#trans people will very often have a different childhood experience than their cis peers

[lesbianshepard]

There is no universal "AFAB experience" and there is no universal "AMAB experience" and cis people using these terms are often just using them as a way to misgender trans people but dress it up in a veneer of seemingly progressive language

i think we need to put a moratorium on cis people using "AFAB" and "AMAB." they're getting a bit too comfortable with it.

[omegawizardposting]

Gendered socialization is a thing, but it varies widely depending on factors such as culture, race, gender presentation, and when a trans child chooses to come out/whether or not they're accepted as trans.

Both me and a Latino trans friend of mine agree that we were raised in the way girls from our cultures typically are, but his upbringing still differs from mine. We have different experiences and view female socialization differently.

Some trans people experience "gender non-conforming" socialization. A trans girl who is very feminine even before she comes out is going to be treated differently than a masculine cis boy. I encountered this form of socialization in middle school, where my peers and the authority figures in my life started to put a special focus on downplaying or "correcting" my masculine traits. It was around that time I began trying to embrace feminine things to avoid complete social ostracization.

(That backfired royally lmao.)

Sometimes a trans person will come out and begin their transition in their childhood, so they'll end up being socialized as the gender they actually are instead of their AGAB. Alternatively, they won't find acceptance in their family or community, and that can lead to a different type of socialization, too.

Socialization is complicated and everyone reacts to it differently. I think if you say that there's no difference in how boys and girls are raised, you're being willfully ignorant, but there are many variables involved in gendered socialization, and trans people often have experiences that are unique to transness or gender non-conformance.

It's not a simple black-or-white matter.

[intersexfairy]

thanks for helping - i will continue to read more! im confsued though i dont see how pcos is intersex though? female people with pcos are unambiguously female, they would never/very very rarely have to be assigned a sex at birth due to ambiguous genitalia? and for many intersex people the activism i have heard about is about invasive childhood surgery so for their community to be suddenly full of largely cis women could derail their aims? idk im confused but happy to keep reading!

Uhhh, no, I'm diagnosed with PCOS (although I might have NCAH) and this is pretty offensive. TW for.. a lot of things.

There is more to intersex experiences than invasive surgery at birth. And a lot of intersex people don't have ambiguous genitalia, and are still intersex. Intersex activism goes beyond surgery too, but perisex people pay most attention to the surgery part.

Intersexness isn't just about genitalia (or our bodies in general). That's only one type of sex trait. There's internal genitalia, there's hormones, there's secondary sex traits like breasts and facial/body hair. We are a varied bunch of people who don't conform to a range of standards about bodies & sex categorization.

Since PCOS is the topic here, I'll use it as an example of other intersex experiences aside from surgery related to genitalia.

People with PCOS oftentimes experience hyperandrogenism. This commonly leads to those with it developing secondary sex traits that are commonly classified as "male." They may grow beards/mustaches, have "hirsutism" (a lot of body hair), and overall look more ""masculine."" This can result in them not being able to/have a hard time passing as female, or being made to feel different from other AFAB people. And intersex people w/o PCOS have experiences with discordant or double puberty (as i like to call it) too.

For all hyperandrogen people, doctors may force us onto hormones to feminize our appearance. They may tell us that if we dont, our health is at risk (even if it isnt). They pressure us and do not give an option for an informed decision. This occurs to both children/teens and adults, and is also breech of our bodily autonomy. Forced hormones is something that a lot of intersex people who don't have PCOS experience too. And sometimes, we don't even know we're taking hormones because we're lied to about what the pills are. Often told we have an illness and will get sick if we dont take the pills.

But medical abuse isn't the only thing we go through either.

We get harassed for looking the way we do. We get bullied in school for being different. Our parents tell us shame us and neglect/abuse us for simply being intersex. We get blamed for all this mistreatmenr because if we had just changed like they told us to, we wouldn't be being mistreated.

Like, some people with PCOS can develop eating disorders in attempt to feminize their appearance. Which is something other intersex people experience too, so they can try to fit the norm prescribed to them.

Overall, our body image can be extremely poor, because we're always made to feel like our bodies are wrong. For me and many intersex activists, the crux of intersex activism is depathologizing and normalizing our bodies. So that we don't have to be in pain about body - our home.

