When You See It

Detrans woman, lesbian, butch. I do not identify. I am.

[user87262893]

trans women are just as much women as you are. it's okay if you can't grasp that or it makes you upset, but cis women do not own womanhood. i pray for you to learn and grow.

Hi love!

I hope this helps explain why I disagree with you in a simple, friendly manner.

And also

And also

And also, regarding womanhood

And finally, I found a little visual of what this interaction we're having looks like!

[dtgg2021-deactivated20211127]

Do you have a link to the sixty minutes thing?

Health care challenges for transgender youth

Lesley Stahl reports on the spate of legislation being introduced in states that would limit care for transgender youth.

Inside the 60 Minutes report on transgender health care issues

Correspondent Lesley Stahl takes viewers inside her report on the health care challenges facing the transgender community.

[butchsowhat]

Who told you that girls didn’t stand like that?

Who told you ?

Who told you your body should always be hungry ?

Who trained you to apologize?

Who said you acted like a boy?

Who made the rules?

Who told you what to wear ?

Who kept you still?

Who picked that color, that hair ?

Who told you to shave?

Who made you ashamed?

Who made you hate you?

Who?

[unknowledge]

From Laura Aguilar’s Plush Pony, a series chronicling the denizens of a lesbian bar in El Sereno, LA in the 1990s.

Aguilar set up a makeshift studio in the back of Plush Pony and offered to photograph women alone, in couples, or in groups. The resulting series of photographs is an amazing document of working-class Chicana lesbian culture, a group whose existence is relegated to the margins of both Chicana and lesbian social formations. The Plush Pony series records the highly stylized bodies of the women—in particular, their Chicana configuration of butch/femme tattoos and hairstyles and their poses.

[mistakesweremadehere-deactivate]

From Keira Bell on Twitter [Source]

[permutational]

Building Lesbian Space Together

Are you a young lesbian who wishes she could be in lesbian spaces more often (or at all)? Are you dismayed at how few lesbian spaces exist? Are you disheartened at “missing out” on lesbian culture/history? Are you convinced that lesbian spaces are disappearing, dying, of a different time and place?

I’d like to make a few recommendations:

1.) Establish the belief, the knowledge, that lesbian spaces can and will always exist. Know that we have the collective strength to hold ourselves up. 2.) Know that you can directly help lesbian spaces thrive, and that the more of us that pitch in, the better it will be. 3.) Do something about it. Take concrete steps to contribute to physical lesbian spaces and gatherings. They can be tiny steps or big steps. They could a contribution of time, skills, money, or even just spreading the word: reminding other lesbians that we can build something together.

We need each other, now and in the future.

Lesbians will always face pressure and backlash. There has never not been opposition to lesbian autonomy. Our lesbian foremothers did not have the luxury of acceptance, and neither will we. That didn’t stop them from gathering, working together, and building something worthwhile. It doesn’t have to stop us either. We can accept the torch that they’re giving us.

We can do this.

We can come together and make sure there is always space for us, and for future lesbians who need it.

If you want a concrete example:

Earlier this month, I became a recurring donor for the We Want The Land Coalition (WWTLC). If you are able, I recommend doing the same!

Until the end of this month (Dec 2020), there is an ongoing campaign calling on women to be landmothers: recurring donors.

I’ve still never had the chance to visit The Land in Michigan. But I want to. I want that space to be there for me, when I finally have the means to visit. Contributing can ensure that space will always be there for me, for my friends, for all the lesbians who want to be there.

I also like that the WWTLC is a land conservation & stewardship effort for 650 of acres of ecologically astounding forests and wetlands.

As it goes with donations: every donation, no matter how big or small, can make a difference. Many hands make easy work of a barnraising.

Part of me feels like $25/mo is a lot of money. But the rest of me knows it’s not, especially for what it’s going toward. I can look back to the first half of this last decade, in my early 20s, when I had far less money, and know that even though I was struggling at the time, I still easily spent far more than $25/mo on drugs alone, because nothing else gave me hope.

It’s a matter of prioritization. What is important to me now? What do I want to be a part of? What do I want to work toward? What do I want to see manifested in this world, and in what small way can I help make that happen?

If I want lesbian land to be there for me, I have to be there for her first.

We are entitled to nothing. We get what we put forward.

[butchsowhat]

I will support this.

