#I hate that religious people have a stupid little answer for everything. I shouldn't say religious as a blanket statement

[neverendingford]

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[daughter-of-sapph0]

May I ask what helped you decide you wanted to convert? For me, there's always been a fascination with Jewish culture that grew into a lot of love for all of the aspects of religion. As a queer person, the celebration of survival against all odds really spoke to me as well as the deep philosophical nit-picking of the Talmud and what god even means. The fact that you even be Jewish and convert as well without even fully believing in god is very meaningful to me.

I haven't started my conversion process yet because the only synagogue near me has some pretty bad politics but I really hope to be able to start one day

Anyway I hope you have a nice day💖

I've had this ask in my inbox for days because I've spent forever just thinking about how to answer it. I'd say it's really two big things that made me want to convert. the first thing being the people around me who were Jewish and had a love for their religion, and the second being my catholic mother.

let me explain the my mother first. I was raised catholic. my mother comes from an Irish catholic family, so from birth to about 8th grade I was raised as a catholic. I never really questioned it any. my dad was lutheran, and even though he wasn't religious, we sometimes went to mass with his parents. and we also had lots of friends who were all different flavors of christian, so I had a pretty diverse experience of what it ment to be christian. but that's the thing, I only knew about christianity. I mean, I knew other religions existed. I knew that other people believed things that were different than the things I believed. I knew there were different traditions and holidays and such. but I knew basically nothing about it until I got to middle school.

I went to a very small catholic school for middle school. I had previously gone to a public elementary school. but at 6th grade, my mother really wanted me to go to the school she went to when she was a kid. it was a tiny little k-8 brick building connected to the local church that couldn't have had more than 200 kids in the entire school. it was basically the same as public school, although the math program was a year ahead so I was doing geometry in algebra 1 in 8th grade instead of 9th. we had a religion class that was basically history revolving around early christianity. I say that because although they said it was the history of Jewish people before Jesus, it was taught in a very christian-centric way.

I wouldn't say it was a bad school. there was never any forced political views. there was an optional field trip to go to the march for life anti abortion thing in DC, and I wanted to go (because I was a stupid kid who had no idea what abortion even was and just wanted to visit DC) but my mom told me I really shouldn't and explained why she's pro choice. I distinctly remember this conversation with her, because it was at that point I realized that christians, even of the same dinomination, have wildly different views, but you aren't really allowed to talk about it.

I can't remember a lot about the school. I just remember that I was bullied a lot. I had severe undiagnosed adhd and autism, plus I was struggling with my own sexuality and gender. although the school wasn't outright homophobic, it wasn't like they were hosting pflag meetings either. so I kinda bottled my emotions up until high school. it was at that time I became an atheist. I was questioning the concept of an all knowing and all loving god who would make a world with so much hate and violence and sadness in it. I couldn't accept that god loved me, knew everything about me, made me the way I am, but also hated me because I was gay and disabled. obviously I wasn't taught this at middle school. but I heard it online from homophobes and ablists using religion to harm others, and I associated this with all christians. I didn't hate christianity, I just didn't want to be a part of it.

so anyway, I was an atheist for a while. for about two years in high school. I wasn't a reddit atheist or an antitheist. I still respected other people's religions. I just didn't believe in any of my own. I was still questioning my gender at this time, and I struggled a lot with grades especially in my freshman year. I finally started going to therapy and taking meds to help focus, and my grades drastically improved my sophomore year. (I just realized that those terms probably mean nothing to non-americans. freshman is first year of high school, or 9th grade. sophomore is second year of high school, or 10th grade. junior is third, or 11th grade. and senior is fourth, or 12th grade)

my mom was always supporting me through all of this. she accepted me with everything that was going on in my life, whether it's religion or sexuality or disability or gender. she was the first family member I came out as trans to. and she has been nothing but supportive and loving for my entire life. she like, the exact opposite of a conservative christian. she uses her religion and her faith to spread love, and not hate. and even though at this point I wasn't a christian, she still supported me because of her being raised as a catholic to love everyone. and she never forced me to go to church or change back to catholicism or anything. she let me do my own thing and supported everything I did.

