Petty note about the derail aside, because it was both of us, I'll drop it. I understand you determine what you feel, and I won't make the mistake I did here next time, sorry.
[RD] Trans Genocide
- Thread starter emzie
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Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
It sure was both of us, that wasn't an accusation but an observation.
I've been trying for a good long time to come up with some analogy or metaphor to help cis folks really understand gender dysphoria and being transgender. My inability may be partly ironic - not having fully transitioned in any substantial way yet, I can't really understand being cisgender. Hmmm. Have you ever had the strong feeling that you were an imposter in a group of people? Perhaps they're all educated and you aren't, or wealthy and you aren't, or very religious and you aren't, or huge fans of a certain sport and you aren't? Where you're reluctant to engage because "what if they figure it out"? But yet, being referred to as one of that group just doesn't feel right or true and makes you feel like you're lying to everyone just by not objecting?
If so, take those feelings, expand it out to having them 24/7/365, and turn the volume of them in your head up to 11, especially when you look in the mirror in the morning. And there's two ways of getting away from that frequent soul-crushing feeling of not being the person you are. One is taking steps to really become a part of that group (though that means telling everyone you weren't originally a part of it and enduring their disgust - after all, you'll never really be a member of the group, according to them). The other is just ending everything. This analogy falls short because it doesn't so much address physical elements of dysphoria, and I've sometimes gone with being left-handed vs right-handed, but since society isn't looking down on lefties anymore there's not enough personal identity rolled up in it - no one is making judgments of whether you're LH or RH based on your name or appearance unless you play baseball.
Would be all kinds of stupid thing to say, but not a denial of my humanity. Russians are human.
Why I am pushing back against this is that the claim "misgendering = denial of humanity" can be seen as insinuating the other gender is "less than human". Which I don't think is your intention, but we could still do without it.
I acknowledge this... but depression of such severity is commonly regarded as mental disorder.
Major depressive disorder - Wikipedia
"I am ill > I need treatment > hrt is an effective treatment > therefore I need hrt > therefore it is evil to deny me this" would be an easy-to-understand argument, but I take it you object to being thought of as "ill"?
Lexicus
Deity
So can you explain why I, a fellow cis person, read that post too and didn't feel targeted by it?
Not really, no... but thank you for the explanation - I can attempt to relate to that at least.
Being ill and benefiting from treatment are definitely perceived as different concepts. It's kind of amusing, actually. No one thinks of short-sighted people as ill, although they benefit from laser eye surgery. And a person with a cancerous tumor is definitely thought of as ill once they are on chemotherapeutics, but whether we think of them as ill before and after a successful surgery, I just don't know...
We hope that the treatments help return someone to an acceptable baseline of health or capacity.
"Ill" might be a degradation from a previous more healthy state?
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
I took "ill" to be the "severely depressed state of being". Which is what the treatment cures.
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
just for the record, such a grain export does qualify. so yea...
sophie
Break My Heart
The mistake, I think is in trying to imagine yourself as or becoming "the other gender." Because when you do this you are not imagining what transness feels like, you are imagining what it would be like "if I were trans" if that makes sense. To understand transness I think it'd help to go more absurd, to take your mind away from familiarity. So instead, imagine a Gregor Samsa scenario. You are precisely the same person you are now, only one day you wake up as a giant cockroach. Every part of you feels completely alien. It feels wrong. You feel like you were not built for this world. Every moment of existence is a stark reminder of this alienness. You try to roll over in bed but your hardened carapace can no longer balance on its side. You try to walk upright, but you cannot, and are forced to crawl around on the ground like a dog. Movement itself is utterly humiliating. Every door you go through you get wedged. Every time you catch your reflection you become physically nauseous. You can no longer feel warm water when you take a shower. You see visible looks of alternatively disgust or pity on the face of every person you meet. Your parents are embarrassed by your existence, they barely talk to you. They won't even look at you. You are jostled and stepped on constantly as you scuttle down the street, your wide girth presenting an obstacle and an eyesore to passers by. You try to have sex, but everything just feels wrong. You don't even have a penis anymore. You feel like an unlovable pest as your 6 legs flail about impotently. You fear you will never be able to feel sexual pleasure ever again. There is never a moment in which you are not palpably reminded that you are a disgusting hideous bug. You are reminded every time you try to put on clothes and they immediately tear to shreds, by your inability to manipulate the buttons, by the grotesque way the shirt strains against your girth, while the pants are at once somehow too small to clasp around your abdomen, but also too long and 75% of the leg lies comically on the floor. You are reminded every time you reach for the milk and it falls to the ground because you no longer have hands. You are reminded every time you eat your food off the floor, unable to chew or taste, but only to pass food through your mandibles and down your gullet.
