i dont think tme people get, or ever will get, how deeply affecting the experience of transmisogyny is. will elaborate later.
okay I drank more coffee and I'm ready to get into this.
so transmisogyny is the intersection of transphobia and misogyny, which should be obvious but some people don't like to listen. its another layer of oppression past the transphobia that transmascs have. every transfemme I've talked to and befriended has had some experience with feeling predatory for having feelings for someone (generally affects trans wlw more) or infantilized themselves and acted very gentle and passive in order to not feel as though they're predatory. (I'm still working through the first one and used to deal with the latter)
we're taught to be afraid of our own bodies, especially our genitals. it's as if we're monsters for being women born with penises, as if that in itself makes us gross. there's a reason that all the transphobic bathroom arguments come down to a "man dressed as a woman" preying on women. this goes a million times as far for black trans women, who have the added intersection of blackness. that paints them as even more masculine and aggressive despite how far that is from the truth.
I developed my eating disorder because i felt like my body was too big and masculine, that i would look more feminine if i were skinnier. thats obviously something cis women face, but its not the same for us. we're told we have male bodies and that we need to make ourselves smaller to fit in with "real women".
we're excluded from women's spaces for "not having the same experiences" or "invading" or whatever other transphobic reterric they want to use to allow trans men in but not us. we're alienated from trans/LGBT spaces due to the heavy focus on transmasc and tme nonbinary people in discussions of transitioning. for every 20 resources on how to bind and its dangers i get on my dash, I see 1 or 2 on tucking and its dangers. for every 20 binder giveaways i see I've never seen a gaff giveaway. I bet some of you don't even know what a gaff is. (its what we use to tuck)
the amount of times I've seen jokes about men in dresses, the amount of times i've heard words like femboy and tranny thrown around by tme people as if they're not harming us by doing so sickens me. every time you make genderbent fan art, draw a guy looking embarassed in a dress, or make a femboy friday joke, you are contributing to the stigma that follows us wherever we go.
I'm probably gonna lose followers for this and get told in the notes "I would reblog this but your tone is so aggressive :/" but I DON'T CARE. WE USED OUR POLITE VOICES AND YOU DIDN'T LISTEN. BLACK TRANS WOMEN BUILT THIS COMMUNITY AND NOW THEY'RE DYING ON THE FUCKING STREETS. WE AS A GROUP, ARE BEING TURNED AWAY FROM HOMELESS SHELTERS AND BEING JOKED ABOUT ON THIS AWFUL WEBSITE. IT'S OUR BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS.
Not to mention the fact that people barely understand anything about our transitions. I almost never see any kind of informative posts about what to expect from hormones/surgery/etc., and even the doctors that prescribe my meds hardly seem to know anything about them. The six page long informed consent document I had to sign to get my hormones listed like a hundred possible effects, all of which came with a “this may or may not happen we’re just kinda guessing” disclaimer, and I’ve STILL found TONS of things that no one EVER told me while they were busy stressing over and over that I’d probably be sterile after a while.
Did you know it’s not uncommon to lose a shoe size or two? Or to shrink a couple inches because your entire pelvis rotates after a while (which hurts like a motherfucker, I might add)? Or that it’s very possible that you’ll suffer some of the symptoms of PMS every month even though you can’t menstruate? Did you know your tastes in food might change because your sense of smell changes? Probably not, because barely anybody researches or published information on this stuff. And who even fucking knows what you can expect after surgery because hearsay reports vary wildly and there’s basically nothing out there.
It gets so much harder to stay healthy when it’s so hard to find information on how our bodies function.
reblog this version actually
I reblogged this post but now I'm reblogging it again to add something. HRT is so unstudied and ignored that every time I've had a doctor that isn't specifically studying HRT, gender, and anything to do with the endocrine system, I've had to be their teacher. They don't know what the acceptable hormone levels are, they don't know what changes a person can go through, they don't know the dosage or even what might change after prolonged HRT. Most doctors are uncomfortable treating Trans people but especially trans women. And it shows when you have to find a new doctor. Nearly every time I've ended up with a doctor that is un informed and un prepared to help a person like me and it shows when they look at my lab results and say, "is this normal?" What should I be looking for.
Thank fucking God I pay attention to my charts and results l, because I can answer that to some capacity. But definitely shouldn't have to be the one teaching my doctors about this shit.
