Butch-Choice

Reidentified passionable Butch

[butch-choice]

When you remember every single thing you put in your car because of moving from one place to an other place and it's too much input and you could sleep for days. That's were i am right now x).

[fox-steward]

what actually changes your sex?

i’m taking a nugget i wrote into a huge reply and making it its own post, because i think it’s important.

when trans people say that transition changes the sex of their bodies, or moves them closer to the sex they desire to be, or moves them away from the sex they were born as, this has a lot of implications. i explore those implications below and explain why it just doesn’t work that way.

if we’re going to say that the removal/adoption of sex characteristics changes the sex of that body, we need to expand our scope.

is a woman who loses her breasts to cancer suddenly less female? is she now partially male? a woman who has to have a hysterectomy doesn’t start to become male, does she? a man with gynomastia is not less male and partially female if he grows breasts, right? a male who loses his penis in an accident isn’t less of a male? a female with PCOS who grows a beard is not partially male, right? i hope we can all agree that these people are all still the sex they were born as.

so if we agree that the above circumstances don’t affect the sex of the people experiencing them, why do we say that transition changes the sex of a trans person’s body? if we want to say that transition is somehow special, that removing sex traits or adopting sex traits for transitional reasons somehow does move someone closer to their desired sex, then we must agree that the factor determining sex is intention. and this is not a rational position to hold.

so essentially what we’re saying is, if someone wants their body to be a male body, then it is a male body. if a female person experiences something that makes their body look aesthetically like a male body, but they do not intend to be or look male, then it’s not male. it remains female through intention. (example: my mother took steroid after chemotherapy and now she has a mustache and some facial hair–is she less female now?).

can we all see why this is not a logically sound way to think?

[destroyyourbinder]

