think pieces of a curious mind

I often see more gatekeeping presented as a way to prevent detransition. And while this wouldn’t necessarily be useless, it’s a band aid solution. Working harder to root out the “right” people to transition from the “wrong” people to transition isn’t going to eliminate transition regret. To get at why we have to ask, who are the “right” people? Are they the ones are suffering the most or who have been suffering the longest? Are they the most gender non-conforming ones? Are they the ones persistent enough to pass through checkpoint after checkpoint? None of these things insure that transitioning is going to work for someone: that it’s going to improve their quality of life.

When I walked into gender therapy I was suicidal and had been off and on since I was old enough to understand what death was. I was already being regularly mistaken for a boy. I was adamant that I needed this. My therapist called me a “classic case” and still we talked for almost a year before I socially transitioned. I then spent another year living “full time” before starting testosterone and spent my first six months of testosterone on a low dose prescribed by a fairly paranoid pediatric endocrinologist. I met every requirement. I passed every checkpoint. I didn’t take any shortcuts. And still, here I am: a woman, a butch dyke, further from normality than ever, bitter about what happened to me. Because none of those measures addressed my underlying problem.

What we really need if we want potential regretters to not be certain that they need this is a shift in culture. We need environments without misogyny that are affirming of lesbianism and gender non-conformity. We need girls to grow up free from abuse, supported in their mental health and knowing that they can be anything they want to be and anything they are. We need to encourage them to love and live in their bodies and provide immediate solutions if they find that they can’t. Because by the time that many girls step into a gender therapist’s office they’ve already made up their minds, for good reason, that they can’t live this way.

from e-cryptid (deactivated) | thinking of detransition? you are not alone

from tejuina

"rapid onset gender dysphoria" could've been used literally to describe a phenomenon that I do think occurs, but instead it's become this pseudoscientific theory that oversimplifies the issue and touches on everything but the root problem. parents are blaming tumblr and their kid's friend group and the lgbt-friendly teacher at school and of course end up thinking the solution is to isolate their kid and control their life. they blame gender therapists and simultaneously think the panacea is ~good~ therapists, who can occasionally help but are not a substitute for oh, say, the eradication of sexism and homophobia on a systemic level.

rogd implies there's non-rogd trans people aka "real" trans people who can't be harmed by transition if they stick to guidelines set forth by "good" doctors. and on top of that, I think it minimizes the very real problems that rogd teens face that make them vulnerable to "social contagion" in the first place. it's easier to say, "my child was such a normal little girl, nothing was wrong until the internet made her trans!" than to say, "my child grew up in a a patriarchal and homophobic environment" (especially when you contributed to that misogyny and homophobia whoops).

I also hate this assumption that this is just gen z’s ~emo phase~ and that in 10 years everyone will look back and cringe at the phenomenon. things are not going to just magically get better, and they will in fact get worse if we don’t do something about it.

thinking about detransition? you are not alone

— Beauty And Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West, Sheila Jeffreys, 2005, pp. 48-49 (via gaynotqueer)

One weird experience of transitioning is failing at ur assigned gender role the whole time and everyone constantly deriding you for it but then u come out and it's like we lost a beautiful gender conforming warrior today. Must grieve for my wonderful child who pissed me off by being ugly and weird since day 1

so you agree? allowing people to switch between gender identities does nothing to address the root issue of oppressive gender-based societal roles, restrictions and discrimination?

“All feminists are "socialization failures." If the patriarchy functioned perfectly, we would not exist with our current consciousness. Somehow, some of us have managed to slip through the cracks and avoid the attempts of the patriarchy to brainwash us completely. Consequently, we have the ability to imagine a different (world) and to struggle to create it. We must continue to question our assumptions and, through feminist analysis, to detoxify ourselves from a culture that hates women. Through these experiences we are formulating new ways of living and being.”

- Wendy Stock, Toward a Feminist Praxis of Sexuality

direct links!

“Hozier is a lesbian” “Hozier is a man written by a woman” “Hozier is like if a man was raised by lesbian mothers” “Hozier is like if a man was a woman” quick give me one reason why a man can’t be soft and gentle and poetic and in love without sounding like a terf or a misogynist

"terfs" don't believe men can't be soft or gentle or poetic or in love. mostly they're just aware that a man being any of those things doesn't make him any less likely to be an abusive misogynist than any other man

andrea dworkin, our blood

Isn’t it astounding that in spite of six thousand years of sexual, physical, and psychic brutality, women and girls STILL have to be beaten into submission or else we’d all run wild?  And isn’t it amazing that in spite of the ongoing beatings, girls are still wild in the first place, some even stay wild, and even domesticated women can go feral at the drop of a hat?

Isn’t female resilience a fucking thing to behold?  And yet here are these “from the DAWN of TIME” and “it has ALWAYS BEEN” and “there’s NO HOPE” posts, all over radblr, all the time?  It’s like none of you are paying attention to the rest of the story.

wild and traumatized

Adrienne Rich, Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (emphasis mine)

i hate that open and intense man hating is one of the final frontiers of offensiveness. but it does make it so that if u have a shirt with jesus on it that says like "if we can nail one man to a cross we can nail em all" will actually get men upset with you. wearing ur little black metal shirts and images of women mutilated and like a Carcass patch or whatever the hell - its all played out, nobody bats an eye. but OPEN man hating lol i cant believe it

naahh im still mad. all day long u can encounter truly heinous depictions of the female body that are so normalized. just constant onslaught of objectification, mutilation, alienation, and a bad abstraction that projects the message that we are Lesser just all day long all year long. god forbid u walk around with a shirt that shows penis mutilation paired with misandrist text or whatever. final frontier of whats not allowed. remember when the most bitchless reddit incels would walk around with shirts that said FEMINISM IS CANCER in like impact font??? no??

I swear to god we're like, 2 weeks away from the discourse shifting to "trans men aren't really trans they're just butch lesbians." 3 weeks tops.

OP turned off reblogs like some kind of smarmy asshole

can anyone show me one example of transwomen supporting a women's rights cause that doesn't directly benefit them?

can they show me a women's rights cause that they didn't try to derail by language policing women (eg abortion, where they demanded women call ourselves 'uterus havers' and 'birthing bodies' rather than women)?

or one that they didn't try to derail because it centred biological women instead of them (eg trashing the women's march because the pussy hats - which were a direct response to trump's comments about grabbing women by the pussy - were allegedly transphobic)?

transwomen constantly demand 'sisterhood' from biological women, demand we put our issues second to theirs, tiptoe around their feelings in our fight for justice, and even put our safety and comfort aside to make them more comfortable, but they would never do the same for us

the idea that rape rhetoric is divorced from the actions of rapists is why I can’t take most adults seriously

Hello there! Dear tumblr user, did you know that "men as a class hold privilege and power over women" and "men are human beings who deserve basic decency" are two stances that can coexist :)

that's funny, you don't see many men using their internet presence to make posts about how women are human beings who deserve basic decency.