Hey so normally I don't post about this in particular, but regarding trans men and mascs and sports and how we're treated in general. In my middle school we had a single day in health class/sex ed set aside to talk about all lgbtq/queer topics. Already too little time to properly cover everything, but that's a wider issue and a different post. During that one day, we watched one singular piece of media about trans people and didn't get any actual instruction or information, just watched this documentary and that was it. No debrief afterwards, no talking to an actual trans person, nothing. Do you want to know what the documentary was? It was about a trans man who loved running, it was his sport of choice, and he showed incredible promise in highschool before he transitioned. He would've been scouted for all sorts of opportunities. They made sure in the documentary to keep mentioning this, and keep mentioning how happy he was before transitioning, all while refusing to call him he/him, just his deadname and she/her pronouns. It presented his want to transition as difficult for THE OTHER PEOPLE IN HIS LIFE, and not him. It was presented as a horrible loss of opportunity because he didn't perform as well as cis men in his sport of choice. After he transitioned, the documentary just kept hammering home what a horrible shame it was that such a lovely "girl" with such promise would ruin "her" life. This was how trans men were presented to us. Mistakes. People wasting their life and the promise they had as a girl. It was a fucking cautionary tale to not transition because you could mess up opportunities. It wasn't presented/marketed as that, I do remember it being like "wow look at this trans man who gave up everything just for happiness in the right gender!" but it just felt so horrible to watch as the documentary tried to present it as something that you have to choose between? I remember it vividly, because I was just reaching a point in my life where I was wondering if I was trans. And this documentary made me feel like shit. It made me feel like everyone in my life would be scared of me or for me and like I would never do anything of value if I transitioned, and I would have to pick between a good life, and being trans.
I'm sure he had to sign off on a lot of the decisions made in the documentary. Maybe he was fine with everything, maybe that's how he felt. But getting just this story. Just that one. And basically being told "so don't transition 'cause you'll be worse than cis people in your preferred thing that you're good at" and just leaving school that day? Horrible. We didn't have any follow up discussions, we didn't get any other stories, we didn't get a wide range of media to watch, we didn't get told to do our own research, we didn't talk about hrt or social transition vs medical transition or gender dysphoria or gender *euphoria*, we just got a "so yeah that's why being trans is really hard". I hate that presentation of trans people. I hate being reduced down to potential suffering. I hate the idea that trans people, and trans men in particular, are just pitiable misguided children who are ruining their opportunities. I hate the representation of the trans experience that diminishes all of the joy, that presents the trans experience as suffering and pain and something that you shouldn't even consider going through because it's nothing but hardship and misery. And is it hard to be trans? Well, kind of. It isn't hard to *be* trans, but yes, it is hard to exist as a trans person and deal with all of the bullshit that comes along with being trans, having dysphoria, being visibly trans or queer, and living in a day and age where legislation is actively becoming more and more hostile towards trans people. But BEING trans, being yourself, loving yourself, once you get to that level of acceptance with yourself, being trans is not hard. Being trans is joyful, it's a kind of love, it's something I don't see any misery in. It's just a fact of my life.
Basically, to end this, trans men are perceived so often as confused girls, soft little babies we should protect before they ruin their lives, or as stupid little girls who aren't good at anything and don't know what they're doing. We're infantilized, so often. I think this was really prevalent when people hated Cavetown for making the kind of music he does, or when in 2020 (I don't know if anyone else remembers this but I sure do 'cause I was the only transmasc in my friend group at the time and I got to hear this shit constantly) everyone called transmascs and masc nonbinaries "uwu little soft boy/i" all the time or made fun of them for how short they were. This is the kind of treatment I got when I was just starting in my transition, and now ~7 years later, we're still treated like this when applicable, but we also get the "you're all big scary men" when applicable. We're hardly ever seen as people with our own agency, we're only viewed through the lens of how OTHER people might feel about us, no matter if it's the "cute little soft femboy/twink" interpretation, "little girl mutilating herself" interpretation, or the "all trans men are abusers because they're men" interpretation. TLDR, this "trans men is only what we make them/say they are" mentality has been around since I was a kid, and it's gone through different phases, but it's still here and it's still prevalent, and it's still frustrating.
janainaart
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