It's a really good question.
Speaking only for myself (as there's a stealth vs visibility debate in the general community), I'm now starting to mark myself as just plain F where I can, and not trans female (though I'll usually note in whatever profile comments that I'm trans, same as for other personal characteristics). It took me a while to shake off the 'imposter syndrome' of being transgender, and I'm most of the way to shaking off 'imposter syndrome' of being a woman. I suspect it won't ever completely go away, but adjusting what I see in the mirror (via makeup skills, monoxidil, and facial feminization surgery and possibly breast augmentation surgery) and hear when I talk (via lots and lots of practice and some coaching at talking in fem voice) should help a lot more too. I'd be surprised if I'm ever 100% "unclockable" (aka indistinguishable from someone assigned female at birth), and I think that currently leads me to a sort of assumption that I'll always be okay being called trans fem, by people that recognize that trans women are women. In the general public, I would prefer to 'go stealth' mostly for my own safety and security rather than any current feelings of being trans. But my feelings about being trans have been evolving bit by bit for a decent chunk of my life (and evolving much faster the last couple years) so I'm wary about predicting future-me's feelings about it all.
Thanks for going into detail with your personal deliberations. This is something that probably does vary on a case-by-case basis, it is interesting to hear an individual's answer. As you mentioned, it is ever-evolving; someone's perspective on what they wish to be called can change probably multiple times over the course of their life based on their current level of comfort. I've never had the chance to really ask about this as with the few trans people I have known personally, they are very early in their transition and it never seemed appropriate to pose this question yet.
 
What definition of "woman" or "man" would you use/suggest that would not be circular?
 
Non-circular definitions are not really compatible with questions of identities. Not just gender: religious, ethnic and national identity (as separate from legal citizenship) generally all come down to self-perception and are therefore subjective and circular.

Attempts to legally define membership of such identity groups in less circular have been the root cause of various niceties like one-drop rules, blood quantum rules and the like; generally not a brilliant outcome.

I have little more hope for rules defining men and women on testosterone levels and similar, and little more faith in attempt to put objective meaning to cultural identifiers.
 
What definition of "woman" or "man" would you use/suggest that would not be circular?
Non-circular definitions are not really compatible with questions of identities. Not just gender: religious, ethnic and national identity (as separate from legal citizenship) generally all come down to self-perception and are therefore subjective and circular.

Attempts to legally define membership of such identity groups in less circular have been the root cause of various niceties like one-drop rules, blood quantum rules and the like; generally not a brilliant outcome.

I have little more hope for rules defining men and women on testosterone levels and similar, and little more faith in attempt to put objective meaning to cultural identifiers.

We're quantum people, we're in superposition. You are too, you just don't realize it yet.
 
If I may put my own question in, however ignorant it may seem. How many trans people decide (mainly once they consider their transition complete) that they would rather not be referred to as trans and just by male/female? As in, a man transitions to female and once she is comfortable with herself decides to discontinue referring to herself as trans, and wishes for others to do the same. Is this common or a rarity? From what I gather most tend to embrace it, but there are probably those that are not active in the community who go unnoticed, likely because their reasoning is keeping it to themselves.

It’s not an uncommon perspective to take. As Sharon noted, the term is “stealth.” For some trans people this is viewed as the ultimate end goal of transition. This also dovetails with another term: transmedicalism, which is a perspective which sees transness as strictly a medical issue which you treat by physically altering your body to become the other gender. It’s not uncommon under this perspective to view transness as an affliction: a source of shame to be treated and overcome, rather than embraced and celebrated. I don’t really have data, but based on my experience, I would say the perspective is more common among older trans people. I think that’s at least in part down to culture and experience - in the past there was a lot more stigma around transness, and stealthing was broadly necessary as a simple safety measure. A lot of the argumentation during the push for public awareness was about medical treatments for medical conditions, and alongside that is a perspective that visible queerness or taking pride in transness per se will cast a pall of unseriousness on our community that will make us harder to accept.

Personally the above was a perspective I had in the early stages of my transition. What I wanted more than anything was to be able to push a button and be literally reborn as a cis woman. Transition was the vehicle to get to a place where I could *just be a cis woman.* As I started connecting with the trans community on discord and twitter, I came into contact with a number of trans people within my age cohort but several years ahead of me in transition timeline who embraced the trans component of trans woman. They had no interest in things like gcs which to that point I had seen as the end goal, and they said things like that their ultimate desire was to be seen as beautiful, but not cis. For a long time I didn’t really understand what that meant, at least I. The context of being a trans woman or trans man. Nowadays I understand it much more. There is a beauty to transness qua transness that is to be embraced and celebrated, distinct from cisfeminine beauty.

