Transition Fund Collective

1. In my experience, it tends to make your dysphoria worse by allowing you to regularly ignore the fact that your chest exists, thereby encouraging dissociation from part of your body and making it much more difficult to manage dysphoria on days you don’t bind because you’re accustomed to seeing yourself in a binder

2. It literally smushes your chest over time- if you do it long enough, it will cause your chest to atrophy and be smashed and look like it has been smashed

3. Rib damage, back damage, etc. Most people see health issues resulting from binding. There is no way to avoid this. There is no such thing as safe binding. No matter how many breaks you take, no matter if you never do it for more than 9 hours, whatever, if you do it enough you will hurt yourself.

Content: Abuse, rape, experiences with mental illness and suicide

***PLEASE REBLOG TO PROTECT OTHERS IN OUR COMMUNITY FROM HAVING SIMILAR EXPERIENCES–I am finally ready for my voice to be heard***

With Gender Odyssey approaching (and I am too disabled to attend) and the release of the new Tegan and Sara video and the first Trans Youth Leadership Summit, I want to talk publicly about something for the first time. I want to talk about queer relationships, abuse, rape, polyamory, exploitation, and specifically, Eli Erlick (personal facebook page x, professional facebook page x, tumblr x, website x). I was in an emotionally, financially, and sexually abusive relationship with Eli Erlick for over a year and a half. And it pains me to see her get so much applause when I still suffer every day from the trauma she has caused me and I struggle to pull my life together alongside someone else who has suffered from her abuse.

At the beginning of the 2013 school year, I was a baby trans person taking a beloved professor’s Biology, Gender, and Society class to try to understand more about myself. Eli Erlick, an experienced trans person with tons of social capital and authority, used this class to prey on me, a vulnerable new member of the trans community, relentlessly sexually harassing me for weeks, causing daily panic attacks, until finally i felt like the only way to make it stop was to give in. Coercing someone to have sex with you and making them feel like they cannot safely say no is RAPE. Eli Erlick raped me and continued to emotionally manipulate me into an abusive polyamorous relationship in which she exploited my emotional labor and experiences as a trans person of color to benefit her career and social life and gaslighting me to believe that our relationship (which she refused to even acknowledge as one until I tried to break up with her for her abuse) was some sort of beacon of queer progressiveness.

Polyamorous relationships can absolutely be abusive. And the kink community is not exempt from rape. Tops, doms, and sadists ABSOLUTELY need to check themselves. Eli Erlick is NOT an accountable top, dom, or sadist, but rather is someone who literally keeps a scorebook of her conquests, originally titled the 100 list, with the intention of expanding her conquest goals each time she met them. Eli views the bodies she is intimate with as tallies in her book of conquests to do whatever she wants to their bodies. Keep in mind that Eli primarily conquests QTPOC and trans people in general. You do NOT GET TO SEEK OUT A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE SO MUCH TRAUMA WRITTEN INTO THEIR BODIES WITHOUT APPROACHING SEX WITH THEM IN AN ACCOUNTABLE WAY. YOU DO NOT GET TO FORCE YOURSELF INTO SOMEONES BODY AND MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE THEY CANNOT SAY NO TO THE NEXT KINKY OR SADISTIC THING ON YOUR AGENDA TO DO WITH THEM. Check-ins are not a formality you toss out to your sexual partner after you have already aggressively started forcing what you want onto their body. Our bodies are inseparable from the traumas written into them and if you are going to be in a position of sexual power you need to account for the traumas of the person who is entrusting their body to you.

I do not trust Eli Erlick with vulnerable young trans people, especially trans people of color, looking for a hero when they never see their experiences represented. I know that when Eli has an ounce of power over someone, she WILL abuse that power and exploit their body, mind, and experiences for her own gain and sense of accomplishment. It is not even a conscious thing she does, but it is a thing she could consciously watch herself on to prevent herself from abusing others but she does not care to. The most Eli will ever do is make superficial changes to cover her tracks and keep people’s perceptions of her up, not actually change her abusive behaviors to prevent herself from causing harm to others.  I do not trust Eli with trans people, I do not trust Eli with non-binary people, I do not trust Eli with people of color, I do not trust Eli with low income people, I do not trust Eli with disabled and mentally ill people, because I and others have been on the receiving end of cissexist, binarist, racist, classist, and ableist abuse from her.

