Trans/Genderqueer/Agender/Questioning Thread

Yeah that's pretty good. "What do i really want?" is a favorite divining question.

Kate, i really appreciate your generosity. I'm not the first to say this and I won't be the last, but a number of your posts have helped me personally as i've been working things out. Ngl, I worry that saying so places more of a burden on you to sustain the level of generosity you have shown. but I guess you already addressed this kinda

i found that a lot of it resonated with some thoughts and feelings i've been having over the last year regarding my own queerness. particularly in conjunction with you kind of "coming out" as non-binary, deflatormouse, if that's even how you'd frame it.

Yes, I've been "coming out" to friends and family one by one over the last couple of months. I felt i should say something here incase it's an important context for some of the things i post, because i think enough people posting here regularly recognize my handle as belonging to a male poster, at this point.

ok that got messed up. first thing in quote tag is my reply to twitter thread linked by picesx

see, i come from the opposite perspective - i love labels and i'll take all of them i can.

i know.

i see this kind of queer dialectic going on all the time - the meme is one person saying "abolish gender!" and the other person is saying "more gender!" and both POVs are based and the people who hold either or both POV are awesome.

that is so sweet and really warmed my heart to read.

I actually was thinking of how you've talked about "not existing" before you transitioned, and i have talked about finding that "i don't exist" in a completely different, more positve sense.

There's a lot of brilliant stuff in your last posts that I feel no need to respond to. But i can talk a lit

I am middle eastern with dark olive skin. I think middle eastern kids in America are in an unusual position in that it's about as close to a blank slate as you are going you get. You're conspicuous but you don't really have an identity, other than 'the foreigner'. In fact, lot of people aren't quite sure what race you are; it's almost like you have to choose. There are pressures to assume the culture of white people but by choosing white you are then always bombarded with various forms of "why aren't you white?" - you are never really going to be acceptable.
A lot of Persian guys gravitate much more to the parts of Black culture that reach the suburban mainstream. Obviously, they are not going to be accepted as Black (my brother can attest lol)

I style myself as boyish/very soft-masculine. Because perceptions of softness are closely related to perceptions of whiteness, a friend once called me "white enough". I am still kinda pissed about that years later actually. Buuuuut the image of the brutish queer Arab in The Screwball Asses was really shocking- if I have dysphoria or dysmorphia it probably comes from stuff like that

I see the evolution of how I present myself as a process of subtracting metadata. I'm happy with where it is right now. As an album, maybe Plux Quba- it is vaguely childlike but there is so little information attached to it that you start to think about the difference between "Untitled" and " ". And then what little info you get raises more questions than it answers. It's really important for the content (music), which is so delicate and abstract, not to be overwlemed by the packaging. So much would be lost if you were directed towards a particular reading. It has to be allowed to take its own shape without presuming on what it is. There are a couple of important clues but they're very cryptic. That's all you need and all the material can sustain.

So, I secretly thought of myself as transgender in my early childhood and it was a *major* preoccupation of mine & something i was deeply ashamed of already then. I don't put a lot of stock in that memory, but it's been very helpful to me to hear women talk about their experiences.

I just want to let my own ambiguities take shape, or not.

Kate, i really appreciate your generosity. I'm not the first to say this and I won't be the last, but a number of your posts have helped me personally as i've been working things out. Ngl, I worry that saying so places more of a burden on you to sustain the level of generosity you have shown. but I guess you already addressed this kinda

i'm glad that it helps other people, and also talking about my experience of being trans is literally my favorite thing to do in the whole world. it's not out of a sense of obligation that i talk about my transness on every single thread i post on lol.

i really do think of myself as an "evangelical" in the original etymological sense, like to me, finding out that i was _allowed_ to be queer, _allowed_ to be trans, was such profoundly life-changing good news that i just wanted to tell everybody, like, hey, you know all that stuff you were taught about trans people? turns out it's all wrong! turns out all of the shit we all thought someone _had_ to do or say or feel or think in order to be "really trans" is just some shit cis people made up! i am _so goddamn happy_ to be able to tell people that, i legit feel #blessed that i get to do this. people can say i'm a "social contagion" all they want. the only response i have is that joy is a social contagion.

