#cONSIDER THEY'RE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH GUYS KNOWING THEIR GENDER ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE AWARE THAT A LOT OF GUYS

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

first of all, this is all legit, and not bait, though i have a feeling it may come off that way, this did happen to me. please don't publish if tumblr sends it off anon.

i'm a lesbian with gender dysphoria, and while i haven't had much sexual experience, i would consider myself a stone top. in the last year and a half i began reading "terf"/radical feminist writings and reading "terf" tumblr blogs fairly actively, largely out of frustration with misogyny i was experiencing IRL. though i never engaged with the community i did stop identifying as genderfluid and started understanding my dysphoria as stemming from the trauma of being bullied by other girls for having a high-androgen DSD, and using different pronouns/transition thoughts as unhealthy coping mechanisms. i'm happy with this, but i also don't know if i'm attracted to women anymore.

i've always been attracted to women in a way that's stereotypically guy-like; i find feminine women very attractive and not so much fellow(?) butches, want to penetrate with a strap on, don't like bush much, cursory interest in BDSM/daddy kink. i read/watched het erotica and porn sometimes and identified with the man. what i read problematized pretty much every aspect of that- femininity as a cage, penetration as violence/straps as disidentification w the female body, infantilization of women, bdsm as abuse etc. also, desisting making me more conscious of dysphoria/knowledge of how extensive sexual dimorphism is putting me off both women with larger breasts and hips AND smaller breasts and hips/unrealistically masculine body types as well. so a lot of what turned me on before isn't arousing anymore, or i feel guilty about it, and i haven't been able to find butch4butch stuff which is much healthier very interesting.

i consider my sexuality healthier now on a political level but my ability to get aroused/jerk off has plummeted (used to be i could jork it sunrise to sunset) and thinking about being in a relationship w another woman makes me feel uneasy and weird, especially since a lot of what i read emphasized reciprocative cunnilingus/tribbing (which i don't like) as the healthiest sex options. i also think about both my dysphoria and my sexuality issues 100x more than i did before, even though i was promised the opposite (freedom from dysphoria and feeling happier as a lesbian), and it's stressing me out day-to-day. i'm aware based on your general ethos that you probably think i'm a terrible person right now, but i figured it'd be useful to seek the opinion of someone who radically disagrees with what i've read on what i could/should do next, since i admittedly miss being at peace with my sexuality.

thanks for reading.

hi there anon,

it's a bummer that you'd think I would assume you're a terrible person based on everything you've told me here. I generally try not to consider people terrible unless they're actively being shitheads or hurting other people, which doesn't sound at all like you're describing. from what you've told me, you've been up to your eyes in some information that's made you feel deeply uncomfortable in your sexuality and now you're seeking out a new perspective to help you make sense of that hurt. that describes most of the people who send me questions!

it's so striking to me that much of what you're describing is very reminiscent of what's recounted in The Persistent Desire, an anthology of writings on butch/femme identities edited by femme historian and archivist Joan Nestle that was released in 1992. in various essays and interviews countless butches and femmes recount their discomfort with the feminist turn against butch and femme identities that too place in the 70s, when both roles were declared problematic recreations of heterosexuality and summarily decried as politically "incorrect" for lesbians. it's shocking to me how much what you've described echoes these accounts experienced by lesbians half a century ago - the disowning of women who are "excessively" feminine or masculine, the demonizing of penetrative sex, general insistence that there are "correct" sex acts that every lesbian is supposed to enjoy, and the deep discomfort and insecurity that this causes among people who don't fit into the very rigid standards of proper lesbian identity set forth.

here's a link to a PDF, if that's interesting to you at all. it's very long, so feel free not to read it straight through; it's a great project to skim and an incredible way to get in touch with the lesbians who came before us. their accounts of their lives are so wildly different from the boundaries of "good" queer representation that feel so universal today; in discussing their own lives many of these women speak very bluntly about their experiences with abuse, drugs, sex work, and violence. it's a great glimpse into the lives and history of a lot of very ordinary lesbians just living their lives, and I'm very grateful it's been preserved.

