detransitioning stories that don’t need more publicity:
i detransitioned because my feelings were entirely due to internalized misogyny, and I believe that all trans people are just gnc people of their birth assigned gender who either suffer from internalized misogyny or are fetishizing women
i detransitioned because i was confused about my identity and I blame doctors / trans people
i detransitioned because transition isn’t God’s plan for anyone
detransitioning stories that need to be boosted:
i detransitioned because my identity changed, and i don’t regret my transition.
i detransitioned because i was confused about my identity, and I regret transition, but i don’t blame other people for my own choices, and I don’t believe that my experience is representative of most people who transition. i believe that further restrictions on who is allowed to medically transition would do more harm than good.
i detransitioned for my safety, because I live in a place where it’s not safe for me to transition socially or medically.
terfs prey on detransitioning people. detransitioning people are at great risk of getting sucked into terf echo chambers. we trans people need to support detransitioning people because they are not our enemies. the trauma of heteronormative gender roles can be difficult to tease apart from dysphoria, and we need to be sensitive to our fellow humans who just want to feel comfortable in their skin. we need to make it okay for people to change their identities, and try out identities to see if they work.
fearmongering directed at young trans people like “make sure you’re REALLY trans before you [medically] transition, because if you’re not it will give you dysphoria” introduces social pressure to prove to other trans people that you’re really trans, which actually increases the likelihood that a person will transition and regret it. because you’re holding validation of their current identity hostage. if someone eventually detransitions, you shouldn’t add to their trauma later by now giving them an inner “i told you so, you weren’t really trans” voice.
Other detransition narratives that need to be boosted and respected:
4. I detransitioned because it was simply far too expensive for me to be able to afford a body that reflected my identity, and I decided that I would rather live in my sad-but-familiar form than an expensive hybrid.
5. I detransitioned because I did not have the necessary time and energy to keep up the absurd amount of work that it took to reliably pass as female.
6. I detransitioned for my mental and social health, because I live in a place/situation where the act of transition was causing me to be cut off from all support.
7. I detransitioned because my medical circumstances were incompatible with continued physical transition.
These, like #3 above, are not situations where detransition is particularly voluntary, but are a product of the circumstances and society in which a person transitions. I’ve known several people who have detransitioned for precisely these reasons, and it was certainly not an easy choice for them or one that they took lightly. Their identities have not changed (to the best of my knowledge), and if they could wake up tomorrow in a body that matched their identity they would. But that’s unfortunately the way life goes sometimes.
Reminder the Helen Joyce claims trans rights activism is funded by a globalist Jewish conspiracy, which is literally the same belief held by white nationalists. It should come as no surprise that hatred of jews isn’t the only part of Nazi ideology Joyce wants to emulate here.
Her Jennifer Bilek who wrote it Posie, Berns, JKR.
Gender Criticals stop simping for the alt-right challenge
Reminder the Helen Joyce claims trans rights activism is funded by a globalist Jewish conspiracy, which is literally the same belief held by white nationalists. It should come as no surprise that hatred of jews isn’t the only part of Nazi ideology Joyce wants to emulate here.
those new pictures of ellen page are so tragic bc it’s like girl you could have been dressing like this the whole time.
you didn’t have to transition to have this style.
haven’t you ever heard of butches?
you could have cut your hair and worn band tees and tank tops and not worn makeup and still been a woman.
hell, you could have shown hollywood that there’s more than one way to be a woman.
you could have been a role model for lesbians and gender non-conforming women.
instead you gave in to internalized misogyny and lesbophobia, and that’s really fucking tragic.
Elliot Page is a man. Don’t deadname him. Don’t claim that a person realizing they are a transman is misogyny or lesbophobia. Don’t insult butch lesbians or transmen by claiming transmen are just “deluded butches” or the like when transmen are menandbutch lesbians are women. And if you don’t like the fact Elliot Page is a man? Then find someone else to be attracted to and leave him alone.