Because everything about our sex development is scrutinized. Everything, not just genitalia. And I find the idea that letting people with PCOS into the community would be bad because it's a bunch of "cis women" incredibly invalidating to both my trans man intersex self and my cis intersex peers.

It would not be bad letting cis women with intersex experiences into our community. There are already cis women with intersex experiences (who dont have PCOS!) in our community. And they belong and are important.

I suggest checking out my mutual Nova on her tiktok (nova.starchild). She's a cis intersex woman with PCOS. She also has a tumblr, @/n-o--v-a.

[cynicalmedusa]

This is another way that t3rf$ and other groups who engage in gender essentialist and determinist "gender scapegoating" have robbed us of so much nuanced critique and quite honestly, progress on gender as a source of joy and community. We get so stuck in combative and defensive positions that we keep having the same arguments and reactionary politics over and over. It doesn't help that we are constantly flooded with reactionary fascist nationalism that has been building over the last 50+ years and so we keep having to defend transgender, non-binary, and gender expansive (TNB+) experience and relegitimizing it.

But even within circles where binary, white supremacist, colonial, christian models of gender are questioned and undermined, unfortunately the approach to gendered experience and the education of the gender binary when it comes to small children is often robbed of its context. Many people (even when not using buzzwords like socialization) neutralize a process that is at it's core compulsory, indoctrinating, constricted by double binds, and is at odds with gender euphoria, complicated understandings, and quite honestly, meaningful interaction. When paired with compulsory heterosexuality (though we should have a complicated relationship with Rich's t3rf sensibilities), it renders relationships that have very little to do with individual agency but following a set of social scripts violently written on our bodies; this existence is internalized, policed, and deviation from the narrative is punished and repressed. Even from feminist or queer and trans spaces, as reactionary narratives serve to supplant patriarchal, cisgender and heterosexual ones.

It is in many ways a dominating unreality; a mirror world to the needs and desires of human experience. A perpetual gaslighting of not just TNB+ folks, but everyone involved, whether there is benefit from the system or not. Because the benefit is generally only legible within context and in comparison. I wouldn't even argue that it is more rare for cis folks (or others) to question it. It's just for many there is more to lose than they are willing to sacrifice.

When thinking of coercive gendered education in children, I also think it's important to understand it as child abuse. This is not to say that children having gendered experiences is abuse, but rather, few children are ever given the space, autonomy, and ability to craft their own identities that a non-abusive childhood gendered experience within a mainstream dominant culture of coercive gendered education would require. As one would expect, there are a number of different responses to such abuse, including reinforcing it as a norm, expressing that violence laterally, internalizing it to the exclusion of all knowledge of one's true self.

I also think it's important when discussing this to consider that many of us whose parents had inconsistent responses to their own coercive gendered education did not have coherent messaging around gender. This can manifest in much the same way as the common cognitive dissonance of experiencing abuse from an adult that is in theory trustworthy and nurturing. My own mother presented fairly gender subversively, particularly for the 90s. I can remember encouragement towards activities and experiences that were gendered masculine; these were things that she also modeled for me. Yet there have also been times in our relationship where she violently refuted even mild expressions of gender nonconformity, such as when I told her that childbirth, while fine for others, was a horrifying prospect to me. It also meant that I experienced different forms of policing from other parents and adults, as well as peers, for this incomplete gendering. This was only magnified by my neurodivergence.

I also want to touch on the fact that coercive gendered education is not just something that happens to children; we are constantly socialized and re-socialized by virtue of living in a society and being social creatures dependent on each other. The goalposts for idealized binary gendered experience are constantly being moved, altered, and in our society, enshrined within capitalism in a way that keeps so many dissatisfied, alienated, and constantly chasing gendered perfection as a way to stopgap it. It is exhausting, and I think so much of the gendered interactions we see in adolescent and adult spaces is at the root of it.