Now imagine that this is not your existence for an hour or a day or a weekend. This is how it will be forever. You will always be a cockroach. The horror will never stop. You will not acclimate to this, because in your mind you will always know and remember that you are human. The forgetting that you don't have hands and the feeling of utter despair when you drop the milk for the 5th time this week, it's contents splattering across the floor again, will always be the same. The feeling of total degradation at having to scuttle across the floor each morning will always be the same. This will be your existence until you die.
That's what gender dysphoria feels like. It does not feel like waking up the "wrong gender." It feels like waking up in a wholly alien body, where everything you do, even things you would otherwise like, feels completely wrong, and that wrongness renders you incapable of enjoying even those small creature comforts. One of the biggest commonalities among trans people before they hatch is the feeling or sense that they are not of this Earth. That they are an alien creature who was smuggled down here at birth, and that somehow everything on this planet is askew, as if it were not made for them. If you want to understand transness, and the feeling of dysphoria before coming out, the insight won't come from fetishistic transformation material. Trans media is body horror.
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JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I'm not quite sure what this gets to. My body might not have a uterus, but that doesn't make it any less female. There are plenty of cis women born without a functioning uterus and that doesn't make them less female or more male.
There are no biologically male or female bodies, there are only taxonomically male and female bodies.
That's the hell of it, isn't it? On the one hand, we all just want our identity recognized, that people understand it's not an effing choice. On the other hand, we want access to the medical stuff - therapy, hormones, and surgery - that adjusts our bodies to fit what our brains are telling us they should be. Lots of people seize on one or the other in order to oppose the overall identification of people as transgender. Nevermind that every time someone detransitions, even though more often than not it's because society has made it worse for them to be publicly out than to not be out, and even though it's something like one or two percent of transgender folks, it's held up as some kind of proof that it's a choice and a mistake at that.
It does remind me of the "homosexual lifestyle" social uproar in the 90s, and I suppose the medical stuff at that time was AIDS treatments. It's not a lifestyle except for the fact that people that don't like it have made it one, effectively pushing trans folk into their own social group. After all, look at gay folks today, and tell me what is different about their lifestyle now aside from the gender of their sexual partners, since they're generally no longer being forced out of other social groups.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
IglooDame for Battle Queen
This is ****** genocide.
First dish is just the salad. Let's stop it there and tell em snack time is over.
This is ****** genocide.
First dish is just the salad. Let's stop it there and tell em snack time is over.
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LMAO Sorry but I have absolutely no idea what to make of this.
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
if medicine is available, and it cures something, it should be provided. having demographics die that you have the resources to care for...
people don't really understand how this **** saves lives. the food/intentional starvation comparison is good. yes food is lower per mazlow, but diseases are at the level just above food, sleep and water.
i have schizophrenia. if untreated, i will break down. if not outright dying from suicide or stress related things, i will wither away without ability to work. if the state decided to remove the ability for me to afford my medication and/or have access to care, they'd remove my access to life. food doesn't matter if i can't earn money to buy it.
in the case of florida, we're talking a specific minority denied lifesaving treatment. why? they can change (impossible) or die; in either way, the result is that they will be removed from the population. maybe not in totality, but enough that the providers cared to remove access to life-saving medicine.
people don't really understand how this **** saves lives. the food/intentional starvation comparison is good. yes food is lower per mazlow, but diseases are at the level just above food, sleep and water.
i have schizophrenia. if untreated, i will break down. if not outright dying from suicide or stress related things, i will wither away without ability to work. if the state decided to remove the ability for me to afford my medication and/or have access to care, they'd remove my access to life. food doesn't matter if i can't earn money to buy it.
in the case of florida, we're talking a specific minority denied lifesaving treatment. why? they can change (impossible) or die; in either way, the result is that they will be removed from the population. maybe not in totality, but enough that the providers cared to remove access to life-saving medicine.
I don't know if "detransitions" is the real metric to watch, even if it's cited. "Regrets transitioning" might be a better metric. A lot is wrapped up there, but it's the sum of choices made into an environment that can only be predicted.
Nearly every body modification or well-being intervention can be put to a similar test.
Nearly every body modification or well-being intervention can be put to a similar test.
Chukchi Husky
Lone Wolf
For a long time now, long before I realised that I'm trans, I've been thinking about werewolves. The idea that a human transforms into a wolf and becomes a monster. The depiction is that the wolf is the monster but I've long thought that maybe it's not that the wolf is the monster, it's forcing the human into a form that's not their own and the only way they can cope is by acting like a monster, like an instinctive reaction against their new form.
Angst
Rambling and inconsistent
yea like. detransition is disappearingly rare. statistically, people randomly die from appendix surgery but we still do it.
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Exuberance colors the post but I endorse you encouraging and training those near you in the empowering art of using long arms.
Could have used you for this thread a couple years back where break with the US left and endorsed mass armaments to push back on rightwing confidence. And specifically armalites for interoperability.
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