Patriarchy is a momentary aberration

detrans | terf according to TRAs and TRA according to terfs, actually a secret third thing

[terra-feminarum]

Matriarchies were here first. They managed to flourish for millennia without destroying the planet and enslaving half the people.

Matriarchy isn't a mirror image of a patriarchy. It holds completely different values. It's not female supremacy and oppression of males. It's a sustainable way for our species to organize our social structure.

Matriarchal society revolves around care-taking. It doesn't mean all women need to be mothers. Men and women alike look up to motherliness as a virtue, as way of interacting with humans and non-humans alike with compassion.

Patriarchy is about owning and taking. Matriarchies are about giving and receiving.

[hypnictwitch]

Everyone accepts that you can’t know what it’s like to experience something you haven’t until someone brings up womanhood

[radfem-polls]

radleaning here.

what do you think about biochemical dysphoria? i am not claiming it’s scientifically validated, but as a ‘detrans’ woman i do think it has some merit. while i was on testosterone gel for a few months i felt zero anxiety and all the depression related issues i had disappeared. i wasn’t even passing or trying to, and no one knew because i wanted to wait until i had some physical results to talk about it. ultimately, i had to stop less than 8 months in because i was getting the medication from a friend who was being overprescribed and she moved away. pursuing it myself back then would have been impossible due to muslim family and 2+ year waiting list.

nowadays i have lost my interest in transitioning due to being too old to start over again. and i never really believed it could turn me male, just wanted relief from dysphoria. my views are also basically all radfem aligned, save for thinking people should be allowed to pursue a surgery or medicine like this. but very often i still think back of how normal i felt in my head. i had more energy, no anxiety, no depressive feelings, no brainfog or dissociation anymore and was able to function much better. i miss that feeling and have considered going on a low dose in the future, if they make it easier to get.

i’ve seen both detrans and trans people talk about it before, and apparently that’s biochemical dysphoria. so i’d like to see if anyone here has any more insights?

replies / reblogs welcome!

what do you think about biochemical dysphoria?

answer in reblogs

answer in replies

Voting ended onAug 8

-🐌

[terra-feminarum]

I don't think such thing as biochemical dysphoria exists. What would be the cause of that condition? How could a female be born with testosterone deficiency? Obviously some women can have unhealthily low T levels, but that's very different from assuming there are women who need male T levels to feel good.

Instead I believe that taking testosterone will very likely lift your mood, whether you're dysphoric or not. When I was on T, it alleviated my depression and made me more able to function. I had more energy and less anxiety. Unfortunately, it didn't help me with the underlying reasons of my mental health problems. It just masked them.

I bet most depressed women would feel more energetic and happy on T (if the T induced changes didn't cause them distress). Just like many males who use testosterone blockers often struggle with their mood.

If I ruined my ability to focus with excessive tik tok use and too little sleep and then took ADHD medication, it would probably help me focus. But it wouldn't mean I have innate neurochemical psychostimulant deficiency. Or if drinking beer alleviated my anxiety, it wouldn't mean I have innate alcohol deficiency.

[terra-feminarum]

The effect of social media notifications is wild. I get a little dopamine rush every time I get a new death threat. They've been numerous lately so logging in to tumblr has been rewarding.

[majchic]

Study

[terra-feminarum]

Someone pointed out one potentially serious issue with this study. The Finnish system of gender related medical treatment takes place within psychiatric clinics. I'm not sure the study takes into account the psychiatric visits which are mandatory for getting a gender dysphoria diagnosis or treatment. So, if one seeks medical treatment for gender dysphoria, one will inevitably have a record of visiting psychiatric healthcare several times.

In other words, the trans healthcare system itself might have caused the psychiatric visits, and they might not be evidence of worsened mental health.

That said, I'm not sure this is how it is. We would need to know whether this was taken into account by the authors.

[rad4leaving]

It was (bolding mine)

”Psychiatric treatment, excluding gender identity assessments and appointments with a multi-disciplinary team therein, subsequent to the index contact was defined as continuing two years or more after the index contact, to allow time for the gender identity assessment and potential medical GR initiation. The number of contacts with specialist-level psychiatric treatment was extracted from the CRHC and categorised as follows: None, 1–5, 6–25, 26–100 and 101+. Psychiatric diagnoses were categorised into the ICD-10 main F categories in supplementary analyses.”

