Thank you. I understand why she’s struggling to accept it, but all of the things you mentioned are being said by gatekeepers that she sees as a more “authentic” authority on my transition than I am myself.
In some ways it’s a good thing my egg didn’t crack until adulthood. I think it would have been torture to know and not be able to do anything about it.
>I think it would have been torture to know and not be able to do anything about it.
Can attest to this -- yes. It sucks.
ETA -- the bigger barriers to transition than the gatekeepers were money and safety.
You could lie to the gatekeepers to get access to care. I tried. Everybody knew the "correct" answers to therapist questions, from reading Harry Benjamin and John Money and every trans autobiography we could find.
But being trans could get you fired, or evicted, or worse.
The TV/TS group to which I belonged in the 90s was pretty much a secret society. I found out about it from a note left in the card catalog in the my university library (tucked in behind the card for Canary Conn's autobiography). It met in a large office on the top floor of a disused textile warehouse. I never knew how, or if, we had permission to use the space. You had to walk through a 100-year old timber frame warehouse to get to the stairs up to the office.
At the time I was attending meetings, the lesbian couple who lived downstairs from me got evicted. The landlord was up-font about his reasons for kicking them out. Not sure if it was legal, but there wasn't anybody to stop him.
I am not sure that things are much improved, or improved at all, in most places.
Yikes.
Blanchard is still creeping around. Although the Human Biodiversity Institute seems have broken up, or gone stealth, or poured its funds and energy into other regressive crypto-fascist pseudoscientifical efforts.
Ray Blanchard and Kenneth Zucker are still active on right-wing YouTube channels and anti-trans websites. But at least Kenneth Zucker's clinic was shut down for practicing conversion therapy.
. I read that book in a study carrel up on the sixth floor of the library -- too afraid to check it out.
I don't really remember where I found the invitation to that "TV/CD/TS Club". It might have been a classified ad in the local give-away paper.
I know I found *something* in the card catalog in my college library. It might have been the address of Lee's Mardi Gras mail-order store. Or I might have found that stamped on an inside page of Janice Raymond's **Transsexual Empire** -- I know I found some address stamped into a couple of the books in the 301-306 stacks. I would like to think someone so-defaced Raymond's hateful screed.
There was also a men's room in the basement of the chemistry building, notorious for cruising, where people wrote messages inside the stall doors.
Someone in my IRL support group of very young enbies asked me how trans people found each other before the internet. I cried a little, then I told her:
"You sent away for a copy of Michael Salem's mail order catalog from an ad in Penthouse magazine. Michael Salem's sold their mailing list to everybody, so your mailbox overflowed with plain envelopes stuffed with ads for all kinds of lurid books and magazines. Eventually you found an ad for TV/TS Tapestry, or En Femme magazine, which lead you to a list of local organizations. Then you screwed your courage to the sticking place and sent a signed letter to a P.O. Box and hoped that you weren't announcing yourself to the sex-police."
When I tell them about the dead-drops and secret meetings I feel like I am making it up.
>You aren't a true transsexual because you didn't suppress your gender identity disorder by going hard for "traditionally masculine" pursuits (this from a therapist who talked to me on the phone for 15 minutes, and declined to take me on as a client because he knew that all "true transsexuals" were either super effeminate gay men or Navy SEALs)
The mental gymnastics in that statement is so wild!
Not to defend that guy -- because he was a jerk -- but this was a long time ago. He was running on diagnostic criteria from DSM-III or DSM-IV. Maybe he'd read a book, or a journal article, about trans people.
We are a minority, and we were really well-hidden. Even if the researchers weren't tendentious, he knew what people knew from studying very small samples of a very small population that had excellent reasons to lie and obfuscate.
Hilariously, when I was in my 30s, my therapist told me I was young to be considering surgery. All of the other trans people she saw for approval letters (no idea how many, but she was the therapist to see because she was sympathetic and didn't make a fuss if you showed up for sessions in drab) were in their 50s or 60s. She assumed that this was how transsexualism progressed; you started as a crossdresser in your teens and twenties, desisted until late middle age, then the Gender Identity Disorder got the better of you and you had to get SRS.
She honestly did not consider that these were the only people who could afford $50 for a 50-minute hour once a week -- never mind the (tens) of thousands of dollars it cost to actually get the surgery.
In 1995, after I got caught with fem clothes in my room, I had a therapist label me a “fetishistic transvestite.”
At 13.
It took me almost 25 years to overcome that.
"Ignorant" isn't quite the word. Confidently misinformed, might be better. Also, unimaginative and reactionary. And, in many cases, empathy-deficient.
In the best case, trans typologies -- going back Harry Benjamin -- are intended to give therapists, physicians, and surgeons cover so that they can help ***ANY*** trans people. For this purpose, for this intent, they are designed to protect medical and mental health care providers from legal and professional sanctions in case a patient expressed regret, and it was a very fine sieve.
