Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

*wrong sex sorry

new DN just dropped

haha

kinda side jaunt, deflatormouse i loved your post and i may or may not get back to it. in the meantime i wrote (but didn't post) a thing yesterday about disgust, and then today i wrote this which i figure i will post:

I've found myself talking semi-seriously about what I've started calling "kyphophobia" and today I'm thinking, hey, it's probably worth explaining seriously why I talk about it and what it means to me.

For some number of years now, sometimes I'll be in situations where someone will say "lean back" or "stand up straight" or some such thing, and I will, and they'll say "no, that's not right". That was frustrating, but also kind of routine. My body not behaving the way I wanted it to has been kind of a lifelong experience.

I was born with a developmental disorder that's now known as "dyspraxia". It wasn't medicalized at that time. It was, however, clear that I was unusually poorly coordinated compared to my peers, and as a result I was treated pretty much the same way anyone with any kind of developmental disorder is treated. Oh, you're not good at this thing that everybody else is good at, what's wrong with you? It was something I could get by without it being acknowledged or treated in any way, which I think in some ways is an advantage. Now that I'm middle-aged, though, I find that there are a lot of, like, really effective ways to treat this stuff, and I'm thinking, gee, it would be great if I'd had this 40 years ago instead of being yelled at constantly because my body didn't behave in the ways other people expected.

And this is interesting because this experience is to some extent _correlated_ with my transness, because one of the interesting things about my body is that I have this thing called "hypermobility". Like, there's a normal range of motion joints have, and my range of motion goes a fair bit beyond that. It's a spectrum. I'm not, like, a contortionist like you'd see at sideshows, though I have met some trans people who genuinely are that flexible. It's still enough to qualify as hypermobile. And it turns out this _hypermobility_ is something that is statistically correlated with transness, along with a few other things, like for instance neurodiversity. I got no idea why. As far as I know, nobody has any idea way. Anybody tries to make the slightest _bit_ of causative inference here and I will psychokinetically glare daggers at your brain until you stop. (No, wait, I'm being completely serious here. I don't have psychokinetic powers. Or the ability to double-jump.)

A lot of hypermobility is associated with something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes. There are like 13 of these. I haven't been diagnosed with any of them, but it turns out it mostly doesn't get diagnosed. Most people aren't aware of it, aren't aware of the symptoms. As it turns out this is something that's pretty easy to test for! You can genetically test for EDS, which isn't true for a lot of other ways in which people are different. Honestly I'm pretty averse to getting tested for anything just because of the way people use genetics as a form of gatekeeping. If I say "a lot of trans people have EDS", somehow that turns into "if you don't have EDS you're not really trans". I am strongly and actively opposed to that sort of transmedicalist approach, so I haven't had my karyotype done or any of this other sort of genetic testing, because as far as my being trans goes, the results don't matter.

For EDS I guess it does, though, so I'll probably wind up getting tested at some point. For the moment, though, all I can say is that I do have joint hypermobility. See, I didn't think that having joint hypermobility would be correlated with dyspraxia at first. It confused me. I was like, wait, if someone's joints can move that much, that seems more like a superpower than something that would make you uncoordinated. The thing is that humans have the normal range of motion we do for a reason. Because my body moves in so many ways that most people can't, the idea of "OK, here, this is the most kinetically effective way to move", that's pretty difficult for me to get to, even now.

The other thing about my hypermobility is that I wasn't aware at all that I was hypermobile until after I transitioned. Some of the biggest symptoms of gender dysphoria for me were dissociation and depersonalization. I didn't so much feel like I was born into the "wrong body" as much as I resented having a body at all. I hated how it looked, sounded, and felt, I didn't see any possible way to change that condition, and as a result, I mostly tried to ignore it as much as possible. So much of the joy of my existence is what I call embodiment - the feeling of having a body and existing in that body for the first time.

And part of that is realizing the ways in which my body is different from "normal" bodies beyond, like, the trans stuff. When I started spending more time around other people (another knock-on effect of my transition), people started seeing me do my normal wrist stretches for my carpal tunnel and asked me "Wait, how do you do that?" I genuinely had thought that everybody could bend their wrist that far. I didn't think of myself as hypermobile because I wasn't a contortionist or anything. I also realized that my back wasn't curved the way backs usually are, so I went in to get spine X-rays. My physical therapist went and looked at them.

"OK, so these are the ones of you bent over - where are the ones of you standing up straight?"
"Those _are_ the ones of me standing up straight."
"Ohhhhh. Uh. So did this just happen, or...?"