Since day 1 of knowing Eli I have tried to help her become more accountable as a leader and person. I have confronted her time and time again, even since I ended our abusive relationship and we stopped being friends. When I confronted her about the countless ways she abused and raped me she has acknowledged that she had done these things and even agreed with me that she was a danger to our communities. I told her that the accountable thing to do upon recognizing that she is a compulsive abuser would be to transition TSER leadership to a QTPOC, especially someone like a trans woman of color, because of the distinct void in representation and programming for this community that really could use the funding and resources, and fade herself out of organizing so she won’t be tempted to abuse her power and authority in activist/organizing spaces.

She AGREED to these things and said she would try to transition to just the academia side, which I told her that I did not think she could do accountably either. Eli could excel and thrive in any liberal capitalist workplace who would be thrilled to have such a cis passing, white, conventionally attractive, high functioning neurotypical token of diversity, and in a workspace like this, she has no power to abuse vulnerable people. As she has failed her promise over and over again she has blocked me out from what she does hoping that I won’t see her continuing to expand her empire and her presence and social capital in organizing spaces to cover up her continued conquesting and exploitation of my communities. But I’m not the only one who sees you and your abusive behavior, Eli.

Since I began voicing my experiences with Eli’s abuse in online QTPOC spaces, countless people have come forward and told me they have had similar experiences in even transient interactions with Eli–fetishization, violent elitism, exploitation of their labor and experiences, predation, as well as rape. Eli is a serial abuser and conquester of our community.

Eli Erlick literally iced me out of her organization because she wanted to silence and contain me and protect her reputation and her freedom to continue expanding her trans empire (and I use empire in the most colonialist violent way) to rape and abuse and exploit without being challenged. Over the summer, while still living in the same apartment, we grew more distant as it grew more and more apparent to me that Eli was incapable of and unwilling to change her abusive ways. Eli took this time to not only take out her feelings about the breakup and losing control of me on our entire household of 4 that summer, she also took this time to stop keeping me in the loop about TSER, even intentionally neglecting to inform me about meetings that were happening in the very livingroom of the apartment we were sharing and ensuring that I would feel so alienated and out of place that at my low capacity I would not have the energy to even assert that I belonged.

When I sent her a 17 page letter detailing every horrifying act of abuse and rape she had committed against me, her immediate response was to remove me from the admin role on TSER’s facebook page and group so that I would not have a chance to expose her and speak the truth to her supporters and those she works with. And without even informing me or giving me a chance to fight it, Eli personally removed me from TSER’s board of directors page on her website and buried my involvement and contributions to the organization.

Eli would not have the radical social capital or academic capital she has today without me. During the year and a half+ that we were together, I painstakingly read, edited, advised, brainstormed, and even sometimes outright wrote every single publication of Eli Erlick’s, from papers to grants to even her social media posts. Every. Single. Day. I performed endless emotional labor to educate Eli on intersectional issues that my and other communities besides her own insular white trans community faces. Every day I faced violence from Eli in the form of negating the insight of me and my community members that I was generous enough to share with her. Being with Eli was 24/7 emotional and also physical labor that I was expected to perform with no acknowledgement of how my disabilities make me incapable of performing to her high expectations.

I have struggled with feelings of suicide for years from the trauma of occupying a body that society wants to violently stamp out of existence because I’m mentally ill and disabled, because I’m a person of color, because I’m queer, because I’m trans, because I’m non-binary, because of years of abuse. And Eli was a huge contributor of what nearly drove me to suicide my last official year of college. As my mental health declined, every day Eli would make me feel ashamed for what I couldn’t do, verbally attacking me and making me feel like I was never enough or that I was a waste or that I was crazy for feeling like she was even treating me unfairly. Eli normalized her abuse and her expectations of my body to the point of making me feel so ashamed on a daily basis that it grew more and more tempting to just end it.