It’s telling to me that people believe sex is mutable in this way, because it shows that they fundamentally misunderstand sex and conflate it with aspects of social gender: 1. Most medical transitional interventions are intended to cause someone to mimic the other sex visually, usually with effects on other senses being incidental or secondary. The primary exception is changes to voice pitch, tone, and quality from testosterone, not all of which imitate the effects of testosterone on a natal male’s voice. Changes from testosterone like changes to body odor or skin texture are usually considered incidental, and trans men do not usually seek them. Current medical technologies for transmasculine surgeries also emphasize visually apparent cosmetic results first (i.e. an appropriately masculinized chest with minimally noticeable scarring, a phallus that approaches a natural appearance) and functional qualities second (such as the preservation of normal tactile sensation or sexual sensation). The majority of these effects also are intended to create a visual appearance resembling the other sex that will be most apparent to the general public or at a distance, rather than up close. For instance, most trans men highly desire the fat re-distribution and body composition changes that come with testosterone treatment, but testosterone cannot change the way that fat is stored underneath the skin, which is a sex-dimorphic trait usually only visually or otherwise apparent in close contact (i.e. it is visible as “cellulite” in most women). While many trans men or otherwise transmasculine people notice this as a female trait and may feel dysphoric about it, their “hip shape” or general “flabbiness” usually appears to them as more of a pressing issue than whether they have dimpling of their skin. It is extremely clear to me that modern medical treatment of gender/sex dysphoria primarily focuses on assisting transgender people in their efforts to “pass” as another sex rather than ameliorate internal feelings of a neurological or psychological wrongness, nor does it attempt to literally change their sex characteristics wholesale (or as much as possible) to those of another sex. Medical transition focuses on modifying the sex characteristics of a person that are most socially relevant, particularly those that allow others to readily identify someone as their natal sex, but not always those ones in particular. For example, the first female-to-male transsexual surgeries performed were actually hysterectomies, since the uterus and ovaries were thought to be the most relevant organs to determine one’s sex, and popular theories of the time stated that psychological-sexual abnormalities in female people (including “inversion”, i.e. masculine lesbianism) had to do with pathologies of the female reproductive system. A total hysterectomy was thought to suitably and completely “de-sex” a female person such that they might then be able to live a life passing as male without internal or external conflicts. Interestingly (and I say “interestingly”, but I do mean that it’s terrifying and brutal to experience as someone with dysphoria) I find that most female people who have gender dysphoria (and I think most transgender people in general) are often way out of touch with what will actually help them pass, and the body parts they are neurotically focused on as “tells” have nothing to do with their passing status. At the same time, they often believe that passing will completely fix their issues, with escalating definitions of “passing”; this usually starts with dysphoric people wishing to “pass more” or merely conceal certain characteristics, and then it increases to a desire to pass to low-stakes social contacts like strangers, then to most or all of one’s social circle, then to possibly radically changing one’s life such that no one even knows your previous history as a girl or woman, or even as someone who is transgender. Many trans men become extremely fixated on their surgical scarring from mastectomy, for example, believing that this will cause others to “know” that they are transsexuals, and therefore that they are female, should they ever have to remove their shirts. They may become fixated on this even if they never use communal changing areas or go swimming, for example, because the possibility might occur that their femaleness is revealed. I find a lot of trans female people have parts of their body or body experiences that are especially negatively significant to them that they believe either others are continually focused on or that should they become apparent it would be catastrophic; even if those things have little to do with their actually passing, the prospect of these things “breaking” a male persona or appearance is particularly unsettling. I find in reverse that many trans female people refuse to change body aspects they are fond of (often a haircut or body piercings, but sometimes even something like their own genitals) because they resent that these things are considered essential to their ability to be viewed as another sex. You often see both these dynamics in play when someone decides to “finally” pursue a transitional mastectomy after years of transition. Even if they hated their breasts and hid them religiously for many years, they may resent or have extremely complicated feelings about having to go for “top surgery”, because many trans men in this position are fully aware that they’ve become somewhat backed into a corner about their gender presentation and their life choices. They likely have bound their breasts for years and no longer wish to go through the stress and pain of binding, as well as feel like they are in constant danger (of both a dysphoria-inducing “sex reveal”, as well as the danger of physical or medical violence) due to having an “inconsistent” gender presentation. I have heard many transitioned female people nihilistic-ly say of this decision that they “just had to” at that point, which is something far different than treating dysphoria or changing one’s sex. This is to say if we listen at all to gender dysphoria to tell us anything about sex or sex characteristics, we’ll be led astray tremendously. Neither experiencing gender dysphoria nor the attempting to treat dysphoria has much to do with actual medical or biological determinations of sex, it has to do with how people know about a person’s sex and what they do with that information, and how people internally experience being a certain sex in the context of a world where people may or may not know your sex, and how these perceptions can be modified. 2. I find also these misperceptions about sex also mean that trans people and their allies are focused on a definition of sex that fixes a person’s sex as a property of a single moment (and often by the easily, typically visually determinable variables above). Sex is actually a developmental series of events rather than something that occurs at a single point in time; for example, there are organisms that can produce sperm and eggs at different times in their lives, we call these organisms “sequentially hermaphroditic”, and they are generally much different than organisms that always can only produce one or the other. Sex characteristics have laws and properties that determine their relations to each other; a human being can’t have a full set of both testes and ovaries, for example, because no viable fetus could come to term with the potential for both, and there is no developmental pathway to create two differing sets of gonads. Intersex activists often talk about this in the case of “intersex posers”, because they often invent fantastical intersex conditions that cannot actually exist; we know for a fact that certain conditions cannot exist because they are developmentally impossible, because the history of a viable organism has certain tracks it can take and certain tracks it cannot. Sex characteristics are not a random grab bag, and if we alter them after their developmental trajectory is complete or even in the midst of it, we also must alter them according to biological and physical rules. The reason why a male person cannot simply have a uterus transplanted into them and become pregnant is similar in many senses to the reason why there are no dragons  (i.e. winged, fire-breathing lizards) and we cannot simply make one. This is not to say that this is completely and totally impossible given incredible feats of technology, but it is to say that it would require near-magical levels of biological understanding and medical technology, because human males do not follow a developmental pathway that would permit even merely easily fitting a uterus inside of them, nonetheless developing the organs and feedback mechanisms for the extensive regulation of hormones and coordination of body processes needed to grow a viable human fetus inside this uterus, just as a lizard does not follow a developmental pathway that would permit the musculature and skeletal structures necessary for wings to be fitted to its own musculo-skeletal system. If a female person takes testosterone and has their breasts removed, they are still a female person, albeit with a beard and without breasts, because they developed as a female person and then had their specifically female sex characteristics altered through medical technology. There are limits to this technology as we all know, and the limits are not just predicated on a lack of human knowledge, but also what it is just plain possible to do to a human being with a certain physiology. The point is that only female people can be trans men; only female people must have hysterectomies after years of testosterone therapy. Even if you believe that you can “become male” after medical transition, only originally-female people must become male in that way, only originally-female people can have the sort of history that trans men do. In any case I believe that you’re misrepresenting what sex is at that point, because humans can’t “change sex” and no organism changes its physiology to a different essential category altogether; the fact that some changes are possible and others are not is what helps define an organism’s sex. We call some organisms “sequential hermaphrodites” because they do change their production of gametes and some associated sex characteristics from one possible type to another, and they are called “sequential hermaphrodites” precisely because their physiology permits them to do this, to distinguish them from organisms for whom this is developmentally impossible. Humans do not do this; for us to alter our sex characteristics, we must undertake extensive technological endeavors, and some alterations are possible, with varying degrees of effort, and some are completely impossible precisely because we are a type of organism in which we develop and remain as males and females. It is your history and what is possible for you that determines you as male or female, not a collected list of body parts, nor which body parts are readily visible or have been altered by medicine to appear in one way or another.

