#transmasc health issues

[vaspider]

It's 100% okay if you don't feel comfortable sharing, but as a trans man who has never enjoyed his period and felt enough pain that I had to go on birth control (though now being on testosterone has made it better and go away entirely),

how does one tell the difference between period-typical pain and discomfort coupled with dysphoria, and No Literally You Should Not Be Experiencing These Kinds Of Feelings Go See A Doctor? you made reference to throwing up, but I'm also someone who doesn't do that often at all, especially in response to pain.

I recognize all information shared would be anecdotal and you are not a medical professional ^-^

"Is this pain interfering with your daily life even when you've taken reasonable over-the-counter steps to control it?" If so, that's a problem. Bonk your head against a doctor until they listen to you.

So, like, if you're taking advil/tylenol/whatever works for you and using a heating pad and stretching and the basic stuff, you know, and it's not working, and you're still spending days just laying in bed or sitting at your desk staring out the window waiting for the pain to stop or if you're throwing up because of pain or if it's making you change the way that you live/eat/work to cope with the pain, the GI upset, the mood swings... that's a problem! Go talk to a doctor.

If I'd known that, maybe they wouldn't have had to spend like 3x as long taking my uterus out because my entire insides were glued together with endometriosis. :/

[gor3sigil]

I’m Trans and Insane and I’m doing fine.

[TW Psychosis, transphobia, psychophobia, medication, psych ward]

“Are you sure ?” she asked.

I remember looking back at her in disbelief, because that was certainly a question I never asked her when she came out.

“Why do you ask ?” I say.

“Dude, I’ve seen you go into depersonalization so hard you even thought you were a human soul in a robot vessel and now, you want me to trust you when you say that you, too, are trans ?”

That’s the memory that comes back to me as I fold and put in my bag my psychiatrist’s note attesting that I suffer from gender dysphoria, NOT LINKED to any psychotic symptoms. Here it goes in my folder with my prescription note, an increase - again - of my anti depressants and Xan, and my endocrinologist’s HRT prescription, increased too - finally.

I go to two separate pharmacies to pick up each prescription for two reasons:

There is only one in this godforsaken town that always had testosterone in stock.

I can’t explain to you with words the look you can get when you give back to back, to someone who, despite not being a doctor, works in healthcare, a note for trans HRT and then a note for psychiatric meds.

And I’m lucky, because I’m not taking antipsychotics anymore. Contrarily to what you could think, it doesn’t magically makes the voices and the shadowy people disappear, but it can make a mess of your head pretty bad and my doctor and I both agreed that I didn’t need more damage up here than what I already had. And no, it doesn’t make your delusions vanish magically too: in fact, I was still pretty certain that I was talking to my soul family out here in Argentine telepathically about my mission on Earth, the meds just made it more difficult to understand their voices, but the belief was still solid.

Anyways, I’m back home with the Hoy Grail I fought tooth and nails to get: a letter from the Sacred Council of Mental Sanity also known as Psychiatry that I was, indeed, a bit delulu, but also trans, and that both things didn’t play into each other. My transness wasn’t a delusion, my delusions didn’t have anything to do with being trans.

Or did it ?

Chicken or egg, you know the drill. Did I have my selves fractured before and one of the piece that shattered my brain happened to make me trans or was I just trans with a shitload of traumas in the back that made me insane ?

But don’t worry, at least, trans people when we’re together, we have each other’s back ! Right ?

“Transidentity ISN’T a mental illness !! We don’t DESERVE to be FORCIBLY LOCKED UP and MEDICATED and MADE TO CONFORM FOR OTHER’S SENSE OF SECURITY !!”

Neither do I, RIGHT ?

Oh

Or do I ?

Remember what she said, my girlfriend, right at the beginning ?

How I can’t be trusted about myself when sometimes I don’t even have a sense of self anymore or I have too much selves who fight against each other ?

And what do we say to that ?

Get treatment. Get in-patient. Take medication. And for the love of God, shut the fuck up about it, you’re giving us a bad name.

Because being trans and crazy can’t exist. It’s absurd. You have to fix one of these two things. Choose which jacket I’ll wear, and they call it a straitjacket for a reason it seems, so am I queer or am I insane ?

All I know today is there isn’t a universe in which I’m a trans without any mental illnesses, or mentally ill without being trans. And yet, I can’t tell you how many time I got asked “do you think you’d be trans if you never got through [x trauma] ?”. I. Don’t. Know. I’ll never know. And I deserve just as much agency as you get despite being mentally ill. If you don’t believe in that, don’t come yapping about “liberation for all of us”, but “if one of us is crazy they’ll all think I am too and that can’t happen”.

No LGBTQIAA+ person deserves to be told they need to be put away, to be cured, to be allowed out in the open only if they’re deemed “acceptable” by society’s standards. And no mentally ill people deserve to either.

