estrogen will turn you into an anime girl. your imperfect fleshy body will melt away and be replaced with immaculate linework. your eyes will become the size of tennis balls. your hair will shine every colour of the rainbow. every time you move a poor overworked animator will only be paid 10 yen per frame.
no but seriously why have i seen no less than 5 posts saying some variation of "estrogen won't turn you into an anime girl, you'll look like your mom or like a regular lady on the bus"
like what are you talking about. No one on this earth thinks hrt will make them look like anime. so the question is what are you using "anime girl" as shorthand for?
Because (though perhaps this is just me) I can't help but read this as incredibly condescending and, vaguelly transphobic?
The only way I can read this that makes, any sort of sense, is "get more realistic standards."
"There is only so much HRT can do for you, do not expect to look pretty."
or even "trans women need a reality check because you're all probably shut-in weeaboos with beauty standards based entirely on chinese cartoons."
like if anyone want to explain what they *actually* mean by this then go ahead i'd love to hear it. if you wanna celebrate mundane beauty and how hrt will make you look like any other woman, there are ways of doing that that don't involve talking down to trans women.
Okay fine:
A common toxic coping strategy for dysphoria is to decimate your emotional skills to try and align with masculinity.
Likewise, there is a big overlap with autism and that produces difficulty communicating until its acknowledged and healthy coping strategies are learned.
Hi, I have AuADHD, I have a traumatic brain injury, a very fucked up childhood, and my attempt to be more masculine was to socially amputate myself and punish myself for introspection until the age of 23 because i had a very surface level "outside looking in" view of the human experience and it was an excuse to try and control my emotions which were very intense. My mom also has auADHD undiagnosed and I think she may have nearly drank herself to death trying to cope before I turned 12.
I'm not transphobic to my knowledge (yes, transpeople can also be transphobic, we are not excused from shittiness), I'm not misogynistic to my knowledge, and I read a lot of feminist literature to understand "what the deal is", I read lots of psychology, and I'm very very trans.
If you engage with the post on a metaphorical level of values and what "anime girl" is a signifier of and what it means to a lot of folks instead of interpreting it very literally and it will make sense.
The hyperbole is there for a reason and going argument ad absurdum over some percieved slight isn't going to help you understand it.
A lot of transfolk's emotional development stops when puberty kicks in and only resumes after transition starts. Some of us are emotionally delayed. Hi, I'M emotionally delayed. I am in therapy about it and trying my best.
Its not that they're anime specifically, but that anime distills a lot of socialized expectations of feminine appearance by being hypernormalized -- so to a lot of people, all of the socialized anatomical markers people who lack the social skills to recognize the social component or the confidence component or the presentation component are there in a very exaggerated and clearly displayed way.
A lot of people look at things like body work and voice-work and fashion and makeup and don't have the money to practice these things or the confidence to be comfortable enough with failure to practice these things.
"I want to be an anime girl" is wishing one could skip to the end without doing the learning or understanding or suffering.
The point of the post is to say "you need to reconsider what femininity is".
This is such a common phenomenon all over the world that there are long running stories about it that many transfems have found quite helpful actually, myself included?
Charon's sister dressed him up as a girl, and he liked it. This is her story, learning about who she is, and slowly realizing and becoming h
You might find it condescending.
I actually genuinely found it incredibly helpful.
Before you go to the keyboard and start angrily typing or trying to make a fight out of this:
IDK if its media literacy but there is this idea inside media literacy that recognizing the target audience of something is part of the skillset.
Maybe its not meant for you. It was definately meant for me.
That you didn't need the message doesn't mean some of us didn't need the message. Social stuff is confusing as hell and I'm not very well learned in it so I hold myself to absurd standards which are unattainable.
The point of it is to say "you won't look like the rediculous ideals you have, because they're rediculous but you will look like your mom who's clearly indisputably a woman despite also not meeting those ideals.
I SUPER needed to hear that.
I'd literally just done FFS and I was still obsessing over the negative.
I was so redicuously dissociated that hyperbole was one of the only things which could cut through and reach me.
After it, I reconnected with my mom, saw some photos of her when she was my age and I had a very, very, very long cry.
You didn't need that.
I absoloutely 10000% needed that.
I have spent my entire 20's and 30's getting over the need to flinch from every percieved slight against me with a fist.
Please just let me have this thing which has helped me, and don't be weird about it.
You do not understand what this post is about and I recommend you delete your post before someone meaner than me points it out.
Now that is infantalizing.
I might not have seen the discourse you've had about the posts in private on a corner of tumblr about the posts, but I have seen the posts and I have seen many of them.
Could you point me toward a post or thread that qualifies what you're saying or make one so we're on the same page?
I'd like to know what you know that I don't know.
Being mean doesn't get anybody anywhere.
okay but like how is viewing yourself as anime girl being considered âaligning yourself with masculinityâ. also like you wouldnât bash cis women who compare themselves to anime girls, a thing iâve seen happen a lot. why are trans women immediately silenced for even thinking to invoke the idea they be cute anime girls. yes having too high beauty standards is an issue but itâs an issue we all deal with due to how our society was built and issue a lot of people struggle with, but when youâre in a healthy mental state over your a little hyperbole or exaggeration in how you want to celebrate your gender it valid asf. like stop policing how people want to view themselves, itâs just fucked up
















