destroy your binder

basics of sexual conflict within species. taught to undergrads who study evolutionary biology everywhere. 

note how male is analogous with parasite and predator

‘male trait costly to females’ means males harming females

note how female doesn’t just ‘submit’ to being harmed, but evolves countermeasures. it’s an arms race

your desperation really comes through in this ask, i’m so sorry to see how deeply you’re hurting.

i suspect there’s a lot of negative self talk in your life right now. there’s no need to create a false dichotomy between “ugly scum halfman tran” and whatever negative attachments you hold with being a woman. this is a false choice and you’re doing yourself no favors thinking like this. it creates a situation where you either suffer being whatever characture you have of women or you resign to the inevitability of transition, which you also hold a lot of negativity about.

my best advice is, first and foremost, stop speaking to yourself this way. don’t call yourself a freak or scum, don’t call people like you halfman scum (people like you meaning females with dysphoria).

next, seek therapy. i don’t mean this disparagingly, i sincerely believe you need the help of a professional to navigate the waters right now.

here are some truths about your situation:

1) you’re female. transition or not, you will always be female and never be male. transition or not, you’re going to need to deal with whatever misogyny you harbor that makes you unable to stand being a woman, because you will never be male. you’ll either hate yourself for existing as a woman or you’ll hate yourself for never being male enough, and you’ll resent males because you can’t be one, and you’ll resent women who have made peace with their existence as females. that’s a shitty way to live. again, seek therapy, seek help.

2) this doesn’t make you a freak. you’re human and you exist in a fucked up, misogynistic society. you’re someone who is suffering and needs help, but you’re not a freak. mental illness does not make you a freak.

3) you can’t “get the trans out;” there is no entity within you that is trans, like some kind of possession, like some kind of soul-poltergeist. transness is an ideology—you either believe yourself to be another gender (making you trans) or you don’t (meaning you’re not. if something requires you to believe in it to be “real,” it’s a faith, a lot like religion is a faith. you can only stop believing you’re inherently, intrinsically another gender, like losing faith in a religion. personally, this is what i’d advise. faith-based ideologies don’t interest me, and a faith-based ideology that encourages you to change your body with surgery and/or meds, spend money, drastically alter your social place in the world—that’s destructive. it asks you to chase an ideal that is inherently out of reach (becoming male), but if you can’t reach it or find happiness in doing so (you never actually change sex), it’s your fault (sounds like a religion, no?).

4) you need help (professional and interpersonal). if there are people in your life you can turn to, lean on them. none of us is an island, none of us gets through life alone. if you have support, lean. seek out therapists. seek out female role models, talk to women, find women who are like you and talk to them. there is so much joy and healing in connecting with other women. for me, connecting with butch women and other lesbians is an oasis in the desert.

I tagged this #i will not elaborate on this at this time, but now I will elaborate on it. 

I’m gonna go ahead and post the disclaimer: Academic studies of the nature of oppressive forces are generally a good thing. There’s even some value in the ideas of “unpacking language” and “deconstructing narratives,” because yes, sometimes those things matter. I’m specifically talking about a certain kind of academic writing that is hard to define, but tends to have a few specific characteristics: It’s usually focused on something “social justice” related, it’s written in extremely dense jargon, and it’s more focused on moralizing than making any meaningful analysis or providing practical recommendations. 

This kind of writing is not for the purpose of furthering our understanding of oppressive forces. This kind of writing is for furthering the careers of academics.

Academia works kind of like an MLM. Professors want to keep their jobs, so they need students to teach and graduate assistants to help with their research (and grade their papers for them), so they convince people to pursue education in their field. Then those people want to become professors, and they also need students and graduate assistants. A few rounds of this, and you end up with way, way more people with PhDs than positions for professors. This creates the increasingly cutthroat nature of academia. (I’m gonna come back to this.)