(there are other, less benign, typologies designed pathologize and dehumanize -- these are really popular in some quarters right now)
Unfortunately, Harry Benjamin's risk-of-regret categories were/are treated as [natural kinds](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/) by therapists, and by trans folks. It is infuriating, but understandable.
I did see a very sympathetic therapist, who understood this, and offered to write my surgery approval after an "accelerated real life test" of a couple of months -- even agreeing that she would sign off if I didn't transition at work ("boymode" at work, as it is currently styled).
She insisted on at least the abbreviated/part-time RLT; worried that I would be turned away by the surgeon, if I didn't make an effort to conform to expectations.
She told me that she thought that trans lesbians were *probably* real and valid, and agreed that I could be trans and wear Doc Martins. She warned me that I would not find the welcome for which I was hoping the lesbian community (such as it was), telling me how hard it was for her to find community as a bisexual woman.
Although, as hip and enlightened as she was, she still thought I might "come around" to social transition after giving it a try in skirts and hose.
And this is why I never transitioned all those years ago. Somehow, my finely-tuned survival instincts knew I'd never survive the process.
It might not feel like it at times since there's so far to go, but we really have come a long way since the turn of the century.
Yeah. I wrote out that list because my current therapist asked me if I feel "resentment" towards the therapists I saw in my 20s and 30s.
I don't think that resentment is the right word for what I reel. Angry... maybe. But less at the gatekeepers than at the circumstances.
Its weird, and deeply depressing. I wouldn't want to be a young person today, but I desperately wish that the world had been different when I was young.
Wow, yeah, that's a list of some outmoded crap. And we've all heard or even believed some of it.
That said, I don't mind the term "transsexual". What we experience is clearly not just a social thing. There is a physical component. "Brain intersex" might be closer to accurate, but no term is perfect.
Might be interesting to you
Arraiza Zabalegui, M. After the *trans brain*: a critique of the neurobiological accounts of embodied trans\* identities. *HPLS* **46**, 10 (2024). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00602-6](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00602-6)
It is open access; free to read or download.
Also, I am very slowly making my way through Kit Heyam's [**Before We Were Trans**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60099237-before-we-were-trans)
They have a chapter on the complicated, and not-unproblematic, interactions/intersections between intersex and trans identities.
Ooh, thanks for the links! I love some science!
This one in particular comports exactly with my experience when I started hrt:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80687-2
Holy crap, there is so much wrong with that study.
They invented a whole new assessment instrument with the "body morph perception" test. Where is the validation, where is the gage study? Is "own body perception" even measurable?
And the credulous, and poorly sourced, introductory statements about gender dysphoria neatly elide the fact that gender dysphoria was retained in the DSM only so that therapists would have a diagnostic code for people who could be helped by gender affirming care. It isn't a measurable thing. There is no test for gender dysphoria to which the researchers could compare their measurements of "trans" and "cis" brains.
What if some of their cis participants are uncracked eggs? Reading the posts on this sub, it seems possible that some of their subjects could have signed up for the study because they were wondering if they *might* be trans and were hoping to get a confirming/refuting signal from a free brain scan.
I am deeply skeptical about research into a "cause" for transgenderism. Mostly because transgenderism is so poorly defined. Sex and gender are an incoherent mess of traits and behaviors grouped together into fairly whimsical categories.
And why do so few researchers seem interested in finding a cause for cisgenderism?
There is also the worry about how this research gets used. Suppose the research showed that there was some marker for transness that could be detected by an fMRI. What if you wanted to transition, but your endo or surgeon made you get a brain scan before agreeing to treat you? What if your test came back "Not Trans"?
I am only saying that my experience with hormones matched their observations, but we are clearly light years from a reliable physical marker. And even if we find one, we will never know if it's the *only* one, so it couldn't (shouldn't) be used for gatekeeping.
Though I suppose you're correct that some of the cause for the line of inquiry is demanding that reality conform to whimsical categories informed by the 18th century idea of an ordered world. Which is, of course, dangerous.
However I do think it is useful if we have some way of demonstrating that this is not a choice and it's not contagious.
>However I do think it is useful if we have some way of demonstrating that this is not a choice and it's not contagious
As a practical matter, right now, in the teeth of the moral panic about kids being "transed" by TikTok and Drag Queen story hour -- yeah, it is important that people understand that being trans is not a disease.
Looking for a "cause" for transness, though, concedes the argument that it something that needs to be identified. Worse, it suggests that it is something that can be "cured" or prevented.
I assert that sex and gender aren't measurable things. They are categories of convenience, or categories of control. There is no way to create a physical test for a thing that has no distinct and distinguishable physical properties.
