#trans stories

[newlevant]

Preview of Sam Long’s story, drawn by the amazing Cynthia Yuan Cheng! (@cynthiaycheng, cynthiaycheng.com)

Becoming Who We Are Kickstarter ends Dec 14! Preorder now to help us fund the book!

bit.ly/becomingkickstarter

[heyitschloej]

Can I be your special Christmas surprise?

Please reblog 💋❤️

[donnstuart]

I may look innocent, but I’m not

[foxellixy]

“i don’t hate trans people but i don’t want to see them on media!”

stfu honestly. as a trans guy living in a transphobic country where i am at risk of going to jail if i try to transition or went straight to the psych hospital, here’s my story.

since 11 years old i was thinking “i may be a trans man” but i always shut those feeling down. i had zero courage to admit it to myself. each year passes by, i go back and forth with “i’m transgender” to “yeah, no, i just need to love myself more”. but year after year despite changing my looks i keep struggling. more and more, at the age of 20 i don’t know who i am anymore. i masked so hard that i forgot who i am truly. i don’t know anything about my future, i don’t want to exist. i m 1 step away of unexisting myself.

and i watch squid game 2. i see hyunju. strong, beautiful and amazing human being. despite all the struggles she’s trying her best to keep going. and she became my final push to finally finding myself. finally admitting who i am. and that there’s nothing wrong with me. so basically seeing her on screen saved my life literally.

character like her is what all people. especially trans people need. because representation like her make sure that we’re not alone. we’re not freaks, we are people. strong, shy, beautiful, vulnerable, loud, quiet PEOPLE.

[abearinthewoods]

How I know.

(I'm writing this all down so i can reference it when ever I get self doubt. I plan to link this to my family at some point so comments and reblogs will be heavily moderated.)

I remember the first doubt. I was using the mirror attached to the locker door at the rec center, a fancy one in California with a dome they would put over the entire poor deck in the winter so it could still be warm. I was in 3rd grade and this was an after school program my single mother used so she could work overtime without (hopefully) worrying about me getting myself or my two brothers into trouble.

Back to the mirror: I had recently learned more about the differences between genders, and looking between my legs, I would imagine finding out that I had lady parts, hidden away some how. I would often imagine this was some conspiracy where I was changed at birth from a girl to a boy and my parents were keeping it from me. (Truman Show resonated with me).

In 4th grade I used to go on about how girls were better than boys and always connected with girls more. (Until the Core™ Memory™ that turned me into an MRA towards the end of this school year.)

A few years later would be the first time I remember truely feeling out of place because of my gender. It was my cousin's birthday. Them being two nearly teenaged girls it was an explosion of gender and girly activities I didn't mind but could feel I wasn't supposed to like. Being autistic gives you a weird relation with societal norms, every abrupt reconciliation between how you think you are coming across and how you actually come across becomes an almost traumatic event. Fear of this in relation to me acting girly while male became crippling enough to keep me away from truly entertaining any further thoughts for a while, with the exception of the random joke.

After I moved up to my dads I exchanged brothers for sisters. For a while one would let me play with her barbie dolls, but eventually she said was it was weird and creepy. All of the sudden I could see it as she did, another painful reconciliation between my mental model and reality. Internalized transphobia is a bitch.

When I was dating my first girlfriend I wanted to stay up all night with her having pillow fights until it got physical. "Girls like mature guys, not immature playfulness" I got told by one of her close male friends.

The girlfriend I first hooked with was when I first made jokes about being a lesbian trapped in a man's body. It was becoming clear to me at that point that the bi women around me wanted different things in their male partners vs their female partners and we can guess which of the two I identified with more.

As an adult, there was this, like, medical hope? That I'd get a CT scan one day for some reason and find out I was a women all a long, overlies and all. At 25 I remember getting an xray done for back issues and googling to figure out if ovaries would show up on one.

Three years ago at 32 I was googling some random vague medical symptoms I was having and one of the many potential causes listed was XXY syndrome. This enticed me and I spent the entirety of that month learning about klinefelter syndrome fascinated by it for reasons that elude even the greatest minds. Finding out it wouldn't lead to hidden™ vag™ syndrome™ was disappointing. (I would make zero attempt to unpack why this was disappointing)

All this time, being an MRA and feeling tethered to the male gender because of it, I never actually *truly* entertained the idea that I wanted to be a women, just that I wanted to have a vagina and uterus and ovaries and that I identified with sapphic depictions of love more than any other and I got distressed feels every time somebody treated me differently from how women get treated it. Still cis thou.

