Tumblr: You’re a literal child who cannot consent to sex until you’re 85 years old and you can only have sex with someone who was born on the exact same day at the exact same minute as you and you can only do it in a way I personally feel is healthy and Pure™
Also Tumblr: So you’re saying 6 year olds shouldn’t transition? Why do you hate trans people lmao
Thanks for making me agree with /pol/ on something, Tumblr. I hate you even more now.
Can we stop referring to cases of misdiagnosis as child abuse? This shit is just annoying at this point.
This was a misdiagnosis. She didn’t just decide “my child is trans!” (I can understand calling it child abuse when parents insist their child is trans without medical intervention).
Her child expressed concern. She took her child to professionals. They diagnosed her child with gender dysphoria. They gave what they believed to be the appropriate treatment.
This has nothing to do with her parenting skills. We always talk about how you shouldn’t self-diagnose, but then criticize parents/people when they actually take the advice of professionals? Fuck that.
Would people be calling it child abuse if a child said “mom I frequently feel sad for no reason” to their mother, she took them to a psychologist, they were diagnosed with depression, they were given medication, and it ended up actually being bipolar disorder and they spent half a year suffering because of the wrong type of medication? Probably not.
When you say misdiagnoses are child abuse what you’re implying that when it comes to complicated mental health issues, parents should be dismissive of their children, not trust professionals more versed in medicine and psychology than they are, and prevent their child from receiving treatment.
Situations like this aren’t child abuse. They are misdiagnoses that should inspire professionals to create a diagnostic process that are more efficient at weeding out people who are not actually transgender and setting age standards for opposite-sex hormone treatment (opting instead for puberty blockers).
There’s something I found out that I think is important for trans men, trans mascs, and anyone who’s considering or is regularly binding to know. You know those binder safety guidelines? There is no science backing them whatsoever. They are essentially arbitrary, best guesses of what constitutes as safe use. The actual length of use and how long of breaks need to be taken, etc could actually require shorter durations of use and longer breaks.
When people have bad experiences with binding and speak out against their use, it’s often just dismissed as they weren’t following the safety protocols. However, we have no evidence that religiously following these protocols will guarantee someone will not experience a serious binder injury or permanent damage. I think we need to start noting that these aren’t safety guidelines and you’ll be safe when following them. These are guesses at how someone may reduce the risk of harm from regular binding.
I’m saying this as a trans man. I’m not someone with an agenda who’s using dishonest scare tactics. It’s important people are aware of the risks to make a truly informed decision on various aspects of transition. Especially when you consider how few people actually moderately follow these guidelines let alone religiously follow them.
Making it easier and cheaper for trans people to get hrt and surgery under insurance
Making de-transitioners less common
Medicalizing being trans is NOT about:
Telling anyone if they are or are not trans because their dysphoria doesn’t match a “one size fits all” model
Remember that wanting to make detransitioners less common doesn’t mean it’s not okay to detransition! We make mistakes! We have phases! We just wanna prevent people from medically transitioning and finding out the hard way :)
My name is Helena, and as of this writing I’m a 23-year-old woman who, as a teenager, believed I was transgender. In the years since detransitioning (stopping testosterone treatment and no longer seeing myself as transgender), I’ve become interested in exploring why, in the last decade, nearly every English-speaking country has seen a meteoric rise in adolescents believing they are transgender and pursuing cosmetic medical and surgical interventions. Here, I’d like to go over how and why I came to see myself as transgender, the process of transitioning, and the events leading up to and following my detransition.
The short version of my detransition story for those who want the bare details is that when I was fifteen, I was introduced to gender ideology on Tumblr and began to call myself nonbinary. Over the next few years, I would continue to go deeper and deeper down the trans identity rabbit hole, and by the time I was eighteen, I saw myself as a “trans man”, otherwise known as “FtM”. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood to begin a testosterone regimen. At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19, sometime around February or March 2018. When the disillusionment fully set in, I stopped the testosterone treatment and began the process of getting my life back on track. It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr.
But what leads a girl with no history of discomfort with stereotypical “girl” toys and clothes, or even the slightest desire to be a boy in childhood, to want to be a “man” through hormonal injections as she approached adulthood? In a vacuum, such a profound confusion leading to such drastic measures sounds like it should be rare and a sign of some sort of severe mental disturbance. Was I a fluke? Was I some kind of idiot who mistakenly believed I was trans because I’m crazy or just downright irresponsible?