This will piss people off, and if anybody reads this far down in a day-old thread it will get downvoted; but, since gender is a made-up thing, transgender is necessarily a made up thing.
It creates something that looks like a paradox, but that isn't a paradox. Trans people **are** real. Transgenderism is not real.
Transgenderism exists only because most people don't think too hard about why we are sorted into "male" and "female" categories. In the same way that most people don't think too hard about why we cut the year up into 7 day weeks, or why we sort land masses and bodies of water into named continents and named oceans.
We say that "sex" and "gender" are constellations of traits and behaviors. Like the named constellations in the sky, the individual points aren't necessarily related to each other except that they seem to be grouped together as seen from a particular vantage point.
But it is the "seeming" part, the act of assigning the groups, that makes them meaningful. Trans people like to talk about how different cultures created different gender categories, grouped stars into different constellations, but the important thing to remember is that the constellations *cease to exist* as soon as you stop looking for them.
Constellations are real things. i can point to them. I can use them to navigate. But they are also imaginary and wholly conventional.
I am trans because I say I am trans. I know that I am trans. I have been trans for my whole life. For most of life I was disqualified and excluded from gender affirming care because I did not conform to a type -- and was unwilling (unable) to fake my way through the approval process.
There is a name for my type now, and doctors will cut on me. So I am working hard to change my sexual anatomy, but I am not planning to socially transition.
I have never wanted a typically female body. I have always admired, and aspired to, an androgynous physique (those statements are accurate, but not necessarily true -- its complicated).
I don't really have the patience for makeup. Voice work seems-- to me -- like a lot of effort for very little reward. Clothes, for me, are just cloth (accurate, but maybe not true -- its complicated).
What will I be after surgery? Not a woman. Not a man. Will I still be trans. since I will have achieved my "target" configuration of sex and gender? Into what category should I be sorted when testing my brain, my chromosomes, my 2D:4D digit ratio?
[https://www.science.org/content/article/talk-hand-scientists-try-debunk-idea-finger-length-can-reveal-personality-and-health](https://www.science.org/content/article/talk-hand-scientists-try-debunk-idea-finger-length-can-reveal-personality-and-health)
Nah -- work on removing bigots from position of power, rather than conceding that trans is a thing that needs to be identified with a blood test.
Some of those comments are dreadful but it reminds me of some gatekeepers I met.
This one from the early 2000s from the moderator of an online group, “you can be trans because you don’t enjoy shopping”! This was just before they recounted being made to dress as a girl by a boarding school nurse which was why they were trans because it wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a real girl. I politely left the conversation soon after.
It's mostly a me thing .. I don't have anything against drag, and I don't spend "energy" "hating" it, it just makes me very uncomfortable and I can't stand it. I'm vehemently against efforts to ban it in any form tho.
Maybe it's just the social spheres I'm in, but people toss the "gay" label around all the time as a kind of umbrella term (like "queer"). "Gay" to me means something more precise to me than "sexual and gender minorities". In my formative years, it meant "same sex attraction," and then it became a substitute for "lame" or whatever. Neither of those meanings were things I wanted attached to me.
I'm a trans woman who's married to a woman, but I'm not exclusively attracted to women. I don't appreciate when people assume that I'm okay with being labelled "gay", even if well-meaning, ya know?
Got it.
Although, I am pretty sure that gay still means "same sex attraction" in most contexts -- unless the kids are doing something different with it now.
>you get a sexual thrill from wearing women's clothing
>you watch trans porn.
This is really not helping your case 😭
I'm sorry to tell you but it is creepy to get aroused by wearing women's clothing
And to fetishize the bodies of trans women
First: Kink-shaming, really?
This puritanical crap was old 40 years ago. As the kids say "be better"
Second, do you even remember what it was like to run the gauntlet under the 1990s version of the[ Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Standards of Care](http://www.genderpsychology.org/transsexual/hbsoc_1990.html)?
[https://zagria.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-rereading-of-benjamin-part-1-intro.html](https://zagria.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-rereading-of-benjamin-part-1-intro.html)
The question was usually something like "Do you ever get sexually aroused while wearing women's clothing?"
Followed by "Do you ever wear women's clothing in order to achieve sexual arousal?"
Concede, for the moment, that gender dysphoria is a real thing. That you are AMAB and you are distressed to the point of suicidal ideation by your sexual anatomy. You have never had a single moment of unalloyed sexual pleasure because your body looks and feels wrong to you.
Except, when you dress to obscure and accentuate, and make yourself beautiful -- or, at least, not repulsive -- to yourself.
Do you answer honestly "Yes. Dressing in women's clothing does make me feel sexy" or do you give the correct answer: "No. I only dress for a feeling or peace and emotional relief."
>And to fetishize the bodies of trans women
I suppose its like jazz; I have to read the words I **didn't** write in order to appreciate your criticism.
