& that 1% regret rate is almost entirely “Yes I’m still trans but the surgery was bad, or the transphobia i encounter is so much worse than anticipated, or I was pushed towards a specific treatment by my binary-oriented doctor when I wanted a non-binary transition” etc.
Actual ‘whoops, I don’t identify as trans anymore” cases are closer to 0,02%.
[Image caption for original post: tweet by @EVeracite reading: “I like how in the context of trans affirming care, successful treatment in 99% of cases is treated as dangerous, whereas in all other areas of healthcare a 99% success rate would be treated as an absolute miracle.”
This is quote-reteweeted by @aster_disaster_ with the following addition: “Having a child has a 7% regret rate. A knee replacement has anywhere between 6-30% regret. Across all types of surgery, the regret rate is 14%. Transition and trans related surgeries have a 1% regret rate.” End caption.]
My shoulders are too wide by almost exactly an inch on either side, and it’s measurably worsening my quality of life.
That’s not just my self-loathing telling me that. That’s not just what I say to myself when I look in the mirror and decide for some reason that my proportions are ugly. That’s not just what I say to myself when I see how a women’s shirt fits over them - off-the-rack clothes, after all, are made so that one size fits none.
No. The reasons I say my shoulders are too wide are far more basic than that.
Routinely, when I try to walk past something fairly closely, my shoulder ends up clipping it. The amount of overlap is usually a little under an inch.
About once every other month, I wake up with an awful pain in my neck and shoulder that I can only attribute to having done something absolutely horrid to those areas while sleeping. I have no idea what those movements are, because I’m asleep at the time, but it can happen in either shoulder, and no arrangement of pillows seems to sufficiently prevent it.
My hand-eye coordination is totally shot. I can’t pick up objects without actually being able to see my hands. When I try to pick something up with my eyes closed, my hands have a systematic and reproducible error of a few degrees - the exact amount they’d be off if my shoulders were wider than my brain expected by about that much.
In the most literal sense, my brain and my body do not agree on one of the most fundamental proportions of my body. No amount of body positivity or self-love will ever fix that. I highly doubt there’s a way to rewire my brain into accepting my body as it is, either - and if there were, I’m not sure it’d be a good idea.
Nor is there a satisfactory physical fix: clavicle shortening surgery exists, but even if I could afford the multiple tens of thousands of dollars it would cost, I can’t help but imagine the horrible back pain it would cause if it left my shoulders perpetually scrunched forward. A satisfactory physical fix would have had to have required my body to grow the right way the first time, and that ship has already sailed.
So I’m stuck like this, stuck with a body and a brain pitted against each other, both refusing to yield, with me stuck in the middle. Even if mirrors were a total non-concept – even if beauty standards didn’t exist, and neither I nor other people cared what I looked like – I would still experience this problem.
In a lot of ways, I’m lucky! This is about as severe as my brain-body map’s incongruence with my actual body gets. (I also have serious voice dysphoria that makes it - without exaggeration - physically painful to use my voice for extended periods of time; but in a way, even that is not as bad as this.) A lot of other trans people, especially those with serious height dysphoria, probably have this a lot worse.
But if there’s anything I wish cis people could take away from this, it’s this: when trans people say forcing trans kids through natal puberty is disfiguring and cruel, believe us. We know. We have every reason to know. A lot of us are going through completely unnecessary suffering.
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.
[Image caption: excerpt from the linked article above, as follows.]
But to dig deeper, Olson and her team focused on more than 300 children who had undergone a social transition.
About two-thirds were transgender boys, meaning boys who had been assigned a female gender at birth; about one-third were transgender girls.
All were enrolled in the TransYouth Project between 2013 and 2017. The project tracked transition experiences over a five-year period, with children being between the ages of 3 and 12 when first socially transitioning.
Though Olson’s focus was on social transitioning, she noted that some of the children had embarked on a medical transition as well, though she emphasized that was only the case among the oldest kids, given that “youth are not eligible for medical transition until after the onset of puberty.”
Specifically, nearly 12% had begun taking puberty blockers during the study period. (After the study period ended, however, 190 kids ultimately began taking blockers; nearly 100 of those children also started taking gender-affirming hormones, Olson noted.)
Solely on the social transition front, Olson noted that over five years only about 7% of the children transitioned back at least once.
By the end of the study period, 94% of the kids continued to identify as the gender they had embraced when first socially transitioning. (That figure includes the just over 1% who had at one point re-transitioned back to their birth gender, before then returning back again to the gender to which they had initially transitioned.)
Of the 6% who did not stick with their initial transition, a little more than 3% described themselves as non-binary by the end of the study period, while just under 3% said they identified with their birth gender. (Identifying with one’s birth gender was notably more common among kids who had socially transitioned before the age of 6.)
“Interestingly, we are not finding that the youth who re-transitioned in our study are experiencing that as traumatic,” Olson noted. “We’ve been finding that when youth are in supportive environments — supportive in the sense of being OK with the exploration of gender — both the initial transition and a later re-transition are fine.”