Apparently it's unusual for someone to have kyphoscoliosis as severely as I do and just not _talk_ to anybody about it for decades. Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever how to benchmark pain, what's really severe and I need to get looked at, and what's something I can just deal with and don't need to talk to anybody about. I don't know how much it's _normal_ for people to hurt. See the thing is that physical and emotional pain have a _lot_ more in common than people often like to acknowledge. Not only did gender dysphoria hurt to such an extent that it was very difficult for me to accurately understand or diagnose other sources of pain _before_ transition, but I am still dealing with some pretty significant long-term effects from spending several decades working really hard to ignore the effects of an extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition, one that I really fucking needed to get treated. When it got so bad I couldn't ignore it, I tended to deal with it by doing things like curling into a ball for hours on end or screaming "IT HURTS" repeatedly, and being unable to elaborate any further. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hypochondriac.

My physical therapist is actually really great. I was able to tell her why I spent several decades not caring about my body, and she understood really well. She gave me some physical therapy exercises I can do in case I have days where I'm too depressed to get out of bed. It's worked out really well - sometimes doing the exercises gives me the kind of strength I need to actually get out of bed.

-

All of that is pretty much just background, though. What really has me thinking about this whole thing is what happens when I tell people I'm a hunchback, which is that people will tell me I'm not. It's funny, because the thing I was most scared about when I was coming out as trans was that someone would respond with "no you're not". When people tell me that I'm not a hunchback, though... well, it's just given me a lot of perspective. When I was coming out, what worried me most is that if somebody else said I wasn't trans, _they might be right_. When someone's in a position of authority, it's just so easy to kind of assume that what they're saying is right. With my kyphosis, though, I find people who are situationally in positions of authority arguing with me about my own body. Not maliciously, is the thing. Like one of the people telling me I'm not kyphotic is trans herself. That's kind of what's interesting to me.

I say "I'm a hunchback" and not "I'm kyphotic" because nobody fuckin' knows what "kyphotic" means. I've thought about, you know, is hunchback a slur, am I using a reclaimed slur, but ultimately I gotta tell people things in language they'll understand. Except they don't, because the only thing they know from "hunchback" is Quasimodo.

I don't really know a lot about _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_. I haven't read any Victor Hugo. I didn't see the Disney version (came out after my time). I think I saw some of the Lon Chaney version. I really like him as an actor, even if his girl voice in the sound version of _The Unholy Three_ wasn't exactly all that and a plate of chips. (Heat from fire, fire from heat, Lon.) Overall my impression is that it's a good story, a good movie, and my GOD is it kyphophobic.

Like kyphosis really isn't a super rare condition. Lots of people have it. It's a form of scoliosis, which again, is pretty common. The only conception anybody has in their mind of it, though, is this grotesquely deformed creature, which, like, OK, he's not evil, he has a heart of gold or whatever, that's nice. The Disney character design makes him look pretty loveable even. He's still deformed. I was actually writing about this the other day, the disgust response. Humans often feel disgust when we see something that we consider "extremely ugly". So the only idea in someone's heads of a hunchback is someone who's extremely ugly and disgusting, even if the moral lesson is that, hmmm, when I see someone who I consider to be so ugly that I'm disgusted by them, I shouldn't act on that emotion.

So when people tell me I'm not a hunchback, not kyphotic, what I hear them saying is more that "You're not extremely ugly, I don't feel disgusted by you". Which is good! I'm glad they don't consider me extremely ugly and feel disgust when they look at me. I'm still a hunchback, though!

It helps me to frame things in this way because the stakes for "kyphophobia" are so incredibly low. Nobody's going to try to "clock" me as a hunchback. It's annoying that people try to claim I'm not kyphotic when I am, but people who recognize me as kyphotic don't think of me as disgusting or grotesque because of it. I don't suffer prejudice because of my kyphosis. It's actually not a big deal at all.

And this is frustrating to me because in my mind, that's how people _should_ deal with my being trans. I just can't imagine saying that I shouldn't be allowed in the bathroom because my being kyphotic makes me a predator or some such ridiculous nonsense, but thanks largely to transphobic media narratives, people seem to actually believe that my being trans rises to that level of significance. It's just so bizarre to me that people are looking at me for "signs" of something that's far less observable than my FUCKING HUNCHBACK and meanwhile not only don't _notice_ that I'm a hunchback, they don't BELIEVE me when I tell them that I am! You ask me about my bones and I'll say things like "kyphosis, scoliosis, thoracic compression fractures", but transphobes, all they say is "BONES OF A MAN". Like, it's not even about them being _wrong_. It's not meaningful, accurate, or useful anatomical knowledge. There are a lot of interesting things about my skeletal system. If all someone's interested in doing with it is arbitrarily assigning a gender, they're missing a _lot of clinically interesting shit_. I guess that's what frustrates me the most about the pseudomedicalism of transphobes. If someone doesn't _like_ my body, fine, but if somebody's going to spend that much fucking time thinking about my body, it's absolutely appalling to me that they wouldn't at least find my body _interesting_.