now, as for what you're actually gonna do: hey. listen. first of all, if you haven't given up reading this stuff yet, you've gotta. you simply cannot keep internalizing stuff that makes you overanalyze your own sexuality so hard that you feel uncomfortable about being attracted to women. that's not "healthy," that's conversion therapy lite. there are other places to talk about feminism without being made to feel ashamed of yourself.

listen: there's nothing unhealthy about anything that you described about yourself. being a stone butch, being attracted to certain looks and aesthetics, watching porn, wanting to use a strap and roleplay during sex and not being interested in other sexual activities - all of those thing are completely normal and, yes, healthy. certainly healthier than feeling the need to repress your sexuality so hard that thinking about being with a woman doesn't feel right!

should we run through that list?

femininity as cage - sure, okay, femininity isn't for everyone, and there are parts of it that suck. that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with women who like to wear dresses or put on makeup or shave or whatever, or anyone who's attracted to those women. genuinely I cannot think of anything less interesting or important to feminist organizing than getting hung up about what people want to wear. it's clothes, dude. it's fucking clothes. pick a more important hill to die on, I implore you.

penetration is not the same thing as violence. there's just nothing to debate about that one; it's patently absurd to pretend that every act of penetrative sex is rape and you'd have to fundamentally misunderstand how consent works to believe that.

straps are not about "disidentification with the female body," they're about augmenting a sexual experience. a strap-on is not more problematic than a vibrator or a massage oils or a pillow used to prop up a body part. unless those are also bad? are those bad? are pillows disidentifying from the female body also? I'm not up to date on this.

straight up I don't even know which part of your whole deal the infantilization of women is supposed to address, but a thing that I've always found interesting about a lot of radical feminists who are deeply distrustful of sex is the way that many of them seem to assume that women can't be trusted to understand their own sexual desires and need to be taught what's appropriate. seems kind of condescending to me, personally.

BDSM isn't the same thing as abuse. abuse, crucially, is not a situation that people can safe word out of or negotiate the constraints of. it's kind of like how, you know, I purposefully pay people to shove needles in my skin when I want a tattoo, but I wouldn't be stoked about it if somebody just ran up to me in public and started stabbing me without any warning or conversation. context is crucial. there can certainly be abusive people within BDSM spaces, but that's true of people of literally every sexual proclivity on earth, and certainly not an innate feature of BDSM. it's just make believe, dude. it's dress up. it's sex LARPing.

also, psst, hey. that thing about being attracted to women in a "guy-like" way? no such thing. men are humans, dude; they experience attraction in as many different ways as anyone else. for every dude interested in the same stuff as you there are men yearning for hairy women, muscular women, masculine women, women who will dominate them, women who would rather be eaten out then penetrated, and so on. to say nothing of the men who aren't into women at all! and, as is obvious from your own experience, men don't have a monopoly on those kinds of feelings, anyway! there are no men or women feelings, dude; it's all just people having feelings and fighting for their lives trying to figure out what they're into to.

I want to particularly talk about that last bit, where you mentioned not enjoying or wanting to engage in cunnilingus or tribbing. that's totally fine! people like different shit in all kinds of combinations - I'm personally a huge fan of getting eaten out and scratched up or bitten, but I don't do penetration and I've genuinely never met anyone who actually liked tribbing - and there are absolutely people out there who will, to paraphrase the poet Tinashe, perfectly match your freak.

(have you heard about the perpetual, critical shortage of tops that the queer community faces? you'd be a godsend, just saying.)

also, actually, hey I wanted to circle back to another thing as well: it's deeply alarming to me that whatever radfem stuff you've been reading has you feeling "put off" of women with wide hips and large breasts as well as women with small breasts and hips. what is wrong with either of those? both of those are just ways that women naturally look. women just look a wide variety of ways, and it's sad that that's upsetting you now. just thinking about this, conceptually, is giving me hives.

having been up to your eyes in all of this, I can definitely understand why you'd feel the urge to overanalyze you own gender and sexuality to the point of completely talking yourself out of identifying with anything that feels good for you. as I said, that's actually not healthy in any way, and as a sex educator I can't say that I think anyone genuinely invested in your well-being would want that for you.

entirely aside from their feelings on trans people, which I obviously disagree with pretty vehemently, one of the things about radfems that's most endlessly vexing to me is the insistence that such an extremely narrow range of sexual behaviors are appropriate. seems like a miserable way to live, and I sincerely hope you can detangle yourself from the morass of shame it's landed you in. you deserve better.