anyway, I came out as trans during the middle of my junior year. I had just been through a rough breakup with a really nice guy, but he helped me figure out my gender shit and made me realize I could be whatever gender I wanted to be as long as I was happy. we stayed friends for a while after that. but he was a year older than me so we didn't really talk after he graduated. but he helped me realize I was trans. and now I started to feel better and more confident about myself. I made friends with a lot of people online. I specifically made efforts to make friends with all different types of people. I had always been a pretty liberal person and social justice advocate. but I wanted to try and learn more about the world beyond my very limited experience. and either by coincidence or fate, I ended up being friends with a lot of transgender Jews. I spent a lot of time learning about Judaism and what it ment to be Jewish. idk what it was, but I felt a really strong connection to my Jewish friends.

but anyway, I'm going through high school, in my senior year, while also taking night classes at community college. just going about life, taking sociology and psychology, while also being a social justice advocate online. when BOOM, pandemic. everything stopped. I graduated high school, but college switched to online and my grades tanked again. it was just like freshman year, except now I was paying nearly two thousand dollars a semester. so I quit. I would have became a total shut in if I hadn't met some really nice people who lived nearby. they helped me be more confident with my self image and personality. I went out more, safely of course because it was the pandemic. I decided I wasn't going to quit college, but just take a break until in person classes started again. I had a few jobs in retail and restaurants, which all absolutely sucked. and I spent a lot of time meditating and thinking to myself about philosophy. since I had a lot of free time, I read a lot. different religious texts and commentaries on those texts. I started to realize that I was religious, but I just didn't know how. I told my current philosophy to some of my friends, most of whom happened to be Jewish, and they said it sounded very similar to Judaism. so I looked into it. in fall of 2020, I reached out to a local rabbi, and told him I wanted to convert to Judaism. he denied me three times as per tradition, but finally said that if I wanted to be Jewish, I had to make sure it was the right religion for me. I had to study and ready and learn. converting is a long process, and usually takes years. I'm almost two and a half years into my conversion process. and from reading and talking with other Jewish people, I'm learning more every day. I've had times where I've doubted myself. where I felt like I had imposter syndrome, or like it wasn't my choice to convert. it's been hard sometimes. but I haven't given up. I'm staying with it because I truly love Judaism and Jewish people and traditions and culture and the thousands of different approaches to god and faith.

converting is gonna be different for everyone. but in general, it's not easy. and it's not supposed to be. you're not really supposed to convert out of Judaism. you can be a Jewish atheist. but once you're Jewish, you're intended to be Jewish for life. so all that time you spend studying and learning is supposed to make you ask yourself over and over and over again "are you sure". and every single time I've asked myself that question, the answer has always been "yes".

sorry this turned out to be more of a life story than a simple answer as to why I chose to convert. but there is no simple answer. I didn't just wake up one day and decide to be Jewish. it was a long process from the millions of decisions and choices by me and the people around me that lead me to where I am today. in religion, philosophy, art, and life in general, there are no such things as simple answers. so, find beauty in the complexity of the universe.

thank you, anon

[hussyknee]

This is a lovely answer, OP, and absolutely true - a lot of people do stand with you!

But first, I gotta say - nonnie, your feelings are valid and I'm really sorry you feel so isolated. But aces and aros felt the exact same way you do right now when the exclusionism was raging (we have literal PTSD from the gaslighting and invalidation and our communities haven't even begun to recover). Things are still only a little better for aros I think, and the fact that they were invisibilized by us aces, who should have been their closest allies, did not help. Neither did the fact that many gay and bi aces also joined allo exclusionists in their hate campaigns.

Idk whether you mean you witnessed the discourse or experienced it for yourself as one of the targeted people. But there are trans masc bi/pan/ace/aro/enbies who have had to bear the brunt of each and now have to listen to other trans mascs tell them "but those weren't this bad". You get how that's an extremely shitty thing to do, yeah? You get who you sound like?

To get back to OP's point - as a well-meaning cis person who's only now really starting to learn about trans issues, the majority of us didn't even know this TMA/TME stuff was a thing. Nobody who isn't Extremely Online knows about it. The first person to try and tell me that trans men had it easier than trans women was himself a trans man, and if he hadn't been a close friend I would have gotten angry, because I had another trans masc friend in my own country who I'd watched get stalked, harrassed, and beaten up and thrown out by his own father. (Luckily that trans masc friend wised up, and later became the one who introduced me to the transandrophobia discussions happening here.)