-

So I guess... that's what my kyphosis, my hunchback, my experience with "kyphophobia" means to me. My body is interesting in a lot of different ways _other_ than being trans. Some of the ways in which it's _more_ interesting as well as more _obviously_ interesting are seen as _less important_ than stuff that just really doesn't matter at all to most of the people who make a big deal about it. The "kyphophobia" I experience is directly a result of negative, inaccurate portrayals of "hunchbacks" in the media which lead people to think of "hunchbacks" as grotesquely ugly and disgusting. The only way I can even _describe_ my kyphotic condition to them is by using a word which I'm just gonna go right ahead and call a "slur".

Despite this, my being a hunchback has _not_ caused me to suffer any significant prejudice. Even when people have misunderstandings about my being a hunchback, they don't go into a whole moral panic about it or react at all in a way that's grossly incongruent with my actual condition. People don't assign any moral value to my kyphosis. All of these things are particularly remarkable to me because of how starkly they contrast with the way people react to my transness. Talking about "kyphophobia" is in large part, for me, a way to communicate how grossly inappropriate and malicious the prejudice associated with transphobia really is. My being a hunchback isn't in and of itself important or noteworthy, and it _shouldn't be_.

Not only did gender dysphoria hurt to such an extent that it was very difficult for me to accurately understand or diagnose other sources of pain _before_ transition, but I am still dealing with some pretty significant long-term effects from spending several decades working really hard to ignore the effects of an extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition, one that I really fucking needed to get treated. When it got so bad I couldn't ignore it, I tended to deal with it by doing things like curling into a ball for hours on end or screaming "IT HURTS" repeatedly, and being unable to elaborate any further. I got a reputation for being a bit of a hypochondriac.

ok this is why revising my drafts is good, the "extremely painful, potentially lethal health condition" i'm talking about isn't kyphosis, it's _gender dysphoria_. having kyphosis hurts but god, nothing hurts like gender dysphoria.

I didn't so much feel like I was born into the "wrong body" as much as I resented having a body at all. I hated how it looked, sounded, and felt, I didn't see any possible way to change that condition, and as a result, I mostly tried to ignore it as much as possible. So much of the joy of my existence is what I call embodiment - the feeling of having a body and existing in that body for the first time.

i'm telling you, Plux Quba is the best! it's the only high school classic that I still go back to a lot (i am probably forgetting something). it's... i wouldn't say it's front-loaded, but it is "top-heavy" in that most of the density and physical mass is located in the first 2 or 3 tracks which are each like a minute long. And then after that the dominant voices on the record are disembodied voices.
So like the disembodied voices on Plux Quba are really the clearest expression i can find of how i experienced life as a child. Of, above all, detachment- and also perceiving things slowly, through a haze, and of the tactile and sensual being limited to the euphoria of a gentle lull, a brain sensation like ASMR.

Maybe what i'm trying to describe is trouble activating. And i still experience that some of the time!

I don't know if it's dysphoria or something else, because most of my life i regarded my body as just an avatar, and that kind of outlook leads to neglect and forming bad habits and it becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Having the sense that the self and the body are separate, or the mind and the body has been a very good way to experience life as a void ime.

I think I required other people to snap me out of it, honestly. I needed people to force me to be present, in real time. And I needed to be touched! It was never something I could do on my own, or by thinking or talking.

I hear you about how it's easier to just say a recognizable, misleading thing.

I don't know if it's dysphoria or something else, because most of my life i regarded my body as just an avatar, and that kind of outlook leads to neglect and forming bad habits and it becomes like a self-perpetuating cycle. Having the sense that the self and the body are separate, or the mind and the body has been a very good way to experience life as a void ime.

― O Fundo Escuro de (Deflatormouse)

um yeah that's actually textbook dysphoria, that's dissociation, that was most of how i experienced my dysphoria. i legit didn't think i had dysphoria, because i thought "dysphoria" just meant constantly hating your dick and wanting it cut off, which i never did. (yeah i've had it cut off but i didn't ever hate it or even _want_ it cut off or anything, there was just other stuff i wanted that was incompatible with my continuing to have a dick.)

anyway "dysphoria" turns out to be all kinds of shit that i just thought was totally normal. and that also meant that when i felt bad because of dysphoria i didn't ever think of it as "dysphoria" or imagine that it had anything to do with my gender. i just hurt a lot and i wasn't ever to make the connection about _why_ i would have these attacks. like i'd see a girl in a pretty dress and my brain would be like "i wish i could be pretty like that", but i couldn't allow myself to consciously acknowledge that, which didn't make me feel better and sometimes i feel like might actually have made it worse. i felt like wanting to be pretty the way girls are was awful because women had to deal with patriarchy and all that and it was awful of me to want anything like that, i felt like i didn't have a right to want that stuff. i was never big into the stones but i thought about the lyrics to "paint it black" a lot.

