#this brought to you also by the trans history research i've been doing for that makes two of us!

[sureuncertainty]

at first i felt so bad for blocking my mutual who turned out to be a terf, or at least to be transphobic as shit, mostly bc i know this person was having a lot of anxiety about it and made posts about how they were so worried about losing friends etc. over it but you know what i decided fuck that lol good. i hope they feel anxious about it. i hope every transphobe never has a moment's peace

[wirewitchviolet]

That thing about 'the arc of history bending towards justice...'

I'm pretty sure I've gone on about this before, and I'm pretty sure I'm preaching to the choir, but I just had a well-intentioned acquaintance try to give an inspirational speech about American trans people's fears right now, and his heart was in the right place, but all his facts were wrong, in some really important ways. I feel like the perspective he has is the same one as... basically every decent person who isn't like, intimately familiar with WPATH, so please spread this around, and please if you only read one rambling history lesson from a trans person about the current state of things, make it this one.

So here's the big problem. Trans people get brought up in the mainstream media a LOT these days, but the framing is totally wrong. The impression people get is that there is presently a big push for new trans rights, where we want proper government recognition, and trans women in particular want to be able to use public women's restrooms, and play on girls-only sports teams, and a dozen other things. That is a lie you are being fed. These are all rights we ALREADY HAD, for decades. Possibly centuries depending what we're talking about specifically and where we're talking, even. The big issue right now is that a bunch of bigots just woke up one day about 10 years ago and decided that nothing else they were angling for was getting them anywhere with the general public, so hey let's make a boogieman out of this minority of a minority nobody knows the first thing about and act like all the horrors they're inflicting are just them enforcing some totally fictional status quo.

Speaking personally, I can say that The Trans Agenda in like 2014 was something like: 1- I'm gonna make a nice big pot of chili. 2- I'm gonna maybe replay some old video games from the '90s I haven't taken down off the shelf in a while. And OK maybe 3- It'd be cool if it weren't just the medical professionals who specifically specialize in trans stuff had enough of an education to know that when there's a difference in how a drug is going to effect men vs. women, it's for reasons directly tied to the levels of various hormones, or would at least trust their trans patients to know what we're talking about and not give us the wrong doses of things and maybe kill us as a result. And also like, treat us for regular things like broken arms (real example) without weirdly panicking about some prescription we're on they don't recognize.

There was absolutely not a point where some trans woman started petitioning the government or whatever to let her pee in a toilet with a little placard of a stick figure in a dress in front. We've just been doing that the whole time. Nobody's ever had a problem with that. You didn't know we were in there? OK. If I'm like at a restaurant and have to use the bathroom, I don't know how many of the other women in there have like, type O blood. I also don't care, and I think everyone would agree it was weird if I suddenly did care, and demand they post a guard out front asking to see driver's licenses. Just completely out of the blue some nutcases from the UK started foaming at the mouth and writing weird tabloid articles about their completely unfounded fears that... I don't even know. Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs might put on a wig and follow them into the bathroom, dose them with chloroform, and drag them to some basement dungeon through some series of secret passages or something.

This was based on literally nothing at all, to be clear. Like, people pushing for this went and did serious research for anything even anecdotal to back them up on this, and didn't actually find anything. Then they started walking into public restrooms with cameras throwing doors open on people and going "see? See? Some creep could totally do this if we don't ban trans people from using bathrooms!" And... somehow this got traction? I figure it's because coincidentally there was this whole other thing going where people were looking at how every building had equal numbers of men's and women's rooms and saying "you know, like, 90% of people who come in here are the same gender and we end up with really long lines, what if we just took the signs down and told everyone to just use whichever?" which... when it's happening at the same time Chicken Little is ranting and raving about the boogieman wearing a cheap wig, wires got crossed? And suddenly we've got waves of legislation passing all over about who's allowed to use what bathrooms with weird standards that'd involve like DNA tests to actually enforce properly. Absurd stuff.

Meanwhile, your average trans activist at the time was just like... sitting there eating a sandwich and going "huh, they're making a TV series based on Fargo? That's an odd thing to happen out of the blue. And yeah we started going "hey, what the hell?" when this stuff started passing because like... yeah that's what you do when you see an article in the local newspaper that says you can't go to the bathroom at work or whatever without swabbing your cheek and waiting for lab results for 3 weeks first or whatever.

