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

Yup - watch any feminist content and you'll be served ebdless clips of dudes DESTROYING feminism, doubt it works the other way around.

I know someone who works at YouTube, I should ask her what the thinking is internally there, because I imagine there are people who are exasperated with how this algorithm works (or doesn't work).

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/sep/25/eternal-90s-stars-cancel-full-band-reunion-over-reported-trans-rights-clash

Yup - watch any feminist content and you'll be served ebdless clips of dudes DESTROYING feminism, doubt it works the other way around.

― Daniel_Rf, Saturday, September 16, 2023 3:10 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

Sounds a lot like it just feeds you things with the same keywords tbh, aside from other variables it uses to brainlessly lump content together with the same subjects.

Well that's the thing, is the dude watching his Rogan DESTROYS feminism videos getting pro feminist videos served to him by the algorithm? It seems not.

Maybe! Why not? They also probably love to hate-watch that stuff so maybe they're even clicking on it.

In fact, the more they see that stuff in their feed, the more they believe it's "invading" the lives of normal people and kids so I'm sure that feeds their narrative too. "It's everywhere, we can't escape this stuff! We gotta do something!"

Well all I can say is this a phenomenon I've seen a lot amongst ppl who watch yt and are into progressive causes but I've never ever heard of alt right dudes noting the same, which is strange because much of the internet seems dedicated to chronicling everything these ppl say, doubly so if there's schadenfreude to be had. I know this is hardly scientific evidence.

I think there are probably a lot of reasons why, for one: I'd bet pro-feminism videos are much less likely to put the word "FEMINISM" in their thumbnails and descriptions etc, than a video that is all about "ANTI FEMINISM". Also takedown video essays are a pretty popular youtube format, and the people that like that sort of content are looking for people to put things like FEMINISM and twitter discourse in its place. So the demographic for a popular video type is disproportionately on THAT side of the debate. It's just not an equal landscape for both sides.

I think there are probably a lot of reasons why, for one: I'd bet pro-feminism videos are much less likely to put the word "FEMINISM" in their thumbnails and descriptions etc, than a video that is all about "ANTI FEMINISM". Also takedown video essays are a pretty popular youtube format, and the people that like that sort of content are looking for people to put things like FEMINISM and twitter discourse in its place. So the demographic for a popular video type is disproportionately on THAT side of the debate. It's just not an equal landscape for both sides.

― Evan

i mean these are all interesting ideas and if the data to back them up were available i'd definitely consider them

i have an interesting idea! maybe youtube, being a capitalist/corporatist entity, has decided that joe rogan and matt walsh synergize with their business model more readily than feminist, queer, and trans voices do, and therefore they tend to promote rogan and walsh more than they do queer and trans voices.

you know who synergizes really well with youtube's business model, on the left? vaush. that's who.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs today, one I read pretty regularly. I won't say which one it is, only that the person who updates the blog is someone I like and respect a lot, someone I've personally learned a lot about music from. What I'm saying here isn't any sort of a judgement on them or their blog. I only mention because somebody might recognize the source and take it as some sort of judgement. It isn't.

Anyway, I ran across this quote from Will Hermes' 2011 book _Love Goes to Buildings on Fire_:

The Waldorf-Astoria was the epitome of uptown, up-tight, upper-crust New York; whoever agreed to give the ballroom over to the Dolls and their wasted fans was either clueless or wickedly subversive. By midnight, a thousand-some freaks of various stripes were packed into the ballroom entryway, pressing against doors that were supposed to have opened at 11:00. Tempers flared, doors were smashed, and someone lit a stink bomb in the hotel lobby in protest. Security guards admitted a portion of the mob but hundreds were turned away. Arthur Bell described the scene as “Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange and Joel Grey in Cabaret by the dozens, chains and hoods, silver buttocks, scarlet breasts, dildoed noses,” with old-school trannies washing down demerol capsules with swigs of whiskey.

