Off Topic

Immediately afterward, my little brother got a little tearful and frightened and I watched as the nurses immediately responded to this by pinning him down against the table and giving him the shots while he screamed.

It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.

Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.

It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.

In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.

Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.

I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.

I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?

what do you mean breathing exercises arent supposed to make you feel out of breath???? what???

also why the fuck did i need to be told the feel better exercise is supposed to make me. feel better? what went wrong here. genuinely asking.

The foundation of most therapeutic techniques for "anxiety" seems to assume that what your body does, what your body knows, how your body reacts, it's all fake and wrong and you have to forcibly make your body do the right things.

It has been hard as fuck to unlearn all that, and to re-learn how to just. Be an animal with survival instincts.

OP isn't oppressed for being a man, OP is oppressed for being a TRANS man. OP is a target of transphobia because OP is transgender.

im so confused how OP can accurately identify the oppression they experience as transphobia, but then proceed to say they experience for being a man, not for being transgender.

the reason trans women do experience oppression for being women is because we live in a patriarchal society. so women experience oppression simply for being women.

that is why trans women experience oppression for being women AND for being transgender.

in other words, transmisogyny.

Read the post again.

Why are you bring up cisgender men when I am talking about transgender men? I said this in the replies but why must you transphobes always go "but what about cis men???? Do you think cis men [xyz that I said about trans men]???" Like you must know how disgustingly transphobic & cissexist it is to constantly bring up and compare trans men to cis men when we're talking about trans men's experiences, right? Because it's so fucking obvious you bigots see trans manhood as an inauthentic poor imitation of cis manhood, rather than a unique and authentic, very real, manhood on its own that exists outside of cispatriarchal ideals of what it means to be a man and is therefore treated differently by cis patriarchy.

I've read Crenshaw multiple times. It seems like you haven't, or by "reading" you mean looking at words and not actually thinking about the meaning of those words strung together.

Because there is no reality in which transgender men are treated as nebulously "transgender" without an actual gender modifier changing that. The modality through which trans men are transgender is their gender identity as men.

It works like this:

Person identifies as a man > being a man is different to their socially imposed gender > because they are man that means they are trans > becsuse they are a man that is trans they experience oppression for their transGENDER identity > simplified, they are oppressed for their gender identity because that is what makes them trans, and thus open to oppression.

Nowhere am I saying "all man are oppressed for being men". I am saying "every transGENDER person is oppressed because of their GENDER identity, including trans men".

"Trans men are oppressed for being men", "trans men are oppressed for being trans", and "trans men are oppressed for being trans men" all mean the same thing.

I wrote this post because I'm sick of seeing anti-intersectional bullshit separating our gender from our troubles as trans, when the reason we are even trans is because we are men and those two things are inseparable parts of our identity. Bigots don't look at me and go "well you're trans so I hate you, but you being a man is fine". It is the very act of transitioning toward manhood that makes me open to transphobia and bigotry and oppression. The very fact of me being a man is very specifically what they hate about me.

When I was a kid and learned that some people still believe that deaf people are stupid/incompetent it was so fucking wild. I didnt know that people still thought that, or why they would still think that.

The fact that some of you forget that bed bound disabled people exist, people on oxygen exist, etc etc is so wild to me.

And I'm not talking normal stuff like being overly ambition, or lack of planning, not finishings

Tell me the stupid stuff.

would you refer to women-who have had mastectomies due to cancer as "mutilated" or "disfigured"?

I feel the same way about how a lot of radical feminists will frame being a lifelong medical patient through a moral lens. There is nothing inherently wrong with being a lifelong medical patient just as there is nothing inherently wrong with being disabled. Being a lifelong medical patient is why some people will get to live that life. It is a positive thing that we live in a time where those people can receive care and support instead of being left to die. To demonize this will bleed into how you treat disabled people because much more commonly they are lifelong medical patients more than trans people are.

And that's my theory on why like 2/3 of the radical feminists I interact with keep calling me retarded. They know I have an intellectual disability but it means nothing to them and often they don't even see this for the slur that it is. Because the rest of their rhetoric has already done the work of normalizing ableism in their minds.