okay so i don't mean that as in actually validating this period thing with that one trans women from reddit but tbh i feel like this response is kind of out of line. she is obviously miserable. i've read that post and it doesn't come across as someone doing it for attention. it just reads like someone who is in such a bad place that she is believing that stuff. telling her that she will never have that is cruel. validating it would be too, but there are ways that are less harsh. i used to be in a place like her and tbh i was so miserable that those 'delusions' were the only way to avoid doing some pretty bad things to myself. she's needing help and not people talking about her like that. like would you do that if she had 'normal' delusions? i get it that this is offensive and i agree but this all feels like it's more about her being trans and not about the rest. and tbh it's not disgusting or anything to wish for the nagative parts of the opposite sex when you're trans. being told to be lucky for lacking some of those traits hurts a lot and even tho we know that there are things that suck it is part of being that opposite sex and i can assure you that i would volutarily go through a kick in the balls every day if i could be a cis guy in exchange through that. every physical pain i have felt so far (and i have felt a lot because i have a bunch of health issues) was not as bad as the whole package my dysphoria causes. there were points where i wanted to die because i was in so much pain and i would take that any day over the absolute hopelessness and the disgust with my body and the fact that i will never be just a normal guy. i like you and you usually have opinions i can agree on, but in that situation i feel like you do not understand how bad dysphoria can be and what it can do to someone. its super disrespectful to treat a clearly mentally ill person like that that probably heard things like this often enough to hurt more than most cis people can actually understand because they don't have those experiences. i believe that some can do that but it's really hard and i don't blame anyone for not understanding that fully but please at least treat trans people with respect even if they are delusional. dysphoria can literally cause various mental illnesses with symptoms like that. and the treatment many trans people get socially can too.
I'm assuming you're talking about my response to the post?
I don't think I was harsh or cruel at all. I actually remember carefully choosing my words and making sure to be gentle. I could have been absolutely nasty but I stayed civil, even when people started calling me a terf for pointing out that trans woman are physically incapable of menstruation. But apparently I wasn't nice enough? I get that I could have just ignored the post, but it was a post on a public website which I have the right to respond to in any way I see fit. "but there are ways that are less harsh.", tell me, what ways? What could I have changed about what I said? I didn't discredit that the op was experiencing something, I just said she wasn't experiencing a period.
Which brings me to the delusion part. I'll be completely honest and say I don't know much about delusions or how to handle them, and it's something that didn't cross my mind when responding to the post. But as I just said, I didn't completely deny that the op was feeling something. I just told her it wasn't a period, and that maybe she could find another thing to call it. You say that neither invalidating or validating the belief that she has a period is good for her...which leaves ignoring the post as the only option. Which means she only gets validation, as the majority of people were all "yass queen periods!!!!".
"but this all feels like it's more about her being trans and not about the rest."
I'd have commented if it was a guy saying this, too. Hell, I and the women in my family get annoyed when men in our family act like they have it just as bad as us because they have to experience us having a short temper on our periods (which mind you, none of us use as an excuse to be bitchy lol. We just warn people that we're on our periods and may be short fused). If I get annoyed at that, of course I would be annoyed at a guy literally claiming to have a period. I wouldn't just ignore it if it was a guy and not a trans woman. It has everything to do with diminishing periods, and not with trans women. It just happens to be that men typically don't go around pretending to have periods, trans women often do. Which is why it seems this discussion targets trans women the most.
And no, it isn't wrong for trans people to want opposite sex characteristics! I completely understand that that's the whole point of being trans. (Which is part of the reason I genuinely tried to be nice in my response, because I knew this was part of the picture) But it is wrong to then claim you have something like a period, which is universally understood to be a bad experience, even though you're physically incapable of having one.
If it hurts trans women to be told they don't have periods, a simple solution is to not go around claiming to have one. To claim you have a period when being incapable of having one, is to set yourself up for either disappointment, or for people to lie to you out of fear of being called transphobic.
It's not disrespectful to tell the truth. It is disrespectful to treat trans people like sensitive babies that you need to walk on eggshells around, which is what you're doing when suggesting I'm failing to treat trans people with respect by telling a trans woman she doesn't actually have a period. I treat trans people how I treat anybody else, which means calling them out for behaviour I don't agree with.
I thank you for being civil, because a lot of people aren't. But I'm sorry, I just can't agree with you on this. I see where you're coming from and understand your perspective...but as I said in the response, periods are something that heavily impact both myself and women close to me. It's a personal topic for me, and I don't see anything wrong with speaking about it bluntly, which also means telling people who were born male that their stomach pain cannot be called a period.