This is disgusting! OP is perfectly willing to deny Elliot Paige his bodily autonomy, the labels he identifies himself with, and even his fukcing name. All because OPs “team” (not lesbians by the way, because most lesbians are not transphobic pieces of shit like TERFs are) no longer has access to him.
This is beyond transphobic. This is hateful fetishizing of a trans man who wants nothing more than to live his life in the way he sees fit. This is rage over no longer having access to his body, over not being able to control his very identity. OP, and anyone who shares these kinds of views, has no right to call themselves a Feminist, much less a decent human being. This is fucking Patriarchy with a “radical feminist” sticker on top.
Fuck off with your hateful, transphobic, lesbophobic, fetishistic rape apologism and LEAVE ELLIOT THE FUCK ALONE. He would be just as disgusted with you now as he would have been before he even realized he was trans. He is who he is and no amount of vile, regressive tantrums will ever change that. Your only option is to stay mad about it, and go fuck yourself.
i see a lot of trans men and female nonbinaries often say things like “i face misogyny because people still see me as a woman! i don’t deny that!” but male nonbinaries and trans women would rather be caught dead than accept that they have male privilege … why is that
^ Adding the above answer to my request for clarification on what “male privilege” for trans women means here, as it would be too cumbersome to respond via replies.
So the simple answer to this is we don’t experience male privilege because we’re not men. We may have physiological similarities to cis men, and we may be socialized (often against our will) in similar ways, but as trans women we experience all of these things through a transfeminine lens. Nearly every single aspect of what is thought of as being a boy/man is intrinsically inseparable from this lived experience, and most advantages in this regard come with associated costs that outweigh them on the whole.
Biological advantages like not having to worry about getting pregnant, come not only with dysphoria and its associated mental health issues, but are also used as a bludgeon by society to “prove” we’re not “real” women. We are inundated with messaging, both through personal attacks and through society at large, that the ability to produce eggs and carry children is an intrinsic feature of womanhood (which is a damaging narrative to all women, obviously, but is harmful to trans women in much the same way as it is to cis women who do not have the ability to get pregnant.) Trans girls forced to go through “male” puberty experience increasingly severe dysphoria, suicidal ideation, and find it ever more difficult to pass which furthers ostracism.
Social advantages for being raised as male are more ephemeral, and are better described as “passing privilege” than male privilege. We are treated as boys/men not because we *are* boys/men, but because we *pass* as boys/men, and that preferential treatment largely vanishes the moment we come out as trans women. In fact, out trans women by and large face gendered oppression in similar ways to cis women, with things like violent victimization, sexual abuse, poverty, employment discrimination, wage gaps, etc. experienced at rates commensurate to or in some cases even higher than cis women. Further, passing for cis men is deeply traumatizing for most trans women, and is often done to avoid abuse, ostracism from family, or worse.
In the same way that I’m sure you wouldn’t consider a cis girl who passes for a boy to have male privilege, or a gay person who passes as straight while closeted to have heterosexual privilege, closeted trans women do not have male privilege. Privilege granted at the point of a gun and at the cost of denying who we are is no privilege at all. While I do not deny that trans women have some advantages, with all factors considered it clearly does not meet the bar to qualify for privilege in human society any more than the advantages associated with being a woman equate to female privilege.
Lastly I’ll say to your original point, I don’t really see trans women not having male privilege and trans men suffering from being perceived as women as being in fundamental opposition, it’s all a function of cisnormative patriarchal forces that value manhood and devalue anyone perceived as not being a part of that. However, as I am not a trans man (similar with non-binary people) I can’t fully speak to their experience, so I will leave it there for others to weigh in.
what is a man? what is a woman?
i am aware that dysphoria is a real and debilitating condition, but why does incongruence between the mind and the body warrant the denial of social conditioning based on biology? trans women didn’t grow up being taught how to “become women” which is NOT something to envy. little girls are forced into femininity, face discrimination and bias in school (and, depending on geographical location, are denied the right to an education because of their sex), are face cat calling and street harassment from pre-puberty ages, etc. the descent from girlhood into womanhood is something that the vast, vast majority of trans women do not experience because of the ages of their transitions. childhood socialization is incredibly difficult to unlearn and becomes a core part of ourselves. while girls are going through this, boys (referring to male children including trans women) are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. they are masculinized, which gnc boys find undoubtedly uncomfortable, but it is true that they grow up learning that they are worth more than girls and they do not face systemic and interpersonal misogyny.