The truth is that there has been an extreme rise in adolescents, especially girls, believing they are transgender. UK NHS referral data shows a 4000% increase in pediatric gender service referrals (not a typo). So-called “gender dysphoria”, which was once a very rare diagnosis that described mostly prepubescent boys and adult men, is now most commonly diagnosed in teenage girls. Activists will argue that these explosive numbers are a result of increased societal acceptance, and that at long last trans people are coming out of hiding and living as their authentic selves. If this were true, one might expect to see comparable rates of transgender identity across all age groups and between both sexes, but its disproportionately adolescent females feeling that warm and fuzzy inclusive acceptance. Considering “acceptance” now implies supraphysiological doses of cross sex hormones and having healthy body organs surgically rearranged, it’s worth a deeper look into what kinds of factors are driving this population clamoring to go under the knife.
This is a very long, very compelling, very personal essay by a woman who got caught up in gender ideology, but thankfully realized she made a mistake before doing any irreversible damage. It’s far too long to post here - a good 20-30 minute read - but well spending the time on.
I wanted to pull out a part of it that stuck with me.
How could I have been so stupid?
I couldn’t bring myself to tell Jamie what I was truly thinking. I knew that she would probably freak out and try to make me rationalize away these feelings, but it was too late for that now. The dam had broken. Instead, I silently berated myself and catastrophized internally until I mustered the courage to tell my very pro-LGBT therapist: being trans had been a massive mistake.
I remember her response clear as day: “But you always tell me about your terrible dysphoria!”
“I know, but I… I don’t think that’s what it is” I replied, and started to tell her my still developing thoughts on how I had developed the “dysphoria” after finding out about gender identities online as a teenager, when I had been struggling with so many other emotional issues for a long time, and that in retrospect I must have gotten carried away, thinking that being trans was the explanation and solution for all of my problems. She wasn’t really hearing me, and questioned the things I said from the angle of “you’re trying to talk yourself out of being trans because transphobia is making you hate yourself.” Ironic that nobody ever questioned my desire to be trans that way.
This was the first moment I started realizing something was off about the trans movement, and institutions in general. I had experienced this massive realization, and it was agonizing but at least it was finally something real, and here I was being met with all these rationalizations for why this of all things was a psychological symptom. Not the effects of the testosterone, not my belief that all of my problems would be solved by transitioning, not my aversion to being female, but the fact that I now knew transitioning had been a mistake.
I left this session feeling frustrated, and I don’t think I ever went back. Sitting in the car outside the building, I told Jamie that I was regretting my transition and questioning my trans identity in general, and predictably she was extremely upset. She reacted in anger, saying I must be confused and, like my therapist, accusing me of having these thoughts due to some underlying psychological issue, like only an insane person would ever regret being trans.
She was not being uniquely harsh here, this is a common occurrence in the trans community. In one direction, there’s a desire to encourage gender questioning in others who have not questioned their gender yet (some people call this “cracking an egg”). In the other direction, there is an intense fear of others changing their minds about being trans or wanting to transition. Once someone is questioning their gender, there’s a push to encourage them to take steps towards social and medical transition, which, once initiated, makes changing one’s mind more complicated and going back to living as they did before more difficult. I personally have gotten very angry and desperate when friends in the past would voice doubts about identifying as transgender, and I have also encouraged gender questioning and trans identity in friends of mine who did not yet identify as trans. I regret this very much now, as some of these friends have gone on to medically transition, and I no longer believe this was remotely in their best interest. But in the trans community, people cope with the inherent doubts and cognitive dissonance of pretending to be someone they are not by encouraging others to do the same. This is also why so many adult trans people advocate for child transition. If an innocent, pure child can “be trans”, that validates their identity and belief system too. An enormous amount of mental energy is devoted to the crowdsourcing of validation and firefighting of anything that triggers internal conflict, which is always nagging in the back of the mind.
When a person is at peace with themselves and expressing themselves naturally, they don’t desperately micromanage everything and everyone around them.