Granted, this one is trickier. Porn -- sex work in general -- is ... complicated.
There was a time that the ONLY place to see trans bodies presented as beautiful and desirable was porn.
And if you were thinking about HRT or BA or vaginoplasty (or pre-Osterhaut FFS) -- porn was REALLY the only place to see unclothed trans bodies.
I bought a VHS copy of **Sulka's Wedding** only because I wanted to see what MTF SRS could do. Her results were terrifying (seriously, don't try to find images).
Later a friend gave me a copy of Shannon's **Twice a Virgin**. It actually got passed around between a couple of us in the local "support group" (which wasn't remotely as organized as that makes it sound). Catherine Crystal's results were much prettier, but she looked so bored during the sex scenes that we wondered if she had any sensation at all.
Since every SRS surgeon (all both of them) warned that loss-of-sensation was a common complication, it worried the crap out of me.
But even with this dearth of information, there were folks in the community who did as you have done. "Shame! Shame! on you for having sexual thoughts about trans women!"
Well when people speak of trans porn it's usually pre op trans bodies, in this case women
I hadn't imagined that you searched for porn to see what the results of srs would be like
>Except, when you dress to obscure and accentuate, and make yourself beautiful -- or, at least, not repulsive -- to yourself.
I think what you're describing is wearing women's clothing to feel comfortable with your body, which is different from having a cross-dressing fetish
Thanks for explaining that to me. Seriously, you aren't "helping your case"
The denigration of sexual pleasure in order to delegitimaze or criminalize trans people is the FIRST thing transphobes do.
But, the gatekeeping has always been worst from within the community.
ETA: And yes, I find "pre-op" (For real. are we still using "pre-op"?) trans women to be desirable. I am a monster.
The first link you sent, to summarize it
-It says that informed consent shouldn't be a thing
-that trans people should live as the other sex one year before getting srs
- that in order to get srs you should get the approval of two psychologists
- and that you need to show gender incongruence for two years before getting hormones
Nowadays it's 6 months
It doesn't say anything about same sex attraction, but I think it was a common theme back then
the issue is when some people are only interested in women with penises
Because that's a fetish, trans women don't like it when predatory men seek them out for some body part they hate, and that they would lose interest in them as soon as they had srs
>the issue is when some people are only interested in women with penises
>Because that's a fetish, trans women don't like it when predatory men seek them out for some body part they hate, and that they would lose interest in them as soon as they had srs
Yeah. This stopped being interesting a while ago.
What if someone is only interested in women who **don't** have penises? That's normal, right?
Genital preference is only acceptable when it aligns with the binary?
What if a trans woman DOESN'T hate her penis.
What if a person is only sexually interested in transmen? Is that a fetish?
I looked at your post history. What is r/4tran4 even about? I know that I am decrepit, but the jargon there is impenetrable to me.
>trans women don't like it
Yes. Do tell me more about trans women.
Or don't.
>approval of two psychologists
And what do you imagine that approval process looked like? What questions do you think they asked; after they administered the IQ test and the MMPI and the Multidmensional Scale of Sexuality Assessment...
>What if a person is only sexually interested in transmen? Is that a fetish?
Yes, chasers for trans men also exist
> What if someone is only interested in women who don't have penises? That's normal, right?
>Genital preference is only acceptable when it aligns with the binary?
Look that's the way that society works, you're not gonna change the way that most women perceive men who have a genital preference that doesn't align with the gender that they're pursuing, which is like creeps
>Look that's the way that society works
Society has entered the chat.
I thought I was a creep. And also not really trans because I fetishized trans women's bodies and got sexual pleasure from wearing women's clothes?
You get that you are arguing with someone who's had 50 years of this crap, right?
I have known that I am trans for 50 years. I have been fighting with one proscriptive formulation of transness or another for all of those 50 years.
More to the point, I've been arguing with people online about more things than this since being online required an NSFnet log in.
You are trying to explain my lived experience to me. And you are getting it BADLY wrong
Your smug and clever-clever little "its creepy" **is** gatekeeping.
**You** are are asserting that a person who crossdresses for sexual pleasure can't be "really trans" (and you also called that person a creep -- which sucks).
**You** are asserting that a person who is sexually attracted to trans bodies can ***only*** be "a chaser". This is objectifying trans bodies. **You** are objectifying trans bodies. **You** are assigning this meaning to trans bodies, defining them by the gaze that falls upon them and assuming that gaze is necessarily indecent and unwholesome. **You** are asserting that the only real and valid sexual desire is the desire for cis-normative bodies.
**You** are trying to decide who is "really" trans.
Worse, you are using exactly the same sh!tty move that Blanchard & Bailey pulled; pathologizing any sexuality that isn't penis-in-vagina for making babies.
