insomnia_cat

TRANS MASC - 30+ - AUTHOR - WHITE - HOW DO PEOPLE MAKE THIS STUFF SO LONG??

[insomnia-cat]

Making a pinned post, because I figure that's the sort of thing I should do now that I'm actually making this an active blog. So:

I'm a trans man. That's primarily why I have this blog. It's a place for me to post about my experiences since I'm not fully out in real life. At the moment, I present to most people as a cis woman. That will hopefully be changing, but I live in Hell, so it's unlikely to happen super soon. I'm an author. I am actively working on many books. I love to talk to people about my creative works! Please feel free to reach out and talk to me about them. However, if you send an ask, you're agreeing not to be an asshole! It's right there on the button. So, if you click on it and are still an asshole, I reserve the right to block you unanswered. I'm also autistic. I don't usually see how that's relevant, but I am so. I honestly don't know what else to put here.

[therapatical]

I think before you're allowed to argue about whether trans people who can get pregnant are vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence in ways that trans people who can't get pregnant are exempt from (even if they are vulnerable to different forms of violence! they are still exempt from this one thing), you should be required to watch a vaginal delivery as well as a cesarean delivery. on video. full video. there are plenty of educational videos online where you can do so. if you have never seen a birth, I do not want to hear about how trivial of a violence you think it is. I really don't.

[transfemme-shelterdog]

Also the permanent changes it can cause to your body.

Like yeah, body hair for transfems for some is INCREDIBLY dysphoria inducing. Now imagine if a transfem was banned from ever shaving anything ever, and was forced to have a beard and shag carpet of chest hair. Would make you wanna die right? Now imagine how trans guys who are dysphoric around their hips and waist and chest feel when they're forced to become *more* feminine looking and permanently unlike being able to shave. You can't shave off those changes.

[insomnia-cat]

Also I know it’s not the popular viewpoint, but stretch marks related to pregnancy are Also Permanent, for most people. I thought for the longest time that I was a bad person bc I didn’t feel empowered by my “tiger stripes” or my “battle scars” or however cis people try to paint the physical signs your body carried a baby. I genuinely thought I was monstrous bc whenever I look at the stretch marks I specifically gained from pregnancy I experience plummeting, horrible feelings in my stomach. But like. Birth for me was traumatizing. It wasn’t easy or magical or fun. I had an emergency c-section for my first child and thought I was going to die. Trauma + dysphoria + social shaming means this is the first time I’m talking publicly about how it feels to have marks on my body that won’t ever go away unless I elect to have expensive surgery, and if I have that surgery I am immediately ostracized and painted as shallow for not being able to overcome my trauma/dysphoria bc “girl power” or whatever (and no, saying “well I’m not a girl” does not stop this behavior.)

Birth for people who can have it but are dysphoric about it, can be a permanent trauma on their body in so many ways. It’s okay to acknowledge that and it doesn’t make a person bad for feeling those things and it doesn’t make us ungrateful when we do feel dysphoric over it.

(Obviously neither of you were saying that, but I have seen many who do and it’s always terrible when I do.)

[insomnia-cat]

Already seeing someone acting like Iron Lung is going to make the state of cinema some kind of horrible thing as we're not already stuck in remake hell because the only movies getting produced and making money are fucking. Insanely large companies. PLEASE. I don't care if the next ten movies are made out of indie games or internet jokes or fucking anything, if I have to watch another mediocre remake that flops and stains the memory of the original, then I will personally shoot m--

[creekfiend]

we are broadly so fucking bad at being good friends to people who Cannot Leave

there are people who Cannot Leave. hopefully it's not the case for their whole lives but it is the case for them RIGHT NOW. and even trauma and abuse aware communities are shitassfuck bad at knowing how to be a supportive friend to these people and I find it soooo fucking frustrating. it's condescension and scolding and unrealistic standards and victim blaming and minimizing all the way fucking down .

[lailah-tov]

It's so important to educate yourself about why people stay in bad situations and how to help someone who can't leave or goes back. Any sentence starting with "You should just" is bad, but "You should just leave" is one of the worst.

[creekfiend]

thank you for those links!

[insomnia-cat]

Very funny to me (not really) how many people talk about, loudly, how half of the population doesn’t have an internal world or any emotional depth beyond their assumptions.