Eli was by no means the only factor in how I was feeling but she certainly sent me spiralling to a dark place that I luckily have been in the process of pulling myself out of and healing with my amazing partner Knight. My will to survive and make a livable life for me and my little family is stronger than ever before, but I’m still haunted by my trauma from Eli, who every other day I see pop up in my newsfeed being showered with praise, attention, and social capital for something she takes credit for that should be credited to so many communities and individuals she has leeched herself off of.

This same person who has gained so much activist and capitalist credit for working with The Trevor Project, a queer suicide prevention organization, was the person who when I was in the car with my abusive parent at the peak of a fight about me being trans with my hand on the car door on a speeding highway chose to respond to me reaching out for help with the words “I’m on the verge of committing suicide” by policing my language telling me it was inaccurate to say that and that it bothered her that I was using incorrect language to be dramatic.

This same person gaslit me into thinking my brain was falsifying memories of sexual abuse to deny me the right to claim survivorship so that I could not identify what she had been doing to me as rape and sexual abuse.

This same person victim blamed me and gaslit me for “stereotyping flirtatious people” to deny the way she sexually harassed me and coerced me into a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship.

This same person wouldn’t let me transition the way I needed to because she was more interested in controlling my body’s attractiveness to her liking. The other trans masculine people she conquested were allowed to be on testosterone, to have body hair, to have facial hair, to have deeper voices, to have acne, to have their pronouns be respected, to be gendered affirmingly with her in public, but not me, because my willingness to mold myself to her liking was the thing that made me special to her compared to them. I was stockholmed to feel like our relationship was some sort of radical queer polyamory rather than it being abuse and control. I felt like I had to let her mold me into exactly the type of non-binary trans person she deemed to her liking, I consistently reassured her I wasn’t being gendered affirmingly in public so she could keep her queer social capital, I let her call me she, I let her call my parts whatever she decided they had to be, I let her relate to my body in ways that made me dysphoric and triggered me and hurt me and scared me and that I did not actually consent to. All because she made me feel like I never had the chance to say no and made me feel like I would be nothing without her because I was struggling to survive.

Like any other abuser, Eli controlled my body and what I could do with it in ways that were violent and traumatizing to me as a non-binary trans person. Any time I would excitedly wonder what my body hair would look like or what my voice would sound like on testosterone, Eli would cut me off saying, “Don’t do T. It’ll make you hairy/gross/unattractive” or “I wouldn’t be as attracted to you” knowing well that the abusive dynamic of our polyamory made me really insecure about my attractiveness to her because of how she would compare me to everyone else and go out of her way to make me feel less desirable and secure to control me.

This same person steals the spotlight and the mic away from vulnerable struggling (but also POWERFUL) communities like trans women of color, disabled trans people, and so many others who NEED their voices and experiences represented and their issues addressed EVERY TIME she takes a press opportunity for her own personal gain.

This same person forced me to advance her resume by writing almost her ENTIRE PeaceFirst Grant and helping her appear in a capitalist video segment exploiting queer people at the expense of my sleep, mental health, and a midterm.

This same person uses her social capital to intimidate and impress vulnerable young trans people to gain access to their bodies and a voyeuristic, exploitative look into the lives of people who are marginalized in ways she is not.

This same person fetishizes and preys upon queer and trans people of color, ESPECIALLY Asian Pacific Islander people, who make up the last 4 serious relationships she’s had and an unbelievable number of the people in her conquest list. Conquest culture IS rape culture.

This same person has STOLEN so much of my ideas without giving me any credit and continues to build and build and capitalize off of her own reputation while I struggle to survive.