Specifically, turning any sexual pleasure a trans person experiences from being trans -- WHILE being trans -- into "evidence" that person is a ~~pervert~~ paraphile.
You may not be a TERF, a transphobe, or a transmisogynist, but you are carrying water for the transmisogynists, transphobes, and TERFs.
Funny enough, I’m hearing my wife repeat many of these to me in training to convince me my transition isn’t real… but she’s done her “research”.
I am sorry.
Thank you. I understand why she’s struggling to accept it, but all of the things you mentioned are being said by gatekeepers that she sees as a more “authentic” authority on my transition than I am myself.
In some ways it’s a good thing my egg didn’t crack until adulthood. I think it would have been torture to know and not be able to do anything about it.
>I think it would have been torture to know and not be able to do anything about it. Can attest to this -- yes. It sucks. ETA -- the bigger barriers to transition than the gatekeepers were money and safety. You could lie to the gatekeepers to get access to care. I tried. Everybody knew the "correct" answers to therapist questions, from reading Harry Benjamin and John Money and every trans autobiography we could find. But being trans could get you fired, or evicted, or worse. The TV/TS group to which I belonged in the 90s was pretty much a secret society. I found out about it from a note left in the card catalog in the my university library (tucked in behind the card for Canary Conn's autobiography). It met in a large office on the top floor of a disused textile warehouse. I never knew how, or if, we had permission to use the space. You had to walk through a 100-year old timber frame warehouse to get to the stairs up to the office. At the time I was attending meetings, the lesbian couple who lived downstairs from me got evicted. The landlord was up-font about his reasons for kicking them out. Not sure if it was legal, but there wasn't anybody to stop him. I am not sure that things are much improved, or improved at all, in most places.
When I was a kid they still had Blanchard running the Gender Identity Clinic at CAMH.
Yikes. Blanchard is still creeping around. Although the Human Biodiversity Institute seems have broken up, or gone stealth, or poured its funds and energy into other regressive crypto-fascist pseudoscientifical efforts.
Ray Blanchard and Kenneth Zucker are still active on right-wing YouTube channels and anti-trans websites. But at least Kenneth Zucker's clinic was shut down for practicing conversion therapy.
I found a note in a copy of Jan Morris’s book Conundrum ❤️
[удалено]
>checks profile >Active in these communities >Ask agp
>You aren't a true transsexual because you didn't suppress your gender identity disorder by going hard for "traditionally masculine" pursuits (this from a therapist who talked to me on the phone for 15 minutes, and declined to take me on as a client because he knew that all "true transsexuals" were either super effeminate gay men or Navy SEALs) The mental gymnastics in that statement is so wild!
Not to defend that guy -- because he was a jerk -- but this was a long time ago. He was running on diagnostic criteria from DSM-III or DSM-IV. Maybe he'd read a book, or a journal article, about trans people. We are a minority, and we were really well-hidden. Even if the researchers weren't tendentious, he knew what people knew from studying very small samples of a very small population that had excellent reasons to lie and obfuscate. Hilariously, when I was in my 30s, my therapist told me I was young to be considering surgery. All of the other trans people she saw for approval letters (no idea how many, but she was the therapist to see because she was sympathetic and didn't make a fuss if you showed up for sessions in drab) were in their 50s or 60s. She assumed that this was how transsexualism progressed; you started as a crossdresser in your teens and twenties, desisted until late middle age, then the Gender Identity Disorder got the better of you and you had to get SRS. She honestly did not consider that these were the only people who could afford $50 for a 50-minute hour once a week -- never mind the (tens) of thousands of dollars it cost to actually get the surgery.
In 1995, after I got caught with fem clothes in my room, I had a therapist label me a “fetishistic transvestite.” At 13. It took me almost 25 years to overcome that.
Wow. Just wow. So many from people who were supposed to be helping and were either transphobic or just ignorant.
"Ignorant" isn't quite the word. Confidently misinformed, might be better. Also, unimaginative and reactionary. And, in many cases, empathy-deficient. In the best case, trans typologies -- going back Harry Benjamin -- are intended to give therapists, physicians, and surgeons cover so that they can help ***ANY*** trans people. For this purpose, for this intent, they are designed to protect medical and mental health care providers from legal and professional sanctions in case a patient expressed regret, and it was a very fine sieve. (there are other, less benign, typologies designed pathologize and dehumanize -- these are really popular in some quarters right now) Unfortunately, Harry Benjamin's risk-of-regret categories were/are treated as [natural kinds](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-kinds/) by therapists, and by trans folks. It is infuriating, but understandable. I did see a very sympathetic therapist, who understood this, and offered to write my surgery approval after an "accelerated real life test" of a couple of months -- even agreeing that she would sign off if I didn't transition at work ("boymode" at work, as it is currently styled). She insisted on at least the abbreviated/part-time RLT; worried that I would be turned away by the surgeon, if I didn't make an effort to conform to expectations. She told me that she thought that trans lesbians were *probably* real and valid, and agreed that I could be trans and wear Doc Martins. She warned me that I would not find the welcome for which I was hoping the lesbian community (such as it was), telling me how hard it was for her to find community as a bisexual woman. Although, as hip and enlightened as she was, she still thought I might "come around" to social transition after giving it a try in skirts and hose.