Yes, I've been "coming out" to friends and family one by one over the last couple of months. I felt i should say something here incase it's an important context for some of the things i post, because i think enough people posting here regularly recognize my handle as belonging to a male poster, at this point.

fwiw i know surprisingly little about a lot of the folks here, i've gathered a thing or two over the years from context but honestly a lot of times i just don't feel like what gender a poster is matters. it's the DS9 thing:

KOR: Curzon, my beloved old friend!
JADZIA (laughing): It's Jadzia now.
KOR: Jadzia, my beloved old friend!

i like when people come out mostly because then i can celebrate, haha! but they don't have to.

I am middle eastern with dark olive skin. I think middle eastern kids in America are in an unusual position in that it's about as close to a blank slate as you are going you get. You're conspicuous but you don't really have an identity, other than 'the foreigner'. In fact, lot of people aren't quite sure what race you are; it's almost like you have to choose. There are pressures to assume the culture of white people but by choosing white you are then always bombarded with various forms of "why aren't you white?" - you are never really going to be acceptable.
A lot of Persian guys gravitate much more to the parts of Black culture that reach the suburban mainstream. Obviously, they are not going to be accepted as Black (my brother can attest lol)

the idea of "passing" is definitely one that i think about a lot. particularly lately because i just watched "framing agnes" last weekend! it's about a lady who had a paper written about her, and the paper, published in the late '60s by a cis guy named harold garfinkel, codified the idea of "passing" in a trans sense. like a lot of trans stuff, "passing" was something that was taken, appropriated sort of, from somewhere else and assigned to us. in this case harold garfinkel took the concept from the pre-existing idea of Black Americans passing as white. and it's one of those things that's similar but not the same. i've talked with this a little with people from other backgrounds, and even though we're different we did have this kind of shared experience of passing being a double-edged sword - one is resistant to certain forms of prejudice, one can be seen for things other than one's Marked quality, but the trade-off is that one is _misrecognized_. it took me a while to figure out what i'm trans-passing _as_. i don't pass as a woman - i am a woman. one doesn't pass for what one _is_, only for what one _isn't_. what i pass as is a _cis_ woman.

in your case, it seems like - and please correct me if i'm mistaken here - by "passing" you get to choose what Marked identity you want to be identified as, which i guess is some kind of passing privilege lol. to me, there's no comparison between my passing privilege and my white privilege. white privilege is being able to be recognized _for what i am_ without being defined entirely by that quality. white privilege is the ability to be seen as an individual and not as a synecdoche for an entire demographic group.

I see the evolution of how I present myself as a process of subtracting metadata. I'm happy with where it is right now. As an album, maybe Plux Quba- it is vaguely childlike but there is so little information attached to it that you start to think about the difference between "Untitled" and " ". And then what little info you get raises more questions than it answers. It's really important for the content (music), which is so delicate and abstract, not to be overwlemed by the packaging. So much would be lost if you were directed towards a particular reading. It has to be allowed to take its own shape without presuming on what it is. There are a couple of important clues but they're very cryptic. That's all you need and all the material can sustain.

god i haven't listened to that record in so long. that's the other thing i sort-of love about transness - since it's not something that has, really, a clearly defined historical form, there are very few "canonically trans" songs before a certain point - and the few that are, like "candy says", are usually cis songs _about_ transness, however great they are - transness is nearly always a subtext. it's possible to read all kinds of songs as having some correlation to one's own trans experiences. transness, to me, is one manifestation of this invisible quality that runs through everything, unobservable except in retrospect. when i look back at past work that's implicitly or explicitly gender-fucky, these days i don't see them as being "trans" or even "proto-trans", just as the slightest hint of this vast, unnameable _thing_, from which transness is only one currently visible outcropping. any name i could give it would be a misrepresentation of who i was - the fact that my transness was not nameable or _thinkable_ is just this intrinsic part of it.

i love your framing of it too - "subtracting metadata". we've all been walking around with all this _shit_ stuck to us that we all take as being somehow an essential part of who we are. just taking off a particular frame and saying "ok, what do i look like now? who do i want to be now?" was an essential part of me being able to say, ok, here is this thing which i am. even this thing that i say i am now, though, "trans", this is just a frame that suits me better. this is just a way i exist in community with other people, a, well, social construct, if you will. that doesn't mean that my gender isn't _real_, that my womanhood isn't _real_, only that the description of it, the way i present myself, the way i communicate my gender to others, all of that is necessarily constructed.

