#trans essays

[llyfrenfys]

Y llyfr heddiw yw 'GENDERqUEER' a olygwyd gan Joan Nestle, Clare Howell a Riki Wilchins, a gyhoeddwyd yn 2002.

Mae'r llyfr hwn yn casgliad o draethodau rhyweddgwiar. Defnyddiwyd rhyweddgwiar yn y 1990au a'r 2000au i olygu unrhyw un yn croesi normau rhywedd - cydryweddol neu drawsryweddol, bwtsh neu ffem, wrywaidd neu fenywaidd, deuaidd neu anneuaidd - y ddau ac y naill na'r llall. Yn ddiweddar, mae'r term wedi dod yn olygu dim ond anneuaidd, ond mae'r term mewn gwirionedd yn ymbarél mawr. Mae'r traethodau'n ddisgrifio trawsnewid menyw i ddyn, rhyw lesbiaidd, menywod bwtsh, rhyw hoyw cyntaf, dysfforia rhywedd ac yn y blaen.

Dyma'r llyfr yn bwysig iawn imi - rwy'n ddyn traws ac yn rhyweddgwiar fy hun!

Ydych chi wedi darllen y llyfr hwn?

/

Today's book is 'GENDERqUEER' edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell and Riki Wilchins, published in 2002.

This book is a collection of genderqueer essays. Genderqueer was used in the 1990s and 2000s to mean anyone crossing gender norms - cisgender or transgender, butch or femme, male or female, binary or nonbinary - both, or neither. Lately, the term has come to mean just nonbinary, but the term is actually a huge umbrella. The essays describe female-to-male transition, lesbian sex, butch women, first gay sex, gender dysphoria and so on

. This book is very important to me - I'm a trans man and genderqueer myself!

Have you read this book?

[androgynealienfemme]

"I know what butch is. Butches are not beginner FTMs, except that sometimes they are, but it's not a continuum except when it is. Butch is not a trans identity unless the butch in question says it is, in which case it is, unless the tranny in question says it isn't, in which case it's not. There is no such thing as butch flight, no matter what the femmes or elders say, unless saying that invalidates the opinions of femmes in a sexist fashion or the opinions of elders in an ageist fashion. Or if they're right. But they are not, because butch and transgender are the same thing with different names, except that butch is not a trans identity, unless it is; see above."

-"I KNOW WHAT BUTCH IS", Butch is a Noun, Essays by S. Bear Bergman (2006)

[corpsentry]

pick your battles

[auramgold]

The Abuser's Guide to Transmisogyny

aka "How to Cancel a Trans Girl", an essay about the tactics transmisogynists use to ruin their victims' lives framed as a satirical how-to guide.

i wrote this last year, but i've been reminded of it recently, and it remains relevant. you can read it on my website:

[walks-the-ages]

OP deactivated, and some of the links were broken/marked unsafe by Firefox, so here's a new compilation post of Leslie Feinburg's (She/her, ze/hir) novels and essays on being transgender:

Stone Butch Blues official free source directly from Author's website:

Stone Butch Blues, backup on the webarchive:

Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come, on the web archive:

Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, on the web archive:

Lavender and Red, PDF essay collection:

Drag King Dreams, on the web archive:

(Also, if anyone ever tells you that the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues ""ends up with a man""........ they're transmisogynistic jackass TERFs who are straight up lying)

Please also check out your local public libraries for these books and see if they carry them, to help support public libraries! If you have a library card already you can checkout Libby and Overdrive to see if your public library carries it as an ebook that you can checkout :)

EDIT: another not included on the orignal masterpost-- Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or blue !

annnnnd in light of the web archive losing it's court case, here's a backup of both PDFs and generated epubs a friend made:

5/26/2023: hello! I am adding on yet another book of queer history, this time the autobiography of Karl Baer, a Jewish, intersex trans man who was born in 1884! Please signal boost this version, and remember to check the notes whenever this crosses your dash for any new updates :)

6/24/2023:

Two links to share!

Someone made an Epub version of Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years, which you can find Here , as a more accessible version than a pdf of a scanned book if you're like me and need larger text size for reading--

And from another post I reblogged earlier today, I discovered the existence of "TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism", which has 10 issues from 1993-1995, and includes multiple interviews with Leslie Feinburg and other queer feminists / activists of the 90s!

Here's a link to all 10 issues of TransSisters, plus a 1996 "look back at" by one of the writers after the journal ended, you can find all 10 issues on the Internet Archive Here !