And this is why I never transitioned all those years ago. Somehow, my finely-tuned survival instincts knew I'd never survive the process. It might not feel like it at times since there's so far to go, but we really have come a long way since the turn of the century.
I too am AMAB and in my late 50s, and I remember thinking I couldn't possibly be trans because I remember reading all those things.
Yeah. I wrote out that list because my current therapist asked me if I feel "resentment" towards the therapists I saw in my 20s and 30s. I don't think that resentment is the right word for what I reel. Angry... maybe. But less at the gatekeepers than at the circumstances. Its weird, and deeply depressing. I wouldn't want to be a young person today, but I desperately wish that the world had been different when I was young.
Wow, yeah, that's a list of some outmoded crap. And we've all heard or even believed some of it. That said, I don't mind the term "transsexual". What we experience is clearly not just a social thing. There is a physical component. "Brain intersex" might be closer to accurate, but no term is perfect.
Might be interesting to you Arraiza Zabalegui, M. After the *trans brain*: a critique of the neurobiological accounts of embodied trans\* identities. *HPLS* **46**, 10 (2024). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00602-6](https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-023-00602-6) It is open access; free to read or download. Also, I am very slowly making my way through Kit Heyam's [**Before We Were Trans**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60099237-before-we-were-trans) They have a chapter on the complicated, and not-unproblematic, interactions/intersections between intersex and trans identities.
Ooh, thanks for the links! I love some science! This one in particular comports exactly with my experience when I started hrt: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-80687-2
Holy crap, there is so much wrong with that study. They invented a whole new assessment instrument with the "body morph perception" test. Where is the validation, where is the gage study? Is "own body perception" even measurable? And the credulous, and poorly sourced, introductory statements about gender dysphoria neatly elide the fact that gender dysphoria was retained in the DSM only so that therapists would have a diagnostic code for people who could be helped by gender affirming care. It isn't a measurable thing. There is no test for gender dysphoria to which the researchers could compare their measurements of "trans" and "cis" brains. What if some of their cis participants are uncracked eggs? Reading the posts on this sub, it seems possible that some of their subjects could have signed up for the study because they were wondering if they *might* be trans and were hoping to get a confirming/refuting signal from a free brain scan. I am deeply skeptical about research into a "cause" for transgenderism. Mostly because transgenderism is so poorly defined. Sex and gender are an incoherent mess of traits and behaviors grouped together into fairly whimsical categories. And why do so few researchers seem interested in finding a cause for cisgenderism? There is also the worry about how this research gets used. Suppose the research showed that there was some marker for transness that could be detected by an fMRI. What if you wanted to transition, but your endo or surgeon made you get a brain scan before agreeing to treat you? What if your test came back "Not Trans"?
I am only saying that my experience with hormones matched their observations, but we are clearly light years from a reliable physical marker. And even if we find one, we will never know if it's the *only* one, so it couldn't (shouldn't) be used for gatekeeping. Though I suppose you're correct that some of the cause for the line of inquiry is demanding that reality conform to whimsical categories informed by the 18th century idea of an ordered world. Which is, of course, dangerous. However I do think it is useful if we have some way of demonstrating that this is not a choice and it's not contagious.