And then when the half of the population they’re saying all this about is like “hey, wtf? I’m a full whole person just like you??” There is so much upset. Just. People ready to go scorched earth on everything because they got called for being shitty.

Not to mention how badly this ignored the existence of nonbinary people or people who don’t fit into boxes neatly at all. (Which imo isn’t just nonbinary people—the entire world wants to pretend their boxes aren’t as restrictive as they are but like. That’s a whole bigger conversation.)

[insomnia-cat]

I think the most frustrating thing about the social tendency to cling to shortcuts is that like. It's so easy to recognize once you start to recognize it as a behavior. "Oh, I actually don't know anything about that person--that's one of those social shortcuts that gets ingrained into people, but it's not real." Men aren't laborers or protectors or violent monsters. That's a social shortcut. You actually don't know anything about any man you haven't yet interacted with--and when you do interact with them, you actually only know what they revealed when they interacted. Women aren't natural nurturers, or wildly empathetic, or harshly judgemental. That's a social shortcut. We pretend to be able to tell these things right away because society pretends like we need to have a Stock Person we can judge before anyone opens their mouth, based on gender. Non-Stock People confuse people who are used to using Stock Shortcuts to make quick judgements. Those quick judgements feel safe, because it feels much safer to Know Things than to Not Know Things. Trans people are more alike and simultaneously more different than society wants to let us acknowledge. There is so much to that, that I can't really encompass that here. It extends to other things! All sorts of things. Society will try to shove you down so many shortcuts, but they don't actually go anywhere. Because you are lost, convincing yourself society handed you a map, but there's nothing on it. The more you buy into it, the more it destroys your relationships with huge swaths of people. Because the only things you ever know about a person is what they do and say. That isn't to say that these socially created short cuts are useless to understand--lots and lots of people are using them, after all. But don't fall for them. Don't believe them just because they're easy boxes to shove people into when you don't initially understand them. I don't even really know how to tag this. Anyway, this was born from me thinking about how I'll probably never actually pass because I like bright colors and earrings and heart cut out shirts that show off my tits and I don't think that's going to change even when my tits are Guy Tits and the social shortcut says colors and style and earrings are all girl things. So don't think it's deep thoughts, I'm just Annoyed.

[yesterdaysprint]

Hartford Courant, Connecticut, March 9, 1906

[les-fleur]

I love making people feel human and accepted. I’m not flirting with you.

[insomnia-cat]

hi! could you pls trigger tag that post with fatphobia/tw fatphobia? as a fat trans man that post really upset me, and i have tw fatphobia blocked for this exact reason. thanks

Hi! I’m more than happy to add the specific tw fatphobia tag. However, maybe I’m just old and using tumblr weirdly, and I’m not trying to pushback at all, just understand. These are all the tags I used on the original post, where you can see fatphobia is tagged. Specifically, I tagged it for people who may be upset by seeing the fatphobia. Do you not have the fatphobia tag blocked as well?

Please know I’m just trying to understand, not argue.

Sorry that this happened anon!

[insomnia-cat]

This is an obvious troll. Please do not interact with trolls and give them more access to people to hurt. Pleeeease.

[hyaenidaeful]

And to add here as a more positive balance;

Trans men, there is no inherent body shape that will help you pass, like any other man your bodies are allowed to be diverse and that includes being fat. Your body type doesn't detract from you being a man or being able to be masculine and presenting as such.

On HRT or want to be? Your fat distribution will change anyway; estrogen promotes fat accumulation in the hips, thighs, and buttocks, on the flip side of that though? Testosterone leads to fat deposits around the abdomen. (My body shape was noticeably more square than curvy after starting HRT.)

Not on HRT? There's still a lot you can do! And within that is looking at men you know or see around you, what do you notice about them that you may be able and want to imitate? What clothes? Body language? Anything.

Voice training lessons can be found for free online, different voices utilize different musculature and the way you speak can do a lot to be affirming. Find your voice!

Confidence suits you more than trying to hide! and by that I mean trust yourself, wear fitting clothes; patterned clothing can hide your body shape. Be aware of how clothing fits you in general, you blend in a lot more while being confident (or just acting like you are) than you do relying on baggy clothes and hiding yourself. Genuinely the fake it til you make it mindset is massive, take up space! Be YOU!

Binding or taping if applicable (and you CAN tape for larger chests, it just requires more and a bit of trial and error), if you can't access this route then high impact sports bras will be your friend for holding things in place.