[butch-choice]

one day I'll read that all ;)

[butch-choice]

The Ever Increasing Concentration of the Sex Industry in Germany

Francine Sporenda interviews Manuela Schon about the legalised sex industry in Germany and the impact of new regulations. Manuela is a socio

[butch-choice]

the best place to pee for a biological woman at a street festival is still the churchyard^ which has a fence around it.

[lookataleaf3000]

The past couple years I’ve been way more tuned into broader community stuff particularly getting to know older generations of butches. And one thing that keeps hitting me over & over is people I know or just know of, who are either butch, trans masculine, or trans men, getting cervical cancer. And it makes sense, right, that a dysphoric population would avoid getting Pap smears? It does go beyond that though, because finding good & competent doctors who don’t show obvious disgust with your existence is like… fucking hard, so of course we avoid it. There is a very particular shame involved in going to the doctor as a gender nonconforming or transgender female person. I mean, we see time after time that health related to the female body is not taken seriously anyway, and that often it isn’t until it’s about fertility, and this population is also less likely to want to go through child birth. So it’s a nasty combination of us avoiding the doctor AND being overlooked even when we don’t. I almost started writing out some of the particular ways doctors have been terrible about my butch body and decided it’s too bleak to get into right now. I want to try advocating about this because it’s both extremely serious and NOT TALKED ABOUT AT ALL, but it’s tough cuz im also a hypocrite and have never gotten any kind of gyno exam in my life despite being 26. One of my friends is suffering from some kind of gynecological health problem that was worsened by not getting checked for years and though she has taken me aside to say that I shouldn’t do what she did she also even now can’t bring herself to say exactly what she’s suffering through. It’s this weird fostered culture of us being like, “haha yeah I’d rather just die than go get that kind of test,” but I’m not able to say that casually anymore now that I know people who literally did die.

[butch-choice]

menstrual products for camping

yesterday i was at "sportcheck". it's a sport shop for hiking swimming camping etc.. they have all those little products you may can need for camping, but actually never use. and i was wondering. they have nothing for menstrual purposes. no little bag for tampons. no suitcase for pads. are they just used to male customers? do they think noone would buy it? -i would. i buy there so much trash every time and capitalism likes it every time. i demand for menstrual camping products. where is the supply?

[butchsquatter]

I’ll talk to a specialized endocrinologist from a genderteam soon about the effects of taking testosterone on the long term. I have so many questions, but find it hard to put them into words. I want to know if it can permanently influence my body’s sensitivity to testosterone, for example. Or what effects it has on my uterus and ovaries. Do I need screenings for potential risks? Anyone has some concerns or other questions that might be good to ask?

[fox-steward]

i love being a masculine woman! tbh i love my body, even tho i’m not supposed to. it’s just absolutely great. thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[crashchaoscats-deactivated20200]

Looking back, though, the lack of acceptance of FTMs in the lesbian community in the early 1990s was perhaps forgivable given that trans people were themselves often very confused and conflicted about their motives for transitioning. Les Nichols, for example, told everyone that he’d done it “for male privilege.” Obviously not everyone was as nutty as Les, but at one of Johnny’s FTM support group events I met a newly minted man who had transitioned so that he and his girlfriend could be read as heterosexuals not lesbians. They were living out in New Jersey, miles away from anywhere, and he told me shyly that they had decided they were going to be constantly harassed out there as lesbians. I said wait a minute, you’re saying you had a sex change because you didn’t want to be discriminated against? And his response was, well, what other reason would you do it for? I must have looked a little incredulous, so he added that, really, he didn’t mind being a man, and anyway his girlfriend–as the woman–was still in charge. (When I was introduced to her, she seemed so butch that I couldn’t help wondering why it wasn’t she who had the operation!) Their story wasn’t unique; the medical establishment as that time tended to see one of the justifications for sex change operations as “straightening people out.“