Same deal with sports. Major sports organizations like the Olympics have been weirdly paranoid about men pretending to be women since 1950. And there have been, to the best of my ability to research... zero men who have actually done this. And while the weird standards used for this have been used to kick a good number of women out over the years, none of those women have been trans, for what that's worth. Really, the whole gender testing thing has only ever been used for horrifying stuff like forcing women to strip in front of random creeps, or let them do "invasive internal exams" and of course so many incidents where some woman who isn't white wins at something and people move the goalposts to in some way to get her specifically banned. You may be thinking, "wait didn't I just see a whole bunch of news coverage about someone getting banned after some gender testing thing? She was trans right?" No. You're thinking of Caster Semenya. She's a woman. A cis woman. F on her birth certificate, born with standard issue female genitals, has periods, all that. People are just being weird racists there and crossing the streams with random transphobia. That and just... half-reading stories and making stuff up.

To the best of my knowledge, the total count of trans athletes who have competed in the Olympics would actually be... three nonbinary people, who so far as I can tell all competed against people with the same gender they had on their birth certificates, nothing done medically, so, nobody should have any problem there. Caitlyn Jenner, who didn't come out as a woman until like... 40 years after competing, on the men's team, and Laurel Hubbard, the first and only trans woman to compete at the Olympics as a woman, who placed... dead last, flubbing all three of her lifts.

If we just look at sports in general, OK, there WAS one big famous where a trans woman wanted to compete in a major sporting event, was banned from it, took the organizers to court over it, and the eventual ruling was there was no reason at all she shouldn't be allowed to play against other women. Renée Richards. And this was all the way back in 1976. Nearly 50 years ago now.

And of course in more recent years, again, after a bunch of random bigots just completely out of the blue started losing their minds about trans people with no prompting and started lobbying for new laws banning us from all kinds of things nobody had had a problem with us doing forever, there was Mack Beggs, a trans guy, who was forced, by one of those aforementioned baffling reactionary new laws, to compete on his high school's girl's wrestling team. He didn't want to be there, they didn't want him to be there, but the law said hey, F on your birth certificate, we're classifying you as a girl despite how clearly wrong that is. And then there's been a bunch of other weird cases like that like one state banning trans girls from playing any sports with other girls which only affected one single girl in the entire state, who was playing lacrosse on a team that wouldn't have even existed if she hadn't personally organized it.

But the point here is, trans people aren't asking for anything here. We're just standing here, and people are flipping out and banning us from doing all these things without any prompting. And hell, I THINK this one got shot down in higher courts, but when Florida got the brain worms on this and started passing all the anti-trans legislation they could think of, they actually included a ban on us just standing there! The wording was something like (and I apologize that I can't find it, search engines are useless now), "if a child can potentially see someone who was assigned male at birth who is wearing women's clothes, it's considered sexual assault."

It's important to understand what's actually going on here, both because what's going on here is just plain terrifying, but also because there is this huge segment of the population who has this weird idea that people's rights only ever get better, there's just some weird arbitrary ratcheting where you have to take a number and get in line. Like, "hey, used to be only white men could vote, then eventually the Progress bar filled enough that we let white women start voting too. Then we had to wait for it to fill up again, hey, we're ending this whole segregation of black people thing. Gotta give it another 30 years or so to fill up, now hey, gay people can get married! Don't be impatient trans folks, you just need to stay in line and wait for it to fill again for your turn!"

That's not how anything has ever actually worked. It would frankly be absolutely insane if it actually did, but like, this is an idea people get in their heads because history textbooks really like to gloss over all the stuff that makes the country look pretty bad and promote this whole "stuff is just always getting better!" vibe. But no, sometimes, things just straight up get worse for people. Ten years ago I could go to the damn bathroom, I could have social media accounts, I could access all the medications I need to live, I could safely set foot in any given state in the country... at least if I kept some witnesses around at all times to verify I was not in fact hitting on my would-be murderer in any of the black states on this map.

The problem is NOT that with Trump in power, the pause button is getting hit on trans people climbing towards some state of finally getting to be regular people. We were (largely) already there, and there's been a huge push over the past decade to strip that away from us. And Trump plus the rest of the Republican party in general have made very specific promises to make that way worse real real soon, including several things that will straight up kill a ton of us.

Like, when I'm talking about losing access to necessary medical treatments, I'm not talking about "THE SURGERY" and magic pills that give you boobs or beards. A lot of trans people are trans because there's weird medical stuff that in addition to messing with what does and doesn't grow mess with things like whether your blood flows properly and whether various organs do what they should. Just one of those many things the average person doesn't know, because everything written about us is from deranged bigots making crap up.