thinking about it i guess it makes a lot of sense that you're hesitant about taking on labels... it sounds like you had the experience of, you could try on a label, but then you couldn't take it off, the people who saw you wearing that label would judge you based on that label from then on. that's one of the fears i had, one of the fears i've seen other people have, and i don't really know how to say to questioning people that it looks completely different from my perspective. when someone changes in a way that sometimes get called "detransition", for whatever reason, i'm proud of them. i'm really happy for them. in some ways they're choosing an answer that's more complicated, more difficult, because what's called "detransition" seldom means "oh i'm actually cis". it's "i'm actually this other thing", or "these hormones don't work for me", or (most of the time, unfortunately) "it's not safe for me to do this right now". it's hard when one decides one has to be outside of a community defined by this one particular word, really hard, and hell yes i'm proud of anybody who's able to do that.

like the absolute essence of transition is _taking care of yourself_. we all gotta make hard decisions, impossible decisions sometimes, and the thing is that when you do that there's no wrong decision. i regretted not transitioning before for a while until i realized that it wasn't really a choice i had. wanting to do something that _should_ have been possible but not being allowed is not the same as wanting to do something and choosing not to.

So, I secretly thought of myself as transgender in my early childhood and it was a *major* preoccupation of mine & something i was deeply ashamed of already then. I don't put a lot of stock in that memory, but it's been very helpful to me to hear women talk about their experiences.

― Deflatormouse

see that's the other thing, the role of memory in the whole thing. writing my transition memoir was such an amazing experience for me, because of the way my story changed as i told it. not in a sense that it became better or worse necessarily. just taking the evidence i had and looking at it and trying to see what came out of it, not looking for some ultimate truth, not looking for what was objective reality. just looking at myself from a certain perspective. one of the things that surprised me the most was when i asked myself "ok, if i'm trans, why did none of this ever come up before", and realizing that it had, and i'd just decided to think around it, put it behind a Someone Else's Problem field. and as far as i can tell that's what repressed memory is, just kind of saying "well i'm not going to think about that". that was a particular frame i had and one of the ones that i took down when i started questioning. so to me, that early childhood memory, and the fact that you not only secretly had that thought but were secretly _ashamed_ of, is something that's just incredibly important. there were a lot of things i _experimented_ with that i believed were bad and wrong, even then, even at that young age. even now it's kind of hard to talk about it. because if i say "i used modeling clay to give my he-man action figure girl parts when i was a kid", one, in was something at the time that i was really ashamed of. i thought it was this incredibly fucked-up thing, but when i look at it from today i can't figure out what's fucked up about, like, when you're a kid experimenting with gender stuff. and the other thing that i see happening is when someone tells their story, like "i did such and such a thing", someone else will be like "well i never did that, i guess i'm not Really Trans". i went through that too. i actually knew a trans woman in the late '90s, and i was really kind of ashamed to even be around her, i figured she could tell that i wasn't Really Trans, that i was an imposter and a disgrace to her. and like it doesn't work like that, none of us get to say "oh you're not Really Trans", there's no high council, i mean basically all of us are high is just how that works.

but then if i don't say that, then people are like "oh ok so There Were No Signs". and of course there were signs, but either (1) they weren't recognizable as signs, based to all of the bad metadata about gender that we were stuck with from an early age, or (2) we were actively ashamed of the signs, read some fundamental moral dimension into them that just isn't there, and buried and repressed them, made them invisible, made ourselves invisble - again, not a moral act, just the kind of shit queer people have to do to survive.

anyway that's an absolutely massive wall of text and basically none of it was what i thought i was gonna say when i started replying, but i hope it helps. it's really good to be able to talk about this stuff with someone else.

Do you ever read ilx on a desktop or tablet? I find that what looks like a massive wall of text on my phone sometimes turns out to be, like, 2 sentences.

It's definitely helpful, way more than I think you realize, at the very least because it's forcing me to consider things directly that i might not grapple with otherwise, or not right away.

by "passing" you get to choose what Marked identity you want to be identified as, which i guess is some kind of passing privilege lol. to me, there's no comparison between my passing privilege and my white privilege. white privilege is being able to be recognized _for what i am_ without being defined entirely by that quality. white privilege is the ability to be seen as an individual and not as a synecdoche for an entire demographic group.