No trans person should be going through years of counseling to have the access to HRT.

And I shouldn’t have had to threaten my own mother’s life to avoid being locked in an adult psych ward at 14.

If you ever think, for one second, that these two things have nothing to do with one another, you are far removed from history.

To hear queer people say “yeah but some mentally ill people are dangerous !” feels like you don’t even know where you come from.

And if I want to say, that me being trans is linked to me being mentally ill, or at least, that both are connected in a way, all hell breaks fucking loose.

So I’ll explain very carefully.

See, when I was young, my mind got shattered into a thousand of pieces I had to try to glue back on. All these pieces of myself broke further more down the line because I couldn’t catch a fucking break. And now, it happens that the final puzzle does not have the same face it had before. It happens that its shape changed over time, for reasons over the control of all of us who tried to build ourselves back. Now there’s a bigger picture, less pieces, a few other shadows, and me. Built from the shatters. With my own needs and afflictions.

And whoever you are, whatever your agenda might be, I will not let anyone take any agency away from me under the false pretext that I can’t know anything for myself. They say that about children, they say that about minorities, about physically disabled people, about the people they want OUT. And my trans siblings, you know that.

I came out for the first time 7 years ago, to my then girlfriend, who was the one asking the question that is the first sentence of this text. I came out a second time 3 years ago. Been on HRT, had top surgery, had psychotic breaks, got my meds changed, switch therapist.

Because I am trans and crazy. And yet, all these choices I made, I made myself. It didn’t have to be that hard to get the basic care I needed. It didn’t need to be. But it WAS. And I’m part of the lucky crowd of people who had access to out-patient treatment, who never have been locked up in ward, who managed to stay alive through meds withdrawals without medical assistance when I had no therapist.

Be very careful of when you start to put conditions on the rights you think you deserve. Be very, very careful about your definition of sanity and of how it warps the way you see people. When you start to say “I have access to that, but there’s people like X or Y who shouldn’t BECAUSE”, pause and ask yourself what led you to think this way. More often than not, you’ll find yourself playing the same mind games as the ones you swore to fight against, and when it gives them the upper hand, they won’t hesitate to come for you after that.

[rullikka]

here's just some guy from my sketchbook 🛠

[hideyourautumn-milkteeth]

Anyways on the topic of body positivity I think we need to kill the people on the internet who still go around pushing the idea that having a neck beard is a sign of something inherently negative. Whether it be misogyny or unhygienic, we need to start treating it neutrally like we should with any body or facial hair.

I'm not going to hate the hair I'm growing on myself just because some fatphobic fucks decided to make a stereotype out of it over a decade ago. I went on T, I fought hard for the facial hair I have, and I'm not going to make myself hate it just cause some stupid motherfuckers keep telling me I "have to" for whatever dumbass reason.

I love my neck beard. I love the hair that grows between my chin and neck. It makes me look like an actual DUDE and is fun to stim with. I love the hair I've fought so hard for and I'm not gonna act ironic about it.

[mad-wheelies]

Just had starting hrt (testosterone) delayed another six months. Someone kill me.

[quyaghogogsworld]

Hello, we are the Voided System. Our host, Maverique, will be the one mostly posting on here, but our headmates will post, too. We would like to give you a friendly reminder that this is mostly a VENT ACCOUNT. It will most likely contain the following topics. Viewer discretion is advised if you are sensitive or triggered by the following topics.

◇ Self Harm

◇ Gore

◇ Self Hatred

◇ Body Dysmorphia

◇ Gender Dysphoria

◇ Hateful Actions and/or Words

◇ Talk of Abuse, Domestic Violence, Child Neglect

◇ Imposter Syndrome

◇ BPD struggles/Awareness

◇DID Struggles/Awareness

◇ EDNOS struggles

◇ Disordered Eating

Again, if you are sensitive/triggered to any of these topics, PLEASE AVOID MY ACCOUNT. I would like for people not to be hurt by what I post. If you do not like it, scroll.

[aldercaps]

sometimes you feel like getting sappy on main. Sometimes you need to beat your past self over the head with a stick that says “STOP ISOLATING YOURSELF WHEN YOU FEEL BAD”. The poem I wrote last year is under the cut.

If you have a huge self realization, You don't actually have to do anything about it. It's so easy to hide from. When I heard other people's stories, I always assumed when I reached my breaking point, I would HAVE to do something about it. Some current would buoy me along, And I wouldn't have to just sit in bed, Consumed by self doubt. At what point do you just HAVE to do it? I feel like I've reached that point a dozen times. How many times have I cried about this? How many times am I going to? If I ignore it long enough, will it smooth over like a rock caught in a stream? Or will it consume me, Crawling through my body cavity until I choke? Until I die? I told myself I would tell people, if it got bad enough. I don't know if I can tell people, now. It's been so long. The tiger's been chasing me through these woods long enough I've stopped caring if it digs its teeth into me. Maybe if I lie down and let it eat me, something nicer can grow out of my bones.