Consider someone who doesn’t hold a belief in a god, becomes a Xian, then deconverts. The Xians from the church they left might accuse this person of “having these thoughts due to some underlying psychological issue” and never spot the hypocrisy.
its important to me as a detrans woman to be vocal about it. its important to me as a detrans woman who initially only had radfems to talk to about detransition, because i couldnt find a single trans inclusive detrans person for over a year, to make sure other people know they have options.
radfems arent your aly if you’re questioning your gender. they dont have your best interest at heart. they dont care about helping you explore who you are, theyre only interested in sucking you in to be another transmisogynistic pawn for their violent ideology.
if you’re trans/nonbinary now, but are wondering if it isnt right for you, know that you have options. you can talk to me. there are people who have not done a 180 into bigotry who are here to support you.
please reblog, do not just like, this post.
i dont have a large platform. i want this to get spread. i want to remove terfs from the forefront of detrans/reidentification awareness & support. they cannot continue to be the first contact for questioning people.
i am begging you, yes you personally, to please reblog this, and comment or reply in the tags if you’re a safe, trans-inclusive detransitioned or reidentified person to approach.
its important to me as a detrans woman to be vocal about it. its important to me as a detrans woman who initially only had radfems to talk to about detransition, because i couldnt find a single trans inclusive detrans person for over a year, to make sure other people know they have options.
radfems arent your aly if you’re questioning your gender. they dont have your best interest at heart. they dont care about helping you explore who you are, theyre only interested in sucking you in to be another transmisogynistic pawn for their violent ideology.
if you’re trans/nonbinary now, but are wondering if it isnt right for you, know that you have options. you can talk to me. there are people who have not done a 180 into bigotry who are here to support you.
please reblog, do not just like, this post.
i dont have a large platform. i want this to get spread. i want to remove terfs from the forefront of detrans/reidentification awareness & support. they cannot continue to be the first contact for questioning people.
i am begging you, yes you personally, to please reblog this, and comment or reply in the tags if you’re a safe, trans-inclusive detransitioned or reidentified person to approach.
Before I got testosterone prescribed by an endocrinologist, I had to sign informed consent. The problem is, that it seems to be quite impossible to fully understand what you’re consenting to. And no one was able to explain me all of it.
I fully understood the physical consequences that I could expect, that were known. I knew about the facial hair, body hair, balding patterns, libido, oily skin, muscle mass, probably becoming infertile, fat distribution, acne, clitoral growth, change of body odor, etc. I had researched it all, for years. I also understood that the hormones wouldn’t exactly change my personality, but that they could change the way I felt things and how I’d react. I understood it could become harder for me to cry, that I might get angry easier and that emotions and events could affect me less or more intensely.
What I didn’t realize, is that one day, I might actually meet women that are just like me (in real life!), but don’t change their bodies. And what I definitely didn’t understand was that these women and lesbians would not recognize me, but see me as a cisgender man instead. And treat me as such. No one could have explained me what this feels like.
I did not understand at that time, that when I consented to being assigned to use male bathrooms forever, it didn’t just mean that I would never get angry and disgusted stares from women anymore. No one told me that in many cases, the stall is closed/non-existent/too exposed, or so dirty that I can’t sit. No one told me that if you very often don’t sit or try to pee as little and as quickly as possible, you can get some trouble with your pelvic muscles. I have problems with relaxing in any kind of situation now.
No one told me that taking testosterone could make me feel even more alienated from both men and women.
No one told me that straight women being attracted to me feels very different from lesbian women being attracted to me.
What I didn’t understand was that I could one day change my mind, and stop taking any kind of hormones. I also didn’t realize that I’d become sincerely afraid of the tissue of my reproductive organs being changed in some kind of way by the high levels of testosterone. In a way that’s dangerous to my health.
No one could tell me that I hadn’t met the right people yet, before I could make a proper informed decision. No one reminded me that until that point, nobody had really loved me romantically exactly for the way I am. I had only been loved despite my butchness, or despite my body. And nobody told me that it is actually possible to be loved and desired the way I was, in a way that I could believe.
Nobody ever told me that it wasn’t necessary to take testosterone if I wanted to get a double mastectomy.
I couldn’t know that I consented to somethingI could actually regret. I didn’t know I consented to something that would at some point make me feel like I betrayed myself, and the girls like me.
I didn’t understand what I consented to and I don’t think that that endocrinologist will ever be able to understand this.
I am not against informed consent. But there has to be some kind of way to improve the information and the deeper understanding of the consequences.