The above excerpt is from Sex, Drag and Male Roles co-authored by Diane Torr and Stephen Bottoms. Both authors wrote different sections of the book and the quote comes from one written by Torr.

Diane Torr was a drag king and performance artist who also ran workshops teaching women/female people how to pass as men. One of her friends and collaborators was a trans man named Johnny Science, who enjoyed making up women so they could pass for male. As mentioned in the quote above, Science also ran a FtM support group. Torr was exposed to the FtM community through her friendship with Science and also by people who attended her workshop to explore their masculinity and gender expression. She was by no means opposed to FtM transition.

I thought this quote was interesting and it reminds me of various discussions that people were having in FtM, butch/femme, lesbian and queer communities when I was researching transition in the early 2000s. At that time, it wasn’t uncommon for trans men to talk about social forces as a factor that could lead a person to transition. I remember people in the FtM online communities I lurked in expressing concern about people transitioning because of how badly masculine women are often treated. I also met trans men who said they probably wouldn’t have transitioned if they lived in a different society. 

I hope we can have open conversations about these issues again, without hating on anyone or putting people down. 

[lookataleaf3000]

Please tell my dude customers to stop acting like I can’t haul furniture on my own 😂

[butch-choice]

I had this too, a lot of times

[tejuina]

when I finally went back to my gender clinic and told them I was detransitioning (which I only did because I needed hrt seeing as I had a hysterectomy, otherwise I would’ve never gone back), I asked if they knew of other detransitioned women and they said no. I later spoke to another detransitioned woman who went to the same clinic and she said she was also told there were no other cases of detransition

so yeah 🤷🏽‍♀️

[tejuina]

idk if they did it maliciously or not but there’s two possibilities:

1) the clinic is intentionally neglecting to collect information on its detransitioners, perhaps because they see us as a liability and don’t want to deal with us. the more of us who come together, the more we’ll notice recurring patterns that could at best give them a bad reputation and at worst constitute medical malpractice/negligence (mind you, I already thought they were incompetent back when I identified as trans)

2) the people we talked to genuinely didn’t know of any other cases but didn’t bother investigating further. I think we both explicitly told the people we saw that we wanted them to write down our information and send it to whoever could be responsible of collecting that data; it seems they didn’t care further than writing a small note in our files

either way, the point is claims of detransition being the rarest thing to ever happen are suspicious lol

[butch-choice]

The vibrator story

It's strange i first bought mastectomy and later then bought a vibrator.

I wanted a vibrator for years.

But i chose the thing, i wanted for just 2 years. And it was much more expensive. What a stupid thing. I should have bought the vibrator first.

Not amerika first. Vibrator first.

And try to tell you're not opressed, when you're to embarrassed to buy a vibrator but doing a mastectomie is fine. (Ironical)

[butch-choice]

One of these would be nice for every women toilet in my university for Applied Sciences.

https://www.amazon.de/KOSMETIK-TAMPONSPENDER-WATTEPADHALTER-TAMPONHALTER-RUND-CHROM-WANDMONTAGE-NEU/dp/B00DUEFQSY/ref=sr_1_cc_3?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1546129453&sr=1-3-catcorr&keywords=tampon+spender

[butch-choice]

t is annoying

i went into a store to buy some things. i haven't speaken in days (talking with google home doesn't count). and was suprised how deep my voice is. and that it really doesn't sound womenly anymore. t is annoying. even a year after you stopped it..