------

8/28/2023:

"Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out", can be found on the web archive Here, for the 25th Anniversary Edition from 2015,

and also Here, for the original 1991 version.

Each of the above can be borrowed for one hour at a time as long as a copy is available :D

This is a living post that receives sporadic updates on the original, if you are seeing this on your dash, click Here to see the latest version of the post to make sure you're reblogging the most up to date one :)

------------

October, 25th 2023:

"I began to dawdle over breakfast during shift changes, asking both waitresses questions. After weeks of inquiries, they invited me to a demonstration, outside Kleinhan's Music Hall, protesting the Israeli war against Egypt and Syria. I was particularly interested in that protest. The state of Israel had been declared shortly before my birth. In Hebrew school I was taught "Palestine was a land without peo-ple, for a people without a land." That phrase haunted me as a child. I pictured ears with no one in them, and movies projected on screens in empty theaters. When I checked a map of that region of the Middle East in my school geography textbook, it was labeled Palestine, not Israel. Yet when I asked my grandmother who the Palestinians were, she told me there were no such people. The puzzle had been solved for me in my adolescence. I developed a strong friendship with a Lebanese teenager, who explained to me that the Palestinian people had been driven off their land by Zionist settlers, like the Native peoples in the United States. I studied and thought a great deal about all she told me. From that point on I staunchly opposed Zionist ideology and the occupation of Palestine. So I wanted to go to the protest. However, I feared the demonstration, no matter how justified, would be tainted by anti-Semitism. But I was so angered by the actions of the Israeli government and military, that I went to the event to check it out for myself. That evening, I arrived at Kleinhan's before the protest began. Cops in uniforms and plainclothes surrounded the music hall. I waited impatiently for the protesters to arrive. Suddenly, all the media swarmed down the street. I ran after them. Coming over the hill was a long column of people moving toward Kleinhan's. The woman who led the march and spoke to reporters proudly told them she was Jewish! Others held signs and banners aloft that read: "Arab Land for Arab People!" and "Smash Anti-Semitism!" Now those were two slogans I could get behind! I wanted to know who these people were and where they had been all my life! Hours later I followed the group back to their headquarters. Orange banners tacked up on the walls expressed solidarity with the Attica prisoners and the Vietnamese. One banner particularly haunted me. It read: Stop the War Against Black America, which made me realize that it wasn't just distant wars that needed opposing. Yet although I worked with two members of this organization, I felt nervous that night. These people were communists, Marxists! Yet I found it easy to get into discussions with them. I met waitresses, factory workers, secretaries, and truck drivers. And I decided they were some of the most principled people I had ever met..." Transgender Warriors (1996) Leslie Feinberg

[shidoutsukiomi]

I find it a bit strange how it's okay and normal to say trans men have 'afab privilege' but if you say trans women have 'amab privilege', that's bad and wrong and incorrect and also maybe you should kill yourself. strange stuff

somehow trans men were 'socialised female' and therefore can 'get away with being women' but trans women were not 'socialised male' and can't 'get away with being men' cos there's something inherently feminine, inherently queer about them.

though, i spent my whole life being called gay, getting asked if i was a butch lesbian, getting asked if i was a tranny, cos i wore pants [girls!] instead of skirts, cos i wore shirts [girls!] instead of blouses, cos i wouldn't wear dresses and would prefer [girls!] formal wear that weren't dresses, cos i liked bionicle instead of dolls, cos i played video games, cos i swore, cos i liked heavier music, cos my favourite colour wasn't pink, cos i wore caps. i would not say i fit into girlhood at all, actually.

but this masculinity was inherent to me, it still is, i couldn't and can not change it (despite trying, very hard, to my detriment) so i ALWAYS stuck out as being 'too masculine' for other girls. and then i come into queer spaces and i'm 'too masculine' for other queer people - but that's besides the point, currently.

so, currently, when i see people say 'trans women aren't "socialised male," that's not real, they always stick out as "other"' and then turn around and say 'trans men have afab privilege, they can be women to get away with things, they fit into girlhood so well' I can't help but become incredibly fucking frustrated. this is not true and actually it's something we have in common! neither of us were socialised 'correctly' cos we're both trans and raised amongst peers who were not trans!

