBB)

well that's the thing, it's hard to say even if it _is_ a whoops because she's "ok with any pronouns". it's one of those things where it's hard to know what that means. like in her case "preferred pronouns" are genuinely that? "preferred pronouns"? and suzy is her "preferred name". so it's ok, i guess, that the NYT does a whole profile on her and consistently calls her "eddie" even though her preferred name is suzy?

that's the thing that makes it difficult, again, all of the _pressure_ we're under. saying "oh i'm ok with any pronouns" is a great way to take some of the sting out of being misgendered. if people are gonna call you by a man's name and use male pronouns for you no matter what, you know? it's something i also saw in with, like, rachel humphreys, lou reed's partner for much of the 70s. will hermes, you know, he does his best navigating the shifting landscape of gender identities, and one of the things he points out in his prologue (which is all of his lou reed book i've actually read so far lol) that humphreys was ok with "any pronouns", and i mean, if you look at the shit people _said_ about her back then... it's not like she was in a position to say "no, i am a woman and you are going to respect that." i have the ability to be able to say that, _now_. i didn't in 1996, which is one of the big reasons i didn't transition back then.

i think you kind of see that in a lot of people who have been out as some variety of gender non-conforming for quite a long time. the stuff trans people go through now, it's often invisible to cis people and is really hard to talk about. i think there's a pretty strong likelihood that suzy has spent her whole life being called the f-slur. when people are transphobic, usually they don't call us the t-slur, they call us the f-slur. i mean, how do you deal with something like that? for a while i did the "i'm not an f-slur, i'm a dyke" thing, and now i'm like "sure, ok, i'm an f-slur, is that a problem?" (i'm "reclaiming" it but not to the extent that i'll say the actual word in ways that will make people uncomfortable!)

which is to say that while i'm horrified at suzy saying that she doesn't think j.k. rowling is transphobic, i absolutely understand where that impulse is coming from. i don't blame her for it. it is, though, especially horrifying to me, seeing a trans person caping for jkr. to me, that's a special case, that's when someone externalizes internalized transphobia. that's some of what gets contrapoints criticized from certain people within the trans community - there's specific stuff that's not wider public knowledge that makes that explicit, but again, when you look at where she came from, which is 4chan... you come up through there and you're gonna get a fuckton of internalized transphobia, you're really gonna learn to hate yourself in a way that a lot of trans people don't. and a lot of times it's people who in one way or another externalize internalized transphobia, the blaire whites, the caitlyn jenners, who are held up by cis media and cis culture as being _representative_ of us. but there are more complicated cases! richard o'brien is a positive role model for a lot of trans and gender non-conforming people, is non-binary, and they're also transphobic. contrapoints' videos, overall they've been very positive for trans people. her work has done a huge amount to promote trans acceptance. that's way more important than the occasional undercurrents of internalized transphobia in her work. those occasional undercurrents don't invalidate the tremendous things she's done to further the cause of trans rights. it's just _there_, occasionally, and sometimes it comes out in ways that hurt some of us.

like i said, suzy izzard was really influential on me, had a positive influence on me in a lot of ways. she just doesn't speak for trans people (any more than i speak for trans people) and some of the things she says are actively harmful to a lot of trans people.

I have tended to ignore her based on my hatred of british comedy and my assumption that her thing was just part of the long UK tradition of drag-as-comedy* (as distinct- in my mind at least- from drag-as-drag which may be comedic or not) which I now see was a reductive POV and that element was just a means of hiding in plain sight

*see US transphobes periodically trying and largely failing to rile up UK transphobes over the (to my mind) deeply conservative tradition of the pantomime dame (maybe worth reconsidering my perspective on this since I know nothing about this part of the culture)

the JKR thing is a very bad take but it's worth remembering how cis celebrities who have called her out have been treated in this country - in this case it would mean weeks of headlines and probably serious career consequences

those mental health stats are BS

personally I don't know of any trans or queer people who aren't headcases but I don't trust anyone who isn't a headcase in this world

No way was Izzard ever drag-as-comedy tbf.

I know that now but I made that assumption based on what people around me were saying

I have tended to ignore her based on my hatred of british comedy and my assumption that her thing was just part of the long UK tradition of drag-as-comedy* (as distinct- in my mind at least- from drag-as-drag which may be comedic or not) which I now see was a reductive POV and that element was just a means of hiding in plain sight

*see US transphobes periodically trying and largely failing to rile up UK transphobes over the (to my mind) deeply conservative tradition of the pantomime dame (maybe worth reconsidering my perspective on this since I know nothing about this part of the culture)

i mean i do think the whole tradition is interesting, there is a part of the gender non-conforming experience that is deeply conservative - i mean, just look at how many trans women come through 4chan. i do wonder, speculatively, if there is perhaps some correlation to how passing-centered one is and conservatism. a lot of times "passing" comes hand in hand with, you know, tradwifing. that's one of the reasons i was so, i'll say, ambivalent to the notion of "passing" early in transition. i didn't want to tradwife.

