heyy soo just a question here cause im kinda confused but how are you a radfem and a trans person at the same time??
Thank you for asking! I'm sure a lot of people wonder this, so this will likely be my next pinned post.
I'm finally feeling ok, well caffeinated, and the Adderall has kicked in, so I'll do my best to summarize and make this easy to read. I know I tend to write books, so apologies in advance. Let me know if anything is confusing or doesn't make sense, I'm happy to chat about it.
In short, the TLDR is, because the two aren't mutually exclusive and don't have to be, especially if you're well educated about and care about women's health, and also well read on or open to learning about the insidious forms misogyny can take, which should be a given for any radical feminst.
Additionally, atp the trans community primarily serves fetishists, predators, homophones, and misogynists, thus I do not belong there despite my material reality being transgender by classic definition.
My dysphoria, accordingly, has fuckall to do with gender roles, and never did.
As far as my personal story goes, there is no me without transition, end of. I never had a proper puberty in the first place due to severe childhood neglect, all other available (meaning, extremely limited) medical intervention failed, and my body was irreversibly damaged by uncontrolled medical conditions plus aforementioned severe childhood abuse & neglect. And because all of this happened in an insulated cult-like environment surrounded by organized crime in a region that's an absolute hotspot for this sort of thing, there was absolutely nobody that was going to save us.
"Us" being, me and my little sister. I would've done anything just to get her out of there and away from him, and so, I did. Prostitution. Whoring myself out on camgirl sites. Getting my face beaten into the pavement while I'm (censored) for cash, only for my abusers to steal that cash and have to repeat the hellish process all over again. It didn't matter. Fuck what happens to me, I'm already damaged. Protecting her as much as I could was all that mattered to me back then, and we had no options at all. So, I decided to make some, no matter what that took.
It was sheer "convenience" that I had been genuinely sex dysphoric since early childhood, even predating the sexual abuse, which started stomach-churningly young. This doesn't even begin to go into the ways I experience dysphoria, or how torturous it is, or how impossible it makes functioning when combined with all of my other disabilities, but please believe me when I say it has fuckall to do with gender roles, and that I cannot function without it being under control by transition.
Please believe me when I say peaking and therapy did absolutely nothing to help it. This has been a part of me-- this is how I've been wired--, as long as I was ever even remotely capable of thought, sensing, or feeling.
It's not about my place in society, or how people see me. When I came out as a teen, the number one thing I wanted my peers to understand is that I'm still the same person. It was not crafting an entire new identity of someone who isn't me, the way a lot of the youth now handles transition.
Because dysphoria-- the way I experience it-- is an internal, deeply personal, and bodily experience. It's something that results in literal phantom pains, and what I or others think of myself has zero impact on it. It's just simply always there, at the same intensity, in the same exact ways, all the time. It's something I've driven myself crazy try to reason out of, only to eventually learn this isn't something that even can be reasoned with. Because it's not psychiatric. I finally figured it out when I realized I was probably autistic (ultimately diagnosed autistic later on), because every way I have suffered from autism, I suffer from this in the same exact way, with the same exact patterns.
The same way my sensory issues from being autistic also cannot be reasoned with, neither can this. It doesn't matter how many times people tell me I'm "being too sensitive", or I need to "get used to it", because my brain is wired in a way that a large amount of sensory experiences are inherently overwhelming. Because my brain factually lacks what allows allistic people to block out irrelevant stimuli. In the same way, the way my brain perceives my own body on a neurological level inherently is incongruent with my sex, no matter how many times I am told or I tell myself that my body is fine the way it is, or how much I believe that it is. It is entirely independent of my own beliefs, or the way others perceive me. It's about whether or not my brain-- on a neurological level-- can recognize my body as my own. And it can't. It's simply not capable of doing so, and never has been.
Because it's not psychiatric in nature, it's not based in misogyny, and it isn't because I hate myself or have unresolved trauma. It's a stable constant that has always been with me, and only ever got quieter when I put on a binder and finally went on T, because this fools my brain into not perceiving an anomaly every time my breasts are or my naked body is in my peripheral or direct view.
It's not about hating my body, it's about not wanting to be constantly weighed down by an unsettling experience that can hardly be described. The closest sensation I can think of is passive body horror, but so many associate that with immediate and inherent panic that they miss the point entirely, because they cannot imagine what a constant passive sense of body horror actually feels like in the real world once the fear gets old and the panic dies down. And even that still hardly describes it at all.