everything from masculine girls to trans men do not fit into 'girlhood' cos masculinity is not what girlhood is meant to be. this shouldn't be hard to grasp. this is why the 'socialised' concept is bullshit cos it's founded on whatever was forced upon you as a kid and if you don't fit that standard you will not be socialised that way due to, in large part, being fucking ostracised from everyone else. and that doesn't mean there won't be things to unlearn, i know very many trans men who were very feminine for a long time and the opposite for trans women, but someone who clearly cannot fit what's being pushed onto them is going to come off as 'strange' and 'uncanny' to the people who can fit into what's pushed onto them.

but the way people talk about this really highlights to me that yous don't want to consider us trans in the first place - transness is for trans women and not for trans men, socialisation concepts are fake when it comes to trans women but real when it comes to trans men cos they're not really trans, 'amab privilege' would get you branded a TERF or radfem saying it to a trans woman but it's fine to say trans men, trans men have 'afab privilege' cos we're not trans, we're just women. you know until we get a little too rowdy and then we're not trans, we're just men.

maybe i'm just jaded and bitter. idk

[trans-androgyne]

TERFs feel ownership over transmasc bodies. We already know they think we don’t deserve to make our own decisions about what to do with them, that we’re mentally ill or delusional or autistic or just trying to escape misogyny. But I also think they look at us and see nothing but themselves. They see their pain, their trauma, what they could have become if only things were different. And they conclude that, therefore, they know better than us. They know what we really need: to be converted to TERFism and detransitioned. After all, we’re ruining our poor, beautiful, fertile “female” bodies that they so covet.

This happens a hundredfold when the transmasc in question is their own kid. My transphobic mother would tell me my body is hers and therefore she could do whatever she wanted with it. She was joking until she wasn’t. TERF moms act as though it’s their own breasts being “cut off,” testosterone being put in their own bodies, their own uterus being removed, without their consent. They’ll tell you to your face they know you better than you know yourself, their words dripping with manufactured sympathy, because after all we’re the same: we’re both “female.”

If you haven’t already, please familiarize yourself with how radical feminism looks and how to spot a TERF beyond them saying they hate trans women. You don’t want to see these people around for any longer than it takes to block them.

[ladycharles]

Occasionally JK Rowling says or does something so offensive to my sensibilities that I must speak. Sadly, today is one of those days.

This post, and the "male" she is referring to is a cis woman boxer from Algeria. There is an unconfirmed report that she might have an intersex condition in which one's chromosomes are XY. She may not even have this condition, but even if she does, it does not mean anything but that she has an unusual DNA quirk. We do not call Tom Cruise a woman for having an extra X chromosome, for example (nor would I expect Rowling to accept it if he decided to compete as a woman in the Olympics).

Now Rowling, upon being pointed out that she essentially pulled the twitter equivalent of Austin Powers punching that old lady because she "looks rather mannish", moves the goalpost. She claims, against evidence, that she an unfair advantage, going so far as to imply that simply by competing with a rare condition this woman has cheated.

This might seem bizarre coming from a self professed FEMINIST. It is the contention of anti trans "feminists" like Rowling that womanhood is being erased and destroyed by "trans ideology"; Yet here a cis woman achieves a olympic victory and they accuse her of being a man, of cheating. They erase her achievement, they erase her womanhood.

The subtext is racist and misogynistic - a strong Algerian woman with features that do not reflect Western beauty standards is being denied the very womanhood that TERFs claim to protect. She has lost to women before, she has no clear advantage... Yet by virtue of her looks and a possible rare genetic condition, she is now a "man" and a fraud.

This doesn't surprise me, and I suspect that anyone who has had to deal with TERFs will agree. But in case anyone is shocked here's my take:

TERFism has always been a reactionary movement. While it draws from second and third wave feminists and has an ideology on paper, any space with TERFs will tend to feature mad crusades accusing cis women of being trans on looks, attacks against sex workers that are harsher than those on the men who make that industry dangerous, few towards actual men, and a sense of outrage that trumps any real ideology.

It is feminism much like how "National Socialism" was socialist. And like the Nazis did with socialism, it uses the idea of feminism to legitimize attacks on perceived enemies while preserving the status quo. For TERFs that's traditional gender roles, which they have twisted into something that protects women rather than subjugates them. (This is not to say TERFs are Nazis, but it is a decent comparison because fascism is the ultimate reactionary ideology; full of symbolism and mythology yet devoid of any substance but machismo and hate.)

In a nuanced, good faith society, we might discuss trans women in sports using science to determine whether there are unfair advantages, and consult stakeholders and experts in sport and biology. We might study if chromosomes do impart an advantage, and weigh that against the other myriad genetic advantages like long reach or faster muscle gain to determine if there is any problem with current regulations. We might not do these things too, considering we have gone the entire history of sport without a single women's league collapsing from secret "male" invasion.

