The Self-Diagnosed Transsexual

There's something to be said here about "dogwhistles", which are innocuous phrases that have a hidden, sinister meaning. These phrases are designed to seem safe and even positive, and are widely spread by people who 1) generally don't realize their negative implications and 2) are not the community targeted by these phrases.

A common example here would be something like "men do not respect women's spaces", which many spectators would assume means "cis and trans men do not respect women's desire to be apart from them", but TERFS use to mean "trans women don't belong in women's spaces, and their desire to be on equal ground with cis women is male entitlement".

Here's another phrase which is received in vastly different ways depending on your own views:

"You need dysphoria to be trans"

Now, I've spoken with several self-described truscum who swear up and down that this means "you have to identify contrary to your birth assignment to be trans"

But the people this is aimed at are trans people at the margins. Poor trans people, fat trans people, closeted trans people, teenage trans people, and gender-nonconforming trans people. The people who aren't able to pass, can't afford to transition, or don't care to.

Solidarity is the foundation of community-building

For some of y'all, your compassion for other people begins and ends at the limits of your own experiences. You don't have to fully understand their experience to respect and support other people!

And, listen. Exclusion does not actually improve things for a community. That's just the lie the oppressors tell you. Of course they'll say "I'd love to give you rights, but those extremists on your side are just too much!" No matter how many people you kick out, there will always be someone who is the "most extreme". If you kick out enough people, it will be you.

You know what gets shit done? What gets an actual improvement in resources and conditions? Solidarity and collective action.

When I was in college, there were at lot of buildings that were decades old. The math building had to be retrofitted to even have women's restrooms, let alone disability access or gender neutral accomodations.

And we'd have never changed things if it was just the trans students saying "we need to more gender neutral restrooms".

Instead, we got the whole LGBTQ+ office involved. We got the Disability Services office to buy in. We talked to students and staff who were parents of small children, and we talked to the Muslim student association.

A rising tide lifts all ships. Greater accessibility helps everyone. Single stall restrooms might not be your first though when you think about public accommodations, but everyone needs to pee. If you can't pee in a public place, you are being pushed out of it. You must limit the time you spend there, or risk your own health.

We did get the school to commit to renovations to increase the number of single stall gender neutral bathrooms, by the way. And we didn't require proof of trans status or disability to use them.

Don't let yourself blame the people you are competing against for an resource's scarcity. The blame lies with the people who produce and control access to that resource.

like even if bisexuality didn’t have a long history of including attraction to all (which it does) why tf wouldn’t bisexual people today be able to claim that definition? even if he/him women, and esp he/him lesbians didn’t have a long history (which again, they do) why the fuck would it matter? Women would still be able to use he/him now if they want because it’s their fucking choice. Even if nonbinary lesbians didn’t always exist, which they did, they would still have a righ to exist now. Even if nonbinary people in general have never existed before today, which they have, it wouldn’t suddenly invalidate current nonbinary people’s genders. Even if butch trans women didn’t exist forever, they would still be here now.

Whether or not people in the past have approved of your existence now, you still have a right to exist. The idea that history has to dictate the way the current lgbt community functions is stupid lmao. Like the whole point is to have progress and to improve as society changes, not stay in the same cycles over and over again.

And it’s especially stupid when this leads to you guys putting historical writings and activists on a pedestal. None of the past activists were absolutely perfect and there’s a lot of issues with historical lgbt movements that need to be evaluated with a modern lens.

“Gay” is used as an insult. It is used to be demeaning. Its used to discriminate. And yet its used as the all mighty umbrella - gay rights, gay marriage, gay community - when discussing the entire community.

Gay gets used as a slur. Queer gets used as a slur. But I don’t walk up to gay people and say “your identity is a slur, you know that right” or get pissed when they say “the gay community” when they mean the whole community.

Personal identity and preference in terms, even harmful words that get used as slurs, are not questioned; except for the word Queer.

Queer gets shut down. Queer people get others in their faces saying “your identity is a slur!” Queer people don’t have the freedom to identify in a community, but are forced under other terms against their will due to hypocrisy and double standards.