And obviously, there's nothing inherent to passing really, and above all you should do what makes you feel best and safe with your circumstances. You should be happy in your body doing what you want to/can to achieve it.

[insomnia-cat]

This is an obvious troll. Please do not interact with trolls and give them more access to people to hurt. Pleeeease.

Edited to add: I thought I should say, you should also just block this guy. The more of us who block him preemptively based on his behavior now, the less of an audience he has for the attention he wants and the less people will be hurt by him.

[insomnia-cat]

Trying to figure out if people really got someone’s blog terminated over saying “wrong answer”? Or if something else happened I didn’t understand? Or if I somehow got blocked… anything is possible.

[brandneweyescd]

rb to explode

[mi--corazon]

[anarchistmemedistro]

[insomnia-cat]

Specifically about discussions online, I think that if you could choose to reasonably ignore something and still get the same message from the post, then you’re not being spoken over. I think what people are often trying to say, and even are often wrong, is that they’re being talked down to or that the statement they’re objecting to is oppositional in some way.

An example of someone not speaking over you: someone adds on their own experience to your post. “I also have this experience and for me it looks like this! This experience for both of us appears to be good/bad/etc.” or some show of solidarity over a shared experience.

An example of speaking over you: someone makes a video, screenshot, or edited post where they literally obfuscate or take apart what you said to make it suit their own purpose. In this, their own addition takes center stage and is almost always oppositional.

An example of someone derailing a post (that I actually have seen): post is about x group experiencing bigotry. Person responds “well, don’t forget x group is actually bad, and y group has it worse!! Why isn’t this post about y group? You’re transphobic for making this post about x group when they’re bad, actually, and y group (the good group!) deals with this too!”

You can not want to have any of these responses, and I do think it’s reasonable to expect no one is going to do the last two. However, if you don’t want anyone relating to your experience or discussing their perspective in the comments of your post, you should probably tell people that otherwise it’s very confusing. That might look like “comments from x group will be deleted/shamed” or something. Unfortunately, yes, that will not make you look good to put that on the post. The secret is that it also doesn’t make you look good for people to slowly realize that is the practice that you want.

[this-is-trans-joy]

everyone loves to hate terfs until they realise that it actually entails rejecting bioessentialism entirely and then suddenly you’re “taking things too seriously” and you “don’t have a sense of humour” like i’m sorry but saying protect the dolls doesn’t make you immune to terfism it has seeped into every corner of mainstream feminism and unless you’re actively searching it out and checking your own biases you will always be at risk of sharing a space with terfs

[this-is-trans-joy]

“Only women can—” nope. “But all men—” nah. “The divine femininity of—” gonna stop you right there. “Everyone born ama—” if you finish that sentence I’ll kill you. “Men don’t experience—” you’re wrong. “Gender isn’t real but sex is imm—” *loud incorrect buzzer*

It also goes without saying that bioessentialism inherently can’t be trans inclusive no matter how hard you try. “All men including trans men—” probably not. “This is only a woman’s issue—” is it really? “Afabs only—” why? “All trans men are like—” what? what are they like? finish the sentence i dare you.

[busket]

you cant appropriate gender btw. gender is not like an ethnic culture that you are born into and if you are not a part of that culture its disrespectful to wear the costume of it. gender is a fully human experience that belongs to everyone. anyone can be a woman, anyone can be a man, anyone can be both or neither and there is masculinity and feminity within all of us.

I see folks say stuff like "trans men weaponize their agab or access their feminity/womanhood only when its convenient or to attack women" and obviously no one should be attacking women or anybody. but is this trans man actually "weaponizing his agab" or surreptitiously accessing his "womanhood" to gain social favor, or is feminity just a part of him the way feminity is a part of every human being, and masculinity too?

believing that men or masculine people, trans or cis, are conniving by infiltrating womanhood or taking advantage of femininity is a terf mindset. terfs belive that womanhood is a closed practice that only select people are allowed to access. if you think that trans men are not allowed to tap into that femininity or even keep in touch with their female side, thats terf shit. masculinity and feminity, maleness and femaleness belong to everyone. there are no borders to gender and expression and I think this comparison to cultural appropriation where people think they can gatekeep who can or cannot access gender expression in the same way that some people can or cannot access certain ethnic and cultural practices is extremely harmful.