[saxophones]

What made you detransition or rather how did you realize you no longer identify as such? /gen

Well basically I went to a gender therapist per the recommendation of my regular therapist (who fully believed I was trans but she didn't feel comfortable prescribing HRT considering her lack of experience in the field). I had about 20 sessions with him and at one point after about 8 he said that based on the criteria for gender dysphoria he was prepared to write me a prescription for HRT but he wanted to know that I was comfortable with it. I realized I wasn't because giving up the possibility of having biological children hit me like a huge truck. I am aware that some trans men can get pregnant but it's not a sure thing for everyone and also the idea of being perceived as a pregnant man made me very uncomfortable (back then I would have said dysphoric, in reality I'm sure it was just the social stigma), more uncomfortable than the idea of being perceived as a pregnant woman. I am adopted and I have seen firsthand how hard it was for my mom to not have her own bio kids. She still feels sad about it even though I am enough for her. I had always planned on having kids and went through a phase when I was 15 or 16 where I was researching pregnancy in-depth. This should have been another sign I was cis lol.

Anyway so I told my gender therapist I wanted to wait and have a couple kids with a likeminded bisexual cis man or trans woman and then transition. We then spent several sessions talking about other things entirely. In my mind I still identified as a closeted trans man for another year or so but I only told my boyfriend at the time who was bi so he didn't care and I un-came out to my parents - told them it was just a phase and they were relieved. :(

While I was dating that guy, I had a huge crush on a different cis guy who was straight. With this straight guy I would fantasize about having a straight relationship and straight sex, and eventually I did start dating him but didn't really feel the desire to come out to him as trans. I felt weird about having come out to my old bf and I wished that I could just pretend to be a cis woman again to everyone I knew. At some point it occurred to me that while the obvious explanation for this is that trans identity is stigmatized, many trans people do feel relieved when they come out regardless, especially to people that are as supportive as my boyfriend and friends were. It instead occured to me that I wanted to present as a cis woman because I WAS a cis woman but I was still kind of throwing ideas around in my head, not sure what was going on.

Then I happened to go on the subreddit for OCD and they had a bunch of subreddits for specific obsessions listed in the sidebar. I didn't know what /r/tocd stood for so I checked it out and it turns out there is a pretty common subtype of OCD based on the persistent idea that you're trans despite no evidence for this or pre-existing desire to transition (I think the sub is /r/transOCD now). I read through a bunch of posts on there and it basically explained everything I had gone through in the past few years. It was an OCD-based intrusive thought like my old ideas about having to do every problem in the math textbook or having to wear purple to open my crown chakra. Unfortunately this one was spurred on by a bit of social pressure like those posts that are like, "If you even are thinking about being trans, that means you're trans, cis people don't think about this shit" and egg memes on Reddit. Obviously there is also social pressure to NOT be trans but when you've filtered your social circle so stringently that it doesn't include any bigots and therefore anyone who would pressure you to not be trans, the pressure to accept it if you're thinking about it can be stronger in reality.

Like I'm sure that a lot of people who wonder if they're trans are the real deal, a much higher number than the general population, but people with OCD should stay far away from ideas like "If you think about X you are X." OCD makes you fixate on completely random things that have nothing to do with reality, they're not necessarily things you're afraid of, just because you fixate on being trans doesn't mean you're afraid of trans people or dislike them - it just means it's something that your brain has decided to latch onto because it's stuck in a horrible anxiety loop. Maybe I was afraid of being a man in women's spaces and the anxiety that unconsciously provoked in them, or of never coming across as feminine enough, or of my hypersexuality meaning that I was some sort of failed woman. There may very well be a rational root of the obsession but unfortunately TERFs and other people skeptical of trans people existing at all will take that and spin it to be an explanation for everyone who identifies as FTM. I'm sure a lot of trans men had similar feelings to me growing up in a lot of areas but the difference is that they have male brains and I simply don't, they're happier being men socially and physically as much as possible and I am happy with the opposite. So I hope no one takes my personal experience out of its personal context. If you have any more questions feel free to ask and sorry for the novel :)