It was meant to denote sexually perverse people, most frequently sex workers and those who hired them. Anyone who participated in anything but married, vanilla, straight sex might have been referred to as “gay,” including any suspected LGBT person.

The word (already being one frequently used on the community,) was reclaimed as a community identifier when the community wanted to disconnect from the clinical and diagnostic implications of “homosexual.”

There is record of queer being reclaimed and used as a personal identifier literally before the popularization of gay. Both words are reclaimed slurs with negative histories, and BOTH are used as slurs against the community still to this day.

Also, queer is reclaimed in a particularly empowering way. It doesn’t just mean “same-sex attraction” but encompasses a whole spectrum of attractions and gender orientations. It’s a word that says to asexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, trans folks, genderfluid and genderqueer and genderless folks and people who are still figuring themselves out, “hey, you’ve got a home here. We don’t need to categorize you to love you.” 

This is important because there are a lot of divisions within the LGBTQ+ world, and in particular cis gay men and cis lesbians often overlook or exclude trans, bi and asexual people. Queer is the only word that not only demands equal acceptance for everyone, but leaves the door open for words and descriptors that haven’t even been invented yet. 

Lmao yeah! the pushback against this idea is overt and disgusting and I don’t trust anybody who perpetuates it. 

Queer is full of the types of people who don’t make good poster children for the middle class assimilationist cis gay couple just looking to get married and have some kids. Queer forces us to realize the fight didn’t end with gay marriage, and cis gays are gonna have to step out of the spotlight sometimes, and realize cis gays have privilege, and fight for someone with less. Trans people, nonbinary people, people in nontraditional relationship structures, aromantics, asexuals, sex workers. Heck more and more bisexual people these days are switching over to queer because the amount of biphobia in the so-called lgBt community is so alienating, and also because so many of us feel the term bisexual reinforces a false gender dichotomy and we’re too tired of jokes about kitchenware to use pansexual.

Sometimes happily transitioned people and people who detransition feel threatened by one another, and we may even express concern or hostility toward one another. The ONLY reason this happens is because YOU (i.e., the cisnormative majority) KEEP PITTING US AGAINST ONE ANOTHER. If you all weren't so dead-set on compelling us to fit into your perfect little gender-conforming world, we wouldn't have to justify our identities to you. We could explore our genders without constantly facing transphobic social pressure, or pressure to adhere to in-community ideals (which arise almost entirely in response to systemic transphobia). If it wasn't for YOUR strict adherence to cisnormativity, it wouldn't matter so much if we appear somewhat gender-non-conforming because we took our sweet time before deciding to transition, or if we ultimately decided to detransition because it wasn't quite working out for us.

trans women are regular women & should be an integral part of every women's community.

gender dysphoria is a varying and deeply personal experience (I say as a cis woman with butch dysphoria) and can exist independently of medical transition.

nonbinary people don't have to be "man/woman-aligned" (though many are). they're not binary, it says so right there.

define your gender or sexuality however makes you comfortable. all labels were made up by somebody. you have the right to have yours respected.

queer is a useful label & important to a lot of people.

aromantic & asexual people's sexuality is normal and they belong in lgbtq+ spaces.

bi/pan/m-spec women belong in wlw spaces.

whoever else it's popular to invalidate and hate these days in the name of community purism? they're my friends now. hurt them and you fight me.

Source

Want more info? Here ya go: 

This Biology Teacher Disproved Transphobia With Science 

ALSO:

Sex redefined

“The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that.”

Genderqueer identity and culture existed well before this hellsite did and will continue to exist long after tumblr has gone down in flames.

Hoo, boy. Apologies in advance, but this is gonna have a long answer.

The thing about “biological sex” is, it’s a complicated science with a lot of nuance involved, and people who don’t actually know anything about it love to use it to mean “penis is boy, vagina is girl”.

Which, on the surface, makes sense to a lot of people. Its what we’re taught our whole lives, and it’s difficult to listen to any argument that contradicts our worldview. It’s scary and confusing, and people automatically resist scary and confusing things.

The thing you need to know, though, is that what we call “Biological Sex” can actually depend on a range of factors: 

First off, primary sex characteristics: the bits directly involved in reproduction, what most people consider the defining indicator of gender.