[fox-steward]

hi, not sure if this blog is active bc im on mobile but you seem v knowledgeable so i hope you are. i have a question if thats ok. ive been id'ing as ftm trans/nb for about 6 years now but havent rlly been able to come out to many ppl or transition at all so im still largely presenting as female. i wouldnt rlly call myself gender critical or anything like that, but i know transitioning is a long & difficult process and im wondering if there is a way to alleviate my dysphoria without going (1/2)

“thru all that. i dont want to transition only to realize that i dont feel better and there was an easier way. in other words, id like to rule out any possibility that im not trans before medically investing in being trans. any chance you have any advice for me? (2/2)”

hey there—still active, if sporadic.

when it comes to healing from dysphoria, there’s no cure-all, no hidden path to healing that you’ve simply yet to uncover. just as there’s no way to guarantee transition will make you happy, there’s no opposite guarantee either. i can only share some of the stuff that has worked for me and some of the hardships i uncovered about living as trans, which i hope you find helpful.

what helps me?

get clear with yourself about what you believe about gender, ideologically. i personally feel, if my beliefs do not stand up to critical thought, if they cannot be supported by rational arguments, then those beliefs are not worth holding on to and i need to let them go. this is what happened to me WRT transness, gender, and all that.

start small—what is gender? is gender innate? do we have gendered souls? how could we have gendered souls if gender is a social construct? okay, so we can’t have gendered souls, so what is gender, if not innate? is gender the social expectations and norms attached to the two sexes? is it possible to break those roles and expectations? does breaking those roles and expectations change anyone’s sex? no—males can behave in typically feminine ways and females in typically masculine ways and that does nothing to change their sex. so what would conceivably make someone (or myself) trans? inhabiting the social roles and expectations of the gender associated with the opposite sex. since we already established that gender isn’t innate and we don’t have gendered souls, there’s no merit in the “born in the wrong body” narrative; it is not possible to be born in the wrong body. we each get one body, no matter how we change it. but if i wasn’t born in the wrong body, why do i feel so uncomfortable with mine, especially with the sexed aspects of it? if you’re female, the likely culprit is misogyny. you don’t actually have to hate women on a conscious level to be suffering from internalized misogyny. we live in a misogynistic world, it saturates everything. if you’re female, it affects almost every factor of how you move through this world—how people treat you, what opportunities you’re given, which behaviors are encouraged for you and which are discouraged, etc. if you are inclined to prefer masculinity—for whatever reason—society will encourage this in males and discourage it in females. having your way of being subtly discouraged all the time can easily lead to feeling disconnected from your body, perhaps even hating it, especially since you know that your way of being would be ENCOURAGED if only your body were male. and that’s when many of us encounter trans ideology that tells us we CAN be male—in fact, we actually were all along! all we have to do is change our bodies drastically with lifelong medication and surgery, all we have to do is trade money and time and health to convincingly imitate the opposite sex—THEN society will finally recognize that our way of being is okay—because we were actually masculine MEN all along, it was simply our female bodies obscuring that. does this feel like a good or healthy trade to you? it doesn’t to me, but i can’t make these decisions for you.

there IS an important caveat, a shortcut that bypasses this bad trade entirely—and that’s realizing that your way of being is ALREADY okay. masculine females and feminine males are healthy and good. it’s not always easy to comfortably BE that way in a society that does not embrace masculinity in women and femininity in men, but the solution is not to change your self, it’s to change the society. and the only way you can do that is by carving out that path—BE a masculine female/woman and you’ll show little girls today that there’s a place for them in this world.

i did try out the trade for myself, however, and i learned a few things you might find useful—maybe these lessons i learned can save you the time and money and pain i’ve already spent.

1) you never actually change sex. you’re always chasing the aesthetic imitation of the opposite sex with transition, but never becoming the opposite sex. in this and so many other ways, transition never ends.

2) passing is conditional. when your sense of self is predicated upon others seeing you a certain way, it can be taken from you in a second. i could be treated like one of the guys for a year, until one of them finds out i was born female. now that he knows, he cannot unknow. now my experience is tied to how he sees me—does he see me as a woman now that he knows? is he comfortable with me in the locker room? it was stressful and uncomfortable for others to have this level of control over my experience of the world and of myself. it’s also out of my control whether he decides to lend manhood to me now—will he use male pronouns with me? will he call me a woman? will he out me to the others? will he sexualize me or sexually assault me based on my female body?

3) as stated above, transition never ends. no matter how well you pass, transition always requires maintenance. you’ll need bloodwork as long as you’re on hormones—that’s time and money you wouldn’t have otherwise spent. you’ll need supplies for your hormone shots—time and money you wouldn’t have spent. there will be instances where you need to disclose your trans status, thus repeating the coming out process infinitely—doctors or EMTs, new intimate partners, friends. this process is exhausting and othering, it’s an ever-present reminder of the fact that you’re trans.

4) medical transition is expensive in terms of money and heath. taking hormones is always a risk. there’s potential for: cardiovascular risk associated with testosterone, vaginal atrophy and sexual side effects, changes to mood (some for the better, some worse), not liking how hormones change your body. then there’s the financial aspect. in the USA at least, this costs money—money for doctor’s visits, money for the hormones themselves, money for the supplies to administer them. there’s risk in any surgery—risk of death or serious complication, loss of function and sensation, improper healing, chronic pain. and of course, the monetary cost associated with surgery. removing the uterus can have lifelong consequences—early onset dimentia, lifelong need for synthetic hormones, osteoporosis.