My thing with the Stones is the indelible image of their recent incarnations playing Start Me Up or it's Only Rock n Roll in a hockey stadium makes me forget how good they actually were in the 60's.

anyway "dysphoria" turns out to be all kinds of shit that i just thought was totally normal. and that also meant that when i felt bad because of dysphoria i didn't ever think of it as "dysphoria" or imagine that it had anything to do with my gender.

Yeah it's a tough thing to recognize and diagnose.

like i'd see a girl in a pretty dress and my brain would be like "i wish i could be pretty like that"

I have only and always had eyes for the boys tho. Not sure if that complicates things more, or less 😅😂😭

Yeah idk on second thought I mean I have worn eye glitter and mascara, little girls' plastic hair clips, pink and purple feather boas etc on rare occasions, like, the overall look i was going for was still basically male but there is prob some repressed shit going on here LOL

Like at the very least there is def a certain pixie-ish candy/glam/kawaii style that I'm drawn to and have emulated at times

i mean i don't think it's necessarily helpful to be committed to any one label, that's just how it went for me because i present "binary femme" (although also things change and evolve over time, i'm not actually very femme most of the time - i wear sweaters and jeans or t-shirts and jeans). the way i went about it was that anything i was afraid to do because of how people would judge me, i tried it out to figure out how _i_ felt about it. and, you know, one road leads to another; i've done lots of things since starting to explore that i was absolutely sure i _never_ wanted to do. so i'd say don't be afraid to try that, particularly if it's something like... the biggest thing that was a challenge for me was feeling like i had to "dress my age" and that is _absolutely_ not a requirement.

Thanks Kate <3
Oh I’m not at all concerned about what to call this. Much more focused on how I can use it to live more fully

Yeah I do a lot of things that are not age appropriate, nobody gives fewer fucks

I just realized Tuesday was the 20th anniversary of the live premiere of Brian Wilson's "Smile". This is, was, an important album to me. I've seen multiple trans readings of it. Not sure why. For me it's the idea of it. This fragmented, incomplete thing which has sort of been _reconstructed_ many years later. Except "reconstructed" isn't quite accurate. In 2004, it was constructed for the first time, in ways and using methods that wouldn't have been possible in 67. At the same time, a lot of the people who were part of those '67 sessions had passed away, were gone. There's a sense of loss overshadowing it. A sense of "what could have been", of "if only". It's hard not to feel that way about myself. It's hard not to feel a sense of injustice. My constant struggle is to acknowledge the grief I carry with me, grief I will always carry with me, without allowing it to harden into _grievance_. Grievance leads to entitlement, and entitlement leads to the dark side. Or something.

In any case, I've never gotten on really well with people who held on to some prelapsarian idea of the "real" Smile. The theoretical me who didn't get to transition when I was 20 isn't the "real" me. My incomplete transness manifested in fragmentary ways. I wasn't able to genuinely smile. At best I was able to work up an unconvincing imitation. The metaphor isn't perfect. I genuinely love Smiley Smile for what it is. My past self is someone I... have compassion for. See value in. I don't love what they did. It was hard and painful.

If people want to construct their own versions of Smile, cobble it together using what they have, out of the bits and pieces they have access to... I love that. I love _derivative work_. I kind of think of all work as being derivative work, in a way. Smile is one of the bits and pieces a number of us, I guess, have cobbled ourselves together from. The idea of... the Creature raging against its creator... it's not enough for me. More and more these days I think of myself as my own creator. The world gave me these fucked up parts but I'm the one who crudely stitched them together into a whole. In a metaphorical sense. In terms of corporeal surgery I had some fucking _amazing_ work by some fucking _amazing_ surgeons. I'm really fortunate and privileged to be able to have that done.

That corporeal surgery is important and valuable but it's not the essence of my _creation_. For me it's more a sense of stitching together consciousness and body, things which were split, at cross purposes. That's why I think of myself as my own creator. It was work I did.

