#also kind of highlights why i find angry anon asks so unproductive though

[vamptastic]

I haven't sent you a message like this before.

I wish it were under better circumstances.

Wow, that sounded ominous. Okay, what I mean is that it sounds like you had a rotten morning, and I'm sorry about that. You unwittingly slammed face-first into one of the more tangible weeping wounds in trans femininity, which is how raw it often feels to see anything that appears to doubt or question a trans woman's lived first-person experience.

I'm a trans woman. I understand. After a lifetime of being told "you're sick," then "you're not this way" then "you might be this way but that's sick and you're wrong" and then "fine, we'll treat you, but you're still wrong about everything you report because we have an NIH study from 1973 about chemically castrated prisoners and that's a lot more important than what you say," there is a great deal of sensitivity. Sometimes it almost is pathological- innocuous words take on malevolent shadows just because being a trans woman so often means a state of heart-tight vigilance even among friends.

Being trans femme, also, is one of the worst of intersectional misogynies: You aren't believed about anything and that includes being a woman except you also are dismissed and belittled because you're a woman or at least Not A Man.

But I also could see plainly you were speaking in terms of scientific equivocation, the way an aeronautical engineer would correct a colleague and say, Well, Bill, technically, gravity is just a theory, so we better had approach it that way instead of expecting this to be the same through that wormhole when we bolt on those nacelles.

No matter what, you also phrased things in a way that was without hostility and showed no bad faith.

Moreover, you're literally just some dude on the internet who does not deserve to be made scapegoat for the ten thousand asshole parents, doctors, cops, bureaucrats, and dumbfuck checkout clerks who keep calling a woman with an Instagirl body and a pretty-passing face in full makeup sir because of the name on a debit card.

Nothing excuses any abuse you've suffered.

Sadly, you've also slammed into another hard part of the trans community: There, um, really isn't one.

There are people pressure-welded by common experience, except that experience is mostly negative: Dysphoria, a personal lacking that defies words and easy solution, despair, persecution, the cold terror that turns over in the gut when things grow quiet and stares get too long and people's words rarely are kind.

Common misery does not a community make.

And there are assholes who also transition. I have found a common online culture describing itself as Leftist- whether this is true is the subject for another analytical tirade- has incubated an insane belief that victimhood purifies; well, it doesn't. Pain and hurt and injustice mostly just make people worse, and the worse people are to start the worse it gets.

So there's a lot of "worse" around here, too. There's a galaxy of immaturity, petty cruelty, and high school politics. The victimhood pageant can get intolerable and strident and emboldens behavior that is disproportionate, cruel, and alienating.

You were owed a message like this one: In all my experience, trans women do menstruate. I never have met one who does not. I have a regular cycle I chart on a calendar. There is PMS. I have physical pain, emotional distress (sometimes I'm almost psychotic, to be honest), irrational flares of sexual desire past an already hypersexual person's sometimes-pathological extremes, digestive upset, and other delightful symptoms.

If you're curious, my current protocol is a weekly .25ml dose of estradiol valerate by subcutaneous administration paired with daily 100mg progesterone doses. I am on no other meds but Tadalafil (5mg), which I have not seen is of any clinical significance, but again- there are vanishingly few studies. My menstrual cycle began within approximately a month of starting HRT.

So, of course, anecdotal at best- and these are pretty lousy anecdotal insights for any study, premised as they are on recall and little endocrine tracking with no useful clinical data to offer except irregular ass-covering blood draws for testosterone and estrogen serum levels.

But there is almost no meaningful medical literature on the subject because, well, there is almost no meaningful medical literature on trans medicine at all.

I do not believe you were being dismissive of trans women's lives. I do not think saying, Huh, really? That's interesting. I wish there were more data, is anything close to being dismissive.

People are scared, and they're angry, and at night when you're in that state a beagle with a wagging tail can look like a bristling guard dog if that's all you're used to seeing- which does not at all justify lashing out in any way. This is a mutual sensitivity issue to be solved by communication.

So I'm sorry people were unkind to you. You did not deserve that.

I've always thought you're great in all the time I've known you here, and I still do. You're a very kind, intellectually curious, and open-minded person, and that is amply on display.

I hope things just get better for you and stay great.

:3

i really appreciate this message, thank you! in hindsight i think a better way to phrase my tags probably would've been "this is very interesting, it lines up with my anecdotal experiences and it reminds me of some of the weirdness that comes with PCOS, i'd love to see more studies on this since that's a big area of interest for me" rather than "that's interesting, i think it's probably true" because it left room to assume i think lack of data = lack of phenomenon. PCOS is an area of interest for me and i have some pages of notes on it, so when i see things that remind me of my notes i tend to go oh, civil debate about my hyperfixation time and not oh, you're looking for some recognition from society at large that this thing you deal with is real and deserves study and treatment, not a comprehensive review of the literature.

this is meant as more of an explanation than a wholesale absolvment, but: my dad does this thing when i talk politics with him where he factchecks me incessantly. if i say in a conversation "housing first programs are more effective in getting homeless people employed than shelters kicking them out at 6 am to job hunt", my dad expects that i can pull the name and details of a paper out of my memory mid-sentence to prove it, though he'll still listen to my points on causality and give his opinion if i can't. apparently this is a thing he decided to do on purpose as a Parenting Method, he's not just naturally that much of an ass, but he didn't tell me that until like, last year, and he's done it for as long as i've had enough of a brain to talk politics. which is all to say, i have a strong inner critic who tells me to not make claims without stringent sourcing and add a qualifier (or say nothing) if i'm not sure. being jewish i've had it called my 'inner lawyer' and joke that it's one of my ancestors communicating with me through the veil.

