#while almost all of the more recently out ones are transfemme

[dkettchen]

I thought there were many trans/nb people on my uni (animation/games/vfx) course when I was on it 5-7 years ago and there were like 5 of us in each year group, but the sheer amount of ppl I found out afterwards have transed their gender since (2 in my year group, 1 lecturer, and 1 in the year group above and below ours to my knowledge at current count if I haven’t forgotten about anyone) is both impressive and fairly unsurprising

[theabigailthorn]

Hey I’ve been a fan for a little while now, and I just wanted to say that you’ve been an inspiration for me, a younger transfemme. But I do wanna also ask: what’s it like being a trans woman with her life together? I’m 19 (as of sending), been on hrt for almost 5 months, and have been trans for a year and change. But I’m scared. So, I guess, I wanted to ask: does being trans ever become the norm, my baseline? What’s it like after 2-3 years? And does it get any less confusing or scary?

I think there are a few things going on here.

I don't have my life together as much as it might seem; I just don't show you all the ways it's not. I don't talk publicly about the auditions I don't get, or the things I try and fail at, or the insecurities in my own head that hold me back sometimes, or the handful of decisions I've made that were bad calls and which still keep me up occasionally. I've talked about trauma and mental illness in the past, but I only ever discuss stuff I'm comfortably over - when I'm overwhelmed or in the middle of a crisis I don't post about it. I don't set out to deceive you by presenting myself that way, I just keep my most private stuff private. Everybody has failures and regrets and insecurities: "it's a sign of having lived," as my friend Phoebe told me today. But you see a curated version of me that appears not only more together than the real person, but more together than any real person.

Also, if you're 19 a lot of your life hasn't been in your control until pretty recently and a lot of it still might not be. I'd say it's okay to not feel like you have it all together. You just transitioned, which I think is one of the hardest things a human being can do: you can give yourself credit for that even if you feel like you're not settled into it yet. Congratulations!

As for it becoming the baseline, I mean yeah? Kinda? At least for me. Sometimes I forget. I had a moment today in the gym where I saw a man and I was like "Oh yeah, I used to be one of them, sortof? Weird!" The first year is the hardest, or so they say. I wouldn't say I get less confused or scared now, just scared and confused in different ways. I worry less about getting attacked in the street than I did in my first year, for example. (I'm lucky and privileged in that regard.) But I worry a lot more about other people. I struggle a lot with survivor's guilt, which is something only people who survive get! Anyone who's had a drink with me in the last six months has heard me beat myself up because the night of The Prince premiere in New York was the night of Brianna Taylor's vigil in the UK. That wasn't a deliberate decision - the premiere was booked and paid for months before she was even killed - but I've become a lot more sensitive to those sorts of feelings precisely because I spend less time worrying about myself. I'm more aware now of what my transness means for other people. Like, I made an ironic joke when I came out that I'd become The Transgender Princess of TERF Island, and it's kindof haunted me since - I didn't set out to become "a famous trans person" but it's happened a little bit and it's going to happen a lot more next year. That comes with serious responsibilities and a few mild drawbacks, as well as perks, obviously. So I guess that's a longwinded way of saying I might be a weird person to ask this question because, at least for right now, my transness, my whole self, doesn't just belong to me.

Oh also, some great advice I got from my friends: Paris: "Only change the things that bother you on your good days," and Mattie: "Don't believe anything you think about your life after 9pm."

[cosmo--raptor]

hi i really hope this isnt invasive or intrusive to ask but from one transfemme to another , how do you comfortably and safely dress ?? im in the closet and i live in a horribly violent family and i just feel like a coward hiding myself while everyone is living their true selves

I wanna start this off by telling you that you're not a coward at all. Your situation is tough and it's not something with a simple fix. I'm very vocal about being trans online but I myself am not always able to live my true self; I'd be in skirts almost every day if I didn't feel like I'd be kicked out if my parents found out, so I know what it's like.