male privilege is an axis of oppression that exists outside of our minds. i am white, and i am also an immigrant. i face discrimination due to my immigrant status and i do not have the same internal thoughts and beliefs as a huge majority of white americans, but that does not erase my white privilege. when my whiteness grants me privilege i am uncomfortable because i know i am not the intended benefactor of this privilege—many of my family are refugees and we escaped our home country because of extreme poverty. this does not erase the privilege i have when people are unaware of my immigrant status. i am still white. trans women are still male.
trans girls are not forced to go through male puberty, they simply do—it is a sign that their bodies are working properly.
and honestly? masculine girls who can pass as men and gay people who can pass as straight do not have privilege in the same way that male humans have male privilege. a masculine woman (such as myself) has still undergone female socialization. everyone in our lives knows we are women. we are treated as such. i also choose to dress myself up and lie about being a lesbian when i’m around extended family members and in my work environment, because it’s easier. this does not change the fact that i grew up being told that i, as a woman, must like men. heteronormativity has been a part of my daily life since the moment i was born. male children aren’t taught that they can’t be women—they are taught that they are better than women. there is a difference.
i do think that trans women who pass as women face misogyny. i do think that violence against trans people is abhorrent and trans people have a right to safety. what i do not think is that feelings are more important than biological and social truths. i also do not think gender should be a part of our society; whoever seeks to uphold it is a misogynist.
A woman is a person of female gender, vice versa for a man. And respectfully, it’s clear that there is a fundamental ideological difference between us on how that is defined, so I’m not particularly interested in arguing the point.
I agree that the way cis girls are forced into womanhood is not something to envy. It is oppression, I never stated otherwise. Further, I agree that boys are taught to be strong and smart and powerful. That they are better. The difference here is, once again, that trans women are not boys. We were never boys. We were trans girls perceived as boys, who are taught that this idealized male version of ourselves is strong and powerful. But that person is not *us*. We are “lesser”, lesser in some cases even than cis women but most certainly lesser than cis men. We are an imposter. We speak the truth at our own peril, a peril which often includes abuse. Homelessness. Conversion therapy. Murder.
How does our internalized power, our inherent privilege, actually manifest in society? Not by preferential treatment in employment. Not by being favored for governmental positions. Not by an increased likelihood to avoid poverty, to avoid being sexually abused or fetishized or forced into the sex trade to survive. Not by better opportunities for education. Not by preferential treatment in the eyes of the law.
We only have access to those things if we stay in the closet. And being forced to deny who we are to get benefits does not equate to privilege any more than a cis lesbian “just marrying a man” to pass as straight equates to heterosexual privilege. We are not boys who just decide one day to become women, we are women, and our journey to recognizing this within ourselves is as unique and varied as a gay person’s journey to recognizing their sexuality. Neither is diminished by not understanding ourselves until a later age, especially when the ways society, family and peers seek to deny our identities are completely outside of our control.
You claim that denying this is adhering to biological and social reality, but to do so you have to completely ignore our social reality and lived experiences, otherwise it falls flat. I’m not saying these things to minimize the oppression of cis women, but to show that we are both being oppressed along the same axis but in different ways. Our oppressors are the same, and always have been.
I don’t expect you to agree, again because of the fundamental ideological differences between us. My goal was to explain why trans women do not feel that we experience male privilege with good faith arguments, which I hope you can agree that I have done.
Some followup points since this is winding long:
* Cis girls being raised and socialized as boys, with their true identities kept secret from friends and close family absolutely is something that happens! It doesn’t mean they have male privilege, any more than trans women do.