In Rowling's world, we first attack the winning woman as a "man in disguise" and rail against her without evidence. We have people replying "just look at HIM, he is clearly male". We have people writing violent revenge fantasies in which the Algerian woman gets beaten by a man or a gang of women to "teach her a lesson"... and JK does not once jump in to say any of it is inappropriate or hurtful to women who happen to have androgynous features, like some less fanatic people sharing the story have done.

When this is how their "ideology" reacts to an apparently "male looking" woman winning, we have to ask whether the liberation of women was ever the goal.

And the one thing that makes it all make sense, IMO, is that it's the lashing out that's the point. These people seem to enjoy calling a cis woman a man in much the same way they enjoy calling a trans woman a man. They enjoy the feeling of power as together they act cruel towards a woman who had the audacity to beat a white European. They seem to relish the ability to present themselves as feminists in one breath while brutally harrassing and demeaning women. Unlike ordinary bigots, they constantly bring up their crusade, as if they're growing dependent on the thrill. The cruelty, as they say, seems to be the point.

The danger of these ideologies is really becoming obvious ahead of the US election. Years of social media bubbles and astroturfing have made people like Rowling convinced that they are a silent majority, ironic for people who can't shut up.

Times like this I think are important reminders of where this can really lead. They may spin about being gender critical or concerned about women when the pressure is on; This is what these people do when they think they can get away with it.

This is the dark heart of their movement, beating loud enough to hear.

[mydirtyvalentine]

in this life, its me, and my podcast trans allegories against the world

[emma-needs-attention]

I don’t shave every day. It’s not that I don’t “need” to; I have very dark, dense facial hair that grows quickly and remains pretty visible after shaving. When I do shave, I don’t try to cover it with makeup (beyond some powder to reduce redness). In most other ways I present very feminine, but I always have fairly obvious facial hair.

And it makes me feel terrible.

I started electrolysis a couple months ago. It’s excruciatingly painful, expensive, and it takes forever. In an hour-long session, my electrologist is able to remove hair in only a small region (about 1 square inch). A few weeks later, much of that hair comes back. I am told that it will take two to three years of regular treatments to remove it entirely. On top of that, I apparently have a condition called Post Inflammatory Hyperpigmentation, which causes the skin in affected areas to darken after treatment. For nearly two months after completing a single pass over my upper lip, my mustache was more visible than it had ever been, despite having significantly less hair.

And it made me feel terrible.

I know this is the best way for me to permanently remove my facial hair, but I just canceled all of my upcoming sessions and at the moment I have no plans to begin again.

If I could pay to have my facial hair instantly and completely removed I would empty my savings account. I am intensely aware of it any time I go out in public. If it makes me so uncomfortable, why do I not do more to hide it?

I feel incredibly privileged for a trans woman. I have a loving, supportive family. I have a well-paying job. I live in a very accepting area. I have never had a single person say anything negative to me about my gender identity, which was certainly not what I was expecting when I came out. It is important to me that I be visibly queer, and in my privileged position I am able to do that without fear. A year ago I didn’t think I would ever transition; now I want people to know that I’m trans.

I am disappointed with myself for wanting to remove my facial hair, for changing my voice. I am determined not to have to do more work than a cis person does. Cis women don’t have to shave their face every day. Cis men don’t have to shave their face every day. Why should I? This is who I am, what my body does. Shouldn’t I be proud of that? Am I not supposed to love myself the way I am?

But by that logic, why am I even transitioning in the first place?

I am doing more work than a cis person does. Cis people don’t transition, and transitioning takes effort. I know that there are cis people, both men and women, who do shave every day. Am I lying to myself? I’m a trans woman; aren’t I supposed to want to get rid of my facial hair? Shouldn’t I be trying harder? Doesn’t this give me dysphoria? Am I pretending not to have dysphoria so I don’t have to put in the effort? Does the fact that I’m not trying harder make me… I don’t know, less trans? Non-binary? Is it ok for me to call myself a trans woman? Am I lying to myself?

As a woman who was a man until thirty, there are things about my body that I must accept, that I won’t be able to change no matter how much money I dump into my transition. I’m tall, I have broad shoulders, I have large hands. No amount of surgery or hormones will change these things.