I could go on and on but it drains me to write even as much as I have and the 17 pages I sent Eli last year don’t even begin to cover it.

I have spent today bawling my eyes out about the recent Trans Youth Leadership Summit that Eli put on with TSER. Because this was MY IDEA. MY IDEA that I was so passionate about that she SHOT DOWN. MY IDEA that was inspired by the life changing experiences I had leading trainings with the Asian American Sponsor Program at Scripps with friends who I love and respect and grew with. When I was at my lowest in my last formal semester at Scripps, I was enrolled in a class called Grant Writing for Non-Profits that I took as a desperate attempt to find something that would give my life meaning when I was struggling to survive. I desperately needed to feel like the academics that were sapping so much of my energy and life force could give back to my survival and the survival of my communities and because i was the Program Director and Grant Writer for TSER, I came up with one idea that finally got me excited and hopeful about the future and my potential as an organizer: a TRANS YOUTH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT for SUMMER 2016 with horizontal leadership structure featuring collaboration focused around LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES with a dedicated track for trans people of color. Compare this with Eli’s description of her TYLS (http://www.transstudent.org/tyls)

I put every ounce of energy I had toward brainstorming and beginning to write this grant, even using the last of my ADHD medication to keep my focus while I did not have health insurance or psychiatrist to prescribe my meds, to crank out an amazing beginning for a leadership initiative program that I was so proud and excited about, that gave me hope for my future. Only to have it be immediately shot down by Eli because she would rather use my writing abilities to write a grant to open her up a physical office in LA so that she would have more capitalist credit and acclaim as a Non-Profit executive. When she shot down my idea I was devastated, my mental health and any momentum I had the potential to build crumpled and spiralled. I soon after dropped the class and began a downward academic and health spiral that had me struggling for my life against suicide.

To see her now, in summer 2016, STEAL my idea and remove from it the HISTORY of where my motivation came from with my communities, the LOVE and CARE I put into my work with my communities, and the accountability I hoped to give it, as an opportunity to instead boost her own cred and CONQUEST the attendees. I fear for the number of trans youth, especially trans youth of color that Eli might have conquested or raped at her leadership summit. I genuinely am scared and hurting for the people I never even got a chance to connect with because not only was I not informed, credited, or invited, but I was driven out of organizing into burn-out by its corrupt leader. My heart broke today in ways I didn’t think Eli had the power to do anymore, despite how many days in a month I wake up in cold sweats and panic from nightmares of rape trauma from Eli. I know that I probably won’t ever have the capacity to go back to organizing, vastly because of how tied up in my trauma it is due to Eli. Its a slap in the face to me as the disabled QTPOC she abused the most to see all my hard work and care just go toward Eli’s conquest and empire.

using the small number of detransitioned people as proof that transition is the right solution for most means nothing if we’re not actively fighting against homophobia and sexism and trying to ensure gnc people can live freely. if people such as myself transition because we’ve internalized those messages, what incentive would we have to detransition if society is not moving towards female and gay liberation?

my decision to detransition was, among other things, a way for me to reposition myself within feminism and had little to do with me having a female gender identity. what this tells me is that there are many people out there with whom I have a lot in common who would maybe detransition if the world were different.

One of the hardest things about being a trans man was coming to terms with the fact that I’m unlikely to ever pass as male. Even after 4+ years on hormones, with a crop of chest hair that will soon rival your hairy uncle’s, I’m still consistently misgendered by strangers. It’s something that trans male support spaces never acknowledge, because no one wants to start HRT if they’re afraid they’ll end up… like me. It’s also not acknowledged in activist spaces, because trans men who continue to experience misogyny are an inconvenient snag in the anti-TERF discourse that says identity is everything. However, I’ve found a lot of support from trans feminine people who also think we need to deal better with nuance! Trans inclusive feminist is strong enough to cope with our messy lived experiences, and it needs to do so if it wants to survive! For a long time I just shut up and dealt with this alone. I was afraid to post about my experiences on Tumblr because things can get nasty when you get called out for bucking dominant social justice narratives. I certainly wanted to be aware of my privilege! Maybe I just needed to shut up, to listen. So I did. And eventually, I learned that the popular narratives are just too simplified to be useful for folks like me. My existence is too messy, too complicated, and so I’ve been erased. This isn’t ok.