Please reach out to people and tell them when you’re struggling. You are not needy or a burden for asking for help when you need it.

[g4yr4t]

once again just bc men in a certain group have issues that affect them differently bc they are men it does not mean they are oppressed for being men

[dangerousbluebirdwerewolf]

Dr Mengele

One of the very worse thing that was ever said by a politician about transidentity was by Eric Zemmour (french).

He compared the surgeries transgender people can get to the experiments of Dr Mengele in Auschwitz.

This is literally so stupid and so needlessly cruel.

Stupid, because there is a clear difference between me, receving my monthly injection in the security and warmth of my house, while my mother holds my hand, and children stolen from their parents and being sent to cremation after chemicals were injected into their eyes.

Cruel, because this is implying that the children in Auschwitz had it as easy as I do.

Do I really need to explain it further ? And Eric Zemmour was nearly elected president of his country.

[vaspider]

Thankfully Tumblr seems to have eaten the ask so I can't post it, but I got an ask from @mewthoughtcrime asking me to reblog a post which is a repost of an essay called "The New Thoughtcrime."

@ohara-n-brown wrote a pretty good explanation of why I will not be touching that hot garbage with a ten foot pole.

@mewthoughtcrime (who I have since blocked) is tagging these posts with a bunch of trans-related tags, so if you don't want to see a bunch of "what you are is fake and your community is a cult" all up in those tags, might be easier just to block them. The post is disingenuous about its purpose as a "resource" post - the essay is a rehash of Irreversible Damage and nobody needs that nonsense.

[gor3sigil]

I wanted to remind you something that I myself struggle with: sometimes, living is enough.

I know that as trans people we always feel the need to produce things. Art, music, reading material, anything to show that we're existed, we're here. But, you ARE here. You don't need to prove it, you don't need to theorise your existence nor justify it. It doesn't have to make sense of have a grand purpose.

And no, you won't be forgotten. People notice you. The clerks from the store you shop in every weekend ? They think about you around the time you usually come in and will be surprise, maybe concerned if you don't show up. The neighbour you have a little chat with on your way to work ? They know about you. There's a little community of people that know about you and remember you even if you don't have a close-knit relationship. These little things matter, trust me.

Having ambitions is fantastic, but if for today, tomorrow or more the best you can do is live, wake up everyday and do what you can, then it's enough and I'm proud of you for going this far.

[mental-mona]

Transmascs beware

[our-nonpassing-experience]

I am a transgender teenager. I'm not out. I can't come out. I cannot pass. My biggest gripe with any resource I try to find is that it assumes I'm on HRT and/or have had surgeries or that I simply *don't want* those things. I never see anything about the specific struggles regarding not being able to pass and I feel alone. I feel like I'm dying. Which is odd because in my head, a majority of trans people don't pass. And it's understandable that one wouldn't want to draw attention to themself in that state but for those who wish to talk about it...here you go.

I am aware that the very concept of passing is problematic as at it's very core it works against transgender people and our liberation. To that I say: the world is not past the point where passing is required. Conformity to your gender is required, especially to that of which one was assigned.

Preface Out Of The Way: Welcome To Our Non-Passing Experience! This blog is open to people trans, cis, nonbinary, or otherwise who wish to share their experiences of not passing in some way, shape, or form in a positive, negative, or neutral light. While I find not passing to be a torturous prison, others revel in their non-conformity and I, and I'm sure others, would love to hear just that! Thank you for your time and contributions.

[transjekyll]

So like, this thought has been on my mind for ages and ages, but i've seen some takes today that got my blood boiling so i wanted to write it out.

I think it's pretty crappy to address other trans/nb people you don't know as a "feminine-presenting afab" without knowing that they explicitly identify that way. Most specifically if it's used to dump all over someone's attempts to talk about their experiences. Or deny that these experiences exist.

So, so, so many trans people have little to no control over their outward appearance!

You don't know if they live under the thumb of family members who are strict and controlling of their clothing and appearance.

You don't know if they're struggling financially. (I had barely just come out of homelessness when I started figuring this out, I had nothing! You can't expect everyone to immediately go out and buy a whole new wardrobe when they pass the questioning phase or have the means to experiment with new looks.)

You don't know if they're fighting tooth and nail in a losing battle to access surgery, or if they live in a place where it wouldn't be safe to commit full time to HRT.

You don't know if they just realised they aren't cis yesterday.

You don't know what their future plans for transition are AT ALL.

[somanyjacks]

let's all acknowledge the true elder transmasc experience: dealing with acne on the day of your colonoscopy

[blkkatsuki]

justquill for the ship meme

The second part was genuinely so nauseating I kept getting confused abt which line was which ugh</3 anywayy feel free 2 send more!!!