So how do you succeed in a saturated academic field? You look smarter than your competition, and you tear your competition down at every possible opportunity. That’s where this kind of writing comes in. It’s so dense as to be incomprehensible - but who’s going to admit that they don’t understand it and risk looking stupid? No, now you need to write an even denser, even more incomprehensible article, so you look even smarter. And the focus of “social justice” shields you from criticism. Any criticism of your writing or analysis can be turned back on you with accusations of bigotry or limited, privileged perspective. And you can’t defend yourself against accusations like that - it just makes you look worse. The more incomprehensible and “social justice-y” your writing, the smarter you look, and the less likely you are to be criticized - and the more credibility and leverage you have to criticize your competition. “Cancel culture” existed in academia long before it made its way to Twitter. 

This nasty little game was previously limited to the ivory towers of academia and the people who wanted to join them. The average person did not give a shit what the word “discursive” meant. If you had to engage with this in the pursuit of a regular degree, you nodded along, vomited back the language into your essays, and moved on with your life. (This stuff is partially where the idea of the “liberal brainwashing university” comes from.). For the most part, you had to seek this stuff out if you wanted to engage with it. The people whose dreams of an academic career didn’t pan out went and got jobs writing for snooty newspapers and/or teaching AP Brit Lit in their hometowns.

Enter social media.

Now you’re not just after that tenure-track job, now you’re after that blue check. Now the game plays out in the public sphere. Moreover, every bargain-bin Foucault knockoff who would normally move on from his failed dreams of being an academic at some point can keep playing the game forever. And every undergraduate with three weeks of Philosophy 101 under their belt and a 19 year old’s passion for social causes can also participate. Their friends, not wanting to be shown up or left out, also get in on the game. And so do their friends. And, like a virus, it spreads and spreads and spreads - with Tumblr and Twitter being the primary sources of infection. Super-spreader sites.

As it spreads outward, people lose sight of the fact that none of this ever mattered in the first place. This kind of writing doesn’t serve the purposes of liberation and never did. It was never meant to. It was always a shallow, artificial charade. But it becomes entrenched in the language of politics and liberation as if it was real. To use their own language, we’ve gone through Baudrillard’s four stages of the image. “It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”

And remember what I said about academia being like an MLM? This serves their purposes very well. More people are talking about their field, more people are interested in it! They have more students, they need more funding, they need to hire more professors! And we all know what professors need… It replicates itself to eat itself alive to replicate itself. 

A guy proudly sent me dozens of different nudes that he was secretly screenshotting from Snapchat with some sketchy app. “How is a fat girl like a bicycle? It’s fun to ride until your friends see.” Did you know that nearly every man uses some degree of incel terminology to talk about women? “Bros before hoes” isn’t a joke - men have the strongest class solidarity I’ve ever seen in my fucking life; a man will defend another man that he hates, another man that he’s never even met, over pretty much any woman. Most men genuinely believe that women think totally differently than they do, that women are confusing liars and that’s why relationships don’t work out. Your “feminist ally” male friends and coworkers are calling you a feminazi cunt while they drink beer, and it means nothing to them. Men discuss porn like they’re phD art historians analyzing the design of a Renuar.

In contemporary art, there’s a distinction between “nude” and “naked”. My figure painting professor facetiously described the difference as, “Nude is when you’re wearing no clothes; naked is when you’re wearing no clothes and you’re up to something.” But joking aside, “nude” is the idealized form, whereas “naked” is the real human form, warts (and stretch marks and body hair and cellulite) and all.

Basically, a “naked” model can be the subject of a painting, but a “nude” is always an object—as another teacher put it, “The war of painting was fought on the canvas of the female body!” We are so conditioned to see female bodies depicted a certain way in art that they are, as the commenter put it, decorative. Not a person. Not a subject. An object.

Removing the head/face is dehumanizing. The body is an object. It’s not any deeper than that, whether it’s high art, advertising, or someone’s shitty Instagram art.

you’re welcome to ask me anything, my ask box is meant to be a place for people to bring tough questions, but i do want to make my biases clear; i very openly and obviously do not believe transition is the right solution to gender dysphoria. i believe is does more harm than good, both to the individual and the society in which the individual exists. i believe this from my own experience of transition/gender dysphoria and from critical thought/extensive research on the topic. so when you ask me whether you should transition or try to cope, after laying my biases on the table, my answer is try to cope.