I'm not actually interested in the question of whether or not this is transphobic. Some trans people might say it is, some people might vehemently insist it isn't. I genuinely don't care whether or not making a reference to "old-school trannies" in a book published back in 2011 is transphobic or not. What I care about is this:

Speaking as a future old-school tranny, please don't romanticize me like this when I'm gone. I'm incredibly happy with who I am and what I've accomplished. My life is amazing. I've seen and experienced all sorts of strange and wonderful things. That said, it's really stressful, the way a lot of people treat us. It's hard, and some of the things I've seen people do that might seem glamorous from the outside... a lot of it is just how some of us cope with all of the shit we go through. For me personally, that kind of thing isn't something glamorous, isn't something to aspire to. I personally have coped with trauma in my life in some pretty unhealthy ways. By all means, celebrate me. Please, celebrate me, I'm fairly awesome. However, when I deal with all of the shit I've been through by doing shit that's, well, kind of fucked up? Please don't celebrate that. I don't think it's worth celebrating.

As usual, I'm just speaking for me. Other people are going to have their own takes on this issue. :)

maybe not quite the same thing but I feel like a certain type of cis person can fetishise us, not in a chasery type way but in an 'oh you trans people are so cool and so brave and so interesting!' type way, like we're some kind of fascinating alien species who are also super inspirational. it's rather patronising

I really don't like it when people tell me I'm brave for transitioning. I know they mean well and I appreciate that, it's good they realise that this is not easy. but also the use of the word 'brave' implies that it's something that I chose to do, that I had the option not to transition but that I went ahead with it anyway because I'm so fucking brave. I didn't choose this, when I realised I was trans I tried to suppress it for a bit but you can only do that for so long. I don't want to sound overdramatic here but when someone realises they're trans it's often a case of transition or die

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADGr6swyCto

here is a song i like by a trans woman who lives in my town

yeah i've long hated being called brave... i talk about it a fair bit. like, yeah, transition has been hard, a lot of what i've been through is hard, watching what happens to a lot of my friends is hard. all of the stuff i was afraid of... most of it has happened, but it wasn't like how i thought it would be. it wasn't like that at all.

sometimes i think "i wish someone had told me", but i'm not always sure what i mean by that. if someone had told me i was a girl in 1996, what would that have meant to me? i have friends who've known, who've known all their lives, and they envy me for not knowing, and i envy them for knowing, and we're both, probably, being very silly.

no, today, what i wish someone had told me is how _easy_ it would be. i think i've mentioned this before as well... one time, i was talking to an Old-School Trans Woman (because I _respect_ her as a _person_ I will not use the word Will Hermes uses about her) and said to her, God, that's amazing, how did you manage to do that?" And she said "How did you manage to _not_ do it?"

and for me it was just that i really didn't have a choice, didn't really have the opportunity. and maybe when it comes to being told how easy it is... i don't know. maybe that would have been enough to give me the opportunity earlier than i had it.

well, it doesn't matter. if people want to call me "brave", they don't really know how it is for me, but i guess that's ok too. i wish people understood better, i'll always wish people understood better, but the truth is i'm getting my wish.

-

i'm gonna segue, actually, into what i came here to post. i've decided i'm gonna start staying logged in when i search for things on youtube. i do a lot of searching in private windows because i don't trust google, i want them to know as little about me as possible. i have a couple plugins installed that keep youtube from recommending me videos, but i don't have them installed on every device i browse the web from. last night i was browsing my subs... my subscriptions, my youtube subscriptions... and it starts recommending me videos that actually sound interesting. one called "the incel to trans pipeline". oh god i can tell from the thumbnail, it's about that manga. i've read that manga. look. i'll get back to that video.

the point is i can tell from the cultural signifiers whether a video is going to be hostile to me. this video is posted by someone whose avatar is a cartoon of a girl with cat ears and a choker. i'm not expecting this person to go all matt walsh on me.

so anyway, after that i'm rabbitholing, i'm looking to see if anybody has uploaded a video of that time fred rogers appeared on a soviet children's show in the perestroika era. so i search something like "fred rogers soviet children's show" in a fresh private window and what i get is... well, i get his 1969 speech before congress, you search fred rogers _anything_ and that's what you're gonna get. after that, though, there are a bunch of clips saying "here's what mr. rogers thought about transgenderism!"