Sometimes I tried to talk about my problems it in trans spaces, but trans men by and large don’t have the tools to talk about the psychological effects of not passing. We don’t teach each other these skills because it requires us to confront extra layers of internalized transphobia. Instead, I just got unsolicited passing tips and instructions to just “wait a bit longer.” Eventually, after years of transition, I was too ashamed to show up to trans spaces and admit how long I had been transitioning. It caused me a lot of pain and isolation. It still does. Feeling excluded from cis society, feeling shoved under the rug in trans spaces like a “failed” trans man, having my perspective erased in community discourse. And all the while, I navigate public space knowing that people see me as a “woman” with obvious male secondary sex characteristics. Even with my various other privileges, it limits my ability to travel and to participate in public life. So here’s a bunch of tips based on my experiences. It’s geared toward 1) transmasculine people who don’t “pass” and 2) cis people and “passing” trans men. (I’m not addressing transfeminine people mainly because I’ve not had major problems with transfeminine people re: this stuff, plus it would be kind of fucked up to ask them to do emotional labor for trans men when they are already dealing with an intensified version of this problem themselves.) Some of this is applicable to AFAB nonbinary folks generally, but I’m focusing on my own experience as a (nonbinary) trans man because I have never seen this issue talked about from that perspective.

**Also, disclaimer! I know the word “passing” is problematic. Not only does it have connotations of deception, but it also implies that people like me are “failing.” I’m aware of this.** So my words to trans men and transmasculine folks in similar situations:

Not every trans man will pass after a certain amount of time on T.

This does not have to be the life-ruining nightmare you think it is. I promise. You can have a job, you can make friends, you can learn to look strangers in the eye, and it will become easier to deal with misgendering over time. Various other life circumstances and intersecting oppressions will affect this, of course, but please don’t underestimate your ability to deal with this particular problem! You deserve better.  

Despite the obvious drawbacks, there are some pros to not passing! Even if you really didn’t want to end up this way, it’s still freeing to realize that this is your life now. You don’t have to wait for some distant post-transition day to start doing the things you want to do, such as dating or making new friends.

Other pros: It means you never have to worry about disclosing to your friends. It also makes it really easy for other trans folks to recognize you, which can be great for building community. Plus, a recognition nod on the train is sometimes really reassuring.

You may end up passing in the end! Maybe you can’t let go of that hope, and that’s ok.

Don’t get too hung up on Tumblr discourse, most of which is oversimplified and unnecessarily polarized. Don’t let people, especially cis people, tell you that you are not experiencing shit that you are Measurably Definitely Experiencing, such as sexist harassment.

At the same time, pay attention to the ways in which your life is getting easier. For example, compared to when I presented as a femme woman, (or even a pre-T gender nonconforming person,) I’ve noticed that people perceive me as more confident—and therefore take me more seriously—just because my voice is lower. I’ve also stopped experiencing sexual harassment entirely.*

While male privilege has a lot to do with how people see and treat you, don’t forget about the psychological impact of identifying as male, and how that affects your experience. It was easier for me to go through transition knowing that people perceived me as transitioning into strength, assertiveness, etc. Trans women don’t have this. On the other hand, don’t let people gaslight you into believing that this psychological impact is the same as the privilege cis men experience.

And—this should go without saying—work on being a better ally to trans women. Though trans men experience violence at higher rates than cis people of either gender, trans women experience more. LOTS of trans women have experience with this not passing thing, too! Trans men and trans women can have strong friendships and learn from each other.

Also do as much as you can, learn about other intersections of privilege and oppression. Race matters, class matters. Listen when you are called out.