you state you’ve become certain you are acutely gender dysphoric--and please correct me if this next statement is off base, but--you say that as though there’s such a thing as “real” or “true” gender dysphoria (meaning it’s innate and will certainly be cured or helped by transition) and something that looks like gender dysphoria but gets misinterpreted and misdiagnosed (like whatever us detransitioners experienced). but there’s not. there’s no meaningful difference between my gender dysphoria and the gender dysphoria experienced by someone who transitioned and remained transitioned; the difference is how we’ve chosen to deal with it.

this is not a popular or particularly kind statement, but i mean it in a purely factual sense--gender dysphoria is a mental illness. transition is one way to cope with it. in my experience and opinion, it is not the most effective way to deal with it and can also cause a lot of tangential harm (physical, mental, social, monetary, etc.).

gender dysphoria is a symptom in the way body dysmorphia is a symptom in the way paranoia is a symptom. it’s a mental condition that convinces the person experiencing it there’s something wrong with the body when there’s actually something wrong with the brain (or in the case of paranoia, convinces the person there’s something wrong externally, with whatever the object of paranoia is, when the reality is there’s something wrong with the brain). transition treats the body in the way dieting/starving treats the anorexic’s body dysmorphia in the way isolation/avoidance treats the paranoid person’s paranoia--all of these are external ways of coping with/mitigating/lessening the external manifestation (symptom) of an internal disorder (mental illness). and this is why transition helps alleviate the symptom of gender dysphoria! but it does nothing to address the root. and when the root remains unaddressed and intact, the symptom can always reemerge--at very least the symptom will always require active mitigation (transition and a trans identity require constant maintenance and the participation of others to substantiate--which is to say, others must also participate in the delusion that one is the opposite (or another) sex).

that got long. back to you and your question; at the end there, it seems like you’re conflating gender dysphoria and depression. these may be in concert with one another, encouraging one another, but they’re distinct symptoms. you could very well pursue transition AND choose to cope with your depression in another way--and if you choose transition, you SHOULD address your depression independently. shit, you should treat the depression first, because that’s not a life-changing, irreversible treatment like physical transition is.

having stated above what my opinion is and will always be WRT transitioning (don’t--find another way to cope), i want to encourage you to figure out WHY you experience gender dysphoria in the first place and whether there’s anything else you can do to cope with it before transition. whether you ultimately choose to transition or not, doing that, investigating your gender dysphoria, will have always been a good thing. maybe you realize you can cope and heal without transition or maybe you simply get a better idea of where your notions of gender come from (because, as gender is a social phenomenon, your ideas about gender and the resulting gender dysphoria is certainly not an innate characteristic) and that gives you a more certain place from which to begin physical transition. but whatever it uncovers for you, you’ll be more informed and self aware heading into the next part of your life.

I haven’t! I rarely watch anything on youtube. the online writing of redressalert and crashchaoscats were probably the most influential to me and in general having connections with other detransitioned women who politicize their experiences has been huge- there’s nothing like having conversations with other women about ideas!!!!!! Katie herzog’s article is the only good one I’ve read on detransition, but like iirc she didn’t really have any new takes herself, she just didn’t censor the interview subjects

lesbian feminist and more generally second wave feminist writing don’t directly address detransition but they were very useful to me. Big ones would be gynecology by Mary daly, call me lesbian by julia penelope, the transsexual empire (and a passion for friends. and women as wombs) by Janice raymond, loving to survive by dee lr graham, the cancer journals by Audre Lorde, fight back! Feminist resistance to male violence, women of ideas by dale spender, changing our minds by celia kitzinger and rachel perkins, backlash by Susan Faludi, right wing women by Andrea dworkin, woman and nature by Susan griffin, and scum manifesto!!

Feminist stuff I found useful later were older lesbian periodicals (old sinister wisdom and common lives/lesbian lives mainly, plus the lesbian ethics periodical), the book lesbian ethics by sarah hoagland, the anthology for lesbians only, lesbian philosophy by jeffner allen, lesbian philosophies and cultures edited by Jeffner allen, spirited lesbians by Nett hart, the sexual liberals and the assault on feminism edited by Dorchen leidholdt .....