[genderfuckpirate]

hey, i don't know if you're like are open to questions and all that here, no worries or anything if not, but i was wondering about, in your experience, if being genderqueer/nonbinary made it harder to get testosterone? i've been thinking a ton about t but something im kind of concerned about the doctors/conservative medical system in my area and maybe if just letting them assume im a binary trans man would be easier? yeah if you have any like insight on that or anything that'd be really really great

(hi!! firstly sorry for never responding to this >_> I mostly use tumblr on my phone and i swear it doesn't actually notify you when someone sends an ask... i hope this finds you!)

OK, the short answer: I basically had no issues with getting on Testosterone as a genderqueer person ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The long answer: where I live has informed consent and I purposely chose a trans friendly medical clinic and doctor that's known to approve HRT. I had been seeing the doctor for quite a while, so they already knew that: I had socially transitioned, that I was seeing a psychologist, and that I don't have any health conditions that would clash with T. I basically asked about it during a check up and left with a form to get bloodwork done and an info pack. I got the bloodwork done and by the next appointment I was given a script.

My advice: Obviously the process is going to be super different for different places, but I did a fuck ton of research before I even asked about HRT and I think it helped. Here's what I would recommend:

Get recommendations for specific doctors / clinics from local trans people. Whether it's people you know or just from asking on your local subreddit - you should be hearing first hand experiences about these places. Places might advertise themselves as "queer friendly" but might not actually be trans friendly. Similarly, your state / country might have informed consent but that doesn't mean that every doctor is going to have experience with approving HRT. Also, if you're in an area where it's going to be best to just pretend your a binary trans man, here's where you're going to hear it.

Have some sort of clear goal for why you're going on HRT. I think this one's really important for genderqueer folks because your goal might not be to simply 'pass' as a different gender. I didn't fully know what I wanted out of T but I showed up to the appointment saying that I was specifically seeking a deeper voice and more body hair, which helped the doctor to understand my overall gender goals and see that T was right for me.

Do you research and show that you've done your research. Being informed is a huge part of informed consent. I asked my doctor about low dose Testosterone immediately and I brought a list of specific questions and concerns (things like "I know Testosterone can raise blood pressure and I already take X, would that be problem?" and "I see that it can affect Y and I have a family history of Z, how would impact me?"). I think this really helped to reassure my doctor that I knew what I was getting myself into.

I am super, super lucky that I live in a country that has informed consent, affordable doctors, free bloodwork and government subsided medication so obviously experience is NOT universal in any way but I hope that this still helps! :) Good luck with your journey anon!

[genderkoolaid]

I mean, I absolutely am aware that posts out there like the ones I want DO exist. The post that prompted this wasn't even by someone I was following, it was a post on Instagram about trans Muslim history– which I was very excited about, but was disappointed by because while it gave important information on transfems, it did not even mention transmasculinity despite claiming to be about general trans history.

This isn't even just a Posting™ problem. If you look up studies on trans people with HIV for example, the overwhelming majority is focused on trans women, even if the study also includes men who have sex with men. By which they mean cis men, yet don't think that's important to include despite making it a point to respect trans women's identities and talk about transphobia. (& this has real dangerous effects on transmascs, since PrEP isn't advertised to them & little research is done on how effective it is when it comes to vaginal sex). I have seen countless articles talking about how trans people used to be worshipped, only to exclusively talk about the gala and hijra without ever bringing up transmascs even to address their absence, or talk about two-spirits but only those who were MTF. I literally went through and counted the people on the trans history Wikipedia list at one point, and especially in the historical sections, transfems drastically outnumbered transmascs.

I definitely do see posts about transmasc history, but I also specifically follow people who talk about transmasculinity and actively seek out information on transmascs. It's not that these don't exist or are never ever talked about. But like... erasure is one of the only things people agree transmascs consistently suffer from. I've seen plenty of people talk about being in classes where trans people are brought up, only for their teachers to completely ignore transmascs and even justify their absence by arguing that no one cared about transmasculinity, or transmascs simply didn't exist in that part of history. Obviously people's experiences vary, this is not universal to every post, article, class, group, etc. but it's a widespread and systematic issue regardless. There's a reason basically every paper researching transmasc starts out their introduction with "Very little research has been done on transmascs so we barely know anything about their experiences."

another day another post claiming to give information about transness in history that literally only brings up transfeminine people. can we please stop using "trans" to mean "only transfems because i either can't be bothered to research transmascs & others or don't think it's important to point out the absence of information on transmascs & others"