Just as humans are constantly evolving new ways of thinking and being, we often make the choices to undermine possibility and punish each other's gestures towards joy. But it doesn't have to be this way. We can refuse to cede spaces and angles for ideological analysis to those who would lock us in a zero-sum game that keeps us forever in our gendered double binds. We can demand more, redefine our pathways for critique of this coercive gendered education, and defy the neoliberalization and disconnection of gender from other revolutionary mechanisms. We can challenge ourselves and our communities to unlearn; for isn't that the beautify of refusing to swallow bioessentialist and determinist bile? We have nothing so much as the capacity for change.

thinking about how “gendered socialization” is a terf dogwhistle and that the reality is way more nuanced.

wouldnt it be better to say like “this is how being raised in a violently misogynistic society effected me as an individual growing up” than being like “all people quote unquote “raised as” women have the same experiences” bc thats absolute bullshit. EVERYONE is effected by being raised in a violently misogynistic society ESPECIALLY people who dont conform to society’s gender expectations and often people Know you’re not cis or that you’re otherwise not adhering to society’s narrow gendered expectations before you ever do so. yeah.

[brinconvenient]

So, I realized the other night that I've lived in this town since 2001, except for one year that I lived elsewhere. That means that this past year, I've lived here longer than any other place in my life, including my birthplace, the previous record holder. Has this place become my hometown? It's my daughters' hometown - and barring that one year elsewhere, they've had at least one home here their entire lives. As a kid who grew up as a nomad, that is just so weird to me. I mean, they attended the same school from Kindergarten through 8th grade. By that time, I'd attended 4 different schools. Their mom lived in the same house (almost) her entire childhood. That just blows my mind. 

Like ... this rambling train of thought crashed into another one about how we accept the things we grow up with as being universal (under some contexts) and normal. My mom died when I was 3 and so for my formative years, I had only one parent. I just could not get my head around other kids having TWO parents ALL THE TIME. Like I'd go over to their houses and just boggle at them interacting with these two adults who raised them together.

And though I had one parent, I had a big family of aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother - all of whom helped raise me. I didn't know it was unusual to see your cousins every weekend or sometimes more often. I didn't know it was unusual to get together with your entire family for no other reason than it was hot and someone had a pool. 

So I've had people in my life who haven't seen any given aunt or uncle or grandparent or cousin in years and I just don't know how that works. How is that a thing that happens? Like, I understand on a mental level that like, children of only children exist, and that those big families don't even exist for them, and that there are people who HAVE big families who don't gather with them often if at all, but I can't really internalize that as something that's real without a lot of effort. 

And then that leads me to thinking about this mess right now with trans people being in jeopardy of losing what few rights and protections we have. Somehow, it's become not just acceptable, but fashionable in certain circles, to call our very existence and right to publicly exist into question, as if it is a topic on which reasonable people could politely disagree. 

And I realize that if I struggle to understand what life is like for people with VERY different families to mine, even people whose family interactions and composition is much more common than mine, then there just isn't much hope for the 97% of people who are not trans to ever understand that my lived reality, while wildly different from their own, is true and valid and not dependent on their understanding it. 

Like, of course cis people find it hard to believe me when I tell them that my gender is different than was assumed the day I was born, because in their lived reality, that's not something they've ever had to consider is possible. 

And I could swing a cat and hit a peer who had two parents who were married to each other and raised them together and SEE that it was real even if it was vastly different from my own experience. That said, I could SEE that they had two parents. I could UNDERSTAND that that was different from my family configuration. But I will never be able to TRULY understand what it is like to be raised in that environment, all of the million little ways that having two parents impacts your life. I could SEE that it was true, but since it wasn't my experience, I had to take my friends' assertions that their parents somehow divided responsibilities for all of the things that go into raising a child. I really had the one parent, who had some assistance from his family, to do all those things.

On the other hand, cis people have nothing tangible to point to and say "AH, YES! There is a thing which I can see and touch and which proves that your experience is different from mine but is also real!" In the same way I'll never truly grok the experience of being raised by two (or more) parents, cis people can never grok what it is to be trans. They have to CHOOSE to try to understand. And until they know a trans person in their own life, they have no reason to ever try.

And we know that - we're well aware that you don't get it. We are just asking to have our experiences and truths believed because we're the ones who lived them. Trust us to report our own truth and don't force us to justify our right to exist. 