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 4 September 1895, Xiang Jingyu, communist and one of the pioneers of the Chinese women’s movement was born. She was an advocate for women’s rights, as part of the liberation of the working class, and criticised sexist practices in the Communist Party. She led a strike of thousands of female silk factory workers in 1924. She was involved in organising women’s support for the Canton-Hong Kong workers’ strike the following year. Unfortunately she was betrayed and arrested in 1928 by French police. The French handed her over to the Kuomintang, who then executed her, but before her death she refused to give up any names of her comrades. More info about the Canton-Hong Kong strike here: https://ift.tt/2l3gyGE pressure tends are https://ift.tt/2Ch1Usu

[crashchaoscats-deactivated20200]

Hi Carey,

I am a transgender identifying teen who feels caught between the ultra-affirming trans culture and transphobia. I’m terrified by stories of detransition, and want to make sure I don’t make the wrong choice to transition, however the need to transition is very compelling. I guess I’m looking for any advice you would give to a young trans person on avoiding having to detransition.

I’m so relieved to hear you’re terrified of detransition. Recently the backlash to detransitioners’ heightened visibility in the media have been opinion pieces which argue “De-transition is rare and not as bad as people think.” It’s easy to make such a sweeping minimization when the research into detransition consists of case studies of individuals, and survey research is shut down for being likely to cause controversy. Minimizing the negative psychological, health, social, career, and financial consequences of inappropriate transition and subsequent detransition is unfortunately what we should expect from the doctors who earn money and professional acclaim through pediatric transition. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Detransition is that special kind of hyper-shitty experience where people who will never transition or detransition nonetheless feel they are entitled to be the expert on whether it’s shitty. I refuse to spend this essay establishing it’s shittiness- there are detransitioners writing all over the internet about why and how it’s shitty. At the end of this essay is a list of detransitioner blogs I find especially useful when I need a reality check that this is a profoundly hard and messed up situation a bunch of us are in.

(While the right wing often fixates on the “regret” detransitioners are imagined to feel about our changed (and endlessly objectified) bodies, here’s a link to a more realistic take on the kinds of regrets the detransitioners I know are processing: https://permutational.tumblr.com/post/180871869901/hypotheticals.)

I am a therapist, but I am not your therapist and never will be. Working with patients who experience gender dysphoria would make me vulnerable to accusations of conversion therapy, and I’m not a masochist anymore. One upside about not being your therapist is that there isn’t a paycheck that forces me to mediate the realness of my advice.

(I can’t tell from your letter if you are male or female. I have more insight into being a female managing gender dysphoria so that’s what I’m going to speak to. Sorry guys, good vibes to you.)

There aren’t any demographic markers you can check yourself against to see if you are likely to detransition. I’ve met women who detransitioned after 20 years, 10 years, 5, or luckily found a way to reconcile with being female before beginning HRT. There are detransitioned women whose lives as trans men were pretty complete- wives or husbands, jobs they enjoyed, and kids. There are straight detransitioned women, lesbian detransitioned women, bi detransitioned women. There are detransitioned women who now identify as butches, detransitioned women who now identify as femmes, detransitioned women who have a chip on our shoulders against identification.

I can’t give you a mechanism for checking how future you will feel about the choices you make today. What you can check is 1) the specifics of the experiences you’re having now 2) the realistic potential consequences to the choices available to you and 3) the values you can live by such that if everything goes to shit you can be at peace with what you did with your money and time.

Investigating the specifics of your gender dysphoria:

Track how your gender dysphoria fluctuates for at least a year. 12 months of tracking a symptom is not long, especially compared to how many years you’ll be navigating the outcomes of your medical decisions. What I observed in the community is that many people experienced a big spike in the intensity of their gender dysphoria when they socially transitioned and began hormones, which surgery then gave them relief from. But then 3–5 years later the gender dysphoria crept back, except now fixated on different aspects of their body then what they initially addressed with surgery. It was common for the trans guys I knew to develop a fixation on their hairline, body hair, or hips and thighs. It was also surprisingly common in my circle for trans men, after the initial high of completing surgery had passed, to express the wish that women they met in passing understood they were female. You shouldn’t assume that your desires about who strangers understand you to be will stay the same as they are today.

Supposedly there are some people whose gender dysphoria does not increase or decrease in intensity based on their social context and health factors. I’ve never met one of these people, transitioned or detransitioned. Friend groups, menstrual cycles, stress, jobs, weight loss or gain, and health problems all end up continuing to affect the intensity of GD after surgery or hormones. Whether your transition works out or you detransition, it is likely GD is going to be an experience you have on an ongoing basis throughout your life.