I live in a country where homosexuality is still criminalised and life is extremely dangerous for queer people of all stripes. The only thing that protects most of us is socio-economic class. But none of the real life trans femmes I know would ever have even thought to compare their struggles to trans mascs, just like the trans folk in my queer circles don't compare themselves with enbies. Because it's fucking weird, incredibly assholish and plain stupid. The challenges queer people face depend on race, country, city, income bracket, religious affiliation, culture, ability, neurodivergence - so, so many variables! The same way that all men don't have uniform privileges over all women! Anything that tries to impose some kind of universality along gender and sexuality lines are fundamentally imperialist, colonial, radfem and white as hell.

So it really shouldn't be necessary for trans mascs to stand and argue ad nauseum that transandrophobia is real and as pressing a problem as transmisogyny. I can't imagine the level of brain rot needed to believe otherwise. By which I mean that indoctrination is necessary to make the average progressive person believe it, and it's not easy to indoctrinate the average person with neither the time nor a reason to listen to niche interest logic gymnastics.

None of this means that your feelings of alienation and fear are invalid or unfounded. That's the whole point of targeted harrassment - they infringe on your spaces, surround them and bombard you with hate. It's a way of making the world seem smaller and smaller, cutting off escape, drain your emotional and mental energy and drown out everything except their vitriol. So even when they're not around, the stressed out and traumatized part of you is still on alert for the faintest hint of them. They need to do that because they know full well that they're a minority, and that's a large part of why they feel so threatened. Like all radical fundie gatekeepers, they know the majority doesn't care about this shit and that their ideology depends on obstinate belief over reason.

I'm just really sorry that this is happening to you all, and that you feel so alone. The rest of us are very much failing you by not stepping up, or avoiding those conversations because of the intra-community nature of the issue.

i'm really frustrated because like. idk i keep seeing people argue that people not taking trans men seriously and basically saying we don't have any real problems is similar to the exclusionary cycle that nb people, asexual people, pan people, etc. have faced on here but like. i was here for all of those things, and during all of them there was like, at LEAST a sense of solidarity with certain people who weren't those identities who were considerate enough to stand against the abuse that was being slung at them and provide safety in some regard. this doesn't feel similar at all. nobody who isn't transmasculine seems to think that it's not some kind of huge joke, and even a lot of people who ARE transmasculine are making posts on the daily about how we "wanna be oppressed so bad". the very most i've seen from anyone else is just ignoring it with the implication every now and then that they think trans men are Cringe and just leaving it at that. if anything, this feels more like how "mogai" identities are treated, with absolutely nobody who doesn't have a "weird" gender or orientation willing to defend them existing, and even the most otherwise open-minded seeming people in the community parroting some article about how "microidentities are indicative of internalized homophobia/transphobia/are tearing the community apart by existing" now and then. i hate that for them and i hate that it seems like that's how it seems like trans men talking about experiencing transphobia are going to be seen from now on. it's so exhausting that nobody that isn't one of us seems to care and/or seems affronted by the very idea that we might face oppression because it means we're "talking over people that face REAL oppression". i don't know if i can handle it anymore

I really relate to this, anon. It's really hard to see the flippancy and callousness with which we are being treated, and I think it's taken a large toll on a LOT of transmascs' mental health recently, including mine.

I do want to say, though, that we are very much not alone in this. In fact, one of the major reasons I started "believing in" transandrophobia was because of @stopcannibalizingourown, who was the first non-transmasc I saw talking about this. Seeing a transfem talking about transandrophobia and treating it seriously made me realize it wasn't "scary transmisogyny word I shouldn't use if I want to be an ally" and that directly led to me creating this blog (endless thanks to you, Tera <3)

There's other non-transmascs who have spoken out against the hate we get for talking about transandrophobia, and it's my opinion that honestly, a lot of people stand with us. I think part of the problem is that transandrophobia being so new, and such a "controversial subject" (the idea that men can experience oppression directly tied to their manhood), is a large reason why there is so much pushback. But I believe that eventually more and more people will hear about it and listen to us, and this wave of anti-transmasc activism will pass. One of my favorite quotes is this one, by Angela Davis: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” It's something I've repeated to myself a number of times while running this blog, and in general when I feel exhausted by the weight of hatred and oppression in the world. We have to have hope that things will get better, and use that hope (along with our love for one another and our anger at injustice) to keep moving forward.