Honestly, though, I don't really know how to hold on to any kind of hope. White people have collectively and repeatedly ignored, gaslit and denied the lived experiences of people of color when they talk about all the ways that whiteness is promoted at the expense of any other race's humanity and how these thousands of daily interactions in their lives are impacted by the dominance of whiteness in narratives, news, personal interactions. And there are very visible cues there to point to for white people to be able to accept that people of color's reports of their own lived experiences are different from white people's and also real and true. 

But still, I try to grasp desperately to every last shred of hope because things are already better for trans kids than they were for me, and I have to believe that continuing to shout into the void will make it better for the trans kids to come. 

Sorry for the long ramble on your feed today. This is just the way my brain works sometimes.

[fashiontrendin-blog]

Everything you need to know about gender transitioning

https://fashion-trendin.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-gender-transitioning/

Everything you need to know about gender transitioning

While for many, the concept of gender variance may be relatively new, transgender people have always been a deep-rooted part of our society. In more recent times, our understanding has increased, thanks to high-profile personalities such as Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox, and the development of the language to enable people to verbalise their experience. We’ve called on Dr Helen Webberley, who runs the online gender clinic www.gendergp.co.uk, to break down everything you need to know about gender transitioning, sorting the myths from the facts.

“At GenderGP, we help hundreds of people every year, of all ages, to get the support and treatment they need, either directly through our service, through the NHS or via a combination of the two,” she said.

Here’s everything you need to know…

Myths and facts

1. You don’t have to have surgery to be trans Contrary to popular belief, being transgender is not dependant on undergoing gender-affirming surgery. While some people will choose to have surgery, others will not. This does not make them more or less legitimate in their personal gender identity.

2. It is not all about clothes and makeup Many gender variant people are husbands, wives, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons. Many have full-time jobs and a place in society that they fear losing, should they fully socially transition. As such, they may opt to keep their gender identity hidden from view.

3. For a trans person, being trans may be the least interesting thing about them While the focus tends to naturally gravitate towards their gender, trans people are just as ordinary as their cisgender peers (someone who feels comfortable with the gender they are assigned at birth), with the same day-to-day highs and lows.

4. Gender variance is more common than you think Just as homosexuality was once kept hidden from view but is now recognised as a natural part of human variation, the same is true of gender variance. The more we understand gender and the spectrum that defines it, the more accepted the notion of gender variance will become.

5. Gender is not a choice It is as innate as an individual’s sexuality, personality or eye colour. In the same way that you cannot opt-in or force yourself to be gay, if you are born one gender but identify differently, then that is there to stay. You can try and hide it, but you cannot change it.

6. Gender is a spectrum We often think of gender as binary: male or female, but in reality, it is a spectrum. People can sit anywhere on this spectrum. Some people feel very female, some very male. Some part female and part male (non-binary) and some neither female nor male (agender). That may be tricky to understand, but that does not make it less real.

7. Gender expression is different to gender identity Some cisgender people like to express their gender in a very feminine way and some in a more masculine way. The same goes for trans people. Just because you choose to wear trousers, doesn’t necessarily make you a man.

8. Hormones can make a huge difference The onset of puberty brings with it the secondary sex characteristics typically associated with the male and female form (think breasts and hips for women, facial hair and an Adam’s apple for men). If a trans person has not had to endure the wrong puberty, switching hormones gives them the same external bodily features as a cisgender person, apart from the genitals, which are more easily hidden.

9. Some trans women do have penises and some trans men do have vaginas. We have to stop trying to pigeon hole people according to cis ‘norms’.

10. You can’t hurt a child by allowing them to explore their gender Children should be allowed to explore their world and their bodies with the freedom that perhaps only childhood allows. If your child wants to experiment with clothes, makeup, names, hairstyles, pronouns (he/she/they), this will not force them towards any type of gender identity. Let them explore in a safe environment and their passage through their teenage years will be more comfortable.

11. We still know very little about gender dysphoria Gender dysphoria, the sense of discomfort that comes when your external body is not aligned with your experienced gender, is seen as a medical issue by some, others see it as a psychological issue and some believe it is social. For those experiencing it, it can be all of the above. People tend to fixate on the physical because that is what we see, but that is only one part of the picture.