Primary sex characteristics include the penis and testes, which are predominantly associated with men, and the vagina and uterus, associated with women.

This seems fairly simple on the surface, scientifically speaking, but bodies aren’t that simple. People can and are born with combinations of these things and live long, happy, healthy lives with few or no medical complaints. Many don’t even know they have undescended testes or ovaries at all, and only find out accidentally through unrelated procedures. Is a mother of three who’s known herself to be a woman her whole life suddenly a man because she has ‘male’ sex characteristics? No? Then why should any other woman?

Someone who is still new to this might be experiencing a cognitive dissonance right now, trying to reconcile “penis is boy, vagina is girl” with “people can have both (or neither)”, and they may try to do this by saying, “Well, this could be caused by mutations or deformities, so intersex people (people with mixed characteristics) are outliers, not to be included with “valid” genders.“

Which brings us to the next factor: hormones.

Testosterone is Boy, Estrogen is Girl. That’s what people know, so they don’t want to accept any different. Different is confusing, confusing is scary, scary is bad.

But, like primary sex characteristics, these things can fly in the face of common understanding.

A woman, for example, who considers herself cisgender, who has breasts and a vagina and a uterus and all that, might have high testosterone. Because people have both! And because testosterone can give people body hair, among other things, this woman has chest hair and a beard. She LOOKS a lot like what we think of as "male”, so do we tell her she’s wrong about her gender? 

On the flip side, plenty of cis men with a penis and testes can have high estrogen for any number of reasons, and can develop breasts- does that mean they’re women, now? 

Of course not. We have to listen to them to tell us what their pronouns are, what their gender is, and how is that any different from someone who’s trans? It would be incredibly ride to tell anyone that “oh, you SAY you’re a man, but you look like a woman to me, so I’m going to ignore everything you tell me and call you a woman until you can prove to my satisfaction otherwise.”

So if primary sex characteristics aren’t the final word on gender, and secondary characteristics aren’t either, then what’s left? DNA, right? Genetics don’t lie, everyone knows that.

So, chromosomes, then. The barest evidence of human biological sex. XX means “female”, XY means “male”, forget all that mess about vaginas, breasts, and testes. Our chromosomes are the holy gospel of gender.

Except, again, nature isn’t that simple.

Picture in your head a cisgender woman. She hits everything on our personal little checklist: breasts, vagina, uterus, minimal body hair, small jawline, high voice, everything. But she has XY chromosomes. 

Because, surprise! That happens! And it happens more often than you think! People can and do go their entire lives not knowing it! Because it isn’t important to how we view our gender. We don’t care. 

If you went to a lab today, got tested, and found that you had the “wrong” chromosomes- would you suddenly be fine with Becoming A Different Gender? Being treated like you’re a different gender? Having to dress different, talk different, redefine your sexuality, because your DNA says you’re wrong about your identity? How would that feel? Probably pretty shitty, huh? 

So, when we get down to it, what is the one true indicator of gender? We can’t trust genitalia, because it presents on any number of variations and combinations. Secondary sex characteristics are out too, because hormones do whatever they want without rhyme or reason. Chromosomes do whatever the hell they want, fuck them, they’re useless.

If we are to open our minds to what the science is telling us, then, what is it saying?

If we are to put our faith in “Biological Sex”, then what does is dictate to be the truth?

That physical sex isn’t just “boy or girl”, it exists on a spectrum. It’s not “pink or blue”, it’s magenta, mauve, violet, lilac, periwinkle, cyan, cobalt, or vermilion, and our idea of “boy or girl” is almost entirely a construct of our imaginations, of the society we live in. It’s an illusion that dictates how we experience our lives, how we’re treated, what makes us happy and comfortable or how we feel at ease.

Biological sex cannot dictate gender because they’re different concepts with different rules grounded in separate realities, and no amount of pointless fussing can force them to cooperate. 

Sex is one spectrum, gender is another, and they don’t know each other.

You can accept what the science says, or you can find excuses to justify the beliefs you’re comfortable with. It really doesn’t matter.