i think if weāre going to have conversations about consent we should talk about how consenting to something doesnāt necessarily mean itās going to be a good experience, and having a bad experience doesnāt necessarily mean someone violated your consent. this can apply to a lot of situations but the two iām thinking of right now are sex and transition.
youāre getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didnāt enjoy and in the moment you just didnāt say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesnāt inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.
and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasnāt right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they donāt like the changes and wish they hadnāt transitioned. that doesnāt mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesnāt mean that transition shouldnāt be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.
regret does not automatically mean someone did something wrong. regret is simply one possible result of having bodily autonomy, and i think we need to get more comfortable with that.
jacobvanloon
2087
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
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