Yes, that's pretty close to what i meant. I was thinking yesterday about DJ Khalid as an example of an Arab man who is accepted, more or less, as Black. At least to the extent that he has real agency in Black culture. He's a teddy bear ofc but he has that very suave and flashy look that would be tough for a white guy to pull off. If you put at him and his brother Alec Ledd side by side, you might not even think they're the same ethnicity right away because so much of what we percieve as "race" is in those social signifiers.
Now I am not going to be able to pass for Black but I would *absolutely* pass as mixed/biracial, especially if styled myself differently.
So yeah I kinda "chose to be white" and so i've been afforded some of the advantages white people have, though not all of them. And my brother was more undecided, for once in his life lol, and has straddled the two cultures more (e.g. he has worked for & with mostly Black men ; he is married to a midwestern white woman).

I'm an odd duck and used to be really tenacious. I always managed to be seen as an individual. When i think about what my male privilege has been, the biggest thing is I was always made to feel like my thoughts and ideas and opinions were Very Important (has this been for my best? idk, it's a lot to live up to). But sure, if I belong to any kind of group I'm always gonna be the "ethnic" one of those.

thinking about it i guess it makes a lot of sense that you're hesitant about taking on labels... it sounds like you had the experience of, you could try on a label, but then you couldn't take it off, the people who saw you wearing that label would judge you based on that label from then on.

This is tough to articulate but with labels, if there is something that applies very harmonoiusly, where I recognize part of my own condition and it leaps off the page, then I can feel a kind of vindication. And there's other stuff attached to it that doesn't apply, and that is dissonant and I just want to sweep it under the rug kinda and focus on the vindication. And i think i'm prone to getting seduced by the labels and the language, because I'm too wrapped up in my thoughts most of the time and not present enough. I tend to get distracted from the other nameless imbalances that the label doesn't address, and from the real core of the matter in some cases. Because i get a rush from feeling vindicated.

to me, that early childhood memory, and the fact that you not only secretly had that thought but were secretly _ashamed_ of, is something that's just incredibly important

The funniest thing is that I thought it was secret then, like nobody would have noticed that I openly preferred girls' activities and entertainment and asked for girls' toys and all of my friends were girls. In my mind, it was covert. Kids are funny.

One of my early memories- I don't remember exactly how old I was but I could read- my family went to Salem for an uncle's wedding. My dad took me and my brother to the Witch Museum and bought us a box of crayons. The pink crayon was labelled "light red" and that made me really happy because from then on I would be able to tell everyone my favorite color was "light red" instead of admitting it was pink, lol

and of course there were signs, but either (1) they weren't recognizable as signs, based to all of the bad metadata about gender that we were stuck with from an early age, or (2) we were actively ashamed of the signs, read some fundamental moral dimension into them that just isn't there, and buried and repressed them, made them invisible, made ourselves invisble - again, not a moral act, just the kind of shit queer people have to do to survive.

So yeah I don't think memories like mine say much about my gender identity today, but it demonstrates our awareness and and sensitivity to the ambient social pressures even as really little kids. Because clearly my parents and teachers didn't have a problem with it.

And you're right, I forgot about all of that for years and years.

Something you posted a while ago that was one of my final straws had to do with instantly being accepted into a "sorority" of women where you'd never been 'one of the guys' before. That one set alarm bells ringing. The main thing has been talking to women and finding I relate a lot more to women and find men quite alien most of the time. But also little things like there's an ASMR channel I watch where the girl flips through vintage womens' interest magazines, and the content is the kind of stuff i spend a lot of time thinking about.

I think I was assigned the wrong gender at birth, I have very little doubt about that actually. The delightful twist is that I'm very comfortable in my boy-skin. When I think about myself as a boy, I feel spry and light on my feet when in reality I am flat-footed and lethargic. I feel cute af. I guess that's "gender-euphoria". It's like a happy accident, in a way this couldn't have turned out any better. But there's a danger in it, which is that I start to fill so many roles myself that there is no room for other people in my life. You're prob aware of my psychoses, the oracles whose grand romantic gestures floor me, the stuffed toys i regard as familiars, the common household objects i perceive as showing me love. That's a lot of dopamine, and it's all very fulfilling. Really too fulfilling.

it's really good to be able to talk about this stuff with someone else.

It's a pleasure

My standard line is that I'm a pansexual asexual - I'm willing to not have sex with pretty much anyone.

This is gold, btw
It's been stuck in my head :D

I wasn't sure about pronouns because I always found they/them a little awkward where it refers to an identified singular, and ngl it has tripped me up a bunch of times when i'm reading. Turns out it soothes the dissonance he/him makes me feel, how about that.

*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.

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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.)