Transfeminine Rat

It has some genuinely fascinating stuff to say about gender, and I feel like it's worth looking at/thinking about in the context of Historical Gender Stuff. This 100 year old book has the following to say:

"The truth is that some young gentlemen would rather they had been born young ladies: they cannot admit this openly, because in the male world to confess as much would lead to instant ostracism if not worse; but they cannot conceal it either, and by preferring the company of girls, and soft, feminine clothing, and by flinching during the rough pursuits to which all boys, willing or no, are occasionally heirs, they attract opprobrium."

"Such boys weep too readily for their fellows' tastes - weeping is a great crime among boys unless it is generally admitted that circumstances left little choice - and are hounded for that reason."

"Just as there are girls who had rather been boys - we all know examples of the type - there are boys who, in a kinder world, would have been born into the gender more suited to their dispositions."

"Many young people of this sort are riven with a guilt they do not deserve but have been forced, by the conventions of society, to adopt; they are confused, ashamed and thoroughly unhappy."

"The ideal thing to do would be to treat these cases on their merits, send them to girls' schools, and so on. (The same thing should happen with those girls who would rather be young gentlemen.) Boys of this sort are girls in any case-in all respects save one."

you may be asking "does kitty cat or does cat kitty"

Baby I’m so sorry but a LOT of white people had periods of time as kids or even early adults where they regularly regurgitated slurs and direct racism and performed cruelty on racialized people. It can legitimately anywhere from “saying slurs on COD at 12” to “putting various unsanitary and hard to remove things into Black classmates hair” to “excluded racialized kids around them because they were yucky/etc.” to “assaulting racialized people around them” to “spent time on /b/ and gained standard 4chan racism brainworms”

You also straight-up can’t guess what it’ll be until they mention it or it jumps out. As an example, back in montana there was a white woman in my local kink community who was generally SO fucking sweet, kind, and caring to everyone around her, including me. One day she posted this on Facebook out of literal nowhere:

And doubled down after I called her on it.

Please understand that “hasn’t deconstructed racist social beliefs” means “can and will use racism when useful or they think they’re safe to, or will engage in white solidarity”

If they haven’t actually put in the work to destroy the white supremacy they’ve been internalizing from society their whole life, this can be basically any white person, at any time, no matter how they’ve behaved previously and how much you think they’d never do something like that.

Being fully honest, over the past few years I’ve met multiple white queers who were literally born and raised in full-on white supremacist cults and only escaped as adults, and every single one of them was leagues more tolerable than the average white queer because they KNEW their shit was fucked to hell and they were quick to self-question, address, and apologize when something they didn’t know was false/racist/supremacist came up and they actively wanted to do/be better.

Meanwhile average white queers just don’t want to be cancelled and often don’t actually give a fuck whether they’re harming racialized people around them or whether they’re doing the work of picking the white supremacy brainworms out. Getting an apology, reparation, or basic fixes is like pulling fucking teeth with them.

Gender dysphoria operates very differently from distress over ones sexual orientation. Distress over sexual orientation does not cause someone to be gay, instead it is caused by someone being gay along with an opressive society. By contrast, distress about ones secondary sexual characteristics absolutely can cause someone to be trans. In fact, for many trans people, changing their secondary sexual characteristics is one of the major goals of their transition.

Extreme distress over ones secondary sexual characteristics is an illness, and it is one that occurs in the mind. The treatments for it include surgery and HRT. Of course not all trans people have this illness, and it should not be used to gatekeep access to things like HRT and surgery. But, it would be fucking ludicrous to deny its existence altogether because it has been (ands still is being) used to harm people in the past.

Another distinct difference is that gender dysphoria is not often caused by the social environment one exists in. I could live in the most accepting place on earth and I'd still feel distressed about and want to get rid of my penis.