FTM ANGEL

“what if you start balding!” there are so many hot balding/bald people. why would I care. 

“you’ll get acne” yeah and? I currently deal with acne, and I don’t think that acne makes a person gross. 

“your voice will change!” yup I’m depending on that

“what about your fertility?” my fertility is my business, not yours.

Yeah well you didn't need to put trans men down to get your point across.

Like ugly in what way? How would you describe ugly? Is it 'anything other than the Eurocentric/white beauty standard".

Also notice how they sexualize our bodies? Always drawing the "cis woman faker " (not a fucking thing) as someone with revealing clothing, and a huge chest like embracing your femininity or sexuality as a transmasc is a bad thing to do.

What they want transmascs to be is this ↓

God forbid they look like this

(Picture of me fyi)

Or this

Or this

Or this

Or this

hiya! I figured id make an informational post about the little things ive noticed about being on testosterone that I found weren’t talked about a lot when I was starting my transition and even before when I was doing my research. I think that trans sexual health is an extremely important part of trans peoples lives (and that doesnt necessarily mean sex) seeing as the physical changes that happen during transition are often foreign to us. Sexual health keeps us healthy and comfortable in our bodies, so do your best to stay attentive to your body’s changes! As always, consult your doctor if you feel the need to. These are only tips ive learned from transitioning myself and from my doctor when I asked about certain things.

Lo and behold, as a direct result of that sentiment: men barging into a women’s restroom and harassing a woman.

Rain (any pronouns) is a genderfluid model & posts a lot about how their ability to “pass” as either a man or a woman influences them, and shows off the absurdity of double standards such as mens vs womens olympic uniforms and societal treatment based on perceived gender

One of the interestingly complex issues around families is that a lot of teenagers, due to rapid brain development during puberty, have a very hard time “taking the emotional temperature” of the people around them. Even without trans issues in the mix, it takes a lot of work for teens to hear through the static that their brains are throwing up, and it takes a lot of work for parents to not take it personally when their teens are not able to modulate their emotional responses to unclear data. 

This is one of the reasons why I think it’s super, super helpful when parents can jump on board and get educated before puberty, because it’s a lot easier when you’ve got an extremely thoughtful 4 year old or six year old explaining their gender and a doctor explaining what it means, at a time when the parent is in “learning” mode instead of in “react mode.

Unfortunately bodies and brains don’t always cooperate, because there’s yeah, the “I always knew” kids who came out at age 2, but there’s also a large chunk of kids who don’t figure things out until puberty strikes, and another whack of people who figure it out during or after puberty, and that’s when things get particularly hairy.

See, MOST parents, in theory, want “what is best” for their kids. But how they shape that image of “what is best” depends hugely on their own background, how they were parented, and the social expectations surrounding them. Small town religious families often have a hard time bending, for example, where there are many specific social expectations in the culture (you will go to church, you will marry within the faith or “adjacent”, you will get this kind of job, having a girl means this, having a boy means that.) But so do families in a lot of other places. The same force that makes a parent unhappy when their child doesn’t decide to be a doctor or doesn’t go to their alma mater, all of that… that stuff tends to be generational and difficult to change. 

HOWEVER… There’s this incredibly potent argument to be had around mental health and suicide, that makes most parents, even with those complicated social expectations, sit up and reassess.  And that’s what you see up there. It’s not phrased, “If you don’t do this your kid will die”… it’s phrased, “I know you want what’s best for your kid, and you wouldn’t be asking questions if you weren’t a good parent, and let me give you another angle to look at this from.” (And then the science is presented.)

It doesn’t always work. 

But it works often enough to be worth the effort.  And it almost always needs to come from an outside person.  Because asking a kid who is struggling through dysphoria and fear of parental alienation to coddle their parent through this is often too much when that kid is ALSO going through puberty and unsure whether their parents are truly assholes who care more about their own expectations than they do the person their child actually is or just misguided. 

I’ve seen so many parents make the leap, with varying levels of grace.  But I’ve also seen so many kids whose parents failed to make the leap, or worse, didn’t even try.  If your parents didn’t make this leap, I want you to know that it isn’t because you did anything wrong or failed to make the correct attempt. In most cases, it’s a failing of family culture, and has roots farther back than you could possibly have influenced. 

But if you’re a teen, and having a hard time figuring out whether your parent is really evil or just inept, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE reach out, when you can, to an adult who does already understand the issues, and specifically someone who is working for a hotline or is already a parent of a trans kid who is supportive.  I know parents around the country who would literally open their homes to kids and young adults in a heartbeat if necessary, to give them a soft space to land from parental rejection. I know multiple parents in the town I’m in. 

