been thinking a lot about gender recently so I wanted to draw what my ideal beautiful body looks like… this is only one option of many to be honest, but it hits on my favorite points - androgyny, self confidence, and contentedness. also 80s patterns.
(also I still don’t know how to scan marker work, help me)
Fact #1000: You don’t have to continue being supportive of your family if they refuse to support you. You’re not obligated to be nice to assholes just because you’re related to them.
Your trans body is gorgeous. Not in spite of transness. Your trans body is gorgeous. Your transness is beautiful. It doesn’t have to be ignored in order to determine your desirability.
So, rewind a little more than a year. I’d just started my new job, which is unimportant to the story apart from the basic nature: I get on the phone with people to help them open financial accounts, and I spend maybe 15-30 minutes helping them do so. It’s complex, the computer systems I have to use are finicky, and it’s laden down with a lot of bureaucratic red tape.
My very first day live on the job, I was a nervous wreck. There were so many things I needed to keep track of, and I was having to talk to people over the phone for the first time in years, which meant my voice dysphoria was at an all-time high.
Then I got this client. I don’t actually recall his name and I couldn’t tell it to you even if I did, so let’s call him Bob.
Bob was elderly and had lived a hard life. He was transferring the contents of his pitifully small 401k from Walmart into a more accessible account, and I was helping him set that up. He came on the line cranky and more than a little paranoid. He asked me repeatedly if we were going to tell the government about his money, grumbled at me about the information I had to collect to get the account opened, made a few political statements with which I heartily disagreed. It was not a badcall, but I was definitely on edge.
Then it came time to set up a beneficiary on his account – someone who would inherit the account if he passed away.
And he paused, and then he said, “My daughter.”
I asked for her name and date of birth for the listing, and Bob told me. But then he went on.
“I want to tell you about her,” he said. “She’s very special to me.
"You see, I didn’t always have her. Years ago I had a son. And my wife and I, we loved our son so much. He was our perfect boy. We watched him grow up, he made it into college, he got a job. I never went to college, you know? But he did. I was so proud of that.
"Then, one day, he disappeared. Stopped calling, stopped visiting, stopped everything. Six years, we didn’t know what had happened to him, if he was alive, if he was dead, nothing. It was…”
He paused there, his voice creaking like it was about to break. I could see where this was going, and I was rapt.
“Then we got a letter,” he went on. “From her.She told us everything, explained it all. That she was–” He paused, then said “transgender”as if it were a foreign word that he wasn’t entirely sure how to pronounce. “That he’d – she’d – disappeared like that because she was afraid of what we’d say. What I’d say. Maybe what I’d do. But she missed us and she wanted us to get to know her as she really is.”
He paused there, pretty clearly waiting for my reaction. I said something – I barely remember what – about how scary it must have been for her, and how hard for Bob and his wife not to hear from their child for so long.
“It was,” he agreed. “But you gotta know this. I love my daughter.” He said it with his whole being, with every bit of power and meaning that his thin, aged voice could hold. “I love my daughter, and I’m so proud of her. She’s getting married next month, and I thank God for letting me live long enough to walk her down the aisle, just like every girl deserves. She is the light of my life.”
At the end of a long, intimidating, tiring day, his fierce love for his trans daughter took my breath away. I’m always going to remember Bob – remember how he wasn’t perfect, wasn’t progressive, didn’t really know the etiquette or the language, but how deep and intense his love for his daughter was. How he told this to me, a stranger, as though daring me to say even the slightest rude word about her.
There is love in this world. Sometimes, it comes from the people you would least expect. It might not look quite like you think it will. But it is out there.
“I love my daughter,” Bob said, intense and emphatic, and I will never forget the sound of his voice.
“Nonbinary” is an experience as much as it is an identity. There are as many types of nonbinary-ness as there are nonbinary people. You cannot define your sexuality on nonbinary people because we are not a third gender, we are not a social class, we are not distinguishable from people with “binary identities”. You are not doing anyone any favors by trying to build conversations that center nonbinary identities as the nexus for material analysis because there is no uniform nonbinary experience. Please, for the love of everything, just stop trying already. It’s not helpful or fruitful in any way!
shoutout to transmascs who paint their nails and have long hair and wear dresses and skirts and “womens” clothing and high heels and accessorize and act and present in more “feminine” ways and who love their birthname and go by it and dont want top surgery or bottom surgery or to start hrt and all of that shit that the internet convinced us made us “trenders” bcuz ur wonderful
i spent so much time when i was like 11-15 hating myself for being trans and ESPECIALLY for being trans + gay, and i spent so much time using labels i thought i had to bcuz if i didnt it would make me fake trans, and i spent so much time wearing ugly ass clothes and giving myself horrible haircuts bcuz i thought i HAD to if i wanted to be taken seriously as a man. the truth is that none of that made cis ppl respect me or see me as a guy. none of that made me happy or feel like myself. the only right way to be trans is to literally just Be Trans. im not less of a man now bcuz i have blue hair down to my shoulders im not less of a man now bcuz i wear dresses and im not less of a man cause i use microlables to describe how my gender feels. transness inherently fucks with the status quo and trans ppl who push the boundaries of what is considered “acceptable” transness are the backbone of this community
[Image description: A tumblr text-post, edited whiteout-poetry style to read, “Of course dysphoria is terrible! And I totally agree—teens need to be allowed to live and present and be called what they want. And shown the respect every human being deserves. And since gender is a construct, The feelings of a person determine gender.”]