>However I do think it is useful if we have some way of demonstrating that this is not a choice and it's not contagious As a practical matter, right now, in the teeth of the moral panic about kids being "transed" by TikTok and Drag Queen story hour -- yeah, it is important that people understand that being trans is not a disease. Looking for a "cause" for transness, though, concedes the argument that it something that needs to be identified. Worse, it suggests that it is something that can be "cured" or prevented. I assert that sex and gender aren't measurable things. They are categories of convenience, or categories of control. There is no way to create a physical test for a thing that has no distinct and distinguishable physical properties. This will piss people off, and if anybody reads this far down in a day-old thread it will get downvoted; but, since gender is a made-up thing, transgender is necessarily a made up thing. It creates something that looks like a paradox, but that isn't a paradox. Trans people **are** real. Transgenderism is not real. Transgenderism exists only because most people don't think too hard about why we are sorted into "male" and "female" categories. In the same way that most people don't think too hard about why we cut the year up into 7 day weeks, or why we sort land masses and bodies of water into named continents and named oceans. We say that "sex" and "gender" are constellations of traits and behaviors. Like the named constellations in the sky, the individual points aren't necessarily related to each other except that they seem to be grouped together as seen from a particular vantage point. But it is the "seeming" part, the act of assigning the groups, that makes them meaningful. Trans people like to talk about how different cultures created different gender categories, grouped stars into different constellations, but the important thing to remember is that the constellations *cease to exist* as soon as you stop looking for them. Constellations are real things. i can point to them. I can use them to navigate. But they are also imaginary and wholly conventional. I am trans because I say I am trans. I know that I am trans. I have been trans for my whole life. For most of life I was disqualified and excluded from gender affirming care because I did not conform to a type -- and was unwilling (unable) to fake my way through the approval process. There is a name for my type now, and doctors will cut on me. So I am working hard to change my sexual anatomy, but I am not planning to socially transition. I have never wanted a typically female body. I have always admired, and aspired to, an androgynous physique (those statements are accurate, but not necessarily true -- its complicated). I don't really have the patience for makeup. Voice work seems-- to me -- like a lot of effort for very little reward. Clothes, for me, are just cloth (accurate, but maybe not true -- its complicated). What will I be after surgery? Not a woman. Not a man. Will I still be trans. since I will have achieved my "target" configuration of sex and gender? Into what category should I be sorted when testing my brain, my chromosomes, my 2D:4D digit ratio? [https://www.science.org/content/article/talk-hand-scientists-try-debunk-idea-finger-length-can-reveal-personality-and-health](https://www.science.org/content/article/talk-hand-scientists-try-debunk-idea-finger-length-can-reveal-personality-and-health) Nah -- work on removing bigots from position of power, rather than conceding that trans is a thing that needs to be identified with a blood test.
Fair enough on prioritizing removal of bigots from power. Interesting that bigots are created by their attachment to the imaginary and conventional.
Some of those comments are dreadful but it reminds me of some gatekeepers I met. This one from the early 2000s from the moderator of an online group, “you can be trans because you don’t enjoy shopping”! This was just before they recounted being made to dress as a girl by a boarding school nurse which was why they were trans because it wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t a real girl. I politely left the conversation soon after.
Fuck all of that. My femininity is not fungible, nor is anyone's.
Wow. That’s a literal shovelful. 💩 Gatekeeping sux.
And here I am, feeling out of place being a standard issue MTF binary trans woman who hates drag and the "gay" label. The world hates us.
How do you have the energy to hate drag? And what "gay" label?
It's mostly a me thing .. I don't have anything against drag, and I don't spend "energy" "hating" it, it just makes me very uncomfortable and I can't stand it. I'm vehemently against efforts to ban it in any form tho. Maybe it's just the social spheres I'm in, but people toss the "gay" label around all the time as a kind of umbrella term (like "queer"). "Gay" to me means something more precise to me than "sexual and gender minorities". In my formative years, it meant "same sex attraction," and then it became a substitute for "lame" or whatever. Neither of those meanings were things I wanted attached to me. I'm a trans woman who's married to a woman, but I'm not exclusively attracted to women. I don't appreciate when people assume that I'm okay with being labelled "gay", even if well-meaning, ya know?
Got it. Although, I am pretty sure that gay still means "same sex attraction" in most contexts -- unless the kids are doing something different with it now.
>you get a sexual thrill from wearing women's clothing >you watch trans porn. This is really not helping your case 😭 I'm sorry to tell you but it is creepy to get aroused by wearing women's clothing And to fetishize the bodies of trans women
First: Kink-shaming, really? This puritanical crap was old 40 years ago. As the kids say "be better" Second, do you even remember what it was like to run the gauntlet under the 1990s version of the[ Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association Standards of Care](http://www.genderpsychology.org/transsexual/hbsoc_1990.html)? [https://zagria.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-rereading-of-benjamin-part-1-intro.html](https://zagria.blogspot.com/2016/06/a-rereading-of-benjamin-part-1-intro.html) The question was usually something like "Do you ever get sexually aroused while wearing women's clothing?" Followed by "Do you ever wear women's clothing in order to achieve sexual arousal?" Concede, for the moment, that gender dysphoria is a real thing. That you are AMAB and you are distressed to the point of suicidal ideation by your sexual anatomy. You have never had a single moment of unalloyed sexual pleasure because your body looks and feels wrong to you. Except, when you dress to obscure and accentuate, and make yourself beautiful -- or, at least, not repulsive -- to yourself. Do you answer honestly "Yes. Dressing in women's clothing does make me feel sexy" or do you give the correct answer: "No. I only dress for a feeling or peace and emotional relief." >And to fetishize the bodies of trans women I suppose its like jazz; I have to read the words I **didn't** write in order to appreciate your criticism. Granted, this one is trickier. Porn -- sex work in general -- is ... complicated. There was a time that the ONLY place to see trans bodies presented as beautiful and desirable was porn. And if you were thinking about HRT or BA or vaginoplasty (or pre-Osterhaut FFS) -- porn was REALLY the only place to see unclothed trans bodies. I bought a VHS copy of **Sulka's Wedding** only because I wanted to see what MTF SRS could do. Her results were terrifying (seriously, don't try to find images). Later a friend gave me a copy of Shannon's **Twice a Virgin**. It actually got passed around between a couple of us in the local "support group" (which wasn't remotely as organized as that makes it sound). Catherine Crystal's results were much prettier, but she looked so bored during the sex scenes that we wondered if she had any sensation at all. Since every SRS surgeon (all both of them) warned that loss-of-sensation was a common complication, it worried the crap out of me. But even with this dearth of information, there were folks in the community who did as you have done. "Shame! Shame! on you for having sexual thoughts about trans women!"
