Tales from the Cryptid Crypt

Common Treeshrew (Tupaia glis), family Tupaiidae, order Scandentia, Singapore

When I was first facing transition, I had only one book, Jan Morris’s ‘Conundrum’, and a few snatches of televised information as my entire basis for understanding my plight. I just assumed that I would become a heterosexual woman out the other side, a proper Suzy Homemaker with husband and adopted baby. This was certainly what my doctors seemed to desire me to be, and I dearly wanted to please my doctors, because they held my very life in their hands. I was willing to do anything, be anything, to earn my passage to womanhood. I had little concept of even what that meant exactly, only that that was clearly my goal.

Certainly nothing would stop me in my quest. Not even the truth. My first, early, evaluations by a psychologist indicated that I had a “masculine oriented mentation”, and would not be a safe candidate for surgery. I was “penile fixated”. This was news to me. So I had hit the books at my college library, to find out how on earth such a conclusion could possibly be reached. What learned shocked me. The tests I had been given, the Rorschach Ink Blot Test, as well as other visual tests involving pictures of people and scenes, were not grounded in any rational science. In fact, they are essentially arbitrary, culturally based catalogs of expected interpretations, based on a laughable model of what it means to be female or male of mind.

For instance, if one sees in a random inkblot suitably feminine images, such as flowers and cooking pots, then one is judged female. If one sees cars and planes, then one is judged a boy. It is that silly. In my first evaluations, I saw what was relevant to my life. I played fantasy games, so I saw dragons and griffins. I read science fiction all of my life almost exclusively, so I saw starships and galaxies. I studied science, so I saw cells and DNA. Guess what? According to respectable psychology, none of these things could possibly interest a woman. Only men should care about, and envision  such things. Women should only see domestic subjects, or matters relating to child care.

To say this angered me alone would be to ignore the vast disillusionment and disgust I felt. I resolved that no idiotic psudoscience would determine my survival. I studied the same textbooks that my psychologist used.

My next evaluations uniformly portrayed me as the ideal of blessed womanhood. I saw butterflies and daffodils. I saw train tunnels and doughnut holes. I saw diapers and  teapots. And the most telling part is that my psychologist ate it up with a spoon. Of course all of that useless, degrading therapy I endured to meet the standards of care must have helped me to grow into a successful female psychology. How wonderful was the science of psychotherapy. Back pats all around, and a hug for our exemplary case study.

Early transition I cried looking in the mirror wearing a skirt for the first time. I refused to go out like that. Yesterday I was dressed in a blouse and skirt all day for Easter and at the end of the day I thought back to the beginning of transition and how I would have absolutely refused to wear an outfit like that in public or with my family. Even to this day, I don’t like wearing anything shorter than knee length in public a lot of times because I feel so weird and ugly with my legs out.

so a guy who (for whatever reason) doesnt have transfem friends, or isnt very close to them or just doest talk about pre-early transition, or just doesnt uh. doesn't think too much about the experiences of transfems. i think its very easy fot him to take being flustered and upset by a maid dress as, like, a face value statement of Not Wanting To Be In A Dress, rather than the fact that, for a closeted transfem or transfem egg, thats probably going to be pulling up a lot of trauma.

if you haven’t been on grindr, in instagram comments, or other spaces where cishet men openly express their obsession (which includes both attraction and ritual disgust) with the transfeminized body, it can be hard to explain. the best way i can express it is that “femboy” is a spiritual successor to “trap.” it’s a term conceived for and proliferated by pornography titles, locker room conversations on what constitutes faggotry, and the blank grindr bios of DL men. the thing to remember is this: when power sees “femboy,” it doesn’t understand it as “feminine man.” this becomes obvious if you are ever unfortunate enough to experience firsthand a conversation wherein femboys are the subject cishet men are discussing in assumed confidence. “femboy” is parsed as “sex-object” by these men, as fuckable thing with a pretty face, as woman-shaped pleasure dispenser that you can use and abuse in motels and the back seats of lifted trucks, that you can discard when your family finds out. the transmisogyny and degendering and objectification that undergirds the use of this word in the cishet zeitgeist feels pretty apparent to me.

Me:

Jaller: That makes sense. A Rahkshi killed me once.

Gresh: What