Advice for cis folks and “passing” trans men:

Do not give unsolicited passing tips. A trans man talking about his feelings re: passing is not necessarily looking for tips on how to change his appearance!

Try not to make assumptions about how long someone’s been out as trans based on how well they pass.

Be careful with narratives that assume all trans men can be read as male with HRT. Bodies don’t react to testosterone the same way. Older trans people exist, as do people who can’t tolerate long-term HRT for health reasons.

Related to #1: Don’t assume that being visibly trans either is a 1) temporary or 2) desired situation for trans men.

Do not deny the lived experiences of non-passing trans men in order to win an argument. It’s simpler and easier to argue that trans men are men and men have male privilege, period, but it’s not entirely true. Flawed logic like this does little to further trans rights in the long run.

Related to the above: don’t assume that trans men and trans women’s experiences are opposite. Trans women have male privilege violently stripped away from them when they come out as trans, and frequently experience shame and marginalization before that. This does not mean that trans men never internalize misogyny, or that we stop experiencing it the minute we come out as male. The patriarchy is more interested in keeping people out of privileged positions than it is in welcome people into them.

This is a post I would appreciate people sharing, because even though I’ve been out as trans for over 5 years, I still haven’t been able to connect with many trans men of similar experience. I’d love to make those connections, even online. I know this is not a common outcome of medical transition, but people like us don’t need to be shoved to the background or made to feel ashamed. We deserve to have our voices heard. I’m also interested in feedback from folks who have points to add or points of criticism. Like I said, I’ve been isolated in my ability to talk about this, so I’m sure my thoughts are not perfect. However, I won’t engage with personal attacks, especially not from cis folks.

Don’t / Pass

The purpose of this blog is to keep a record of information about detransition.  We as detransitioned people often only have each other to ask for info or advice, so I decided to create this blog so that others like us can find the information they need all in one place.  We will collect posts about the physical and mental effects of stopping HRT or puberty blockers, reidentification, life after surgery, social detransition, changing documents, and anything else that seems relevant.  This blog is apolitical and will be focused solely on information.  We will also take questions and offer advice to people interested in detransition.  Our mods are all transitioned to some degree (HRT or blockers, surgery, social transition etc.) and we will do our best to give the most accurate possible answers to your questions.

if you are female and medically transitioned for any length of time and then stopped medically transitioning, please contact me if you’d feel comfortable participating in an interview (likely via Skype, but if this is not a comfortable medium for you then another way can be arranged)

I wrote these notes near the end of my twenty-sixth year, a few months before I started corresponding with another detransitioned woman I met online. I had already worked out quite a lot on my own. I was still living as a man when I wrote this. A few close and trusted friends knew I was questioning what I was again and that I was starting to think of myself as a woman/dyke more and more.  I’ve added a few notes for clarification. I’m not sure why I put quotes around word transition.

things i think contributed to my decision to “transition” living in a patriarchal society: -getting a lot of shit for being a “masculine” woman -getting treated better when i passed as a dude -making more sense to people when seen as a trans dude rather than a girl -internalizing standards of male masculinity [As opposed to “female masculinity”, which was still a concept I used at the time. I was referring to how I tried to fit in with men, those born male and raised to be masculine. How I measured myself against the men in my life and depictions of men in culture and media.] -people didn’t know what i was and would remark on it, assume i was a hermaphrodite, that i had a dick, etc -not wanting to be treated like most women are in this society -wanting to be respected by men and treated like “one of the guys” -not having many cultural or media references depicting women like myself -not having many butch women as mentors or role models -identifying with cultural depictions of men, specifically queer men because i could relate to them a lot better than depictions of women -feeling like dyke sex wasn’t as real as hetero sex [For example believing that what two women do together isn’t real sex or isn’t as real as sex between a woman and a man. I remember kids I went to high school telling me this, that lesbian sex isn’t real. Having sex with women who mainly had sex with men was a big deal to me because it “proved” I was as good as a man sexually.] -threats of rape from men -feeling invisible in this society, like people like me don’t exist