Non-feminist (and often actively anti-feminist) books about cosmetic surgery that were clarifying for me were flesh wounds by virginia Blum, beauty junkies by Alex kuczynski, and reshaping the female body by Kathy Davis

I also found reading about the American history of eugenics and other forms of racist and/or classist, and/or ableist medical violence useful in understanding the landscape re: medical projects of bodily control here. So the most useful to me there would be Killing the black body and fatal invention by Dorothy roberts, American eugenics by Nancy ordover, preaching eugenics by Christine Rosen, the Nazi connection: American racism and German national socialism by Stefan Kühl, medical apartheid by Harriet A Washington, normal at any cost by Susan Cohen, surrogacy: a human rights violation by renate klein, and the bioethics of enhancement by mindy hall

also some mostly not-at-all-obviously-detransition-related fiction or memoir I found relevant to understanding my experience of transition would be a hive for the honeybee by soinbhe lally, empathy by Sarah Schulman, dietland by Sarai walker, autobiography of a face by Lucy greely, frankenstein by Mary wollstonecraft shelley, captive wild by lois crisler, and you all grow up and leave me by piper weiss

the book transformative experience by LA Paul doesn’t fit into any of these groupings but it’s a really great little philosophy book by a female author and also big to me on this topic

I did not think about gender identity at all as a younger child. I was somewhat of a "tomboy" but I still enjoyed a lot of traditionally assumed girl toys and interests (not saying this matters in a real sense but it does to concepts of transness). I had 0 indication of any sort of desire to shift genders until age 13.

I was on the internet quite often as a kid, tween and teen. I was born in 1999 so, I have essentially been growing up with computers and specifically the internet, in my life. My parents had an approach towards the internet that was informed by their beliefs of self-privacy. In other words, my internet usage was never monitored. I used to really appreciate that but I recognize how problematic that is now.

I had gotten into a lot of erotic yaoi and gay movies (specifically gay men) at one point starting around ages 11/12, i don't remember how i came across it exactly. But i had a desire to be in a relationship like that, i wanted to be in a gay male relationship. And while I had those desires, I never translated that into thinking that *I* was male.

Shortly after or around this time, I started going through puberty. I got very large breasts at a young age and I got hit by periods *hard*. I recognize now that this threw me into a depression and I also developed a lot of self-hate. I was uncomfortable with breasts and periods made me feel like I was dying for 7 days a month. I wanted desperately to rid of this body. I was just, so uncomfortable. I still did not translate any of this into thing I was male.

As I have said, I had a lot of easy access to the internet and was online quite often. I used IMVU religiously. I had a hard time fitting in and making friends irl but it felt seamless on there. However, and this is after I had been into the yaoi, my avatar and perceived sex was male on there. I presented as male online for awhile. Before I had done that I had people just assuming I was based on typing and at some point I noticed how different people were with me if they knew I was female so... i just started presenting as male online. And I had friends, people found me funny, I was able to live out these fantasies I had of being a gay man in a way with the online relationships I had (ironically, many of the other "guys" I dated at this time ended up also being catfish who were other young girls like me). I had created a whole life and backstory to this person who did not exist but who i wanted desperately to be because... I felt liked and happy as that person and in real life... I hated myself and felt extremely alone and uncomfortable. I still did not translate any of this into me being or becoming male.

So, I came clean about my real identity at one point. And for about a week or so, I was just me online. And I remember talking to one of my online friends at the time on Kik and I don't know what I was complaining or talking about but she ended up asking if I had heard of transgenderism. Which I hadn't. 13-year-old me does all sorts of research on the topic and my brain basically goes--- "wow. this must be what is going on. I hate my body, I don't like being a girl. It just makes sense" and then I basically r/eggirl'ed my whole life, i.e. I cut off all my long hair twice as a 3 and 4 year old.. definitely must have been a sign of me actually being a gay boy born in a girl's body. And that was it. That sealed it. I thought I had figured out who I was and I ran with it. I should note that at this time there was also a specific "look" that I wanted-- i really think my brain was confused bc the look I wanted was just guys I found attractive.

