#actually trans

It's me I'm both these people--

Edit:

Donate to the ACLU, who are fighting for gender affirming care in the federal prison system.

Or

Donate to the Transgender Law Center, a trans led legal advocacy group who work to end the criminalization of trans existence

Or

Donate to The Okra Project, a black trans mutual aid collective. Currently only their therapy fund is accepting applications, but the org still needs $$$

Or

Donate to the Black Trans Advocacy Coalition to support their efforts towards community education, poverty alleviation, policy work, and even direct services.

Or

Donate to Point of Pride, which operates multiple aid funds for gender affirming procedures and items.

Or

Donate to the Black Trans Travel Fund, which provides funding and other forms of support for black trans women seeking safe travel options.

Or

Stay OFF of subreddits like r/transpassing and r/transmanlifehacks. Any of those places on the internet where people post photos of themselves and ask if they pass or not. I assure you that nothing good can come from it. It's a direct gateway to an addictive spiral of self loathing and internalized transphobia that is not easy to kick.

The first advice they'll give you is to go on T. Can't go on T because of legislation, or transphobic family, or health reasons, or price? Sorry, you'll probably just never pass. The next advice they'll give you is to cut your hair. Even if it's already short, make it shorter. If it's brightly coloured, dye it back to its original colour. Take your piercings out. Are you a part of a subculture? Goth, punk, furry? Do you like interesting fashion, accessories or jewelry of any kind? Stop it. That shirt reads as femme to me, try something less colourful. Get new glasses, those ones are too feminine. Smile less. Don't pose like that. If you want to pass, trim away your individuality and your joy and anything that could possibly make you stand apart from conventional masculinity.

And if you object to any of this, if you go "actually I like my piercings and I paid a lot for them, there's no way I'm taking them out," then in response they go "hey, you asked how to pass better. If you don't want to take my advice, that's fine, but the truth hurts." There's often an unspoken insinuation that this makes them more of a man than you are.

Toxic masculinity is alive and well in transmasculine spaces. I haven't seen it as much on Tumblr, but Reddit is absolutely teeming with it. This is the same kind of rhetoric that cis men have been feeding each other for centuries - don't self-express, don't cry in public, keep your emotions to yourself, constantly self-monitor so nothing you say or do could be perceived as feminine. If you do all that, then you'll be accepted in men's spaces, then you'll be worthy of calling yourself a man. It's no more true for us than it is for them.

I often still find myself thinking thoughts like "wait, am I sitting in a feminine way right now?" Or "a real man wouldn't cry so much". Stuff that, if I heard a cis man say about himself, I would perceive as obviously ridiculous. You have to ignore that voice, or you will never be happy in your own skin, even if you're completely unclockable.

This isn't to say that dysphoria isn't real (it is) or that wanting to pass is bad (it's not). But try to do your best to untangle that dysphoria from the toxic expectations of gender performance that come with it.

Trans Pride is a term that is easy to say but sometimes hard to feel. We talk a lot on Tumblr about validating and respecting the gender identities of others, as we should, but I rarely see people talk about how hard it can be to fight off the shame that can come with being trans. Internalized transphobia is an insidious beast, and if you're not careful it will eat you up from the inside.

There are days where I deeply deeply wish I wasn't trans, that I had been born in a cis male body and didn't have to deal with any of this shit. If I could snap my fingers right now and become a cis man, I would. But I can't. I am trans, and I'm never going to stop being trans, so I'm making a conscious decision to try my best to be proud of that fact. Even when it's hard.

Anyways. Trans men and boys and male-aligned people out there, you do not need to give up who you are to transition. Stay safe I love you.

I’m a 21 year old trans man. I’ve known who I am since I was 7. I learned the language to describe it when I was 12. I’ve been openly trans since I was 13. I have diagnosed gender dysphoria the kind that wrecks your brain and your body, the kind that makes living in the wrong skin unbearable, and the kind that’s been at the core of what being transgender actually means for decades.

And let’s be clear about something: gender dysphoria is not new. It didn’t just appear out of nowhere in 2013. Gender dysphoria was first formally recognized on July 6th, 1919, in Berlin, Germany, at the Institute of Sexual Science (also known as Sexology). That institute became a refuge for early trans people and a pioneering center for gender-affirming medical research. But on May 6th, 1933, the Nazis raided and burned it down in one of their infamous book burnings. With that destruction, much of the early research and recognition of gender dysphoria was deliberately erased from history. The condition itself never went away it resurfaced 80 years later in medical documentation, but it had already existed and been treated long before.

This is important: older trans people didn’t just wake up one day and decide who they were. They received medical care, diagnoses, and transition-related treatment because gender dysphoria has always been acknowledged, even when history tried to bury it. So when I emphasize this, it’s not gatekeeping it’s grounding ourselves in reality. These have always been the rules.

So let me be blunt: You need gender dysphoria to be transgender. Otherwise, you’re not trans. You’re gender nonconforming and that’s fine, but don’t water down what this word means. Trans isn’t a vibe. It’s not a trend. It’s not an aesthetic or a game of pronoun dress-up. It’s a painful, often dangerous path of confronting your body, your past, your identity, and society just to be seen as who you are.

I’ve been discriminated against, mocked, misgendered, physically assaulted, and called “it” to my face like I was some kind of creature. That word was never cute or quirky, it was used to dehumanize me. So when I see people online choosing it/its as pronouns and saying it’s empowering or “nonbinary,” I genuinely can’t wrap my head around it. You’re free to use whatever language feels right to you, but let’s not pretend it doesn’t come with history. For those of us who were called “it” not by choice but out of hate, it’s not gender-neutral. It’s erasure.

When it comes to neopronouns, I personally struggle with them I’ve tried to use noun-based neopronouns in sentences, and they just don’t function naturally in the way pronouns are meant to. That said, I do accept and respect pronouns like ze/zem when someone is fluent in a heavily gendered language that lacks gender-neutral pronouns. In that context, creating and using an alternative makes sense because it fills a real linguistic gap. But in English, where they/them already works as a neutral option, many of the newer noun-based neopronouns often end up feeling more like self-dehumanization than empowerment, which honestly just makes me feel sad. I wish the people using them saw enough value in themselves not to adopt identifiers rooted in being treated as “other.”

We fight for hormones. We fight for surgery. We fight to be taken seriously and when you tell the world that “you don’t need dysphoria to be trans,” you erase everything we went through to survive. You don’t get to rewrite the definition and then shame people like me for calling it out. This isn’t gatekeeping, it’s protecting the meaning of a word that saved my life.

And while we’re at it, I don’t care if people want to use neopronouns like kit/kitself or bun/bunself as nicknames, for OCs, or as personal flair. Go for it. But let’s stop pretending these are real, gendered pronouns tied to an actual identity in the same way he/him, she/her, and they/them are. They aren’t. The more you push made-up pronouns as valid genders, the more fuel you give to transphobes who already don’t take any of us seriously. You’re not helping the community you’re making it harder for people who actually need to transition to survive, to be seen, heard, and respected.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Guess who just got approved for T!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!