Psychological factors: -self-hatred and depression -became a coping mechanism and obsession -using t as anti-depressant -looking for meaningful, transformative experience -wanting to separate myself from my mom and her illness -dissociate from the past and a self i despised -discomfort with my body -curiosity and self-exploration -obsessed with idea of body modification -anxiety, wanted to become more real, felt my masculinity wasn’t substantial enough -trying to become a new person/kill off an unsatisfying sense of self

trans/queer culture: -trans issues were hip and cool, talked about a lot in academic scene i was in -queers expressed discomfort with my gender ambiguity, wasn’t sure what i was, rumors at my queer group that i had tits and a dick [the queer group mentioned was one of two that I attended in high school] -queers and others assumed i was trans because of my name, appearance and presentation, used he/him pronouns for me without asking my preference -many trans dudes at the time hostile to genderqueerness [At the time of writing I still identified as genderqueer. The hostility I encountered towards genderqueers pushed me to more strongly identify as male and transition to prove my “realness”.] -most dykes i met didn’t like being mistaken for a dude [In contrast, I found it intriguing and generally liked passing for male. I concluded that this made me something different from these women.] -gender crossing, transsexuality fetishized in academia, trans people as holders of secret knowledge from changing social genders and hormones, body -being trans friendly, to trans guys at least, was hip so i got treated well as a trans guy, though also tokenized and “othered” too

Someone sent me a message asking about this earlier.  I want to respect their anonymity but they told me that what I said was helpful to them so I feel like sharing it with the rest of you.  So here’s some things I do that help me manage my dysphoria:

Reality check

It’s helpful to me to remind myself that dysphoria is not reality, it’s a mental disorder that alters your perception of yourself.  You can think of it like other disorders like anxiety– if I’m feeling really anxious about something, I try to imagine my situation from an outside perspective and ask myself “is this really something I need to worry about or is this just my anxious brain being anxious?”  If I’m feeling really dysphoric I do similar mental exercises, like “I may feel this compulsion to change my body because I don’t like it, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything objectively wrong with my body.  Regardless of how I feel about it, this is the body I have, even if I were to alter it it would still be the same one.”

Physical activity

This is something I’m really bad at keeping up with because I’m a little cave gremlin who doesn’t like to be away from my laptop for too long.  But if you want to feel at home in your body, doing things that make your body do things helps a lot with feeling centered.  Part of the reason I got a dog was so that I would have to get up and move every day, no excuses.  I also enjoy yoga and swimming a lot.  You don’t have to do those particular things, but if you can find something physical you like doing I highly recommend it.

Positive affirmation

Okay, this one sounds really cheesy but I swear it makes me feel better.  When I’m getting ready for the day I take a few extra moments to look in the mirror, give myself a big smile and say something like, “I’m okay the way I am,” “I’m ready for this,” “I am enough,” or something to that effect.  Sometimes it’s barely a whisper, some days I don’t want to say anything out loud at all.  It’s the thought that counts though.

I bound my breasts almost full time for around 2 years before I had my mastectomy. As a result, my lung capacity is reduced and the muscles around my ribcage are still much less strong than they were before I began binding, even though it has been over a year now since I have worn a binder or even a bra. I even bound ‘safely’ using an Underworks compression vest in the correct size, never with ace bandages or any other methods. I still can’t take a full, deep breath like I used to. 

standing, look in a mirror and ensure your shoulders are level, and neither are holding tension. imagine a string is pulling the top of your head toward the celing, and that the rest of your body is hanging down. feet shoulder width apart.

then, staring from the bottom of your butt, pull air as deep down into your stomach, like your filling up a pitcher from the buttom up. take deep breaths like that for about 20 times, maybe 2 or three times a day.

once your happy with that, train with air sustainence. usually, inhaling for 4 beats, hissing for 8 beats. then hiss out for 12 or 16 beats.

