being nonbinary and taking testosterone

[ID: Text-intensive Twitter thread from the Shapeshifters chest binders Twitter account in reply to a post by artist and author Ursula Vernon. Vernon says, A non-zero number of you apparently did not know that The Last Unicorn was a book before it was a movie. It is by Peter S. Beagle. It is made of spun glass and fairytales and iron knives and there are individual lines that I would give my lungs to have written. Shapechangers replies, I saw him every year at NYCC for several years straight, bought something at his table, asked him to sign it, and we spoke. He remembered me from year to year, no small feat at that con. He remembered which stories he'd told me. One year I came back with a different gender on. He squinted at me a bit and said thoughtfully, "I've seen you before in this place." All I had to say was, "last year you told me the story about the inoshishi." And his face cleared, and he leaned in with a grin and told me about a German guitarist who he traveled with, twice. Who transitioned between the first and second time, so he'd gotten to meet this person all over again on the second round. It was a wonderfully kind way to let me know that everything was fine. I was fresh out of the closet and I needed that, and maybe he could see it. The Last Unicorn is the best book in the world and I will defend it and its author til I die. the end. /end ID]

And I think it’s worth putting that in context for myself at the very least. JK Rowling lives in Scotland. Her wealth is directly funding court cases against the Scottish government that burns time and resources, and there’s a feeling of powerlessness within ScotGov because they simply cannot compete.

The Scottish Government is a devolved government with limited powers. They cannot make the case against the Supreme Court ruling, and when the Scottish Parliament passed Gender Recognition Act reform, it was blocked by the British Government.

I cannot express enough how much of the anti trans movement in Scotland and the UK is being bankrolled and supported by the wealth and influence of JK Rowling.

People who still love Harry Potter are either directly financing her ability to inflict harm on trans people, or providing her with the cultural capital which keeps Harry Potter in the limelight.

So the option is to take pot shots at that when we can, and help services which provide critical support to trans people which is what I try to do when I can.

The Federal Trade Commission of the US is currently accepting public comment on gender affirming care for minors until September 26 2025.

Specifically, the language from their website states: "the Federal Trade Commission launched a public inquiry to better understand how consumers may have been exposed to false or unsupported claims about “gender-affirming care”, especially as it relates to minors, and to gauge the harms consumers may be experiencing. On July 9, 2025, the FTC hosted a workshop on unfair or deceptive trade practices in “gender-affirming care” for minors. The FTC heard testimony from doctors, medical ethicists, whistleblowers, detransitioners, and parents of detransitioners. That testimony indicated that practitioners of “gender-affirming care” may be actively deceiving consumers."

BASICALLY the FTC is trying to portray affirming healthcare as a scam which has been pushed on families, harming minors, who were not given enough information ahead of time of the consequences of the care. The framing of this is all very biased. But we can comment with positive stories of care to try and destroy this framework.

Advocates for Trans Equality created a really good webpage explaining this situation. They also created a template to help you write up a comment. If you scroll down to the bottom of their webpage, there's a link where you can submit comments to them, and they will resubmit your comments to the FTC anonymously. If you do not care about anonymity, you can also submit your comment to the FTC directly here. This document lists a bunch of questions the FTC is asking, and I've seen some folks online say your comment will be taken more seriously if you directly address these questions. However, heads up, these questions are pretty transphobic and if you never had a bad experience with a trans affirming healthcare your answer to basically all of them will just be "no that didn't happen" or "not applicable."

Here is the comment I wrote and submitted:

You know. The medication. That medication my joints and tendons would ERODE AWAY without.

And it turns out, I spent that decade in a constant state of crisis for no fucking reason other than fearmongering about how I would lose my entire sense of self, stop being able to make art or even read books, would be functionally lobotomized and unable to even understand how broken I'd become, etc etc.

Medication can be misused, especially in high control settings like psychiatric institutions. But if you're living under your own care, medication may be what lets you go from struggling to survive, to actually living a life.

It's worth trying.

Oh, sure, SSRIs either did nothing, or made me asleep and starved (Remeron). Benzos didn't even solve the overwhelming anxiety that led me to drop out of college three times.

HRT made me feel alive again for the first time in decades. It ended the depression and anxiety that were a constant presence, in a way that the traditional treatments didn't touch, because the usual causes weren't my underlying cause. Stripped away the dissociation I'd felt from my body since my first puberty began over twenty years earlier, so that I felt like myself again in a way that I had truly believed was lost to the mists of childhood. I am confident, happy, loved, and loving. I'm not searching for my missing home anymore, because I am at home in my own body again.

Yesterday was Transgender Day of Remembrance. There are many names we know and mourn, but there are many more that are never seen. Many names are missing because they could not be acknowledged as their true selves after, or before, their deaths.

The thing that's been bothering me is that the lists most groups will consult, these missing names include those lost to suicide. Known cases of trans people, often young people, are being left out of these lists. Their deaths are not considered part of "the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence".

Every trans suicide is a murder.