I would often display masculinity as a show against anybody who would insult it or act like breaking out of its mold was inherently more virtuous than living within it. Not a surprise to anybody who knows me, spite is my biggest weakness.

The "would I mind living as a women" question never gained purchase in my mind throughout all of that. Even when I thought it, it was with the presumption that the answer was yes. Never actually thought out.

Until she walked into my life.

I, out of anxiety and a odd complicated form of (likely c-ptsd influenced) gender dysphoria from the bear vs man bullshit, made this tumblr, and started trying to work thru my feelings about all of that. I found out about the not-shit side of tumblr from r/curated tumblr so I started posting some thoughts from here to there. My first post idea happened to come on sunday so it worked out for self post sunday. a few posts in and I hit big on one post, and then the next. Talking about trans people, men, and trans men in these posts ( oh and autism, but its tumblr, thats a given).

During this somebody drops a few paragraphs and casually mentions in thier comment a quip about how a certain essay will always be relevant.

Unassumingly I middle click it into a new tab and resume reading thru the comments of my reddit post, go smoke a bowl, come back, and looking for another tab to do a thing I never got around to doing. I clicked on to it and become captivated:

If you haven't read this, its long, its somber, and its 100% worth the read.

I am eleven years old.

I am in a hotel room watching Maury Povich. A lineup of beautiful women makes its way onto the stage and we are told to guess which ones are “real” and which ones are “transsexual.” I don’t know about these words. [..] Instead, as the hotel coffee machine gurgles out an acrid belch, I feel hope welling up inside of me. How much does it cost to sit in the chair and have them flip the switch? Will it hurt? I don’t care. Any amount of pain will be worth it.

Remember the chair and the switch. This is important, but what started the crack was way down at the end.

I am now twenty-six years old and—this may freak you out—I’m not coming out. And I’m not transitioning. Here are the easy reasons: [...] Now—here are the complicated reasons, most of which I only realized while writing the easy ones: I hate that the only effective response I can give to “boys are shit” is “well I’m not a boy.” I feel like I am selling out the boy in baseball pajamas that sat with me on the bed while I tried to figure out which one I was supposed to be [.....] Because I am not a boy, but I had a boyhood. I was, and am, made to live as a boy and I cannot suspend the perspective that gave me and join in when it’s time to fluster one of those clueless fuckers into anger by calling him a fuckboi and then tell him his anger proves he’s a fuckboi, or to humiliate one with an OKCupid screenshot because we’ve willfully conflated the clumsy ones with the threatening ones so we can grab those solidarity faves. It’s fucked up. It has metastasized. [...] Because I am interested in complicating your definition of maleness and of boyhood. I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it. And to me that means considering them with charity, even when they make it difficult to.

This section is very long, even with all i cut out (that is very much still worth reading). Every single fucking word resonated with me. She understood my own relation with my own gender better than I did. I got shell shock from reading that article. I laid down, took a nap, and woke up to see it still on the monitor.

I posted a comment on reddit about how it "resonated with me in ways I still haven't unpacked", repeated it over here on tumblr, and then the™ thought™ entered my mind:

"If there was a chair, and a switch, would I sit down in that chair, and would i flip that switch?" I couldn't think of a reason why I wouldn't. Once I "allowed" myself to think that, I realized I was feeling loss at the fact that this chair and this switch did not exist.

(I knew this 5 months ago. But was still calling myself cis.)

I started walking around more recently while listening to female artists and one day near the start of the last month I found myself walking thru town thinking I was the girl from the Death Cab for Cutie's I Will Possess Your Heart music video. Doing my thing and going about my life. I could feel my ponytail rebound and whip around from the swing when ever I moved my head strongly. (I am bald) Now I imagine she's listening to those songs I was when I see the music video.

(At this point I still mentally think of myself as Cis.)

My best friend shows me netflix's The Witcher. Why do I identify with Yennifer? This is when I first start to admit it to myself.

Trump makes the one EO, people joke how it means he legally classified everybody as a women. For a brief moment in my mind I thought he had magically waved his pen and made me a women. I get my first hit of gender euphoria. I recognize it as gender euphoria. The walls are crumbling.