and again, cultural signifiers. terms like "transgenderism" and "gender ideology" aren't terms that people who _aren't_ anti-trans bigots tend to use when talking about us. that's not a video i'm going to click on.

it gets back to... i was talking elsewhere, i think it was a politics thread that i happened to click on, about how i work hard to avoid "digital self-harm". it's not something i can entirely avoid - risk mitigation. that's why i block youtube recommendations. because there's a high likelihood that it will at some point recommend videos that, just by looking at their thumbnails, kind of make my day worse. not in an extreme way or anything like that, just in terms of, you know _allostatic load_.

i think pretty well of mr. rogers. i watched his show as a kid, and i liked it a lot. i feel like he taught me some pretty good values. he was a kind, caring man who cared about children. and apparently in 1980 or whenever he thought trans women were men.

does that ruin my childhood? does that ruin my opinion of mr. rogers? no, not really. i mean, look, the bar for 1980s children television, i set it real, real low. if mr. rogers thought trans women were men, fine. did he regularly have young boys appear on the show, make them wear dresses, and mock and humiliate them for it? no? well, he _sails_ above that bar, then. the show i watched most when i was 8 _doesn't_ clear that bar.

in the abstract, damn near everyone in 1980 thought trans women were men. it's certainly possible that fred rogers would have been an exception, since he was an exceptional man, but it's not something i'd assume about him. i didn't, though, i didn't want to be confronted with someone telling me "hey, mr. rogers in 1980 thought you were a man." it makes my day worse.

it's not even an actual argument, is it? like, even if you're going to make a poor logical argument based on "hey here's this celebrity who agrees with me", the man has been dead since 2003. is anybody really going to change their mind based on this fact? what with all of the other arguments for and against my existence out there, i can't really consider that this information would make any sort of difference.

it's true that when i'm wrong, i do tend to seek out, even need, constant validation to reinforce my false belief, and i guess that same principle would apply to trans people. you know, it's probably not about me, their constantly sharing and perpetuating every even slightly transphobic thing they can find on youtube.

i don't actually care about them, though, i'm not interested in looking at things from the bigot's perspective. from my perspective, youtube is constantly promoting transphobia to people who use the site, and i use the site, and my goal is therefore to mitigate my exposure to transphobic propaganda. i just have to not think about the probability that lots of other people, trans and cis alike, are regularly exposed to transphobic propaganda. radical acceptance. that's what i need to employ here, radical acceptance.

so i stay logged in, and even here, you know, i still have to work to not engage in digital self-harm. mia mulder uploaded a three hour video about how capitalism is bad, and i'm sure it's a fantastic video, mia mulder makes fantastic videos, but i already know capitalism is bad, and spending three hours confronting that fact has a high likelihood of constituting digital self-harm.

that video about the "incel to trans pipeline" by a creator i don't know? i recognize that thumbnail. it's that One Manga. see that's the other thing about mitigating self-harm is that sometimes shit just WHAM hits you where you don't expect and you don't realize it for three days later. and that was how it was with that manga. this sort of stuff is why content warnings are a thing... it's about being _informed_. that's the big issue with social media, is that shit comes up and hits you and you're not expecting it, and it just hits way the fuck harder.

anyway if you're watching that video, and i've started, and it's great, it talks about the people who TOTALLY AREN'T TRANS but just transition because being a guy sucks and if the only way not to be a shitty guy is to be a girl than they'll take hormones and pretend to be trans, which is stupid but actually being a girl is awesome and come to think of it they've always wanted to be a girl but they're NOT TRANS OR ANYTHING they're just doing this because they're tired of how bad their life as a guy sucks. BUT watch out about that manga, if it's the one i'm thinking about, it fucking HITS.

anyway i guess i'm doing a lot of writing this week

I thought "transmaxxing" was about incels transitioning because they think women have it easier and they could be available to other incels for sex because they would still think like incels and not like "femoids." Bleh. I know way too much about this kind of thing.

I thought "transmaxxing" was about incels transitioning because they think women have it easier and they could be available to other incels for sex because they would still think like incels and not like "femoids." Bleh. I know way too much about this kind of thing.