5) there is no “actually trans.” there’s no meaningful distinction between “true trans” people and others. trans people transition and identify as trans. their dysphoria isn’t any different than mine was. there’s no method for parsing “real dysphoria” from something else. transness is an ideology. i liken it to religion. there are no “real christians” and fake christians, there are only people who believe and those who don’t. that’s the salient difference between myself (detransitioner) and trans people—belief. and if something requires me to believe in it to be real...well that’s a good indication it probably isn’t.

good luck out there. these are heavy questions and weighty struggles. there’s no harm in focusing on other aspects of your life when you’re having trouble answering Big Gender Questions. rooting for you.

[butchsowhat]

Very good advice as always.

[smashing-yng-man]

[butchsowhat]

https://twitter.com/detrans_voices/status/1330615646854385664?s=21

DetransVoices.org on Twitter

“Detrans Voices is a community resource created for, by, & about people who have detransitioned &/or desisted from transgender self-

Another resource for detrans people.

[detranscanada]

DetransCanada.com

🍁

Instagram

[permutational]

Today, I was video chatting with one of my nearest and dearest friends -- a straight woman in her late 70s -- and the topic of posture came up. We were grousing about our desk jobs, when she gave me an anecdote: when she was younger, she used to have excellent posture. She stood up straight and tall. But one day, one of her peers made fun of her for it, because it made her bosom stick out. For years after that, she slouched and kept her shoulders forward to make her chest less visible. It permanently affected her posture.

She demonstrated The Slouch for me, and I recognized it immediately. It's the same one I had as a teenager. The same one that got even worse during the years I was binding. The same one I still have now out of habit.

It's intense to have so many viscerally similar experiences to women so much older than me.

My path is filled with different experiences than most, because different choices, different methods of coping/fighting/living were presented to me. But there are so many formative experiences and traumas that are shared, that are happening over and over again.

The things I've felt and lived are not entirely new. None of us are alone.

[postgenderfunk]

Post Gender Funk 🦎 New Episode Today!

Stream it here! At 7pm EDT / 4pm PST 

A livestream podcast by and for detrans/desisted and reidentified people, hosted by Ben aka @gnc-centric

If you’d like to be a guest on the podcast, recommend a guest, request a topic be covered or just have questions you want answered on the stream, message me or send me anons on this blog! 

If you have any articles, studies, blog posts, etc that you want us to cover on the podcast, pls don’t hesitate to contact me!

Playlist of past episodes 

Thanks for sharing and hope you can tune in 😜

[butchsowhat]

I just want to not like dick in peace.

[nightnightsweetprince]

Here are some cool gals looking mighty dapper! You can click on each photo for names and here’s some info on each fabulous woman:

Lily Elsie: English actress during Edwardian era, famous for being in many musicals and operettas

Josephine Baker: French bisexual actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s, refused to perform for segregated audiences, active with the French Resistance during WWII and the Civil Rights movement in the 50s

Dorothy Arzner: American lesbian film director who was the only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s, created the first boom mike for the Clara Bow film “The Wild Party” (1929)

Dorothy Mackaill: British-American actress who was involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, also notable for her silent-film roles

Daphne du Maurier: English bisexual author and playwright, famous for her works like Rebecca and “The Birds”

Frida Kahlo: Mexican bisexual painter, known for the feminist and nationalist themes in her paintings, created 55 self-portraits and once stated “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”

Hannah Gluckstein, known as “Gluck”: British lesbian artist known for her evocative Modernist paintings, adopted the name “Gluck” because she thought the sex of a painter is irrelevant

Olive Thomas: American silent-film actress, involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, possibly the first “Vargas Girl” after posing for pinup artist Alberto Vargas

Jessie Matthews: English actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s

Katharine Hepburn: American actress who helped to create the “modern woman” image in Classic Hollywood during the 1930s and 40s, wore trousers before it was fashionable for women to do so, won four Academy Awards for Best Actress

[lesbiandomesticity]

you know when i am feeling needy or lonely or sad without me every having to say anything. you sit on my lap, arms draped over my shoulders, and kiss me softly on the head. i pull you close, and feel myself start to thaw. you rest your head on my shoulder, and i breathe in your scent: something warm and sweet, but not sickly. something homey. you kiss my neck, gently, and i melt even further. i want nothing more but to freeze this moment. to live here forever.

[butchsowhat]

Every single day since starting my detransition I have had a moment where I’m so damn happy that I can just exist again with out all the mental gymnastics and worry about if I’m passing.

Everyday since starting  my detransition I look at my beautiful wife and am so happy I get to be with her again as a woman. I missed that more then I’ve missed anything in my life.

Everyday I’m happy I’m living my life as a butch lesbian woman again.

[butchsowhat]

Volunteers still needed.

[butchsowhat]

Final weeks