They handled the subject of gender identity so well, but too bad for the reaction of the mother at the end of the episode.

my mom is friends with this trans woman, who was really sweet and she was super cool, but then i tried to come out after my mom expressed how much she liked her trans friend and how amazing she is. i told my mom about my crippling chest dysphoria and how much i’d love to be called by he/him pronouns and my preferred name. i told her about how i’ve always felt this way and i’ve known since eighth grade.

well the thing is, her friend is a transmed.

my mom is an uninformed person on trans issues, because she didn’t really care about them until recently. she took resources from her transmed friend and it ruined my life. she went off about how i’m not really trans because i didn’t come out sooner, i have piercings, my hair is always a crazy color, i still like girly things, and my glasses are weird. she kept yelling about how i didn’t have dysphoria before, so i obviously have the wrong definition. she told me if i was trans it would’ve been diagnosed by my therapist already, and it was just a cult bandwagon phase. i was locked away from the outside world for a month.

when my next year of high school rolled around, i was out as trans. my partner provided me with a binder and all was well. i came out to all my peers at the beginning and about halfway through the school year to my teachers. it was quiet, under the table. i told them my mom didn’t know and under our school guidelines, they were not allowed to tell my mom that sort of thing. well, one of my teachers ended up being lgbtphobic and i didn’t know, and announced to the class that she didn’t “agree with the lifestyle” and that “gay marriage isn’t what god wanted.” my mom got an email that day about me being out as trans at school. i wonder who could’ve sent it?

my mom blew up. she was sending me treat after threat because i was a trender, all i did was lie for attention, that i chose to be trans because it was trendy and that real trans people wouldn’t flaunt their transness. of course, she got these resources from her transmed friend. she pulled me out of public school and cut my contact with the outside world for three whole months. i didn’t get back into school until february.

We got super gatekeepy and “you must be THIS GAY to ride this identity” and we complained at length about it being “trendy” and how girls only did it to be “cool” and to get attention.

And so among other things I know one person I love is, for example, only JUST getting to have her FIRST relationship ever with a woman at slightly older than me because this shit got into her head and she didn’t think she was “allowed”.

So watching people turn the same bullshit on even more vulnerable kids?

A longtime friend of mine posted, for National Coming Out Day, about being an ally and wanting to make the world safe for all of us.

Somewhere in there, there was some stuff about never really having identified as a woman, and never having really identified with any gender, but being okay with people making that assumption because she wasn’t going to do anything about it…

And another friend of hers jumped in to be like, “same! It literally has nothing to do with who I am, being an engineer has way more to do with who I am than this gender thing…..”

I don’t know the friend, but I know (thank goodness) that MY friend is aware of being autistic.

So I jumped in to be like, “hey. Not having a gender is a thing. Not having a gender is a super common thing, when you’re autistic, because gender is all about socialization and presentation and all that other stuff we don’t really process or do unless we have to. Some people call that autigender. Not having a gender is just as nonbinary as anything else out there. Take it from me, a very autistic, very trans person with no particular gender.” (Thank goodness for @candidlyautistic ’s post explaining it.)

And my friend messaged me today. To tell me, “It kind of blows my mind that nonbinary could be accepted as a way of being trans. I am definitely nonbinary, but always figured it would be ‘appropriating’ for me to cast that as a trans experience in my case.”

She’s like… I don’t know exactly how old, but around 40.

I’m pissed off. I’m pissed off at every fucking demon who has kept people from being able to explore who they are. Because somehow, what they are isn’t good enough to explore, and they’re somehow a bad person for exploring it from a different starting point than the demon did.

As an agender person, I find cis people’s immense attachment to the gender identity of their children frankly disturbing. 

Necessary background information: I have fallen into a YouTube trap of some sort of TedTalk video list of Parents With Trans Kids Talking About Their Feelings (which I personally don’t recommend, but here we are.)

Over and over and over again I hear these parents speaking of their trans kids in the narrative of “losing” their ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ because their child has come out as trans. They start CRYING. They legit BAWL on stage because they conceptualize their entire damn CHILD in this ONE parameter of this ONE gender - SO MUCH SO THAT THAT CHILD DECIDING TO LIVE THEIR LIFE PRESENTING IN A DIFFERENT WAY IS EQUATED TO THEM LITERALLY ‘LOSING’ THEIR WHOLE DAMN KID.

Like. Is that not…. mind-blowing? Is that not really fuckin’ weird? Your kid is RIGHT THERE. THEY’RE NOT DEAD. THEY ARE. LITERALLY. RIGHT THERE. 

This probably also has to do with ownership of children, and perceived control of their child and how they feel they have agency in the child’s relationship with their identity. But these same adults who laugh about how THEIR parents cried over them getting tattoos or piercings (changing their body permanently, etc) then turn around and pull this whole “MY BABY IS GONE” biz. 

It’s disrespectful to your child AT BEST. You are conflating their gender to their entire fucking identity as a human person with interests and talents and quirks. The fact that this is enough for you to think of your child as ‘gone’ says a whole ton about what you valued about them as a person. 

But you are not losing a son, you are gaining a daughter.

You are not losing a daughter…

they know how to argue people in. they were argued in. they know about nontransfemnine people’s latent transmisogyny and they know that we are not as vigilant as we should be. they make popular posts.

they are undercover. they pretend to be allies. there are nonbinary TWERFs and TWERFs that are WOC. keep reading. these people have been coerced in and know how to coerce others in. there are many different ways, and there are many different things to look out for.

when i say don’t argue with TWERFs, when i say ignore them and don’t give them a platform in the first place, it’s not a giving up tactic. it’s because TWERFs know that if they can point out one tiny flaw in your logic, or spout some bullshit that some nontransfeminine person has thought about before, they’ve hooked someone.

TWERFs count on preying on the young and impressionable, the people that don’t know or talk to transfeminine people. this has to be pointed out. the only reason i know this is because i am not transfeminine and i have seen many of my peers, not transfeminine, fall to them.

stop arguing that they’re stupid. don’t let your guard down.