But there are many things that I can change, and while none of them are requirements for being a woman, they may still be changes that I want to make. Where do I stop? Am I finished transitioning when I’ve done everything that is physically possible? My goal isn’t to “pass,” at least not in the way that word is generally used. In a time when cis women are being assaulted because people think they’re trans—because they don’t “pass” as women—the idea of what it means to pass becomes blurry. Often when we say that we want to pass, what we really mean is that we want to be conventionally beautiful.

I am a woman. Therefore, I look like a woman. My transition goal is to pass as myself. I’ve spent the last year trying to figure out who I am so I can look like her. I don’t care whether people see me and think “that’s a woman.” I want to be able to look in the mirror and think “that’s me.” But it can be extremely difficult to separate your own image of yourself from society’s idea of what you should look like. Am I self-conscious about the size of my body because it doesn’t feel like me, or because I’ve been told that women should be smaller? There are tall cis women, there are broad-shouldered cis women, there are cis women with large hands. Those traits don’t make them less womanly.

For the aspects of my body that I do have control over, I am stuck wondering whether I am changing things to become myself, or changing them because I have internalized that the way I am is wrong. At the moment, facial feminization surgery is something that I think I might like to do. But how do I know that I want to do it for the right reasons? I don’t hate my face, but when I catch a glimpse of myself from certain angles I can’t help but think that it isn’t feminine enough. What I should be asking is if it’s Emma enough, but how can I know that? How do I know who I’m supposed to be?

I feel like I was supposed to be a cis woman, but… why? Who am I to say that I wasn’t supposed to be trans? That I wasn’t supposed to transition at thirty, to have both a male puberty and a female one? Being trans has made me more self-aware, more open-minded, more empathetic. The totality of my experience is what makes me who I am. Maybe there’s a world in which I was assigned female, maybe there’s a world in which I was put on puberty blockers as a kid. But the girl in those worlds isn’t me.

Loving yourself and wanting to change are two feelings that can coexist. I tend to think of body positivity as simply accepting yourself as you are, but it is more nuanced than that. As a trans person, who I am inside is not the same as who I am outside. Which one am I supposed to love? I do love myself, but I also love who I could be. I’m transitioning so that someday they’ll be the same person.

Over the past year I have become both my biggest supporter and my biggest critic. I constantly tell myself how pretty I am, how brave I am, how fucking cool I am (hey, nobody else is saying it and it’s true). This forced positivity has been fantastic for me. I can confidently say that I truly love myself for the first time in my life. But I sometimes feel guilty that I don’t love myself more.

I can’t help but stare at myself in the mirror all the time now. I actually bought a new mirror so I didn’t have to walk as far to do so. I’ve taken more selfies than I did in my entire pre-transition life. After many months on HRT, I finally see myself in my reflection. But my eyes refuse to focus on my stubble. Sometimes I catch myself thinking “I’m going be so beautiful once I get rid of this facial hair,” and it feels like a betrayal. Fuck you Emma, I’m already gorgeous.

[funkle420]

Turbo Granny blunt rotation WIP

[lycandrophile]

it's silly but the biggest reason why im not into t yet is bc im so afraid of losing my hair. do you have any solutions/tips for it?

first of all, i don’t think it’s silly — it’s natural to be worried when hair loss is talked about by so many people as like…one of the worst results of aging for men. listening to my dad talk about how much he hates balding definitely did not make me feel particularly good about the knowledge that i may very well be joining him someday. i’m not saying the fear is right, because i don’t think hair loss is something awful that we should avoid at all costs, but it’s an understandable fear given the beauty standards we’re working with, and it’s one that a lot of us (myself included) feel.

one thing that’s helped me is just…paying more attention to the guys that i interact with on a daily basis. i’ve learned two things from it: 1) hair loss is super fucking common. i’d say it’s much harder to find an adult man who isn’t balding at all than it is to find one who’s completely bald. and 2) if you forget everything you’ve been told about how bad hair loss is, you’ll realize that quite frankly, every single one of those guys looks totally fucking fine. it doesn’t ruin their appearance and make them ugly, it looks totally natural and isn’t really even something you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. we put so much weight on it but it’s really just not that big of a deal. i’ll hear my parents talk shit about men in my family who are losing their hair when i didn’t even notice a difference last time i saw them. it’s one of those things (like so many other appearance-related things) that you really only notice at all because you’ve been taught that you’re supposed to care about it.