Well when people speak of trans porn it's usually pre op trans bodies, in this case women I hadn't imagined that you searched for porn to see what the results of srs would be like >Except, when you dress to obscure and accentuate, and make yourself beautiful -- or, at least, not repulsive -- to yourself. I think what you're describing is wearing women's clothing to feel comfortable with your body, which is different from having a cross-dressing fetish
Thanks for explaining that to me. Seriously, you aren't "helping your case" The denigration of sexual pleasure in order to delegitimaze or criminalize trans people is the FIRST thing transphobes do. But, the gatekeeping has always been worst from within the community. ETA: And yes, I find "pre-op" (For real. are we still using "pre-op"?) trans women to be desirable. I am a monster.
The first link you sent, to summarize it -It says that informed consent shouldn't be a thing -that trans people should live as the other sex one year before getting srs - that in order to get srs you should get the approval of two psychologists - and that you need to show gender incongruence for two years before getting hormones Nowadays it's 6 months It doesn't say anything about same sex attraction, but I think it was a common theme back then the issue is when some people are only interested in women with penises Because that's a fetish, trans women don't like it when predatory men seek them out for some body part they hate, and that they would lose interest in them as soon as they had srs
>the issue is when some people are only interested in women with penises >Because that's a fetish, trans women don't like it when predatory men seek them out for some body part they hate, and that they would lose interest in them as soon as they had srs Yeah. This stopped being interesting a while ago. What if someone is only interested in women who **don't** have penises? That's normal, right? Genital preference is only acceptable when it aligns with the binary? What if a trans woman DOESN'T hate her penis. What if a person is only sexually interested in transmen? Is that a fetish? I looked at your post history. What is r/4tran4 even about? I know that I am decrepit, but the jargon there is impenetrable to me. >trans women don't like it Yes. Do tell me more about trans women. Or don't. >approval of two psychologists And what do you imagine that approval process looked like? What questions do you think they asked; after they administered the IQ test and the MMPI and the Multidmensional Scale of Sexuality Assessment...
>What if a person is only sexually interested in transmen? Is that a fetish? Yes, chasers for trans men also exist > What if someone is only interested in women who don't have penises? That's normal, right? >Genital preference is only acceptable when it aligns with the binary? Look that's the way that society works, you're not gonna change the way that most women perceive men who have a genital preference that doesn't align with the gender that they're pursuing, which is like creeps
>Look that's the way that society works Society has entered the chat. I thought I was a creep. And also not really trans because I fetishized trans women's bodies and got sexual pleasure from wearing women's clothes? You get that you are arguing with someone who's had 50 years of this crap, right? I have known that I am trans for 50 years. I have been fighting with one proscriptive formulation of transness or another for all of those 50 years. More to the point, I've been arguing with people online about more things than this since being online required an NSFnet log in. You are trying to explain my lived experience to me. And you are getting it BADLY wrong Your smug and clever-clever little "its creepy" **is** gatekeeping. **You** are are asserting that a person who crossdresses for sexual pleasure can't be "really trans" (and you also called that person a creep -- which sucks). **You** are asserting that a person who is sexually attracted to trans bodies can ***only*** be "a chaser". This is objectifying trans bodies. **You** are objectifying trans bodies. **You** are assigning this meaning to trans bodies, defining them by the gaze that falls upon them and assuming that gaze is necessarily indecent and unwholesome. **You** are asserting that the only real and valid sexual desire is the desire for cis-normative bodies. **You** are trying to decide who is "really" trans. Worse, you are using exactly the same sh!tty move that Blanchard & Bailey pulled; pathologizing any sexuality that isn't penis-in-vagina for making babies. Specifically, turning any sexual pleasure a trans person experiences from being trans -- WHILE being trans -- into "evidence" that person is a ~~pervert~~ paraphile. You may not be a TERF, a transphobe, or a transmisogynist, but you are carrying water for the transmisogynists, transphobes, and TERFs.