As for dressing, I can only really tell you what I've found works, and for me that often comes in the form of tank tops because they usually have a lower neckline(? idk if that's the right word, I mean the bit your head comes out of) which helps me feel a bit more femme. Smaller size shirts can also help accentuate your bust if you're comfy with slightly tighter clothing. Accessories like chokers and earrings have also really helped me feel femme, and the best part is they're easy to keep on you until you're in a safe position to put them on when you're out somewhere. If you don't have pierced ears, I also recommend looking into clip-on guards because a lot of clip on earrings I get off of Etsy have imperfect metal shaping that can become really painful on my ears.

The one other thing I can recommend is make-up. I don't usually wear foundation but a little eyeliner goes a hell of a long way. I know that eyeliner isn't as easy to put on outside as earrings or chokers but the pens themselves are pretty small and would be pretty easy to hide somewhere. I also learned recently that some facial skincare products can be a decent foundation which helps with both make-up application and making your skin look a bit clearer and softer. I'm almost always in black lipstick when I'm dressed but that's a personal preference, you may want to go for something more natural that compliments your skin tone. That being said, it also highlights one thing I wanna touch on which is that dressing comfortably and in a way you like is gonna be subjective; if you find something that you really like and is comfortable, roll with it even if it's not hyper-femme.

I am so sorry you are having to hide who you are. I know full well that survival can feel like fucking torment. I hope my experiences have been able to help you in any way, in any amount. Please stay safe. 🖤

[idiotcat-affectionate]

Am I a ‘Trans Elder’?

A quick note before really starting, My experience with community as a trans person has been heavily online. A lot of what I’m going to talk about has also been very heavily white, middle class and transfemme centric. I don’t think there’s really been a point where that’s not been true of online trans culture but it feels worth noting all the same. This question bugs me a lot. I’ve been out as trans for just over a decade. I’m 29 now and lately I’ve been feeling very, odd? About that experience. This is never more pronounced than when seeing trans people and given that I’m transfemme, trans women. Especially trans women who are older than me a decade or more come out. Or who have come out comparatively recently. For arguments sake I’ll set an arbitrary deadline of May 2014, TIME’s ‘transgender tipping point’. I think that’s a little early but it’s also a point in time between the trans forum culture that I came out into, and the modern reddit and discord trans culture that has taken hold.

Trans ‘forum culture’ felt like it was for people who were older than me ( I distinctly remember some jealousy of how comparatively young I was), trans reddit for the most part feels much younger. I get some real cognitive dissonance every time I see someone with a catgirl avatar tell me they’re forty-five, while I mentally write off the experiences I don’t get as just ‘kids being kids’. Obviously, I’m not ‘elder’ to a thirty or forty-five year old, but my experience with navigating the world as an out trans person is multiple times as high. This is what ‘queer time’, a concept I first heard about on Abby Thorn’s Philosophytube, is to me. It is the idea that I am part of an older ‘generation’ of trans people, whilst being physically younger. The idea that that means I can have ‘trans elder’ advice for people older than me. It just feels awkward trying to give it. Maybe giving advice shouldn’t be awkward, but there was a hole where my ‘trans elders’ could have been. There wasn’t an online trans culture before ‘forum culture’, the AIDS epidemic, and section 28, there isn’t a recognisable group older than me. (There have definitely been offline and more diverse trans cultures through that time with their own trans elders. They just weren’t my community and I had no ‘Mother Hen’ to speak of.) When I’m asking myself the question of whether or not I’m a ‘trans elder’ I don’t think what I’m actually asking for is to be seen as an authority because of my experience. I don’t think it’s even really about that label. It’s about wanting that experience to be heard. It’s about wanting people to be able to learn from it so they can hopefully have a better time of transition and a quicker path to feeling secure in their own identity. It’s about wanting to find people who understand, because I’ve lost touch with almost everyone I knew who came out around the same time. It’s about feeling like there is a space for that. A space that is mine. I guess that’s what blogs are for. So maybe I’ll finally start one. I guess it can go to the place I truly feel best describes the trans generation I feel a part of, given the forums were in decline when I got there and this one went down with the rise of reddit. 

Hi Tumblr. It’s been a while. Kinda surprised you still exist tbh.

[porntagreclamations-blog]

Tags to Remove from Porn

This is a non-comprehensive list and will be amended from time to time as necessary.

Tags are listed in alphabetical order. As most are slurs, the list will be hidden until you click “keep reading”, so that you don’t have to deal with the glut of unpleasant language.

