The statistics for the age disparity between transgender populations reads to me, personally, that trans men are less likely to live as long. There should be, roughly, a similar amount of transgender people from any age demographic. That we only see older, late-transitioning trans women makes me wonder if all the trans mascs who had been born in the same years as those girls even got to live to the same age. Maybe they did! Maybe they already transitioned! Maybe they’re doing ok! But those are some very hopeful and speculative Maybes because its just as plausible that they were murdered, or killed themselves, or simply went so deep into the closet that they have no intent of ever coming out again.
I have been violently suicidal and depressed since I was 13. I (miraculously) survived through 16 years of constant unending suicidal ideation that has been primarily driven by financial stability (and the lack thereof). My family never provided me any financial support after I turned 18 and I was kicked out of the house at 19. I slept in my car for a week before driving 9 hours to a different state to sleep in my partners bed. I struggled to financially support two people on one persons income. I’ve been so suicidal from the effort of keeping a job that I’ve been admitted to inpatient psych and intensive outpatient psych. I have accrued crippling amounts of debt to keep myself & my partner housed. I have considered, on multiple occasions, detransitioning so that I could apply for financial aid that was only afforded to women, and have never followed through because I would rather puke my own guts than call myself a woman. There was no help for me anywhere I looked. No mutual aid. No non-profit organizations. No shelters. I, very literally, had to choose between being a man and receiving any form of assistance, because those options were mutually exclusive to each other. I struggled to get jobs, I struggled to keep my jobs, I struggled to not mutilate myself in some desperate and vain hope that at least if I was bleeding someone would care how much pain I was in. Life has always felt like a tooth and nail struggle to survive. I say all of this as a preface, because I want to be clear when I say this; Despite how much poverty and financial stress I survived through, I am counting myself in the list of trans men who had it easy.
My immediate family (parents, siblings) are accepting of my transition, my extended family doesnt really Get It but I have been largely shielded from their transphobia because my mother is the one who broke the topic to them. With the exception of one grandparent who I no longer talk to, all of my relatives use the appropriate name and pronouns when speaking to me in person. Every good thing I have going for me currently was obtained through the luck of being related to my family; I have a 700+ credit score because my mom established my first line of credit when I was 16 so she could send me on errands and pay the balance off every month; After 8 years of scraping money together every month to make rent, I finally have stable housing because my grandmother left me an inheritance when she passed; That inheritance allowed me to pay off 10k of credit card debt accumulated paying my rent while unemployed and use the rest on a down payment for a mortgage.
I have still been suicidal my entire post-puberty life despite all the privileges afforded to me because it is simply Not Fucking Easy to be queer, disabled, and poor. I had it easy, not because my life was easy, but because there are a hundred other ways it could have gone worse. It’s so infinitely frustrating to hear people even more privileged than myself boast and brag about how ~easy~ it is to be a trans man, when what they are really bragging about is being a housed financially stable able-bodied (often college educated) white person in the imperial core with a community support system. Imo it’s Really obvious when someone has never stopped to consider experiences outside their own; That’s where you get shitass takes like “putting a pride flag in your storefront is so performative and cringe” from people who have never left the comfort of their queer-affirming community. The memory-holeing is Bad. I remember 10 years ago when the only HRT available to anyone in my city was a 3 hour drive to a rural clinic in a college town. Now the community clinic is trans-informed, provides informed-consent HRT, and has a clinical focus on providing healthcare to transgender populations. Thats massive improvement on a really fucking rapid scale, and I think a lot of [privileged] trans people come to the conclusion that this boom in transgender healthcare and visibility has translated into a boon for ALL trans people rather than the reality, which is that its mostly concentrated to predominantly blue cities. Trans people are more accepted today than they have potentially ever been, but that doesn’t change the material reality of trans people who do not have access to these communities.
From a material and political standpoint, trans men start their lives in the social position of Woman. So materially, every form of misogyny that has held down pericis women has also held down every non-woman w/ TMDP. This means rape statistics, this means child marriage statistics, this means the horror stories that come from ex-fundamentalists leaving their cults, this means gynecological abuse and medical assault, this means impregnation as a means to prevent the end of an abusive relationship, this means literally any form of horrific misogyny you have ever heard a cis woman talk about. All of it. That is the material positionallity someone with TMDP before they come out as trans. Coming out as trans increases our chances of being subjected to discrimination and violence.
And, yeah, sure, some people will see and have seen a significant decrease in the amount of interpersonal misogyny they deal with after coming out and publicly identifying as A Man, but that is inherently predicated on how progressive their community is. A trans person surrounded in other trans people with access to established local populations of other trans people is in a vastly different material positionality from a trans person in a conservative rural community, and a trans person from the global south is within their own category of material positionality. These things Matter, they make a huge difference in how much support an individual can receive, and the people most in need of help are the ones least able to ask for it. Which is why it’s fundamentally necessary for privileged trans people, trans people with access to healthcare and housing, trans people with support systems, non-racialized trans people, ect ect, to uphold the voices and opinions of those less privileged, rather than mocking them for using the wrong words to describe the bigotry they face.
That so many white trans people actively engage with this oppression olympics bullshit between Trans Men and Trans Women, while totally ignoring trans neutrals & nonbinary people, makes me want to rip my fucking hair out because it is fundamentally unhelpful. It is unhelpful to argue about who has it worse. It is unhelpful to silence a queer persons voice when they are asking for recognition of the harm they’ve faced just because it is not in line with what the dominant narrative has established. It is unhelpful to suggest that there is any underprivileged demographic in less need of resources, in less need of a voice.
I cannot abide by anyone whos transfeminism begins and ends with the same conclusions of cis feminism because cis feminism very literally leaves non-women w TMDP and intersex people who need gynecological care so out of the conversation they are stuck on the street and left to be run over. Writing “women are allowed to have abortions” into the law because no one listened to the non-women asking to be included in the language means that those same people, the ones ignored and stepped over in the pursuit of “progress”, will continue to be harmed by a lack of legal access to resources.
We cannot achieve liberation without opening the conversation to anyone and everyone who will co-operate with us. I want to HELP trans people. I want trans people to LIVE. Even if their politics aren’t aligned to mine, I still want every single trans person fed, housed, medicated, and safe. Anyone who will help me do this is welcome, because anything less is inexcusable.