what i remember of izzard's stuff is that it was very "yes, i'm a transvestite, but when you think of what a "transvestite" is in your head, that's _not_ who i am". part of it is "hiding in plain sight" but part of it is that, i mean, the thing about being a "pioneer" is that a lot of the time one just has no fucking idea what one is doing. literally as far as most of us know we're just making this shit up for the first time. so izzard is out there in what we might call today "genderfuck". i mean even the fact that she's coming out there as a transvestite and _not wearing a skirt_ is kind of a mindfuck to me at the time but the genderfuck goes way beyond that.

but at the same time there's a lot of "look i'm also a basically normal person". that's still a difficult thing to me, i'm _not_ basically a normal person? but most of the shit i do is normal shit. and even when i do stuff that other people would think of as "weird", people make way too big a deal out of it. i don't want people to think of me as being "a normal person just like anyone else", but i also don't see why people would find it "weird" if i decide to go out in public wearing booty shorts and thigh-high striped socks (which i tend not to do, mostly because i'm not always up to being stared at). it's like, look, i just felt like dressing that way today! that's kind of the sense i get from izzard, she's up there on stage in tight leather pants and high-heeled boots and makeup and is like "yeah i like dressing like this, why is that a big deal".

that said i didn't, in the 90s, recognize her gender stuff as being in any way along the same spectrum as my gender stuff. a lot of it was that at the time i was interested in the more traditionally femme aspects of womanhood. looking at it now, it makes sense, like at that point she'd been publicly gender non-conforming for, i guess, a decade, and one's sense of style sort of tends to evolve over that period of time. a lot of it, i think, genuinely is a lack of lived experience. patriarchy sucks, being a woman sucks a lot of the time... at the same time, there are, like, 40 years of female gendered experiences that i've missed out on. transition isn't as simple as pushing The Button and going from a 43-year-old "man" to a 43-year-old woman. i've gotten a crash course in a lot things, good and bad.

there were all these ideas that just... wasn't any overarching conceptual understanding of them. i had a friend back in the '90s, when i was first trying to come out, who said they didn't have a gender. nowadays, that's easy for me to get, oh sure they're agender, cool, at the time, though? at the time i'm like that meme of columbo reading "gender trouble". "gender huh? see my wife got a cousin lew and she tells me lew don't have one. you ever hearda somethin' like that?" so izzard comes out and says "action transvestite" or "executive transvestite" and i come out and say "i don't know, i'm not really a transvestite and i'm not really a transsexual, i just, kind of, want to do girl shit sometimes", and it turns out those two things probably have a lot to do with each other... it wasn't something that was easy to recognize at the time.

-

when it comes to the larger notion of drag i do tend to... and this is a false binary, like a lot of binaries... differentiate between monty python-style pepperpot drag humor where it's like "ha ha, don't i look ridiculous and stupid, men wearing dresses are disgusting" and the sort of drag humor where the person has obviously put a lot of effort into it and knows how to look good. one of the things i think about with regards to "humor" is this 14th century rabbi by the name of kalonymus ben kalonymus, his big work was something called "eben bohan", which... i haven't read the whole thing, but apparently it's kind of a mix of serious pieces and more comedy bits. and there's this bit in there which is him lamenting over not having been born a woman. some critics have read this and said oh, yeah, this is one of his comedy pieces, god, that's hilarious, who would want to be a _woman_? a lot of trans people, on the other hand, particularly transfemmes, we read this and it's just like "oh my god, he fucking gets it, this is what gender dysphoria _feels_ like." and maybe it was just, you know, "satire" like people in the past have said it is, that its deep expression of gender dysphoria is just, i don't know, us reading into something that isn't there. who knows? the author has been dead for something like 700 years now. even if it is "satire" i find a lot of value and solace in being able to see someone writing 700 years ago writing something that resonates so deeply with me, with my experience of gender dysphoria.

it's not fucking "lola", is what i'm saying.

the JKR thing is a very bad take but it's worth remembering how cis celebrities who have called her out have been treated in this country - in this case it would mean weeks of headlines and probably serious career consequences

i mean she could always just have not said anything. she didn't have to call her out _or_ defend her.

personally I don't know of any trans or queer people who aren't headcases but I don't trust anyone who isn't a headcase in this world

― Left

i'll be honest my sample is skewed, there are some really good, legitimate reasons for people who are emotionally and mentally well-adjusted to, like, not actively seek out my company, haha

and also yeah the mental health people i engage with, there's a pretty common, if unspoken, understanding that a lot of "mental health" issues are caused by systemic oppression beyond our individual control. like yeah i feel like shit because people treat me like shit. that's not exactly a failure on my part, but i still gotta deal with the consequences of that.