Some terms which may be disputed (most if not all will be disputed by someone) have footnotes.

Bitch Crossdresser/CD ¹ Cunt Cuntboy Dickgirl Fag Faggot Female to Male/FtM ² Futanari Hermaphrodite Intersex ³ Lesbo Male to Female/MtF ² Shemale Sissy ⁴ Slut TG ⁵ Tranny Transsexual/TS ⁶ Transvestite ¹ Trap ⁷ Whore

(If you have trouble reading the list try highlighting it!)

Notā Bene: While any number of these terms might be depicted, described (non-visual porn), or used consensually during sex as "Dirty Talk", with the more distasteful language generating more erotic appeal, it is the belief of this blog that these are inappropriate terms for tagging online content. The reason for this is that these terms, when used as the means of categorization of such content, ascribe a certain innateness to the actors or actions depicted or described. This boils down to, for example, categorical descriptions of women as bitches, sluts, and whores. Because these categorization terms carry an assumptions of empiricism, at the end of the day, it's just hate speech.

¹ As a fetish, the eroticism of "crossdressing" comes from the transgression of gender norms by cis individuals. In porn "crossdressing" as a term is often applied to trans women as a means of denying their gender identity. Historically, "crossdresser" or "transvestite" were incorrectly used to describe trans women, with the assumption that they were cis men wearing women's clothes (though of course the validity of trans identities is still disputed by the uninformed).

² FtM and MtF are dated terms (which oddly enough survive largely through use as tumblr tags) which conflate a myriad of different concepts into single misattributions: gender, gender presentation, secondary sex characteristics, and genitals. More accurate terms are "Transmasculine"/"Transmasc"/"TrM" and "Transfeminine"/"Transfem/Transfemme"/"TrF". TrM and TrF are not only much more inclusive of nonbinary people who seek transition, but they much more accurately describe the realities of transition: transitioning from one societally-defined gender presentation and set of secondary sex characteristics to another. Some might try to redefine "FtM" and "MtF" as "Feminine to Masculine" and "Masculine to Feminine", but because the public understanding of these acronyms is already established in their original meanings, "TrM" and "TrF" are the only versions you will see on this blog.

³ Of course, intersex people can be described thusly, but in porn categorization, "intersex", is almost exclusively used to incorrectly refer to transgender people who are not intersex.

⁴ The "Sissy" fetish is one which centers around the concept of transfeminine transition, reworked into some kind of mythological version of the effects of HRT and other medically assisted transition procedures as being not only purely sexual but often with the results being achieved solely through submission and outward feminine gender presentation. Frequently the transition is forced or instituted coercively, with very strong ideas of the would-be "Sissies" "not being man enough" being the catalyst for the change. Obviously this somewhat bizarre re-imagining of what transgender people are, how transition works, and why trans people transition not only denies the identity of the trans people proclaimed as "Sissies", but supplants the reality of trans people and issues with one cooked up solely for fetishistic reasons.

⁵ Although TG can be used as a shorthand for "Transgender", the effect of using this term as opposed to "Trans" is to abstract the concept of transness into an acronym which can be used in comfortable ignorance or denial of transgender people and issues. This tepid attempt to acknowledge trans people really isn't good enough.

⁶ Despite the fact that some trans people may choose to identify themselves as "transsexual", or that some definitions might deem any transgender person who seeks medical transition as "transsexual", the use of the term is quite dated, and current usage is most prevalent among people who have retained an ignorance to trans issues. Evoking antiquated perceptions in full form, in its abbreviated form "TS" is typically used either to fetishize trans people (esp. women) or deny their gender identity and relegate them to otherness.

⁷ The usage of the word "trap" as a description of transgender people (women, mostly) was and remains a terrible way of simultaneously objectifying and rejecting trans people. The sentiment expressed is essentially "I almost fell for [her] trap because she was so hot, but when I saw [her] penis I got out of there." More recently, there have been proclamations that traps only refer to feminine (cis) men, but this is merely a further denial of trans identities, as many trans women are still labeled "traps" by malicious or severely uninformed/misguided taggers. The intentional denial of transphobia and subversion of trans identities makes this perhaps the most sinister tag on this list.