But I can also freely recognize that I come from a position of profound privilege in that. I’m white and so more likely to be perceived as feminine than black trans women, my features, even pretransition, were not very masculine - I could never really grow much more than a patchy mustache, I don’t have body hair really, I’m skinny with narrow shoulders - I am financially independent, I live in a progressive city with a lot of trans people, meaning my risk of violence or discrimination is comparatively low.

For a great many trans people, stealthing and passing are simply a matter of safety. I don’t really begrudge any queer person pursuing their truth. I have less sympathy and patience for those who achieve total passing status and then turn around and pull the ladder up on other trans people. This is the broad perspective of a lot of the more conservative trans people, e.g. Blair White or Buck Angel (or honestly Nathalie Wynn too at this point). All the other queer communities have this same discourse in parallel btw.

weird question, and phrased very strangely but we've seen a few prominent transitions online, and maybe it's just confirmation bias, but do you have any thoughts on this? like,
contrapoints was there from the start i guess
philosophy tube transitioned
james stephanie sterling transitioned
shammy (minor youtuber but a gal with a cult following) also transitioned
there's also a lot of transitions on this site recently.

so, the thoughts i'm curious about - it's just something i've thought over, since so many people in media i enjoy (breadtube and bread adjacent tube) and so many of my acquaintances here on cfc have transitioned. so maybe it's just happenstance or anecdotical, maybe more people are trans than the stats say, maybe it's partly social (which if were the case would be fine and i hate that some people make the hypothetical an issue).

(i really want to underline: even if it's just some form of "transtrending", something that increasingly happens socially - which i don't think it is - i'd like to note that i think there's no moral weight there. since y'know. there's no internal harm in transitioning, the problems are purely external as to society's handling of it.)

so those are my collected thoughts, here's my questions as to my experience: so this has happened a lot recently in circles i'm in. so:
- do you think it's just random/just me?
- do you think the stats underreport how many trans people there are?
- do you think likeminded people gather first and then transition later? (i tend to just immediately connect with mentally ill people more than regulars, later learning they have some diagnosis adjacent to mine - not that transgenderedness is a mental illness, i think you know the comparison)
- do you think it's because transgendered people are more prone to being critical of society for obvious reasons, meaning that the media i enjoy here, breadtube stuff, naturally will have a bunch of trans voices? (even the trans people i know irl are usually very inclined to introspection about the ailments of society)
- in extension of the latter, why so many people on cfc?

So I’ll see if I can get these in one diatribe, but let me know if you want a more itemized answer. I do think the number of trans people is underreported. I think especially that as broad acceptance and understanding of trans people, coupled with the clinical switch to gender affirming care and gender dysphoria, and shifted the way trans people relate to their transness, and their likelihood to recognize and accept it. I know for me the big switch was the realization, from encountering trans people on Twitter and youtube (and here), that transition was more substantial and possible than I thought. I had lived with the internalized transphobic image of a clockable “man” in a dress for most of my life, and had put my desire to be and be seen as a woman into an “only in fantasy worlds with magic” box. So seeing trans posters saying things like “every man has a genetically encoded cup size which they’ll never know unless they take female hormones,” and seeing others celebrating their transition timelines that confirmed those meme posts totally shifted my perspective on what was possible. They didn’t make me trans, but they allowed me to finally see myself in a trans light. That stuff simply did not exist before outside of niche online subcommunities that you very specifically and intentionally had to seek out. The shift in clinical practice that made access to hrt way way easier to access and less gatekept or relegated to black markets also really affected things.

As to the other side of this question, I think it’s not accident that left-aligned creators come out as trans. I think accepting your trans is a process of sufficient knowledge and perspective to accept your identity. To see yourself as trans you first have to recognize it as possible to change your gender, and studying left theory confronts you with a lot of questions that put you there. Additionally, as an oppressed population, trans people skew very left, and if you run in left circles you are going to be put in contact with trans people, which again gives you the perspective that gets you to that “trans is possible” position. Neurodivergence is also very common in trans circles, and it poses an interesting chicken-or-egg question that is endlessly debated: does a neurodivergent perspective cause you to be trans, or were you trans first, and neurodivergence makes you more likely to see it and go for it?