Finally, a little under 2 weeks ago I'm at my best friend's house again. They are gender queer and very supportive and i've just been watching them play video games while thinking about the music video experience and the Yennifer thing and the EO euphoria above and i breath just a little too loudly as some puzzle pieces are falling into place and they ask me whats on my mind, opening a can of worms they could have never seen coming. There was a long pause. Normally i would just make something up. I wanted to make something up. But I also wanted to let it out. I *needed* to let it out.

Now if I could just tell my family.

[farmerlesbian]

I just heard about this website called TransRural Lives which just went live! Go check it out! You can also find them on Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube.

"A digital storytelling project exploring and celebrating the lives of transgender older adults who live in or have strong ties to rural areas and small towns in the Pacific Northwest."

The stories are audio recordings from the trans elders themselves, and I find it incredible to listen to their stories and literally hear their voices. This is definitely worth checking out and maybe even getting connected and sharing your story. You will also find a variety of resources and archives on the website. Check it out!

If you want to get involved, they're taking volunteers, donations, help to spread the word, and stories from rural trans people. Here's some info from the website on who they are looking to hear stories from:

Who is eligible to participate in the project? 

Transgender* adults 50 years of age and older who live in or have strong ties to rural areas and smaller cities/towns in Washington State (outside the Sea-Tac metro). In 2024, we will be expanding the project to include transgender older adults who live in Oregon, Idaho, western Montana, and British Columbia.  

* We include and welcome anyone and any identity that falls outside the gender binary, including nonbinary, genderqueer, gender-diverse, gender non-conforming, and Two-Spirit folks. 

--------

Edit to add: I am in no way associated or affiliated with this project. I simply came across it while surfin' the web and thought yall would be into it and wanted to share it with tumblr! If you have thoughts or feedback or want to get involved or just want to talk to the project, I encourage you to reach out to them. Check out the website! I have zero affiliation with it.

[xdolls-crownx]

So I have this video from about 2 years ago from when I was sick. I was horribly congested and it made my throat dry and sore. As much as I hated being sick the way I was, something good came out of it.

I woke up one morning and went to get my meds. I started to talk to myself just to keep the silence from driving me insane. Nothing to weird just the usual “I’m hoping these meds make all of this go away.”When I started to talk, I realized something.

My voice was really deep.

I happily took my meds and sent a video to my friends showing off this cool discovery. I thought it was the best thing to be coming out of this horrendous sickness.

I thought this because I knew. This would be what I would sound like if I ever got the chance to be on testosterone.

So now, when I’m angry and upset at the world, I watch that video. I watch and it makes me happy because in my head when I think to myself, or I dream, that’s what I sound like.

And that is something you can’t take away from me.

[transhanniday]

Trans women and other femme identifying Tumblrinas WE NEED YOU!

After polling the Hannibal fandom we found that most trans folk in our fandom are trans men, trans masc, non-binary and genderqueer. So we're curious, what are you ladies up to?

If you are in fandom/s you can feel free to let us know which in the replies or tags if you'd like :)

If you're trans woman or femme identifying non-cis person, please respond to our below poll about your hobbies. If you partake in more than one, please just pick the one that you spend most time on.

Please rebagel for bigger sample size!

Thank you 💖

[kendollclitzone]

For the nervous trans newbies out there

[cholerascum]

like anyone can hide sweet stories from me in the tags

@lost-estradiographer

if you have sweet stories about transing your genders please by all means share them I would love to hear them

[our-queer-experience]

hi!! i write fanfiction, particularly about a transfem character and her (cis male) partner. i want to write a fic exploring their relationship in a sexual context; she has been on HRT for a few months, no bottom surgery, and this is their first time exploring what pleasures her with the changes in her body. very soft and gentle and sweet. i want to write this as respectfully as possible and avoid anything fetishistic, so could any transfems reply/reblog this with how they think smth like this should be approached, and any ideas of things to include? i'll come back and check the post. tysm i hope mod doesn't mind asks like this!!

(also, bc i imagine it's one of the first things people will recommend, i have read & reread the zine fucking trans women!)