A new comic that’ll be contributed to a new anthology. Details TBA at a much later date.
This panel depicts the anxiety and confusion I feel when trying to process how people treated me when I was read as female, and how they treat me now as male. It’s a bit of a mind fuck when society tells you to follow certain roles because of your perceived gender and then one day, the switch flips and you’re suddenly told to do the opposite of what you were socialized. Regardless if you’ve always been gender non-conforming, and reject the idea of gender roles/stereotypes, it’s still stressful to be in environments (or around people) who strongly enforce them.
This time of year always makes me think of my transition. I came out to my parents 3 days after Christmas in 2014, I had my last therapy session on New Year’s Eve, and I was scheduled to start HRT in a few weeks. I remember feeling depressed because I thought I was letting everyone down. I was really excited to start injecting testosterone (but I wondered if I’d regret it). I wasn’t sure if I was totally binary and if that was ok. I was stressed about coming out at work. Four years later, I still don’t regret it, I didn’t let anyone down, I’ve realized I’m not exactly binary and that’s ok, and I still have not come out at work.
This is sample of a comic I created for the anthology How To Wait: An Anthology of Transition. It’s about the wait that occurs during different stages of my transition.
“How to Wait is an art, writing, and comics anthology, edited by Sage Persing, that collects the work of 30 trans, nonbinary, and gender-non-conforming artists as they attempt to cope with the myriad forms of waiting that come with their transitions and experience of gender.”
Contributors Include: Gabriel Howell, AJ Rio-Glick, E.L. Tedana, Allspice, Erin Nations, Joris Bas Backer, Sam Owens, Maia Kobabe, Samuel Luke, Krysta Morningstarr-Cox, Oliver Northwood, Indie Beare, Laurel Lynne Leake, Mister Loki, Ash Wadi, Kou Chen, Sage Persing, Kat Ghastly, Will Betke-Brunswick, Simon Williamson, Veronica Casson, Joa Blumenkranz, Charlie Davies, Jae Zander Kitinoja, Jamie Diaz, Sonya Saturday, Oce, Ajuan Mance, Kimball Anderson, Maia Vlcek
To read the full comic, support trans/non binary/gender non-conforming artists and buy a copy online! (As of 04/28/2019, the book is sold out, but it’s being reprinted and copies should be available in two weeks!)
Help! I’m Making A Weirdly Big Deal Out Of A Thing That I Think Is No Big Deal So Why Does It Have To Be Such A Big Deal, It’s Honestly Not That Big Of A Deal, So Everyone Should Just Do What I Say Because Why Do They Care About This So Much Like It’s Some Kind Of Big Deal, It’s Functionally Meaningless, That’s Why I Must Have My Way Or Else, Stop Overreacting!!!!!
My tween has requested they/them pronouns and a new name. We are changing our habits on the pronouns, but we haven’t gone along with the name change. Though their first name is stereotypically feminine, we more often use the shorter stereotypically masculine form (think Samantha to Sam). Their middle name is gender ambiguous. These names were chosen with much love following a family/cultural naming tradition. While we are supportive of using any version of these given names to reflect our child’s gender, we aren’t on board with a name change. We will not call Sam(antha) Simon, Stevie or Susie. Is this so wrong?
—What’s in a Name?
Dear What’s In A Name?
I can’t think of any family tradition more important than making sure children know that they are beholden to the whims of their parents forever, and that they must never be allowed to assert themselves or self-advocate in any way that does not entirely comport with their parents’ personal preferences. After all, it was your child’s decision to be born to you personally, and now here they come tap-dancing into the world as a full-on independent human as if they didn’t specifically ask Baby Jesus to assign them to you! They had every opportunity to choose to be born to any other family on earth, but they didn’t, and so now they’ve thereby agreed to have every part of their identity dictated by you, indefinitely and without even the mildest opposition.
The last thing you want is your child growing up to be a self-assured, independent human who knows their own mind and can ensure that their needs are met on planet earth! That’s not what parenting is all about! You lovingly gave them a name and you will lovingly use it at them no matter how much they hate it, lovingly!
Anyway, you said it yourself: what’s in a name?? It’s such a tiny, piddly thing — since it doesn’t matter at all, and it’s practically not even worth caring about not even a little bit, and it really is just wholly inconsequential, it’s genuinely just downright silly that anyone cares all that much about what they’re called, like truly, who could even be bothered? Not you, that’s for sure! That’s why you can only call your kid one of two names that you came up with a decade ago and nothing else ever no matter what!
What could be more loving than honoring your child’s name and pronouns? Why, forcing your child to use the name you gave them because your personal preference is more important than your child having the core of their identity respected by the most important people in their life, of course! Nothing wrong with that! Stay strong in your convictions, and you will enjoy many great opportunities to call your child by the name you gave them in the coming years — to their voicemail, to their email “spam” folder, and in text messages to phone numbers they no longer use.