Trans people are very common within nerd and geek subcultures. There are endless endless memes about computer engineers all being trans (e.g. amazon recommending thigh high trans flag socks as a frequent purchase with programming books), and the entire architecture of the internet being run and managed by trans people. The Matrix is very apropos on this, the anonymity and infinite space of the internet is very alluring to us. It’s a world where we get to choose our name and choose how we look, and things we say to others are taken at face value. Games provide an escape from a real world which is usually very painful, especially when in the closet. Like in The Matrix, when running in hacker subcultures, you start to see the term “the Matrix” (transgender or transition) crop up a lot, and the internal drive to of seek out what it is, brings you into contact with runner (trans) communities and causes you to realize that you yourself are a runner and eventually accept the offer to be unplugged (take your Premarin and transition).

Conservatives and JAQ-offers wring their hands a lot about trans ideology as a social contagion, and it’s mostly a load of rubbish, save I think for the grain of truth that seeing trans people causes you to question your own identity. And if you’re trans, you’ll eventually arrive at that truth, in addition to a sympathetic ear that you know you can trust and turn to. Think about how many of the bios in here have hatchings that descend directly from emzie’s original ask a thread. That thread was the first time where I got my first cracks in the egg, and gave me the terminology to finally begin to process my internal feelings. And when, several years later I was standing on the precipice, all but ready to jump, emzie was there to give me the last firm push I needed to finally claim the word for myself.

Does that cover everything?
 
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I rewatched "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" a few months ago. I liked this movie but for a long time I probably couldn't say why. There's a term I've heard recently called "trans proxy", the idea that outside of a tiny few examples or more recent examples there's basically no such thing as trans awareness or representation so trans people find something that although wasn't made for the experience of being trans it does help explore the feelings that they may be having without really knowing why. Something like an outsider character that doesn't fit in.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind has the main character Roy Neary have an encounter with something that he can't explain but has left a mark on him, an image in his mind. He becomes completely obsessed with this image, seeing it in patterns everywhere, but he can't explain it to anyone, all he can say is "This means something. This is important." Eventually this image causes him to have a nervous breakdown and pushes his family away. It's only later when by coincidence there's a news report about a fake chemical spill around Devils Tower that he's able to link that image in his mind with Devil's Tower. He goes on a journey and is captured and when asked what he hopes to find, all he can say is "An answer. That's not too much is it?" Later the main scientist tries to explain why these people are drawn to Devils Tower and mentions how because of the news report the people who had an encounter were able to make the link in their minds and that there are people who were never able to make the link.
 
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I'm a bit of a contrarian on these topics. I think "the trans experience" is pretty unique - maybe people who are mixed race have something similar in terms of people judging them to be of one group or another, and that judgment having more to do with the person making it than the mixed race person's personal history - but again, unique. CFC may be a fertile soil for talking about the political and social theory aspects of being trans but the vast majority of people I deal with in "real life," in physical reality, would look at me like I had two heads if I tried to make being trans relatable to them by talking about "quantum people." From my point of view the ideal is for people to not know you're trans at all - "stealth" - or for it to be clear that your being trans is not an acceptable topic for polite conversation. I realize that this is like, regarded as an oldhead belief, by many trans people.

EDIT: I want to be clear that my "trans status," "trans history," "trans identity," "trans experience," whatever you want to call it, being off the table for polite conversation is not meant to create a cordon of shame around being trans; it's meant to normalize(TM) the idea that asking detailed questions about my being trans when you are not a part of my personal life is just as socially inappropriate and rude as asking uninvited questions about a married couple's sex life, or a person's finances.
 
OK, in the spirit of the thread... how did that go? As per my above questions, "business: none of yours" is an acceptable answer. :)

Missed this. Anecdotally, it seems like a 50/50 thing. I was married for 7 years before transition, and with a tremendous amount of effort, we'll be celebrating our 16th anniversary next month.

Think about how many of the bios in here have hatchings that descend directly from emzie’s original ask a thread. That thread was the first time where I got my first cracks in the egg, and gave me the terminology to finally begin to process my internal feelings. And when, several years later I was standing on the precipice, all but ready to jump, emzie was there to give me the last firm push I needed to finally claim the word for myself.

Tagging in @Angst. This has been the biggest surprise to me. My internal calculus was that trans people were somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population. Under an expansive definition, I now think it's between 1% and 10%. I thought I'd be niche. It's starting to feel like I'm part of a revolution overturning thousands of years of western thought! I'm properly awed at the prospect. @JohannaK shared this image with me the other day, and I think we're going to see something similar happen.

69735599_left_handedness_624gr.gif
 
Missed this. Anecdotally, it seems like a 50/50 thing. I was married for 7 years before transition, and with a tremendous amount of effort, we'll be celebrating our 16th anniversary next month.



Tagging in @Angst. This has been the biggest surprise to me. My internal calculus was that trans people were somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population. Under an expansive definition, I now think it's between 1% and 10%. I thought I'd be niche. It's starting to feel like I'm part of a revolution overturning thousands of years of western thought! I'm properly awed at the prospect. @JohannaK shared this image with me the other day, and I think we're going to see something similar happen.