this isn’t something i’ve done personally, but if you really want to desensitize yourself to the idea of it, embrace the time-honored queer tradition of just shaving your whole damn head! find out what you’d look like without hair, find out how you feel about it and what you can do that makes you feel good about your appearance without hair, test the waters while it’s still a temporary change and not something permanent. that way, it won’t feel like this big scary unknown, and you’ll actually have a frame of reference for your feelings about how you look without hair rather than accepting the societal assumption that you’ll inevitably hate it. if you don’t want to actually shave your head, you could also just fuck around with bald filters or photoshop and see what happens.

oh, and if you’re attracted to men, keep an eye out for guys who are bald or balding and also hot as fuck. in my experience, there’s no insecurity or potential future insecurity that being gay for other men hasn’t helped me with. just off the top of my head, i can think of a couple actors who i think are absolutely fucking gorgeous who have helped me get over my fears about losing my hair. despite what our anti-aging-obsessed world might want you to think, there is no such thing as a physical feature that automatically makes someone less attractive, and while making attractiveness less of a priority in your life is good, it can’t hurt to also give yourself some proof that actually, you might lose your hair and look hot as hell doing it.

basically, entertain the possibility that it won’t be a bad thing at all! whether that’s just because it turns out to be a neutral thing for you or because you end up actually liking it, it’s not an inherently bad thing. i’ve ended up liking a lot of things that were “supposed to” be bad effects of t — i love the weight i’ve gained and the new shape it gives my body, i get a lot of gender euphoria from the fact that my acne is now on parts of my face that i saw a lot of guys in high school get it and i’m not complaining about the scars i get from it either because i’ve always liked the added texture that acne scars give my skin, and so on. i think there’s a lot of joy to be had in the changes we’re taught to fear, once we look past that conditioning and actually explore how we feel about it.

but if it’s something you really don’t want and you just want to improve your chances of not having to deal with it, it’s not like there’s nothing you can do! products like finasteride (oral) and minoxidil (usually topical but i think there might also be oral versions) are pretty commonly used among trans guys, for the purpose of avoiding hair loss and for other reasons, and there are plenty of other anti-hair loss products out there (though i don’t know how effective any one of them might be). if it’s a big enough deal for you, you can just decide that you’ll go off of t if/when you start noticing signs of it, since no longer having higher t levels would stop the process in its tracks. and if you don’t find prevention options that work for you so it ends up happening, you can always explore different hair styles (judging by the pattern of hair loss i see in my family, i suspect that keeping my hair long would make it less obvious if i started losing mine), find your preferred method of covering it when you don’t feel good about it (personally i love a good beanie generally and would probably wear them a lot more if i didn’t have hair to worry about because my main complaint is the way they press my hair onto my neck), or just shave it all off if you don’t like the look of the partial balding but don’t mind a shaved head. the point being — you have options!

at the end of the day, whether you go on t or not, you’re going to see your body change as you age in ways that aren’t always going to be attractive to others or aesthetically pleasing to you. that’s just the reality of having a body. even if you never went on t, you’d get older and you might see your hair thin out even if you don’t bald, you’ll see your skin start to wrinkle and sag in places that used to be smooth, your metabolism might slow or your body fat might start to gather in new places; hell, you might lose your hair for a totally different reason and end up in the same place but without the benefits of having been on t that whole time. life is full of bodily changes like that. transphobes will fearmonger about the permanent changes of testosterone all day long but the truth is, there is no escaping permanent bodily changes. whether or not you go on t, your body now isn’t the same as it will be in 1 or 5 or 10 or 20 or 50 years, just like it isn’t the same as it was at any point in your life before now. our bodies are never supposed to stop growing and aging and changing throughout our lives. there’s no guaranteeing that we’ll love every single change our bodies go through, but that’s okay! there are so many things in life that are more important than the way our bodies look. even if you go on t and lose your hair and don’t like how it looks, your life won’t be ruined; plenty of other things will bring you joy and more than make up for the insecurities.

just think about the gender euphoria and relief from dysphoria that t could give you. would losing your hair be bad enough to outweigh all of that? or is it just the pressure of a society that decided balding is bad that’s making you fear one single change despite how much joy you could have if you let that fear go? only you can decide if going on t is worth the potential downsides for you, but i suspect that for most of us, the benefits of going on t far outweigh the possibility of side effects like hair loss happening down the line.

[saccharind]

Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

[asphalt-eater]

i like to think goth is a gender in of itself

[herecomesthementalmeltdown]

god i need to be kissed by her so bad. i want her to hold my hand and tell me everything will be alright.

[sapphic-boy]

If you think transandrophobia is "trans men think they're oppressed because people don't smile at them in the street anymore and they still get paid less" you are missing the point so fucking hard its unbelievable