In response to @notafurry2002 who said: you could’ve just said “hey keep in mind that transitioning isn’t for everyone” bc this could scare a lot of ppl who really are trans and need this. this is why i believe it’s important to explore your pronouns and identity really deeply before transitioning. also, it’s very possible to just… stop taking hormones. be careful with how you word things becuz someone can really take this the wrong way and use it against actual trans people, and there’s already proof of that here in the notes . i understand the message you’re trying to convey but it’s just the wording that really rubs me the wrong way because it just feels like you’re saying that transitioning is really dangerous and risky. which in some ways it could be, but again you have to consider the impact your message can make on ALL people, trans or not. i started T yesterday, i am a transmasc person, and i can only imagine the amount of anxiety this can cause in someone. along with that, it could imply that a lot of transmasc people are just butch lesbians. which could be the case in SOME people, but this in turn can really trigger a lot of unnecessary dysphoria and questioning in a transmasc person who genuinely will thrive on testosterone. it basically can cause internalized transphobia because there’s a stigma that transmasc people are really just tomboys and butch lesbians, which is just awful but it exists. again, i understand the message you really are trying to convey and in some aspects it definitely is something to think about, but i feel like the choice of wording can just do a lot more harm than good. i feel like the message someone should get out of this is to encourage exploring all identities and pronouns before fully transitioning, but it looks like the moral of the story is “testosterone bad and will make everyone hate you and you will use nasty bathrooms. ur probably a butch/tomboy”
With the original post, I was trying to explain that there are people (like me) that thought they were really trans, for years (!), who have explored various identities and pronouns before ‘medically transitioning’, only to found out transitioning wasn’t for them after all. I know this is scary; I’ve lived through this.
I think it’s not good to avoid sharing stories like mine because ‘it might make some trans people anxious to think about it’. In contrary, from my point of view it’s important to share all kinds of different experiences, so that others are more likely to figure out what would be the best options for them & what they could do or think about before choosing a certain path (or feeling like they should stick to the path they’ve chosen).
Furthermore, I definitely don’t and won’t imply that transmasculine people are butch lesbians. There is overlap in some cases, but generally these are two distinct things.
So, the moral of the story: hormone treatment (or surgery) can be both bad and/or good; therefore please be aware of all the consequences, not just the medical effects. Try to find out how your own perspective or your environment influences your conceptions on (aspects of) transitioning and gender, and why you wish to pursue certain treatments.
Please don’t censor out negative experiences. We all need to read about the full spectrum to be able to make better-informed choices.
As gender is a social construct, I don’t believe someone is born with an ‘innate gender identity’. However, we might try to figure out where we feel like we ‘belong’ the most and who we can relate to. Combining this with the struggles we’ve endured and which aspects we identify with, will result in some sort of feeling, that some might interpret or see as 'gender identity’. Naturally, this is influenced by multiple factors.Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that people come up with things such as 'absorbgender’, in an attempt to describe their feelings towards the concept of gender. But I don’t think that coming up with more words to describe our personal relation to this social construct will help on the long term, as this results in only more boxes. And exactly those (restrictive) boxes are what made us feel out of place in the first place. What if we’d get rid of the boxes? What if we’d address the restrictions we feel/felt, instead?
I’m posting this video from the 2021 LGB Alliance conference separately from this post about Dr Az Hakeem as it is really worth watching in its own right.
It covers a lot of subjects, including safguarding in schools, and sex and relationships education, and how these things have been hijacked by trans and pro-porn (ie, ‘queer’) ideology.
Dr Hakeem’s section starts at the 01:02 mark (and is less than 20 minutes long), and listening to him talk about his practise, it is really, really obvious that he is not ‘transphobic’ in any meaningful sense of the word (he also talks about the institutional homophobia of the Tavistock).
Dr Hakeem’s comments at 01:12 on sub-cultures are worth hearing too: his idea is that before social media, sub-cultures were based around music (Hakeem was a ‘post-punk goth’ as a teenager), and were about being rebellious and subversive; now instead of music-based subcultures, we have people identifying as non-binary, which is ‘goth, mark 5’:
Goth, mark 1 = post punk
Goth, mark 2 = The Cure
Goth, mark 3 = shoe-gazing
Goth, mark 4 = emo
Goth, mark 5 = non-binary
There’s also a surprise guest appearance from Baroness Emma Nicholson in the Q&A section at the end!
it’s good society’s made it so trans people are more accepted, but the rise in trans men very much has to do with these teenage girls thinking being trans is the new trend. they confuse body image issues, trauma, mental illness, etc for gender dysphoria. lots of it is fetishization of trans men too, peep all those uwu soft gay boi “trans guys” popping up lately. it’s all confusion.
i’m not saying any of this from a place of hate, but rather experience. i detransitioned from being a trans man. i’m lucky my insurance blocked my access to hormones or i would’ve fucked up my life entirely. i went to gender therapy too and every time i had an ounce of doubt about my identity, she continued to push being trans onto me. this is common for most gender therapists to do. it’s repulsive.
anyways that was my quick rant. rogd is real, though i agree the studies are lacking.