it's also funny that you use the aeronautical engineer example because he's indeed an electrical engineer (and i'm studying environmental engineering) and his workplace related mannerisms probably rubbed off on me. it made me a beast on high school debate team and makes me very good and convincing random people that i'm smart, (which probably further exacerbated the problem lol) but it also means i approach what are meant to be casual questions about my opinions with deadly seriousness and end up earnestly recommending somebody who asked me a one sentence question a 200 page book they'll never read.

qualifiers like 'i think', 'it seems', 'probably', 'most likely', etc are everpresent in my speech and only get more pronounced the more i care about a topic and don't want to get things wrong. it seemed inappropriate and also not worth my time to bother explaining a fundamental aspect of myself resulting from my childhood to an angry tumblr anon though, so i didn't bother. therein lies the problem with sending people you don't know angry anon asks.

in short, i think the person responding was reading in possibly the worst faith imaginable, but they're not wholly unjustified in being annoyed at my phrasing. that's kind of just one of my traits and it's a double edged blade. i try to temper it and i never mind somebody telling me that they disliked my phrasing, though the tone of that anon was needlessly accusatory.

your response, and most of the comments as well as the original post itself, are obviously totally reasonable. the only reason i was on tumblr at the asscrack of dawn was because my sleep cycle is currently in the dumpster, and i didn't read the original post as thoroughly as i normally would or organize my thoughts as well as i'd like to have. i completely agree with the original post. i think your symptoms and those shared by other transfemmes are obviously real, and i want more studies to be done so that people can't pretend they aren't, and so that transfemmes may be more able to alleviate or avoid these symptoms. i truly can empathize with being constantly told that your period symptoms are both not normal and not worth caring about. that is medical misogyny in its most obvious manifestation and it's most certainly something trans women deal with and that transphobes hate to acknowledge.

you are very apt in explaining why this is difficult to study, other than there just not being a lot of research on trans healthcare in general. the same problems with data collection arise and go sorely unaddressed in studies on cis women (frequency of changing of menstrual pads is, imo, virtually meaningless data, for example). it starts to compound when there's also just less care and interest for the health of trans people in general. there's a lot of subpar methodology on the data regarding the average menstrual period that does exist, and not enough interest to then go on and use that to produce better studies. there's also this problem where you have the ability to do a study and say alright, trans women definitely have periods, but it may take much longer for there to be a study saying why (as with PCOS) because the mechanisms of the endocrine system and common disorders thereof seem to just generally be less understood by science than say, the cardio-pulmonary system. it's shocking and awful that there's one, subpar study on this. it feels like so much of the research in trans medicine reflects the fears cis people have about us and neglects our day to day concerns. i hope more trans people get into the medical field and this can start getting better.

in the spirit of solidarity and because i love to kvetch, here's my own experience with periods: i had godawful periods which gradually worsened from age 10ish (precocious puberty) until i finally got on contraceptives at 17. by high school the pain and bleeding were severe and i had begun to get a host of other symptoms. vertigo, brain fog, hot flashes and occasional fevers, gastrointestinal distress, constant hunger pangs due to my stomach muscles spasming combined with constant nausea (no vomiting, luckily), and a spike in libido that was profoundly unpleasant when combined with all the other stuff. i also probably had PMDD but never had it diagnosed. i now take 5mg of norethindrone and haven't had a menstrual period since with virtually zero side effects, and according to my endocrinologist i can keep on doing that until i hit menopausal age.

when i finally did get it figured out, my PCOS diagnosis was then used by medical professionals to suggest i should be first made to try estrogen before pursuing transition to see if it 'fixes' me (i did not actually have low estrogen or high testosterone) if i didn't have obvious proof of an endocrine disorder i'd probably still have a doctor telling me to quit my birth control before 25 for no real reason every time they see my med list. suffice it to say: i empathize, and i hope the medical field improves on this.

i think that's pretty much all i have to say regarding the actual topic the anon was upset over, or at least all i can phrase coherently. as for the rest of your message, i think you're dead on about the problems that keep showing up in the trans community, insomuch as there is one. the raging victim complex that social media seems to foster becomes a thing of beauty when one is legitimately being victimized on a daily basis. it's more tolerable than the rest of the internet by far, but the 'leftist' side of tumblr is just impressively angry, all the time, and incredibly prone to black and white thinking. neither constant self-flagellation nor positioning oneself as the perpetual victim is productive, and both are rampant.

it's a topic that's hard to elucidate and that should probably be its own post but i also relate strongly to experiencing misogyny and then being told that you're not because you're not a 'real' woman. of course this is further complicated by the fact that i don't actually want to be a woman at all. i often feel that transitioning means i have to give up on all of the paltry resources afforded to women in the STEM field whilst still facing increased difficulty at every turn. the degree to which people will perpetuate misogyny against me and then turn around and say, i'm not a misogynist because you're not a woman, whilst also treating me noticably worse than cis men is insane. one of the most maddening aspects of misogyny is that women are mistreated whilst also being told that they lack the mental faculty to know when they are being mistreated. further complicated by trans people generally not being allowed to lay claim on either gender. there's a lot more to be said but i'm going to just leave it that because i really struggle to elucidate how i feel about this.

finally: thanks for the message, i really truly appreciate it. i struggle with RSD a lot and i get terribly anxious over accusatory asks like that, through no real fault of the asker. having a voice of reason say hey you are literally just some guy on the internet and you are not, in fact, responsible for all social evil is a great comfort. i think you are also very kind and incredibly intelligent, and i appreciate that you always approach in good faith and take things seriously. most of my posts are poorly formed musings on things i don't understand well, and it's nice to know that people can read them and see valuable ideas and aren't constantly trying to find the most damning interpretation possible, since that's like half of the activity on this site.

i hope things go (and are going) well for you too :)