Ok fair warning but this is going to be pretty long and may be triggering

I transitioned because I had clinical sex dysphoria. I had first had it when I was a child (probably 9 or 10 was when I asked for puberty blockers without knowing what they were, I wanted my name to be Jack or Andy, etc.) After my early teens it kind of died down for awhile, then I had a sexual trauma and it came back and was very intense.

I now see my dysphoria as a combination of internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, and trauma. I was gay bashed when I was younger by straight girls and it really fucked me up, especially since I’m mostly attracted to femmes so it gives me anxiety to approach them now. I didn’t want to be a lesbian, I hated how most women would never, by their nature, be attracted to me, and how lesbian sex wasn’t “real sex”. I hated being seen as a gross dyke when I knew I could be a handsome boy, and if I were a boy people would like me even without makeup or dresses or uncomfortable shoes.

I had trauma and grew up with a misogynist family with a relatives that practice a patriarchal religion in a patriarchal culture and I just wanted out. I wanted a deeper voice and facial hair, probably because I associated deep voices and facial hair with authority: I hated getting male attention. I hated being smaller and weaker than men, I thought there was nothing good about being female. I had a relative who is a transwoman and believed that I was supposed to “feel” female and be drawn to feminine things, and I just wasn’t.

My sexual trauma made me feel intensely that I was trapped in my body. I hated my sexual organs (I had when I was a preteen/young teenager too but it had died down) and had violent thoughts about them but the whole experience was too embarrassing to talk about that even when I went to a trauma program, they were unable to help much. And transitioning was an easy way out. It gave me something to fixate on, a goal to strive towards, a solution to my pain that didn’t require confronting all the misogyny that had made me this way.

I guess I dretransitioned for a combination of political reasons (wanting to be in solidarity with women and becoming disillusioned with the widespread misogyny in the trans movement) and because I found it didn’t really solve the problem– it reinforced my body hatred, and I still struggled with my trauma and female socialization, I was sexually assaulted by a curious gay dude and I didn’t report it and I feel like I didn’t say no or fight back soon enough. And I found it exhausting to be constantly obsessing over what gender even was and whether I was male enough.

I see it now as a form of self-harm. I understand that many dysphoric people are desperate and feel transition is necessary so I don’t blame them for seeking a solution. But I think it’s important to explore other options first, to put off transition as long as possible, because the medical industry can and will take advantage of you. It’s so much easier to proceed with transition down the line than it is to undo it if you change your mind, especially for female trans people. And I found that transition increased my dysphoria– even when I get residual dysphoria today I just remind myself that while transitioning I started getting dysphoria about my bone structure, my inability to get boners or ejaculate or produce sperm, things I would never be able to change… once I stopped trying to be something I never could, the dysphoria started to calm down.

Submission by: @e-cryptid 22, United states of America

“First of all, you need to pick a new name. Then you’ll need a binder and maybe a packer but make sure it’s not too big of one. That’ll give you away. Try wearing button ups but not if they’re flannel. That’ll make you look like a lesbian. Layering shirts helps, too. Buy bulky shoes and boot cut jeans. Maybe shoe lifts because you’re kind of on the short side for a guy. Keep your hair cut longer on top and shorter on the sides. Square off the hair in front of your ears. It’s too feminine to have it be triangular. Shave those little translucent hairs off of your face. Only women and children have them. You can wear a single earring or a leather bracelet but no other jewelry. Nothing rainbow because, again, that’ll make you look like a lesbian. Use only the lower ranges of your voice. You can find vocal training videos on YouTube if that’s not good enough. It’ll also help to speak in more of a monotone and try to mimic other guys’ speech patterns. Study the way they walk, too. Sit with your legs spread or one crossed over your other knee. Either way, take up plenty of space. Bulk up but only certain muscle groups. Don’t talk when you’re in the bathroom. Use less exaggerated facial expressions. Try not to qualify your statements. Cross your arms over your chest, not under it. Don’t skip. Don’t giggle. Don’t cry.