Here’s a tracking sheet for you use to get some data about what contextual factors affect the intensity of your GD. (I put a copyright claim on this, so copy it all you want, but don’t put it in anything you’re going to sell. I’M LOOKING AT YOU, YOU HERITAGE FOUNDATION F*CKS.) It’s helpful to have real data about how environments, relationships and the choices about your physical wellbeing you are making in your daily life impact your GD. If it turns out your GD increases on days you have to navigate high school, that’s important, because high school is a temporary environment where outrageous sexist abuse and harassment is usually completely normalized. You don’t want to make permanent changes that affect your long term health if a temporary shitty context is escalating your GD. If it turns out there are family relationships that increase your GD, well, you will soon be able to make choices about what family members you allow in your life, so that’s also a temporary context creating distress you don’t want to solve with permanent body modifications.

The reason the tracking sheet makes you rate your GD from 1 to 10 and notice its intensity at different times in the day is that physiologically we experience very different process at different times in the day. It may be physiological factors set off your GD. My GD can be pretty intense first thing in the morning, when my cortisol is high. It’s important to notice that because if your GD is connected to cortisol your plan of action should be directed at decreasing spikes of cortisol, and medical transition tends to set up many high cortisol situations.

It’s helpful to be also note what substances you’re using, both ones you got from doctors and ones you got from lay people. If you notice your body feels incorrect or unreal on days you take a certain medication, your doctor needs to know that. If you notice that the more pot you smoke the more often your body feels incorrect or unreal, that does not surprise me. Dissociative experiences are what pot was cultivated to create for us, so you can’t smoke it regularly and then be surprised that your body feels like a bad dream. Do yourself the favor of being weed-free for the year you are tracking your GD. If you don’t know how you would manage without weed for a year, that challenge needs to be figured out before discerning your medical transition path.

It’s important to track your screen time for a similar reason. If you’re looking at screens 5 hours a day I’m not surprised that you would feel your body wasn’t real or was in some way incorrect. Your interoception, which is your sense of what’s going on with your physical body, is withering away while you stare at those screens. If you have intense gender dysphoria and you are also constantly on the computer (especially if you’re spending your nights online instead of sleeping), it is time to experiment with not having a computer.

What are the realistic consequences to your choices?

This is where you have to do research. What kinds of health issues do trans guys experience after 5 years on T and how do they address them? What about 10 years? What about 20? What’s aging like for someone who takes testosterone for decades? What are the sources of information for these questions and how trustworthy are they? Who is getting sued for malpractice and what exactly did they do to their patients? Are any sources of information compromised by financial incentives? Are any questions of the safety of medical interventions portrayed as settled when the research is not there to back that portrayal up? You’re going to have to decide for yourself what an acceptable amount of unknowns is when it comes to your health. Because you have the good sense to be terrified of detransition, I believe in your capacity to do this research.

One aspect to medical transition that gets glossed over is that there is a fair amount of maintenance required over the life span, whether that’s ongoing HRT, maintaining a certain weight, or problem solving the complications from HRT and surgeries as your body ages. You will always, for your entire life span, be confronted with how big of a priority your desired appearance will be versus other health concerns. The best case scenario is that the occasions requiring choices and effort from you regarding your medical transition become more infrequent as your life continues. As part of your research you should find and speak to older trans guys about the choices they faced down the road because of taking testosterone. Buck Angel and Aydian Dowling have both been generous enough to talk in detail about the complications that led to their hysterectomies. Talk to as many older trans men as you can. I’ve generally found older trans guys to be very upfront and open about the tough parts of transition, even if they are completely at peace with their decisions to medically transition.

What values are you guided by?

Often, the things we think will make us happy don’t. Degrees, marriages, moves, kids- we work really hard to obtain milestones that usually come with their own complex problems and which at best we feel ambivalent about.

Medical transition is an experiment, for everyone. You will not know whether a mastectomy will make you happier until you get a mastectomy. You will not know whether a new pronoun will make you happier until you ask people to use a new pronoun. You will not know how you will feel 10 years out from transition until you’re 10 years out from transition.

The lead up to transition often involves a lot of obsessive though about what “identity” fits you best. Identities change a lot. Values tend to be more consistent. If you care about beauty, family, and nature at 15, there’s a good chance you’ll care about beauty, family, and nature at 25. If you can identify what you value at 15, then you can spend the years between 15 and 25 building a life full of what you care about.