this is facts. i went through a trans phase for 3 whole years of my life. i think my about page even still says he/him bc i’ve been too lazy to change it to they/them. gender therapists are so afraid of going against the public agenda and getting complaints of transphobia against them that they’re afraid to question whether someone’s “dysphoria” could actually be a case of body dysmorphia, autism, etc. and someone was like “it’s ableist to think autistic people don’t have an understanding of their own identities,” but i genuinely didn’t before i had the autism diagnosis. i chalked up my blunt way of speaking and my being “different” to others to being trans. and i came to this conclusion of being trans after spending too much time on social media and seeing the “trans is beautiful” rhetoric everywhere.
there’s a major ethical dilemma in the medical field. planned parenthood currently provides HRT to legal adults on an “informed consent” basis, even offering same-day prescriptions to those applicable. this completely bypasses the first rule of receiving HRT found in the WPATH SOC7: a well-documented and persistent case of gender dysphoria. what happened to “live as your preferred identity for at least a year?” i lived as mine for THREE before realizing i wasn’t trans. fortunately i realized this right before becoming a legal adult so i dodged a bullet of mistakenly getting HRT, but what about the people that come to this conclusion too late? that turn 18, get a referral for hormones, and only THEN realize they’re not trans? the medical field needs to stop this “affirmative action” model for their patients where they affirm their gender identity and take action with no questions asked. the prohibitive model obviously is just as bad because people don’t take too kindly to you insinuating that they’re not who they say they are. clinicians need to thoroughly evaluate their patients and try to find a root cause of gender dysphoria just in case it happens to be influenced by other aspects such as social media, body dysmorphia, autism, etc. otherwise this is downright medical malpractice. i’m not by any means suggesting that transgenderism isn’t real— there are many who feel genuine dysphoria over being born in “the wrong body” and HRT and surgery ARE the best paths for them. but now that the frequency of trans referrals has surged in recent years due to almost aggressively positive coverage on social media, we need to take extra precautions to not misdiagnose someone, as it can be catastrophic.
just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will
sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try
This touches on something I have felt for a long time, which is that one of the reasons rigid queer labels and gatekeeping is so dangerous is because if you want to encourage people to explore their gender/sexuality, there has to be a safe “Actually I was wrong” option.
I went through so very much anxiety coming out, and when I really think about it it was squarely from the fear of being wrong about it all. That I was, at heart, a cishet woman, and therefore I was appropriating a label that didn’t ‘belong’ to me, and I would (somehow) be harming other people by doing so. There’s so much more unnecessary pressure if the sword hanging over your head is “But you do have to be right about this, you can’t back out once you’ve even asked the question.”
I think that is Bad. I think it makes fewer people ask the question. I think that includes those who need to ask, and would be much happier for it.
to summarize: one of the things the Q stands for is QUESTIONING
and that is as it should be
I’d like to also submit the possibility that some people may be more prone to shifts in their gender identity than others, and that it’s not necessarily even a case of being “wrong,” so much as it’s a case of just changing over time. I know the predominant narrative we see in discourse is that a person who transitions was never their agab—and I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people! But… it’s not true everyone? I remember reading an interview with Danny Lavery after he came out, and he said something along the lines of “One day, I went to bed a woman and woke up not a woman anymore.” So if a person can change once, who’s to say that can’t change again? For example, I know Eddie Izzard (whose labels have shifted a lot over the decades, as terminology and options for gender identities identity have changed many times over since the 1980s) has said she goes through long block periods of being a particular gender, so right now she’s “based in girl mode,” (her words) but she’s previously had blocks of time being based in “boy mode,” too. So like, whose to say other people don’t have block periods like that? Maybe somebody really was non-binary for ten years and now they’re not anymore, y’know? Not feeling something about yourself forever doesn’t have to mean you were wrong the whole time. Of course, being wrong is okay too! But I’d make room for both.
Same, 100% same– I was so selfish and close-minded when I was a teenager and id’ing as trans. Thank you to the incredible IGer who shared her story with me!
So thrilled to have the first guest post on this blog! @radfemjourney did an incredible job. If anyone is interested illustrating their own or an anonymous submitter’s story, please get in touch and we can figure something out.
“I feel so violated. I don’t even know what I feel because I did this to myself, but at the same time these communities don’t promote any sort of introspection or self-analysis of trauma or personal issues. I don’t know how to get my life back– I miss being a human being and now I feel like some monster or medical experiment.”
Thank you to the anonymous redditor who shared her story with me.
just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will
sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try