(using link provided by OP)

[majchic]

Study

[terra-feminarum]

Someone pointed out one potentially serious issue with this study. The Finnish system of gender related medical treatment takes place within psychiatric clinics. I'm not sure the study takes into account the psychiatric visits which are mandatory for getting a gender dysphoria diagnosis or treatment. So, if one seeks medical treatment for gender dysphoria, one will inevitably have a record of visiting psychiatric healthcare several times.

In other words, the trans healthcare system itself might have caused the psychiatric visits, and they might not be evidence of worsened mental health.

That said, I'm not sure this is how it is. We would need to know whether this was taken into account by the authors.

[majchic]

Study

[skyjellyfem]

If a man wearing stereotypically “feminine” clothes and makeup is degrading, then the fact that he’s a man isn’t what makes it degrading. The problem is the clothes. You’re just used to women being degraded.

If you put the female animations and poses in a video game onto a male character and it suddenly looks “funny”, that’s because the male characters move normally and the female characters don’t. You’re just used to seeing the female characters portrayed as objects.

Something cannot be degrading, stupid, or comedic when one sex does it and normal and “sexy” when the other does it. If something humiliates a man, then it humiliates a woman, too.

[trans-masked]

The frustrating thing is that while some trans men can attain a level of social privilege from being viewed as male, even if every trans man passed perfectly it wouldn’t mean we could escape. T won’t make me more likely to survive a car crash when vehicles aren’t made for my body, it won’t allow me autonomy over my uterus, it won’t stop misogynistic abuse from anyone who finds out I’m trans or knew me pre-transition. For trans men outside of the imperial core, he/him pronouns in English don’t save them from forced marriage, pregnancy, honor killings, acid attacks, FGM, etc they are protected from fucking NONE of it. The only privilege we could ever achieve on the basis of gender is some men being nicer to us when we hide our identities and pasts. We will never be able to attain the privilege of having the world be built for us and our bodies unless we overhaul the whole system.

[terra-feminarum]

I agree. I used to pass as a male. It ended sexual harassment I had experienced and it probably helped me professionally.

But in addition to the things mentioned below, there was the internal struggle. No matter how well I passed, I was still socialized as a woman, and transition never cured me from the idea that I was helpless, incompetent and less than. The cosmetic changes didn't resolve the internal problems caused by patriarchy. Transition actually made me less willing to face these issues, as I thought I was being somehow revolutionary for being a soft, feminine man.

[terra-feminarum]

Lately I've explored something one might call body neutrality. It's easy to have thoughts about how I'd want to relate to my looks, but thoughts have a limited capacity to change lived experience.

For a while now I've avoided looking into mirrors and looking at my body for no reason. In this culture, and especially as women, we're taught it's more or less normal to look at yourself often. So often it doesn't really make any sense to do so.

What goes on in your head when you do that? For me, it was some kind of wordless evaluation process. Do I like what I see? Do I hope something was different? Does my reflection reflect "who I am"? No matter how much I wanted to have a neutral stance, it couldn't really happen if I kept looking. Even when I was happy with what I saw, it just reinforced the idea that knowing how I look is somehow very important.

Even though I'm now paying attention to not look at myself, I'm not anxiously avoiding my reflection either. If I want to see whether I have dirt on my face or if I've shaven my hair to an even length, I will check it. But before I turn my gaze towards the mirror, I set an intention. I remind myself what I'm trying to accomplish by looking, and then I do only that. No need to check the shape of my nose or the texture of my skin.

At first the idea of forgetting my looks felt almost intimidating. What's the worst that could happen if I didn't thoroughly know how I looked?I don't know. But it feels like giving up control, and women aren't supposed to give up self-control.