* Likewise, trans girls *are* sometimes forced to go through male puberty, as gender affirming care is restricted in many areas of the world. Several states in the US are taking great efforts to do so by passing laws to forcibly detransition all trans kids in their jurisdiction. Our bodies are doing what our hormones tell them to do, but it doesn’t mean those things are right in all cases, and it is standard medical practice to make adjustments were necessary.
* Biological reality is far more complex than we once thought, as decades of medical research into gender affirming care has shown. There is a reason why every major international medical organization endorses gender affirming care for trans people: because it works the vast majority of the time.
i am interested in arguing that point though—what is the female gender? why do you think gender should exist?
how can trans women not go through male socialization if so many of them don’t come out for years, often decades? socialization is how we are treated by society, not how we feel about the way we are treated by society
bio women are also at an increased risk for homelessness and murder—in fact, one thing that led me to gender abolition was how many trans women are being prostituted/trafficked. i know that gender identity does play a role in how society treats people and i don’t think anyone should have to be a victim of violence or trafficking for any reason—the concept of gender/gender roles is the oldest and most deeply ingrained system of violence that exists in the world. why anyone would want to contribute to it is beyond me
you still say that trans women are women without giving me a concrete definition for what a woman is. someone of the female gender makes no sense because female is a biological category, not a gender. would trans women still be women in a hypothetical alternate universe where gender and gender roles do not exist?
i do agree that that trans women may feel that they don’t have male privilege—that is exactly why i made the original post. of course life is hard for you—i never said it isn’t. but the way we perceive things is not usually the way things really are. trans women who do not pass or who are in the closet are treated better by society and that is a fact. when i choose to pass as straight i am treated better but it would be illogical to say that i have privilege because i am still denied the rights to life in multiple countries, would be shunned by some family members, only recently got the right to vote, etc. these are concrete, material reality. gender as something separate from sex is a fickle and fluid thing that no one can ever give a good definition for and everyone “experiences differently.” we can talk about rates of violence and abuse towards trans women while acknowledging that they also live in a society that values males
and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world
It’s not a matter of whether I think gender should exist. It’s that the cultural notion that sex and gender identity are both a.) binary and b.) easily divisible into entirely biological and entirely social does not match our current understanding of human development. This is reflected not only by studies of very young trans children whose behaviors are almost entirely indistinct from their cisgender counterparts, but also by the dissonance experienced by both transgender people AND cisgender people who had their sex non-consensually reassigned in infancy, which in both cases can express itself both as positive knowledge or through discomfort (of varying degrees) with one’s apparent sex. The purely ideological belief that there is no innate sense of gender rooted in biology means that this is a topic that, in my experience, we would typically go round and round with no hope of reaching an agreement… which is why I said that I’m not interested in rehashing that experience.
Note that this is different from gender roles and gender-based discrimination, both of which we all agree should be abolished! But trans women are not gender roles, there are many butch trans women, androgynous trans women, etc. Many do follow cultural feminine norms, but this is because we exist in society and are subject to the same pressures as everyone else (along with additional pressure to “pass” to avoid transphobic harassment.) In a future world where gender roles no longer exist, trans women would still be women, and would ideally have easier access to more advanced treatments that will resolve the mind/body incongruence in a way that makes their outward sex indistinguishable from both their sense of self and cisgender members of said sex. But their social lives and their roles in society would be whatever they wanted them to be, just the same as cis women.
Your replies thus far have constantly skirted around the points that the purported privilege received while closeted is functionally indistinguishable from the way straight privilege is temporarily “granted” to closeted gay people (after all, are gay kids not socialized as straight, taught that being straight was superior, morally righteous and the de facto norm?), and that this purported “male” privilege does not offer a meaningful systemic advantage to trans women in modern societies in which trans people are consistently amongst the most marginalized minorities, with no institutional power to speak of. Without that, how can you make the claim that we experience gender-based privilege, much less male privilege?
I readily acknowledge that society favors males. What society does not do, however, is favor out trans women, or treat them as males in a way that can meaningfully be described as privilege outside of certain edge cases. Because, again, trans women also experience the concrete, material realities of being shunned, being killed, and of having rights restricted in many areas of the world. Hell, in the US many trans women alsodidn’t have the right to vote until half a century *after* white women!