― Christine Green Leafy Dragon Indigo

yeah maybe that's it, i didn't see the whole video. i'm with ceicocat (who posted the video i'm referring to), i do think the whole phenomenon is pretty funny. taking estrogen, transitioning to own the libs, i mean, it's not the worst thing one can possibly do. especially given how many of them wind up experiencing profound gender euphoria and joy while living as a girl even though they're totally _really_ incels disguising themselves as trans women. if that's what they say, sure, i'll accept that, even if it does sound suspiciously similar to imposter syndrome.

i've heard people say enough things about gender by this point that whatever people say about themselves, i accept it. self-determination is important to me. whatever it is people say they are, i generally don't see any reason to not believe them and respect them for who they say they are. i figure they know themselves better than i can know them. (so much for the intolerant left!)

is "transmaxxing" transphobic? i don't know, maybe. just like that will hermes quote, i don't particularly care. i got more important stuff to worry about, personally. a lot of the most transphobic people are trans themselves. trans people get internalized transphobia and sometimes they externalize it. if anybody at all took "incel transmaxxers" seriously i'd probably be more concerned.

if i was going to start looking for flaws in their "logic" i guess i could start with the fact that the term "incel" was coined by someone who was, as far as i know, a cis woman, but basically that's trivia. i'm not a prescriptivist, i'm a descriptivist; what language means depends on how it's used. if most of these incels think only _men_ can be incels, well, i guess they're right. it's not an identity i'm interested in claiming, partly because i'm asexual, i don't have sex because i don't want to have sex, and partly because... incel? eww, gross, who would want to be one of _those_? if identifying as an incel is more important to someone than identifying as a trans woman, i'm not gonna argue with them.

and that's the thing i see a lot... a lot of people won't identify as trans because they have another identity that's more important to them. a lot of people, it's really important to them that they characterize their relationship to gender as a "sexual fetish". i had a lot of trouble with this for a long time, but mostly it was because that was the normative narrative. the idea was that if an AMAB experienced sexual arousal while wearing women's clothing, they were a man with a sexual fetish and categorically not a trans woman. this was a frankly pseudoscientific idea called "autogynephilia" promoted by a guy named ray blanchard. the major problem with this framing is that it turns out that cis women sometimes experience sexual arousal while wearing women's clothing, particularly clothing designed to enhance the sexual attractiveness of the person wearing it. in fact, as far as i can tell, this sort of thing is apparently _normal_. I guess you could classify it as a fetish. i remember when i was young, oral sex was classified as a fetish. maybe it still is in some corners - i don't know.

-

i still remember this conversation i had once with someone who had some questions about their gender identity and wanted to talk to me about it. he said i'm not trans, i'm an autogynephiliac, i just have a fetish. after some thought, i told them, look, my understanding is that autogynephilia isn't an actual thing. if you think it is and you have it, ok, fine, as long as you don't treat any of the rest of us like that's something we have, as long as you recognize that a lot of trans women find that term offensive and that by no means should you ever tell a trans woman that you think they're an autogynephiliac. he was fine with that! he was fine with me saying "you can be an autogynephiliac as long as you're the only one in the whole wide world". people who are questioning their gender so often have these ideas where they feel like they get to be the lone exception, everybody _else_ is really trans, it's just _them personally_ who is a fake and a fraud.

sometimes people want a real trans person to tell them they're really trans, and i will not do that. ever. it's not up to me. the only person who can determine that is them. what i will do is say look, if you say you are, you are. i'm not going to question that. all of those things that you were told kept you from being Really Trans, none of them actually do. you have full permission at any time to be trans, but you don't have to be. that's what a trans person told me, when i was questioning, and i was like "oh ok cool, i'm trans then, thanks", but it's not that easy for some people, it's not enough for them to hear "be trans if you want to be, don't be trans if you want to be, it's not up to me."

with this person, i figured we had an understanding - i'm trans, he's an autogynephiliac who doesn't want to be trans, we're good. except three days later he came back to me and kept questioning:

"ok i want to be a woman but i like being ripped, that means i can't really be a woman, right?"
"i mean lots of women are ripped, you're not going to have as much muscle strength if you take estrogen but it doesn't mean you can't be ripped"

"ok but i dressed as a woman for weeks on end and i really liked it and it didn't feel sexual at all, does that mean i have to be a trans woman?"
"no, you don't have to be unless you want to be"

just for weeks on end he was trying to argue with me, and it must have been super frustrating for him because i wouldn't argue with him. i just kept repeating the same thing - he could be trans if he wanted to be, but he didn't have to be. i don't understand why he kept talking to me about it. he said he wasn't trans, he didn't want to be trans, and that was fine by me. i finally had to say to him look, i got nothing more to tell you. as far as i know he's still out there, doing his autogynephilia thing.