After some weeks I'm happy with my experiment and I'm going to continue it. Less and less of my brain capacity is spent on pondering random stuff about my face or body. I feel less need to have control over my looks. I feel better going to the gym when I pay attention to how things feel, rather than how I hope they would make me look. I'm not sure if this is a coincidence but I've become a lot more interested in how I feel in general, in regards to my posture and tensions in my muscles. And unexpectedly, when I catch a glimpse of myself, I look normal. The neutrality feels similar to how seeing other people feels like. The automatic evaluation process has become a lot weaker.

Most of human history no one knew exactly how they looked. Sometimes a reflection from water is so smooth you can see yourself, but it's a weird angle and a rare occurrence, and no one definitely squatted on the shore of a pond to look at themselves countless of times a day. Or if someone did, it probably looked somewhat insane.

There's nothing inherently dangerous about not being aware of your looks.

[landyke]

I wish more womyn would adopt the attitude that they can learn and do anything if they put their minds to it. No man would say he's fundamentally incapable of learning vehicle maintenance, carpentry, wood working, mechanics, handyman stuff, learning to use tools, etc etc. He just assumes he can learn how to do whatever strikes his fancy. Well so can we.

[gougeddoll]

[meanevilwitch-deactivated202601]

Im unsure if this applies to you, but I didn't snap out of\peak from the trans bs until after I had top surgery and now I feel like I will never be able to get any woman to date me without getting grossed out by my chest (no nip or boobs) If you have also had top surgery, do you have any tips or ideas of how I can forewarn ant potential partners?

I'm a desister and didn't medically transition.

I'm not sure what advice to give, and this may be incredibly naive of me, but perhaps you and any potential partners you might have for sexual intimacy will have gotten to know one another well enough that it will have come up in conversation naturally while talking about your lives before you reach the point that you are having sex, but again, I realize that might be a bit naive on my part.

I am aware that some people enjoy sex with people they don't know very well and don't consider it a very big deal and that's totally fine and a valid way to experience or navigate relationships.

I literally married the first person I had actual consensual sex with and have only had one other sexual partner aside from him (we dated a third person together for a very short while), so I am not exactly a voice of experience.

If anyone who has ever actually been on the dating scene has some advice for anon, it would be much appreciated!

[terra-feminarum]

Stuff like that feels awkward in theory, but in practice it's different. If you have a genuine connection with someone, you can talk about hard stuff. If you have a genuine connection, you will think the other woman is awesome and she thinks you're awesome. Anyway, when there's that connection, she will have compassion. Even if it's just for one night, I think there needs to be the awesome connection, no matter how short that connection is going to be. Don't sleep with anyone if you feel ashamed of yourself around her.

There are features people find hot in their partners. For some, one of these features is intact breasts. It's a normal thing to find attractive. But many people, if not most, are totally comfortable not having all their preferences met when they find someone attractive. The attraction makes details irrelevant. I say this as a woman who has had mastectomy.

For me it's like this: I don't dream about meeting a woman who has lost a leg. If I imagine dating someone new some day, I'd expect she probably has two legs. Most people do. But if I met my dream woman and she only had one leg? How often you meet someone you genuinely like? Why the on earth would I pass that just because I expected two legs? You probably won't find a woman who is seeking someone who has had top surgery, but you could meet a woman who isn't bothered at all by it.

And how to warn someone? If you're in a situation where she's going to see you without clothes, you've probably been close to her with clothes on before. If you've hugged her, she has noticed. She probably has noticed it with her eyes before. So it's not a surprise, but I would still mention it and maybe tell her I'm insecure about it, so she knows it's a sensitive thing. I would tell that well before there's going to be any sex stuff. Just mention it casually. Tell her you've had top surgery and you feel bad about it. Then she knows and can decide what to do with that information.