Lastly to address your final paragraph:
“and every major medical organization endorses transitioning because it is a huge source of money. trust scientists but also have critical thinking skills about the economic state of the world”
This is a thought-terminating cliche, because it doesn’t meaningfully address the argument that gender affirming care is the only treatment that actually works for trans people. All it does is give you ideological cover to ignore scientific consensus and the efficacy of these treatments, in much the same way as anti-vaccine or climate science denial does.
please block @/gentlegifs and @/rad-moods, they’re terf/radfem blogs who break people’s dnis, make stimboards without crediting gifmakers, and even post gifs without crediting videomakers, and at least one of the two literally has banners that say “dni if trans” while definitely using trans people’s gifs that they stole!!
Aphrodite Lesbian: A lesbian who prefers sexual acts and affection, or who centers sexuality in their relationships
I made an Aphrodite lesbian flag as a devotional act for Aphrodite and especially Aphroditos, because I learned the most popular flag was made by a proud TERF and had a whole stripe for only being attracted to vulvas.
…yeah. It’s bad.
So, here they are!
The stripes’ symbolism is as follows:
Red: Roses, Aphrodite’s blessings (love/lust) Hot pink: Sexuality, attraction to the feminine, trans lesbians Pink: A-spec lesbians, sex-positive asexuals, femme lesbians White: Community, connection, acceptance Light blue: Seafoam, allo lesbians, butch lesbians Blue: The ocean, the variety of lesbians, history Purple: Solidarity and love with bambi lesbians, Sappho and violets
wait what’s “pretty bad” about having a stripe dedicated to solely liking vulvas?
Who is gonna tell op that that’s a statue of Hermaphrodite and not Aphrodite with a dick
OP, stop being absolutely ridiculous. There’s nothing bad about solely being into vulvas, you’re just a fucking lesbophobe. I also find it ironic how your joke of a flag focuses so much on women who are not sexual (a-spec, bambi, etc), which results in the absolute contrary of the idea behind the rainbow/pride flag. Why the fuck would there be a stripe for “attraction to femininity” (and trans women ) when there is none for masculinity ? And butches and “allos” have the same stripe, I wonder why … Anyway, leave lesbians alone if you cannot handle the reality of our sexual orientation.
Hi! So, normally I don’t entertain transphobes, but I’m just gonna respond to this because it’s so ridiculous and I want to make some points clear to non-TERFS.
So. number one: it’s pretty bad because some lesbians like and have dicks. Get over yourself. Make your own term if you want something for only liking vulvas, but Aphrodite lesbian was coined by transgender folks, so this word isn’t it.
Two: Hermaphroditos*, not Hermaphrodite, which is an actual slur, so good going there. Hermaphroditos and Aphroditos are conflated and likely the same deity to some degree, and we don’t fully know which statues are of which deity. A quick search on Google could tell you that.
Third, asexual Aphrodite lesbians exist. I know this because I am one. And, yeah, solidarity with bambi lesbians is a stripe because Aphrodite lesbian was explicitly coined to be its counterpart. That’s why the term was made. To be the opposite of a bambi lesbian.
Butches express queer masculinity, and for someone so pissed that pussy isn’t on a flag, you sure are upset that the word masculinity isn’t there.
Also, stripes can mean multiple things. I don’t know what the hell you’re trying to imply by butches and allos having the same stripe, especially because you don’t seem personally offended by femmes and asexuals sharing one. Or by that stripe meaning seafoam, or by the bambi solidarity stripe meaning violets. Do you think I’m implying Sappho is a flower? Or is your goal just to strawman a butch dyke because trans people offend you?
I am a butch asexual Aphrodite lesbian. Maybe you can just hop off my dick and mind your own if you’re so personally offended by transbians and ace lesbians. And also maybe like, use google before you get on your reactionary TERF rhetoric on my blog.
