#trans experiences

[shamebats]

[image ID: TikTok comment by Spedubopy: I once had a german bouncer look at my pre transition-ID and then back at me and just go "ja das ist an improvement" /end ID]

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

[thisislito]

Hope is punk, and I will hold that to my chest until the day I see the stars twinkle for the last time.

The world is scary, terrifying even.

It is also beautiful, and full of so much hope. Even in the horror I see the kindness of ordinary people who care and I remember...

There is so much worth living for. Worth fighting for.

People always ask: Would you die for a cause you believe in?

I'll add to that.

Would you live? Would you hold on to hope and live to see it through? Would you live, exist in all your complexities that make you... you?

[lettherebetboys]

what they don’t tell you about HRT is that you might really like even the most unpleasant and scary of effects

i smile every time my voice cracks. it really does spark joy. why does that happen? i was terrified of my voice changing, and it hurts, and it’s embarrassing, so why does it make me so happy??????

i think it’s that even the “”bad”” (completely subjective btw) effects remind me of what i’m doing. i’m finally on HRT and it’s wonderful and i love it, so why would i not find joy in my voice cracking or gaining a bit of weight or my hair getting a little thinner?

change is beautiful and gut-wrenching and terrifying and wonderful, and this is the most alive i’ve ever felt. it’s scary but it’s good scary, like watching a horror movie and cuddling your friends. it’s rollercoaster scary, or haunted house scary. it’s the kind of fear you choose to feel, and would choose again in a heartbeat. it’s not the fear i’m used to, the slow horror of life passing by before your eyes, the kind of fear that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin.

HRT is good scary. i hope the takeaway from this is ‘do it scared’

[nonbinarymlm]

As a genderfaun person whose fluidity leans masculine (I often describe myself as a genderfluid trans man), the rhetoric of “trans men are men and therefore have male privilege” bothers me so much.

I’m a binary man sometimes. I’m nonbinary other times. I’m often a genderqueer man. When I’m a man, I’m sincerely a man. By the logic of “trans men are men and therefore have male privilege”, I must be bobbing back and forth between having male privilege and not! I’ll have male privilege when I feel like a man and then *poof* it disappears when I’m feeling more unaligned nonbinary.

Except this doesn’t fit with my experiences at all. This isn’t how it works. Being a man doesn’t automatically give me male privilege that I’ll then lose in a moment by no longer being a man.

Personal gender identity isn’t the source of privilege. Privilege is not solely determined by who you are inside, it’s determined by society and how it interacts with you. You can only get male privilege if you are societally recognized as a man, it’s a prerequisite, which is just not true for the vast majority of trans men. Also like this reasoning doesn’t account for nonbinary or genderfluid people at all. Male privilege is a really complex and individual topic when it comes to trans people especially,

[loft-cat]

Ah fuck, I'm not good at this kind of thing but like everyone else, I just watched Skin and am crashing out - for me, specifically, over the Gender of it all.

Thoughts below the cut, naturally with the disclaimer that I'm not saying anything about Seonghwa and his personal identity journey or anything. This is just me observing a piece of art through the lens of being a trans person. I'm also going to do this quickly without giving myself the opportunity to overthink it, because otherwise I know I won't do it, so I apologize if anything isn't as well-worded as it should be.

TW: Discussion of body horror, dysphoria, and internal/external transphobia. Please don't read if that will be upsetting for you.

General statement again for clarity: These are my own experiences and I am not generalizing them to all trans people. Not everyone experiences dysphoria or decides to transition, and those things do not invalidate anyone's individual experience with transness or their own identity.

This is what stood out to me on first watch:

Skin is almost aggressively trans-coded through its body horror motif, and

Stylistically, it's an artistic tribute to DPR Ian

So much has already been written about body horror and the trans experience by people better versed in both writing and queer studies than me, so I’m not going to attempt any kind of scholarly essay here on why it’s so important as a trope to so many trans people, myself included. It also isn’t something that all trans people identify with and intersects with so many painful things - dysphoria, internal and external transphobia, medical intervention, etc.

