I want to ask you a question that's basically just: In your opinion, is this a real problem amongst the trans community that we should actively try to change or is this more likely to be just my own problem that I need to work on by myself?
Background info about me:
Grew up the "fat, hairy, ugly" girl -> Unheathily lost weight and became the pretty-passing skinny shaven smooth girl as a teenager -> transitioned, became the "fat, hairy, ugly" adult man. My experiences with being a fat odd-looking little girl and fat odd-looking little man are WAY more similar than my experiences being a pretty girl. I was treated WAY better as a pretty girl than as an ugly girl/man. After transitioning, people (coworkers/strangers) groped me more, made more comments about my body, I had more difficulty finding a job, etc. I was seen as male but not as a "man", right? I was degendered.
This isn't a sob story though! I like myself. I find myself hot. I read about the Ugly Laws and Fearing The Black Body (about the ties between fatphobia and racism). I've learned that the only bad thing about my appearance is how people treat me about it. I like being fat, hairy, and "ugly". I find it very sexully gratifying to be a weird little freak. To me, ugly doesn't mean "this person's traits are inherently unnattractive". Ugly just means, "this person has traits that (for racist & classist reasons) are marked unattractive by the rich in an attempts to control and make money off of them".
However, it took me awhile to get there, and while I was trying to get there, I felt really left out of the trans community. I kept seeing people insist that T makes you hot, saw posts of people going "no no don't worry I started getting laid and getting compliments way more often after transitioning", and it just made me feel like shit. It made me feel like the trans community would be ashamed of me, like I was letting them down. Because after I became a passing yet degendered male, servers would look me up and down before avoiding serving me, parents would grab their children and usher them away from me when I was nearby, the rare time I got hired I found out they hired me for way less than my friends who also just started working there. No, they did not know I was trans. I am simply a degendered autistic man to them. Cis men, even if they view me as male, don't treat me as one of them.
Anyways, so the emphasis on beauty, that if you believe you're hot then people will treat you like you're hot, it all felt so awful. Especially after doing the research on pretty privilege.
And it came from people who were just as or even more educated on the subject than I was. Their conclusion was simply that ugliness does not truly exist and so the path to self love is to believe you are beautiful. But, for me, it does exist. Because I have countless experiences of mistreatment due to being labled as it. And I want language to be able to discuss it.
Even now that I believe I am hot and sexy despite when people grope me and make comments about my body, I don't feel validated by "HRT makes you hot!". Instead, I feel like that young t boy is still inside me shaking and crying and wondering if the community will accept him and I want to run to him and hug him and tell him that I love him and it doesn't matter what other people think.
So! There is my story. I would like to ask: do you personally think my experience points to the trans community needing to focus less on beauty or is this just a personal issue for me? I would like it if your followers answered too! Should we put an end to trying to convince people that HRT makes them hot, and rather, create communities for coping with being assigned ugly post transition?
The thing that is making me doubt that this is an overall trans community issue is that, although I view "ugliness" as hot, taking on the identity of Being Ugly has made it really difficult to interact with the trans community. I can't watch trans creators if they are attractive or talk about being able to regularly hook up/make friends, I wasn't able to seek out a trans community when I first started transitioning and experiences a lot of dispair/dissapointment/regret by myself (I don't regret my transition anymore, but due to how much better I was treated as a thin pretty woman, I did regret it for a few years when I was 1 to 4 yrs on T), and I generally can't make friends with attractive trans people. Especially trans men. The way they list the privileges they recieved after transitioning and act extremely rude when you say you didnt recieve the same privileges its like... ok you are a tar pit. But I don't think this is a healthy way to think. I don't think it's healthy for me to view my assigned ugliness as something that permanently separates me from the trans community is healthy or even correct even if I feel it in my gut.
I trust you a lot! It's okay if you don't have an answer to this but I would love ot if you published this so it can atleast be spread as a thinking game amongst the trans community! Just, "should we be focusing so much on beauty? what message does this send to people who don't feel beautiful?"
i don't have much to add onto this except yk I relate in that... I am not a conventionally attractive person and some trans spaces do make me uncomfortable for similar reasons. yeah I rly get what ur saying my brain just is tired as fuck and hard to for me to elaborate or add onto it but yah :3