I Make Trash Wallpapers

letter from a mother of a gay man. sent to ONE magazine, 1958.

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How are we doing tonight tumblrinas

Gerard Way witnesses 9/11 and as a consequence, starts My Chemical Romance

Stephanie Meyer sees My Chemical Romance and becomes inspired to write Twilight

Somewhere in Rio de Janeiro, a man by the name of Felipe Neto is so outraged by the Twilight movies that he makes a hate video about them that goes so viral he becomes one of Brazil's biggest YouTubers

His brother Luccas Neto rides off his fame and becomes a children's YouTuber

Across the Atlantic, Portuguese children become obsessed with his videos. Like the lusophone Jake Paul

Portuguese children watch his videos so fucking much that they begin talking like they're from Rio

Portuguese parents are horrified by the Brazilian Portuguese but can't make it stop

I've literally seen perisex/dyadic lgbtq people say openly that they wish they were born intersex so they could be more androgynous (as if being born with an intersex variation automatically grants people idyllic androgyny). I've also seen these same people describe androgyny as "monstrous". People calling themselves monsterfuckers because they're attracted to androgyny. Calling themselves monsters because they're growing non-normative sex characteristics thanks to HRT, unsubtly implying that they view and have always viewed intersex bodies as monstrous.

Intersex women who don't shave their beards being called dwarves and gnomes despite repeatedly asking not to be called that. Intersex men with small penises or breasts being called slurs. People constantly defending the mocking of small penises or large clitorises, shaming intersex bodies. Supposed "allies" telling their intersex trans siblings that they "have it easy" for being born in a body that is highly stigmatized, scrutinized, and medicalized, just because they are jealous of certain attributes their intersex peers were born with. All while completely ignoring the fact that many intersex variations are also disabilities, and that intersex people are extremely likely to suffer from medical abuse from a young age. Dyadic trans people make post after post complaining about "cis kids getting HRT", when those "cis kids" are usually actually intersex children who are being forced to take hormones they might not even want by their parents and doctors for the sake of violent conformity.

The community by and large has a seeming inability to respect the actual lives, bodies, and humanity of intersex people as a whole. This is why it was an entire debate in the intersex community for a while whether or not dyadic people should really even call themselves androgynous at all, because the modern idea and definition of androgyny is based directly on the fetishized idea of the "perfect h*rm*phr*dite" - something that dyadic people are happy to ignore. Dyadic people calling themselves the sanitized version of a slur meant to demean, dehumanize, and mysticize intersex existence is understandably a sore spot for a lot of intersex people.

mind you, i was coming off of these meds because they were doing absolutely fucking nothing for me and she had fought me on stopping them every step of the way — in her mind, me starting t was the perfect chance to make one final (transphobic) push against my desire to stop putting completely pointless drugs in my body

she consistently referred to hrt as me “going on steroids” and told me with every ounce of condescending concern she could muster that she had never had a patient start t without being on antidepressants (as if i was supposed to see that fact as anything other than further proof that her main goal as a psychiatrist was just to make as much money as possible by pushing meds on people)

i tried to explain to her that countless trans people i’d talked to had said that being on t made them feel more emotionally stable, not less, and that i had already chosen a method of hrt that would minimize hormonal fluctuations as much as possible, but she wouldn’t believe me — there’s no question in my mind that she just saw me as a ~naive little girl who didn’t understand how testosterone could make my life hell~

and of course, my mom jumped on that idea and started telling me about how it’s not that she doesn’t like that i’m trans, it’s just that she’s ~so worried~ about what the ~big bad testosterone~ might to to my ~poor fragile mental health~

and when i started t, i was terrified that they would be proven right

now i’m 5 months on t (and a few months post-ending that doctor-patient relationship as well) and what do you know? my mood is better than ever! my therapist (who has known me far longer and actually cares about my well-being) says she’s never seen me this happy, and that she feels like i’m actually living for the first time! it’s been incredible!

in fact, i’ve come to the realization that i most likely had premenstrual dysphoric disorder before t, and that it was contributing to a huge percentage of my mental breakdowns and suicidal thoughts, so it seems there were hormones causing mood swings that i couldn’t handle without proper treatment after all, but testosterone isn’t the cause of those issues — turns out it’s the treatment i desperately needed to manage them!

and after some research and hearing from other people, i’ve learned that it wasn’t all anecdotal after all, because some studies have actually found evidence to support the idea that testosterone has antidepressant effects — i told my therapist that testosterone felt the way the antidepressants i had been on were supposed to feel, but i had no clue there was science to back that up

so now i’m just left being endlessly furious with the way testosterone is demonized as some horrible poisonous drug that will destroy your mental health along with everything else in your life, because being on it has improved my quality of life exponentially and that alone makes being on it SO worthwhile, but no one ever gets to see that side of being on t because they’re so busy drumming up fear about how it’ll wreck your moods instead

of course, that’s not to say some people don’t experience serious mood swings on t, because i would never deny someone else’s experience with their own body and mind, and i think it’s important that people know those effects are possible when they start t

what i AM saying is that i would guess that if you looked at pure numbers, more people have probably had a really positive experience like mine than a seriously negative one, and it’s very telling that the negative ones are portrayed as a universal part of being on t despite seemingly being a smaller percentage when you actually talk to lots of trans people, while the positive ones are portrayed as a fluke at best and impossible or even deceptive at worst despite being a really common theme in trans people’s accounts of being on t

testosterone is medicine. testosterone is healing.

Big coat = place to hide

Trans men struggle with toxic masculinity too. As a trans man who got told, “You’re not a real man, you’re emotional, you’re soft, you’re weak, and real men don’t describe things as ‘cute.’” It fucked me up and turned me into a Dean Winchester-esque man. And although I’m starting to heal, I still get moments where being the slightest bit “non-masculine” makes me extremely dysphoric.  this website seems to show a lot of love towards soft trans men, but I have yet to see a post that supports trans men who grew up believing that they had to be fucking Soldier Boy in order to be taken seriously by anyone. Not trans men who like being masculine. Trans men who had to be masculine.