[uncertainwaters]

it was really important for me to see detrans/desisted women who are happy, gender non conforming, and thriving.

i was aware that ftms detransition. but i was under the impression it was something that meant a life of misery. permanent dysphoria. ever-worsening dysphoria. being miserable, joyless, hating yourself, hating everyone else. i felt sorry for the detrans women i ran across and assumed they must be the unhappiest people alive. held captive, even.

seeing women who were genuinely happy and just as gender non conforming as before, women just like me, it nagged at me more than anything else. how could you be happy without transitioning? "maybe they were always cisgender" was of course one way i could try to rationalize it. but these women would also talk about their prior dysphoria, about their life during transition, and it never rang false. yet these women were happy.

seeing women who were okay showed me it was possible to be okay. that there was another option if the road i was on did not lead anywhere good. there was hope. life would not end if i couldnt obtain or physically tolerate hormones and transition didn't work out. even before i started questioning whether gender meaningfully exists outside of stereotypes, it was comforting to know my life didn't have an expiration date on it, should things not work out the way i planned.

share your happiness. raising feminist consciousness isn't all doom and gloom. sometimes someone needs to know there's a light at the end of the tunnel. sometimes someone needs a little bit of hope. even just to hold in the back of their mind for a rainy day.

[floatingbook]

I don’t know my own face anymore. I’m not aware of it, at the very least. For the better part of three months, I’ve lived away from mirrors. I don’t even have a proper sink; I never wear make up and it’s not like I have hair either, so what need would I have for a mirror? It’s the first time in my life I don’t see myself in the mirror whenever I go wash my hands. I’ve lived a quarter of a century on this planet, and for ever long I can remember, it’s the first time I am not beholding my own face regularly in a reflective surface.

Now that I’m considering that fact, as I write this, as I poke around my own brain and try to ponder how I feel about that, I realise I’m a little unsettled. It’s letting go of something that has always been there. When I consider it, it’s startling. An absence where there’s supposed to be something, and that something is the objectification of my own face, and to a lesser degree of my own body. It’s just, gone. It’s not there anymore. I can picture myself, vaguely, if I try to, but there’s definitely something that has disappeared. It’s not distressing either, so far it’s just a little weird.

I know, from the picture I took of myself the other day for my mother, that my acne is mostly gone. If I don’t see it, I don’t poke it, and if I don’t poke it, it gets better? I wonder less about how I look too, not that I did a lot before, but anyway I’m less in my head than I used to. I just don’t care. My own self isn’t an object distinct from myself anymore, something that I need to tend for everybody else’s beholding. I just am. I don’t see myself from the outside.

My eyes are in my head for me to see the world, not for them to reflect back. I don’t need to see myself. I just exist. It’s liberating.  

[mister-rad-boy-deactivated20260]

So one thing that bothers me about the posts that I’ve been seeing from the detrans subreddit is that the people on there, especially the women, who detransition seem to be desperately trying to play the gender role given to their original sex. They don’t seem to take away that gender roles are subjective and restrictive and are things they shouldn’t try to live by. I don’t see posts from there that often, but when I do, the most popular ones are girls/women who are anxious about not being pretty enough, or not looking enough like their birth sex, especially after being on HRT, which tells me that they haven’t really mentally progressed in a healthy way. They’re just kind of back to where they started, and I think that can lead to many of them relapsing since they steak their entire identity and self-esteem on being perceived accurately to how they feel on the inside, and I think that needs to be brought to attention.

[terra-feminarum]

I think it's partly because most detransitioners have to navigate that very hard life stage all by themselves. Maybe they read stuff from others who are just as lost. Most people who are in a good place with their detransition don't post about it on reddit, we just tend to move on. So people are getting peer support from others who are in the middle of the very same crisis.

It's very freeing to just give up the performance and shift your focus away from your looks and how you appear to others, but it's not easy, especially if you're young. It's hard enough even for those who never transitioned and were never in that culture.

I wish there were more resources for detransitioners. It's validating to see others in pain and being angry for the same reason you are, but in addition to that, I would've needed something hopeful. I would like to see stories of women who have survived transition and detransition and who flourish.

[butchpeace]

Genuinely wild to think back and realize that the ftm hiking group I started when I was trans-identified was actually my first big "female-only space".

The reason I felt so at home and comfortable with them wasn't because we were all trans. It was because we were all female, most of us were lesbians, and because of that we accidentally never included any males in our hangouts.

It's just funny to realize that I was metaphorically walking in the complete wrong direction but tripped and fell into exactly what I needed anyway...