[yanoharuhito]

please don't misgender the artist. Are you not a seki x yano shipper yourself? fujo/fudan is just a term for people who like boys love. Most of the sekiyano artists in the Japanese fandom are considered fujos themselves. Because of fujos sekiyano was able to gain popularity. Meteor himself is friends with many fujoshi. People have taken 'proship' to an extreme and assume it means people who ship only 'problematic' content, in reality in means people who 'ship and let ship'. It doesn't mean a proshipper likes every single taboo subject, rather that they understand that the content is fiction and won't judge people for what they enjoy in fiction. I really think you are taking this a bit too extreme. They haven't done anything wrong but simply exist.

hey woah man. i already addressed that in the last ask i received and removed the term. i was initially not of the knowledge that the term was gendered and i thank you both (assuming you're separate anons) for pointing it out to me. it was my bad.

but furthermore, i'd like to explain why i'm not fond of the term fujoshi, especially now that i'm more aware of its meaning. if we're using the most commonly accepted definition, then it's a girl or otherwise non gay man who is a fan of BL/yaoi. as a gay man, it makes me endlessly uncomfortable that the sexuality i identify with is often fetishized to a degree. and it's not just gay guys too, this kind of sexualization and bastardization of our queer identities spans over the entire LGBT+ community. i think it's way too often that (in this case) gay men get bogged down to fap material and seen as inherently sexual objects. it also bothers me that you felt the need to tell me how i should and shouldn't feel as a gay man regarding the fetishization of gay people.

and i'm not saying that YOU, the writer of this ask, explicitly see gay guys as sex objects (because i feel like that would be a REALLY stupid leap in logic,) but what i'm getting at is that the term 'fujoshi' and its related terms come from a place of fetishization and i can't be comfortable with that. even if the content that supplies ships i genuinely enjoy is sourced from places that make me uncomfortable.... it's not really like there's many other places to go? there's a frustrating lack of gay content in the west that i can connect with and i find it absolutely annoying that i have to search for fan content from these people because it makes *me* compliant too. it's a byproduct of the system currently in place. and it frustrates me that there are people out there who choose to self identify as fujoshis/fudanshis/the like who in the same breath insist that they're "the good ones" without bothering to acknowledge the feelings of the gay men being portrayed in these works. and even when they do acknowledge it, a lot of the time they choose to remain compliant. it weirds me out and i'm entitled to feel that way.

and this segways into the proshipper thing. i'm aware of what the term means. i still find myself feeling less than comfortable with it. you highlight that the term means "ship and let ship" and that it doesn't inherently mean that you're a supporter/fan of "problematic" pairings and the like. i would still like to argue though, that if you fall into the more neutral category under that term... i still find it pretty weird that you're willing to be compliant with others who DO engage with these alleged problematic pairings. like, i don't know man, but i personally put myself a million figurative miles away from a shotacon/lolicon. if you don't feel weirded out by those people, then fine, but i'm going to question you too at that point. take a shot every time i say "compliance" in this post.

and let me be perfectly clear. i have no grudge against any of you. i don't know you, and the only person among you whose identity i'm even remotely aware of is someone i've only interacted with minimally. i've not gone after anyone, and the direct conversation i've had with anyone has been entirely civil. to tell me how to feel, that i'm overreacting, that i'm taking things to the extreme-- that's what i feel particularly insulted by. and i'm not going to pick a fight with you because clearly we disagree and i assume you're as stubborn as i am. that's okay. but i don't appreciate having people come into by ask box telling me that it's "extreme" of me to simply make attempts to distance myself from people i disagree with.

(as a small footnote, i'd like to make note that i don't have the energy to go into depth about the fiction affecting reality bit, because for one, it would increase the length of this post by a mile, and two, it's already been discussed by people more eloquent than me. if you're that curious about it, i implore you to seek out others who share my opinions to give their two cents about it.)