Its not a coincidence that minorities have higher rates of suicide. Its the way we are treated, our quality of life, that most influences these statistics. I have seen news of at least one case, a trans man in Alberta, who committed suicide explicitly because of the anti-trans policies his province was set to enact.

Ive seen dozens of articles. I've seen a trans masc's instagram, where the most recent comments are from their friends. On a post where they were celebrating starting hrt, the most recent comment is mourning their loss, that they didn't live to complete their first year on T. I've looked at their posts, I've read their words, I've seen their smile. And they're gone.

Their name was Bekett Noble. They deserve to be remembered.

There's dozens of people each year who share thier experiences and go unnamed. The young man in Alberta, for example, was not named publicly in the article where his death was mentioned. Due to a family connection, I know of at least one instance of a murder of a trans man in western Canada that I have not seen any news of publicly at all. His body was found with his genitals mutilated.

There's many half formed things I could say about these lists when it comes to trans men and mascs specifically but I don't feel my thoughts are solidified enough and it's not what I want to focus on here.

I believe trans suicides should be part of these Remembrance lists. Its a disservice to our community that they aren't.

If you can, please use the site below. They have a database going back decades with a well implemented filtering system.

These are the known deaths of trans people in Canada since last year's TDoR. Each name links to a page of information about them and links to where the information was sourced.

As for many things, these lists are a community effort. If you see that a death you know of is missing from the list, please contact them with whatever information you have. The second entry, whose name is still unknown, was added after I contacted them and provided the article in which I'd learned of his death. Since then, the folks running the site have done additional research and added what they could to his info page, including an extensive statement from his aunt, whom he was close to.

This past September, The Trevor Project published a report:

From 2018 to 2022, 48 anti-transgender laws were enacted in the U.S. across 19 different state governments. The study examined the causal relationship between these laws and suicide risk over this five-year time period, using national survey data collected from more than 61,000 transgender and nonbinary youth. Results concluded that, during this time period, anti-transgender laws significantly increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts among transgender and nonbinary youth by as much as 72%.

[...] Across the full sample of transgender and nonbinary young people ages 13-24, an increase in suicide attempt rates of 38% to 44% was observed.

- The Trevor Project

Every trans suicide is a murder.

There are a few states that actually have Shield/Refuge laws designed to help trans people fleeing from trans-unsafe states, which also guarantee trans folks access to healthcare. These states are:

California

Colorado

Illinois

Oregon

Vermont

Washington

Minnesota

New Mexico

Maine

Massachusetts

Rhode Island

Connecticut

Washington D.C.

Additionally, some states have "trans sanctuary" executive orders signifying safety for trans folks seeking healthcare. These states are:

Maryland

New Jersey

New York

Living as a resident in these states means you are protected by state's rights and state government to continue or begin receiving trans healthcare. These laws have been codified in their states so everything has been a-ok'd by their state governments.

See the chap with glasses and an incredible moustache in the bottom right? that's Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish doctor who ran the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in Berlin. It was largely his books, his research that the Nazis burned.

If that sounds familiar, it's because it is the EXACT same rhetoric being rolled out by prominent TERFs for the last few years including, yes, The Wizard Lady.

Awesome research from CU-Boulder! I think this dissertation was finished Spring 2012.

In the following audio clips, recorded by University of Colorado Boulder researcher Lal Zimman, two transgender men say the same sentence. Both speakers’ voices have a mean pitch of 140 hertz, which is typically considered to be part of the male-sounding vocal range. But the two speakers pronounce “s” sounds differently, affecting whether their voices are perceived as male or female by the listener. In the first audio clip, a speaker called “Joe” uses low-frequency “s” sounds, and in the second clip, “Kam” uses high-frequency “s” sounds. When the clips were played for a group of 10 listeners participating in Zimman’s study, the group unanimously perceived “Joe” to be male and “Kam” to be female.

“In the past, gender differences in the voice have been understood, primarily, as a biological difference,” Zimman said. “I really wanted to look at the potential for other factors, other than how testosterone lowers the voice, to affect how a person’s voice is perceived.”

As part of the process of transitioning from female to male, participants in Zimman’s study were treated with the hormone testosterone, which causes a number of physical changes including the lowering of a person’s voice. Zimman was interested in whether the style of a person’s speech had any impact on how low a voice needed to drop before it was perceived as male.

What he found was that a voice could have a higher pitch and still be perceived as male if the speaker pronounced “s” sounds in a lower frequency, which is achieved by moving the tongue farther away from the teeth.

“A high-frequency ‘s’ has long been stereotypically associated with women’s speech, as well as gay men’s speech, yet there is no biological correlate to this association,” said CU-Boulder linguistics and anthropology Associate Professor Kira Hall, who served as Zimman’s doctoral adviser. “The project illustrates the socio-biological complexity of pitch: the designation of a voice as more masculine or more feminine is importantly influenced by other ideologically charged speech traits that are socially, not biologically, driven.”