View attachment 655618

LGBTQ combined in most countries that are reasonably open hovers around 4-5%. Lower in countries that are less open.

There's studies in confirmation bias but random have estimated its more like 20-25% due yo the amount of oxygen it soaks up online and the media or selection bias amoung their friends in liberal cities.

NZ doing a census this year and is generally ranked as amount the best places to be lgbtq and least corrupt nation so I'll see what % identify as lgbtq and they're asking about what gender you identify as this year iirc.

In USA lgbtq creeps up to around 10% in some areas but it falls to less than 1% in various areas so it's probably not that different here.

So could be interesting to see th
e % here this year

Moderator Action: Not a question. This is a question thread and not a comment thread. Birdjaguar
 
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What definition of "woman" or "man" would you use/suggest that would not be circular?
ooooh i actually feel pretty strongly about this. i'll try my best to elaborate it well. i would define a woman as "anyone who identifies as a woman" and a man as "anyone who identifies as a man" and so on for every other gender identity out there. i hold that these definitions are not circular.
the problem with a self-referential definition is that you would need to know what the word means in order to know what the word means. for this reason, usually a word containing itself within its own definition is circular, because usually a word is used to evoke the word's meaning. however, sometimes a word is actually used to invoke the concept of the word itself. take the word "fhqwhgads" for example. now, in the phrase "take the word 'fhqwhgads' for example" you can probably understand perfectly well the meaning i am conveying without knowing the definition of "fhqwhgads", as i am not asking you to consider the definition of the word but rather the word itself. i'll call this using a word referentially. when using a word referentially, the word's meaning is not necessary for understanding.
in the definiton of "woman" as "anyone who identifies as a woman", the word "woman" is being used referentially. it is not necessary to know what is meant by "woman" to understand and apply the definition. to determine whether the definition applies, you only need to know if a person uses the word "woman" to identify themself, and not what they mean by it. someone could say "i hate cheese, and i think this makes me a woman", and by the definition of "woman" as "anyone who identifies as a woman", you can know two things with certainty: 1) this person seems to disagree with this definition of woman; and 2) this person is a woman, because she used the word "woman" to identify herself.
knowing what "woman" means in the phrase "anyone who identifies as a woman" would only serve to provide a way for people to be wrong about whether or not they are a woman, which i believe should not be done, or even doable, ideally
i will acknowledge, however, that although this is how i would have these words defined given the power to determine how everyone uses language, i dont actually have that power, and as such in conversation with certain people i will work under different definitions of "man" "woman" etc, so that i can get points across effectively without having to get the person im talking with to buy into my whole gender-definition-system
hope i explained well ^_^ im open to followup questions
 
ooooh i actually feel pretty strongly about this. i'll try my best to elaborate it well. i would define a woman as "anyone who identifies as a woman" and a man as "anyone who identifies as a man" and so on for every other gender identity out there. i hold that these definitions are not circular.

I agree completely with this.

And your explanation is first-rate imo.
 
Q: how old were you when you found out?
16 and 28.

When I was 16. I realized, but I didn't have the language to describe what I knew. I was hospitalized over it. After, I convinced myself it was just a phase and continued to believe that for another 12 years.
 
Q: how old were you when you found out?

Can you elaborate what you mean by "found out"?
I was maybe 10-12 when an appreciation for fem things started coalescing in my brain. 27 when "CD/TV" label felt applicable. About 5yrs ago (48) when I first started chewing on the word 'transgender', and started saying "I'm trans but with no plans to transition". Two years ago "the egg cracked" for real and transitioning started to become a realistic option.
 
Yes; thinking about your fem period (10-12) @IglooDame.

Furthermore, are you all male->female?

Disclaimer; sorry if I don’t use correct nomenclature here. *tiptoes*
 
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Oh, I haven't actually introduced myself in this thread...

Hi! I'm Emily, 36. I started transitioning in 2015, when it seemed like a better idea than it does today. I had sex reassignment surgery in January 2022. You can ask me about that, but don't get weird.
 
I try to keep identifying information about myself to myself, for safety reasons.

I'm a trans woman.

I'll answer questions directed to me if possible, but i ask only this; please keep in the forefront of your minds the fact that we are human beings first and foremost.

If your questions come across as detached or weird im going to gently point that out
 
Do you ever get "phantom" sensations? What's the treatment for that?
Yikes! What a nightmare of a thought. I have not, no. It's not an amputation. The nerves are still intact, just moved around. I don't know how that would be treated.
 
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