That's actually how the trans community used to recognize and conceptualize dysphoria, but nowadays it holds zero space for us dysphorics at all in favor of upholding misogyny and gender norms. Most "dysphoria" presentations in the mainstream light is now outright fetishism, running away from misogyny, or enforcing it. And I can't relate to that shit worth a damn, because that's just not what I experience, and it never was.
And countless FTMs report the same exact experiences, but we're censored, silenced, and violently suppressed by the trans community, because us telling the truth is a huge threat to them.
I have hated being a woman before, but that has never been the primary motivation behind my transition, and I made sure I didn't by the time it came to medical intervention. I explicitly wanted to make this decision in the absence of that self hatred, because this whole thing was about wanting to feel at home in my still very immutably female body, using the least amount of intervention needed for relief so I could survive in the only way I had left. And it turns out, it was the right answer all along. Hence, low dose T, and taking my sweet time preparing myself physically and psychiatrically before I start the process for top surgery.
I call myself a transitioned female because that's what I am, and this is the only way I can access having a decent life that allows me to do more than suffer and waste away due to my disabilities. With an androgynous appearance, often very obviously female to other females, and appropriately looking like an adult. That is, by all means, by definition, still a transgender existence from the lens of prioritizing material reality.
I may have had masculine secondary sex traits to begin with as a result of PCOS, but it was my choice to go on T and exagerrate them, and this has brought me comfort and the ability to be fully present in my own body. It is a distinct material reality with experiences that genuinely do differ greatly from your average woman, with or without PCOS. And that doesn't make them any less valuable when it comes to fighting the patriarchy.
I did my research, I take vitamins to mitigate any potential osteoporosis, and the only other negative side effects from T for me are smelling bad a lot sooner-- which is easily mitigated with good hygiene, which is now actually managable for me--, and very very mild vaginal dystrophy-- which is easily mitigated with topical estrogen cream, which is safe and OK to do despite being on T, because being applied topically means it has a mostly localized effect.
There's a ton of other ways it's been genuinely good for me as well; like contributing to regaining strength quicker after flare up periods, slowing the deconditioning that happens during flare up periods, eliminating severe reproductive health issues that doctors refused to help me with, "aging" me up so I no longer look and sound like a minor, thus allowing me to manage my own finances without question or alerting my abusers, and also stopping the constant attention from disgusting casual male pedophiles who drool at the concept of an adult that looks like a minor, it raised my hemoglobin levels after chronically hemorrhaging during periods, improvements to sexual function, the list goes on and on.
The point is that I would've died without transition back then, because this world hates women. And in current day, it's what allows me to have a life that's actually livable at all after all the cruel and sadistic damage I sustained. Otherwise, I cannot work, I cannot afford my own care, I am bedridden, and then homeless, and then likely dead soon after. I feel a deep solidarity with the lesbians of eld who would transition so they could legally get married. Homophobia and misogyny utterly fucked them over, tried to rip the joy out of their lives and brand them as belonging to males, but they still found a way. And I did, too.
So, let me ask you. If I can see the same truths about radical feminism that you can, is rejecting transition-- AKA silently dying to a serial abuser--, really required in order to be a competent radical feminist?
More importantly, to me; would it have been more feminist to accept my inevitable death there, and leave my sister there to similarly rot as he makes her his new primary target?
Obviously not.
I think hand wringing about how my transition isn't feminist, is downright fucking stupid to be painfully honest with you, but many RFs waste my time doing just that, unfortunately, which is why I have to explain so many things in depth. The fact is, the dangers of transition pale in comparison to what I was forced to survive at the hands of my father. THAT is what RFs should really be worried about. That this freak is still on the loose and harming other extremely vulnerable women in sick and disgusting ways.
The entire reason I was so trapped, could not get help no matter how hard I tried, why my body was so destroyed and warped in the first place, and why I ultimately had no other choice, is because of systemic misogyny. I have always hated it with a passion because it made up my entire cage.
I was a feminist as soon as I was exposed to feminism. Being trans was never in opposition to that because I did not rely on gender roles or an online community to tell me how I should feel about myself. Like everything else, from caring for myself to learning the proper way to care for serious wounds and injuries, I learned on my own how to develop a solid and secure identity. One that doesn't need people to affirm oppressive gender roles in order for me to be at peace with myself. I do not have a gender identity because that is not something I relate or subscribe to. The way it's defined is really fucked up, and it's even more fucked up to use those reasons to medically modify your body. Those were not my reasons, nor is it fair to assume those are the reasons for every single female that transitions (though understandable based on what the trans community puts forth). Not when the world we live in is so severely fucked up that it results in situations like mine, and the widespread censorship of transitioned females in general.
So, that's how.