I think of something I heard someone say about 2004 "Smile" once - something to the effect of "It's only about 10% Brian Wilson, but 10% of Brian is all that's left". Well. I guess in some sense I am diminished. Still. 10% of something beats 100% of nothing at all.

my aborted replies to this would make a pretty good blooper reel ("oh fuck, i'm just talking about Smile again") but the analogy sorta works- because the 3 movement Smile has a surprising emotional arc, a humanity that the unsequenced outtakes don't. And because a 3 movement structure was never gonna happen on 2 sides of vinyl, it's almost unbearably awkward...

We talked about some of the other stuff in a Smile thread months ago (i was heavy handed in declaring my appreciation for The Creature)

the way i went about it was that anything i was afraid to do because of how people would judge me, i tried it out to figure out how _i_ felt about it. and, you know, one road leads to another;

so starting with the glitter shadow, black liner and mascara, now i wanna see it with the little black dress kinda thing? b/c my instinct is 'now i wanna dress more phys ed class than i would have today' and i think buzz-cutter jock boy in extreme glam eye makeup is an underrated look. but i'm already comfortable and familiar with that, and this is about exploring, so, black dress- not terrible on the first try, i'll give it another shot but i wanna put my boy clothes back on *right away*.
second try- alright, swaying a bit, starting to see there's a difference between "i've never wanted to wear dresses" and "i've never wanted to wear that particular dress, or lamented that this look is unavailable to men" and i look at the boy clothes i was going to wear and they seem a bit boring, like inverse wizard of oz stepping back into the b&w universe
otoh, i still want to put the boy clothes back on- if nothing else, i need to get on with my day

how does wearing a dress feel- ehh, it's not a yes or a no rn, it's complicated.

i've been kind of avoiding this since 2018-ish, avoiding the question, feeling i couldn't manage yet another major upheaval. as though i could control the shifts in awareness that happen without my electing to actively "tackle an issue". lol.

but now it does feel more like "electing to tackle the issue"

play with it

I still don't know what my style is I'm trying to branch out from my usual militant androgyne black/navy uniform but it's hard to know what will actually look good when your entire fashion sense has been based on not wanting to be looked at. I'm trying things and some of them look good but feel bad or vice versa which is a whole other issue from what might draw the wrong kind of attention. but I'm trying not to take any of it too seriously. hopefully some things will click eventually

I like the idea of masc and femme days and maybe genderfuck weekends but I'm not brave or stylish enough to pull any of it off yet

yeah that's the thing
it's better imo to think of style as a vehicle for personal transformation than a camouflage
not 'what looks good' but 'who do i want to be today'

i also think it's harder than a lot of people realize to be objective about how your personal style comes across

i wear a lot of dark monochrome, too (at this point, everything in my rotation is black, blue or gray except one lilac t shirt and one grayish-lilac)

that can be conspicuous, of course

on the whole i think it's clean and minimal, but more on the 'genteel' side (if that's a suitably negative word) than utilitarian, in a way i'm not always conscious of. i used to wear shorts much of the year but it made me the target of a sexual assault late in the fall, which i only narrowly avoided, and i've stopped.

now, my bed looks like an 8 year old girl went to town. i've got the princess canopy, the fairy lights, the hanging die cut stars covered in silver glitter, pink and orange tie dye throw pillows. it's a masterpiece, queers. this is part of who i am when no one is looking, i guess.

I still don't know what my style is I'm trying to branch out from my usual militant androgyne black/navy uniform but it's hard to know what will actually look good when your entire fashion sense has been based on not wanting to be looked at. I'm trying things and some of them look good but feel bad or vice versa which is a whole other issue from what might draw the wrong kind of attention. but I'm trying not to take any of it too seriously. hopefully some things will click eventually

― Left

presentation is still a really big challenge for me... i don't know if i've mentioned it but i just realized last week that it's not just worry about being perceived as disgusting, that perhaps the lion's share of it is tied back to SA trauma, to not wanting to be "too cute". it's one of those things that's easy enough to understand intellectually, but a lot harder to put into practice.

for me the pressure to place myself within the "butch/femme" dichotomy is itself a problem. i think i look good in a tank top and tight shorts. i think i look good in a pretty dress. like, a lot of the time i dress for the occasion, i don't know why that has to be part of my _identity_. i mean much as it pains me to say it that's not even _gay_ really.

this weekend i wrote a pilot for a potential serial work that kind of addresses some of these anxieties, about a middle-aged cis lesbian who finds out she's a magical girl and how she navigates things after realizing that - anxiety about femme presentation, anxiety about age, and some other stuff in there as well. now i just have to establish a work routine to keep going with it :)

y'all

the moment y'all have been waiting for is here

f1nn5ter is trans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3reFDwM0yIA

(big umbrella trans. genderfluid. not, like "binary trans" or w/e.)