-

compared to that, i mean, the transmaxxers are pretty straightforward. see, one of the core tenets they have - that they can take hormones and transition socially and _not change_, stay the "incels" they are - my experience is that it doesn't work out that way. i understand being afraid of change. i was afraid of change when i transitioned, i was afraid of losing my essential self. i told people when i came out, look, just because i'm dressing differently and taking hormones, i'm not going to be like a totally different person or anything, i'm still going to be me, i'm just going to look different.

in retrospect that was... an oversimplification. the truth is that we change all the time, and a lot of how we change is based on how we behave. you can act your way into a new way of thinking, as they put it in AA - not only can you, but you _will_ wind up doing so, in my experience, whether you want to or not. kurt vonnegut in mother night keeps saying "we are who we pretend to be", and he's _almost_ right. we change all the time, and we change based on what we do and say. maybe ironic nazis start out being ironic and just become real because they spend all of their time acting like nazis. i don't think they were necessarily "real nazis all along".

i mean i haven't _stopped_ being the person i was. i've just gone through experiences that have changed me a lot. some of it's the hormones, but probably most of it isn't. people treat me differently, for good and for ill. enough people call me "brave" and i just quit arguing. ok, you say i'm brave, fine, i'm brave. i don't think i'm brave, but i don't think i'm a weak coward like i used to believe, either.

i didn't transition to become a better person. i didn't _want_ to become a better person. it's just that i put myself in a situation where i kind of _had_ to work to become a better person. i think these "transmaxxers" are putting themselves in the same situation. i mean, the thing about an incel identity is... you don't just have to not _have sex_, you have to continually work to make yourself into a person who is not safe to love. you can _do_ that while taking drugs that make you feel euphoric, happy, and fulfilled, but it's really fucking hard. i wasn't able to manage it, even though i tried super hard to, i tried really hard to reconcile my essential self-image as someone who was bad and dangerous with the love and respect other people showed towards me, with the love and respect i increasingly felt for myself. ceicocat observes the same phenomenon, the same sort of dialectic process, in the writings of self-identified "transmaxxers". i'm here for that!

it's not unprecedented! if you look at how contrapoints started, she started trying to, basically, convert incels, and in the process... in the process she changed. she's still changing, as far as i know. we all are. i think she's given up on trying to change incels by this point, which i think is wise. the incels will change if and when they're ready.

transmaxxing is a new one to me

I know in chan culture there is the phenomenon of male incels "practicing" their romantic and sexual moves on femme-presenting but I'm-not-trans-because-trans-people-don't-exist incels. the guys see it as easier than interacting with "women" because they're actually just interacting with "men". it is a space for gender deviance within a deeply reactionary (trans)misogynist patriarchal culture but I can't imagine it's a great space to inhabit - I'd feel much worse for them if they didn't pretty much all subscribe to and enforce the ambient fascism of chan culture.

the lack of cis women during the white settlement of the american west created opportunities (economic and otherwise) for trans-like expressions of gender among people who sold sex. there was a whole other level going on with the feminisation of chinese men and the number of non-cis-female sex workers from chinese backgrounds in that time and place but I'm even less qualified to unpack all that - it's worth noting for intersectional reasons as a reminder of how racialisation and gendering and economics are basically inseparable a lot of the time.

the white femme "men" of 4chan tend to express their gender through imitating racist orientalist stereotypes of japanese "girls" although they're as dedicated to white supremacy as the men who fetishize them.

in both of these cases I have no idea how appropriate the word trans is to describe these phenomena - I tend to think it's not quite right in most cases but it's not totally unrelated to transness either

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.

-

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.