What I will say is that this is how I found out I was trans:

When I was very, very young, I realized that something was different about me, and that it was something so deeply wrong (I thought) that no one, absolutely no one, could ever find out because they would see me for what I actually was: a monster. The way I felt (Not a Girl) and the things I wanted (Not to Be a Girl) were so grotesque that it was a requirement, literally an imperative, that I bury them as deeply as I possibly could and, god willing, never let them see the light of day.

Unfortunately, as I discovered in my early 30s, dysphoria is a living thing that, for me, refused to stay buried. My coping methods for dealing with it began to fail, one after another, and eventually I was having dysphoria-related panic attacks so frequently and severely that my survival depended on addressing the root of the problem. And in order to do that, I had take apart my identity piece by piece, try to understand it, and reassemble it into something I could live with. It took months. It took reading so many books. It took therapy. And eventually, it took transition.

How does this relate to body horror and Skin?

Well, one of the things I was drawn to from a frighteningly young age were stories where things happened to peoples’ bodies that changed them, usually against their will and usually painfully. As a theme, it’s dark, it’s messy, it’s often violent, and if you’re living with a level of fear and internalized transphobia so intense that it feels like its own form of violence, it can be cathartic. And for me, the terror of being trans came from two directions: internally, from a puberty that had already changed me in ways beyond my control, and externally, from what felt like a foreign, threatening force that wanted to change me yet again when I did not want to be changed.

Or rather, I did not want to want to be changed. 

Only by doing the actual work of deconstructing my transphobia (still in progress, possibly work that will continue for the rest of my life) did I understand that that outside force was in fact not outside at all, nor was it foreign. It had come from me and was a part of me that couldn't be excised, mentally or physically, and I had the privilege and somewhat limited power, given certain societal, medical, and financial constraints, to address it as I saw fit.

(As an aside, this is also why conversion therapy does not work and will never work and is actual violence. Protect trans kids.)

So the way body horror relates to transness can, for me, be summed up by one question:

What is more monstrous: your current form, or what you fear may be your true form?

And what am I seeing in the music video? Seonghwa in dialogue with two things: the monstrous, and the feminine. To be clear, these are not equivalent. The feminine can be monstrous and there can be great power in that, but I don’t think that’s the reading here. The monstrous thing is the question. It is the uncertainty. It is acceptance and undertaking the change. (I think there’s also more to be said about how we define what is monstrous, because that’s also important, but that’s a subject for another day.)

Skin starts with something literally spreading under Seonghwa’s skin, dark veins snaking out like he’s been infected. Has he been invaded by something foreign, or is something manifesting that’s intrinsic to him? Then he rips something off his back, and later we see him and several women with scalpels literally studying this thing in a laboratory. What are they looking for? What is he trying to understand? Textually, he’s examining his own flesh. Symbolically, he's taken what appears to be that monstrous, incongruous piece of himself and is dissecting it through the expression of his art, which is his primary outlet.

Who else in Seonghwa’s sphere is known for explicitly doing this? DPR Ian, who uses his music and maximalist music videos to visualize his struggles with his mental health. Seonghwa’s outfit at the end is a DIRECT tribute to those videos, which feature DPR Ian in the guises of different aspects of his own personalities. I’m serious, go watch Don’t Go Insane if you haven’t already seen it, it’s great. I think it’s possible that this is his way of thanking DPR Ian for inspiring him to be brave enough to make this kind of art.

There’s so much more to talk about in the rest of Skin, too - he’s surrounded by women, they’re the only other people in the video. Two of them appear almost like guides in the beginning, and then they’re helping him in the lab, he’s walking with them, dancing with them, crossing lines to be with them, and for a split second, there’s even a flash of what could be a woman literally in his place, with long hair obscuring the face. I'm sure other people are going to write wonderful meta about it, but this is almost 1,000 words already and I can't do the rest of it justice. But it’s a beautifully realized music video, and I’m so, so glad and grateful that Seonghwa had the creative freedom and support to make it like this. 

[silililidili]

one of my favorite Trans Experiences has to be relearning you own memories and realizing things that you could never make sense of are just clear as day now