I know that now but I made that assumption based on what people around me were saying

― Left

plus wanting to avoid media depictions of gender non-conformity that one suspects might be pretty hostile is... i mean, it's an evaluation one has to make. if i'm going to go see "the crying game" looking for an honest and sensitive portrayal of the trans experience i'm going to have a real bad time.

the news from yesterday - Cheshire Police didn't pursue Brianna Ghey's murder as a hate crime despite it being so very obviously so, and the sentencing judge made it perfectly clear in her sentencing remarks that she agreed.

ok lol anybody remember Val Venis
the 1990s wrestler with the pornstar gimmick
he's apparently now a libertarian and has decided trans people shouldn't exist. so someone bought up the domain valvenis.com and redirected it to a trans rights website, which is extra hilarious because it highlights how nobody is even slightly interested in val venis and certainly is not going to go to this guy's website
i bet gorgeous george would've said "trans rights"

Val venis
Has a small weenis

in less entertaining news tumblr's ceo's recent actions have led to a mass exodus of trans users (to cohost, i guess?):

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/

silberling's article notes:

Tumblr is in an extended downward spiral. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo (now TechCrunch’s parent company) for $1 billion in 2013, but the platform struggled to the point that Automattic bought Tumblr for just $3 million in 2019. Last year, Mullenweg said that the platform loses $30 million each year, and later, he reassigned the majority of Tumblr’s staff to other projects inside of Automattic. But no one on the trust and safety team was reassigned, so these moderation decisions likely weren’t impacted by the company shake-up. However, Tumblr has a bad track record for content moderation decisions, especially those involving trans people.

ok this shit is fucking wild

https://metalinjection.net/news/breakups/hardcore-band-fires-their-vocalist-for-the-most-insane-unhinged-behavior

lead singer dosed one of the other band members, sixx, with estrogen long-term so he could steal that band member's girlfriend

it, uh. didn't work. for the record.

Meanwhile, this shit isn't just in red states.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nassau-county-banning-transgender-athletes-from-competing-at-its-facilities/

xpost Sounds like the plot of the next Daily Wire movie

xpost Sounds like the plot of the next Daily Wire movie

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

doesn't reflect poorly enough on trans people, for the daily wire to make it a movie they'd have to make the diego character trans

god i'm giving them ideas now aren't i

Meanwhile, this shit isn't just in red states.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

oh yeah, institutional transphobia has been on the rise for a while now, and it's spreading

one of the reasons focusing on the positive is so important for me is because it's... not as _visible_ as the negative

i don't know anywhere in the world _less_ transphobic in pdx, but even here, it's very much on the rise. there's more hostility. every day it's something else. cishets mostly don't know about it. it's hard even for us queer people to know about it, because a lot of the reporting on it is paywalled. yesterday, for instance, the wall street journal published an article titled "Can Warner Bros. Uncancel J.K. Rowling?" i don't have access to the article, but yasharali writes about it:

https://www.threads.net/@yasharali/post/C3ys75XxGt5/

"David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery has mounted a full-court press to woo Rowling back into the fold which includes regularly speaking to her and flying out to London to have dinner with her"

and, i mean, i'm not really in the know about media companies, but the context i've heard is that well of course zaslav is, zaslav is a scumbag, a mercenary, interested in nothing more than artificially inflating the value of WB before dumping it on someone else

which may be true, but god, name me someone in charge of a major media property who _isn't_ a mercenary scumbag?

More about that here
https://www.therowlinglibrary.com/2024/02/24/exploring-the-relationship-between-warner-bros-and-j-k-rowling-three-key-points-revealed-by-the-wall-street-journal/

depressing but not surprising. honestly, most people don't have any idea that rowling is a transphobe. it's easy to look at that and conclude that there's no negative impact to supporting transphobes. obviously i'm hardly unbiased on this issue but i do think that conclusion is based on a misread of the data. while the current hostility towards trans people _is_ dissuading at least some people from transitioning or leading to them to detransition, at the same time, large numbers of people are continuing to pursue transition, even given a fairly hostile and repressive environment.

it's the small stuff, the everyday stuff, the little kindnesses. there's the headlines and then there's the viral tiktok about the guy and his child in smalltown texas who saw a trans woman for the first time and was overwhelmed with, like, happiness. joy is a social contagion. i keep saying that because i keep _seeing_ it.

i don't pay much attention when trans people get killed, only for my own well-being, not because it's not important. i know someone did, recently, and people are being hateful, and maybe it'll keep going like that. more violence. more killing. more blaming _us_. maybe nobody will connect that back to rowling. maybe it won't affect warner bros.' bottom line. ever. they'll keep raking in the bucks and turning a blind eye to the little "side projects" their business associates have and it'll just be some insignicant minority on social media talking about "cancelling" them.

well, i'm biased. i can't imagine i'd take that bet.