Identifying your values enables you to choose suffering that will be meaningful to you. We all, no matter what choices we make, end up suffering. Suffering that has a point is easier to bear. If you know what you value in life, you will feel more at peace with the suffering you have to endure to create what you value.

I would suggest that while you’re spending the year (weed free!) tracking your GD, you also devote a substantial amount of time identifying your values. It’s very tempting in the trans community to buy into “poor me” stories in which you don’t have any responsibility for your circumstances or self-efficacy at your disposal. Identifying your values and challenging yourself about whether your actions and patterns reflect those values reminds you that you’re responsible for how your life turns out. If your top values are wealth, friends, beauty, and family, cool, you should go about your transition in a way that prioritizes those, and creates a life full of what you value. If you double check that all your choices prioritize what you value, then even if you detransition you’ll have a life full of (or at least moving towards being full of) what you value.

My top values are health, respect, independence, relaxation and honesty. If I had taken the time before starting HRT to seriously reflect on and identify my values, I wouldn’t have gone about my transition the way I did. I wouldn’t have socially transitioned in a public way, because that choice made me vulnerable to lots of opportunism and disrespect from people being performative in their allyship. I wouldn’t have taken risks with how I earn my money, because that ended up making me dependent on those awful allies. I would have been more aware of and skeptical of people and workplaces within the community that were toxic. I would have done so much more research on what trans guys can expect as they age. (I had to work at an informed consent clinic before I could grok how uninterested researchers are regarding what happens to trans people’s bodies as they get older.) I would not have cultivated dependence on the Bay Area radical queer community, which is so over the top in its authoritarianism. I would have been more cognizant of how stressful all this supposed liberation was, and a lot more aware of what being stressed does to my GD.

(A note about therapists: There are some skilled, careful, ethical therapists out there. There are also lots of avenues by which therapists can get drawn into professional structures, like supervisory relationships and certificate programs, which if led by ideologues can force a shut-down of their critical thinking. If you ever feel that your therapist would feel disappointed or betrayed by your changing ideas about your identity or about the trans community, that is a big red flag that your therapist’s ideological loyalty is being prioritized over your autonomy and well-being. The most cult-like behavior I’ve seen in the trans community has been among the doctors and therapists. People in that crowd act like it’s normal to have in group discussions that you wouldn’t want the general public to catch wind of. That’s not a normal dynamic to encounter in medicine or mental health. I’ve received so many personal messages from mental health providers and physicians saying they’re concerned about the potential outcomes of pediatric transition and informed consent care, but they can’t say it publicly. The trans health care scene is currently a wild situation, and I’m grateful I don’t have to be in it.)

Don’t think of transition as one big decision you can get right and then be done with it. Think of each decision (whether that’s what pronoun you ask for, or T, or surgery, or which surgeon you choose) as starting down a path leading to many other branching decisions. Once you make one big decision in life, the big decisions will just keep on rolling right towards you. I think this is a hell of a first big decision to make, especially since the part of your brain that is particularly good at making decisions won’t be done developing till halfway through your twenties. Regardless, try to regard your process of making this first big decision as exploring what your process for making decisions that serve you as an adult will look like. How do you remain realistic when making decisions? How do you rank priorities when making decisions? How do you manage risk and the unknowns when you make decisions?

One day, if you’re very lucky, you’ll get to experience being 55. Lots of people, before they’re 55, don’t ever imagine what their lives might be like at 55. You should imagine being 55 in a lot of detail. Because whatever choices you make about your body now, 55 year old you will be living out the consequences of. Before you give your organs unexpected substances to process, or remove body parts, try to get as clear as you can on how your choices will impact 55 year old you. If you challenge yourself to acknowledge the aspects of reality you really would rather do without, and you get very clear on what’s important to you, you can absolutely use your common sense to create a future you’d like to live out. It’s difficult but simple; like Lao-tzu said, “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are headed.

Detransitioner Blogs to Check Out

Crash

23

Redress

Detransition Info

Cari

Detransition Sister

Max

Retransition

Permutational

Butch Coming Home

Tejuina

New Thought Crime

[butch-choice]

sex and gender

rosa freedman suggested there should be gender and sex to choose from. so 2 decisions. to protect females and to protect trans. i like that. if i as early teen had known that sex and gender is different it would have helped me a lot. now i read beauvoir (well the wiki article and the book is in my shelf). now i know. but i'm ten years older and my breasts are gone. what do you think about the suggestion of freedman?