@thetransfemininereview has a lot of great transfem specific books/other lit., so does @makingqueerhistory! otherwise, drop your tips below :)

[0x-hazel]

Hazel's Book Club

Welcome to the second installment of my story reviewing thread! Today's thread has the theme of "kinda stressful stories with troubled protagonists" I guess? it sounds a bit morbid but they're good stories so stick with it (if you want, absolutely no pressure there ^w^)

Up first, The Objectively Most Rational Decision, by The_Luce. The titular decision is, of course, to transition, even though you're just a [redacted]. The story follows a terrible person very spiky egg taking the only logical step to making their life easier. which it will be, obviously. CW for incel/4chan terminology and thinking, references to a whole bunch of bigoted shit (naturally), sexual content.

Secondly, Be a Girl by @zemathememequeen. this one is a modern light fantasy (objectively a bunch of people have superpowers but it's really easy to forget that?) story about a "boy" who gains the magical power to turn anyone into a girl! which obviously goes disastrously wrong when the majority of their accidental targets are cis, and it doesn't even work on themselves :< . It's a rather intense story and gets very depressing in parts, but the final part is beginning now and it's looking a lot more upbeat. But CW for transphobia, depression and dysphoria, and abuse.

Thirdly, and a surprise addition to this post when I realised it fits the theme, is Joobie's Witch Hunt, about a vampire trying to control their hunger, a band of charismatic troublemakers, and the investigation of a sinister plot perhaps? Similarly to the previous story it gets very heavy but also has since lightened up a lot, and I wholeheartedly recommend it. CW A lot of self deprecation and hate, (depression, dysphoria, the usual), bigotry, violence and death.

Finally, special mention to Nexus Alpha by @elamimax. This one is smut, it contains graphic depictions of sex and kink, so obviously do not read if you aren't comfortable with that. But if you are, damn this is good, and I mostly wanted to put it here so that I could remind my friends it's started updating again ;3c . CW violence, intense power dynamics, mindfuckery, bondage and highly graphic sexual content. Oh yeah also big fuckoff mech battles but I feel like those disclaimers should come first.

And that wraps up this installment of the book club! Hope you enjoy some of the stories I recommend~

[some-assholes-familiar]

Okay but like, weirdly hot take: a trans story and a trans character are two different things with a lot of overlap, but a lot of potential.

Like, Jason Todd’s whole backstory post death has a lot of insanely trans themes. Like to a truth ridiculous degree. That being said, I don’t really consider him to be a trans character necessarily, just a character with a lot of struggles that undoubtedly will resonate with trans ppl. Can you headcanon him as trans? Absolutely, I’m certainly, not gonna stop you, but I personally think his story is more interesting if he’s a cis man experiencing a lot of the same struggles I do as a trans masc.

That being said, Danny Phantom? Trans character. Trans as fuck. Yes his story is incredibly trans coded, but it’s far less subtle (intentionally or not) and at least to my understanding, far less nuanced in its approach.

Jason Todd feels like a bridge between cis and trans ppl in understanding a lot of struggles not exclusive to either in exploring personal identity. Like it’s obviously really fantastical in its approach, but if anything I think that lends itself more to exploring these ideas regardless of gender identity or AGAB.

Danny Phantom just feels a lot more overt. The same way Nimona is an overtly trans feeling character. You could read it as a cis guy experiencing purely outlandish fantastical secret identity drama, but it loans itself far more heavily to a trans and LGBT+ experience of familial paranoia to not be inextricably and overtly tied to the experience.

Either way I’m probably a hypocrite, these are just my thoughts on the matter. Regardless of whatever headcanons you might hold or stand by I do believe these are the kind of stories that make bridging the gap of understanding much easier by virtue of being told the way that they are. And have a lot of great potential to bring a lot of comfort to anyone who needs it.

[newlevant]

Thank you so much to everyone who backed and shared the Kickstarter!! Tumblr users really came through. Shoutout to the person who tagged Neil Gaiman, you’re an MVP! Becoming Who We Are is officially a go 🥳

Still a few days left to preorder, and you can get the Kickstarter-exclusive hardcover edition:

[im-arabella]

me: why do i like spider gwen so much?

gwen to her dad: can you see why i didn’t tell you?

gwen to her dad: can you just be my dad right now?

me: oh yeah i get it

[tincanaudio]

I decided to challenge myself this weekend and turn one of my live audio pieces into a video! It's a short piece about names, and the odd relationship I have with my own.

I want to make more of these small, one-shot stories. I found working on my piece for Short Cuts and my documentary for QueerAF this year really creatively fulfilling, and something I want to explore more in the future.

Video editing, however, is something I have to...endure.