I got into trans youtubers like Skylarkeleven, came out to my family. A couple of them were skeptical, my mom was confused but ultimately did research, saw the scare tactics of trans kids killing themselves and decided to support me in all of this. She found a therapist for me, who had experience with trans people, and I went there for a year--she helped convince the people who were skeptical into going along with this all. And after a year of.. not the most productive therapy, I was able to start testosterone which was on my checklist of transition "goals". This was at the ripe old age of 14. And so until August of this year, at age 21, I injected myself with testosterone. For basically 7 years.

Additionally, I got my learner's permit while I was trans so that was listed as male and I had changed my name legally to a male name. I was allowed to get top surgery, double incision mastectomy with nipple grafts, at age 16 after binding my chest for 3 years (which honestly made the desire for the top surgery heightened bc the discomfort of binders).

For the first couple years of my transition I tried to stealth and pass (unsuccessfully bc I am short and even after all the T and top surgery, just never looked "male enough"). Basically all of high school i did this, and yes the entirety of my high school life I was trans.. and it fucked with me socially. You wouldn't think something like where you change for gym would matter but I swear it does. I always went to nurse's bathroom so. I was just alone. And for some reason that fucks with me now because I remembered being able to have some relief in talking with friends in the locker room away from the guys. But I didn't think about that or question any of that in the moment bc my brain at this time was obsessed with my gender identity. It is insane to me now how much time and effort and stress I had over this. I never fit in with the guys and I made it harder for other women to want to connect with me. Even though I had some boosts in confidence it took a major nose dive toward the end of high school and in college.

My entire college life was as a transguy. I went to a state school that was ultra, ultra woke and LGBTQA+ centered. It was here that instead of recognizing a lot of the red flags I had throughout my transition (hating facial hair that I always shaved off, hating increased hair on my body in general, hating the shape of my body, not comfortable showing my chest still because it "still feels wrong", never having had bottom discomfort other than hating periods, and increasingly at this point, being unhappy with the affects T had on my voice, etc..) I double-downed on my ID. I was no longer trying to pass and be stealth, I became very vocal and visible with my identity and I even made my senior project related to trans identity. I roomed with guys the entire time and I am really upset by that now bc I feel I missed out. I made no close friends at college other than 1 roommate I roomed with every year bc he was a decent, clean and genuine guy and I was terrified of who else I could end up having to have sleep next to me (rightfully so bc one of the guys that shared an on-campus apartment with us and slept in the other room it ended up being found out that he had.. raped a couple people which disgusts the fuck out of me now to know I shared a space with this trash for a year). Anyway.

I got very lax with my T shots towards the last couple months of usage, i skipped a lot of weeks.

COVID happened and I was out of college, and I moved out with my partner and I don't know exactly when this happened but the "looks" I was going for were certainly... female by this point. I dropped acid again and got very *honest* with myself (I will say that my limited experiences with LSD have been overwhelmingly therapeutic) and I had discovered the r/detrans sub and I eventually recognized that. I didn't need to do any of this. And I needed to stop. I didn't want to put this effort in anymore. I didn't care anymore. And I just... stopped. I told my family, I stopped IDing as a transguy, changed my gender on my IDs to F, started going by a different name, stopped testosterone, it is all quite literally another transition in a lot of ways. I have so much grief still over all that I have done to myself and feel like I have messed up. I was diagnosed with GID, and yet here I am. I tried to be as detailed as possible here. Maybe just to give some insight to what can happen when you have a mixture of different issues going on and you allow a self-diagnosis to lead the charge and have a therapist that goes along with what you say thats straight off the web for what you should say to get through trans therapy and get access to get HRT.

At this point. I think it is extremely important to not allow HRT and surgeries like this to be performed on kids. As well as encouraging therapy to work on an individual basis rather than just hearing "trans" and then adhering to the checklist and doing a mixture of hiding some truth (in terms of not explaining all of what can happen from HRT and the fact that longterm usage has barely been studied) and scare tactics (trans kids will hurt or kill themselves if not affirmed) to get parents on board.

I don't believe everyone who says they are trans or supports them is malicious in their beliefs but my vantage point now has me seriously scared for people younger than me now and for what is actively happening. I literally see this all as a warped version of self-acceptance. It is self-hate in the guise of self-acceptance. And underlying and/or connected issues are swept under the rug in therapy as soon as the narrative has placed that you are trans.