Interviewer: What do you think about starting an initiative on campus here at UK, to be more inclusive to women who have penises? So we can put urinals in the womens restroom for them.
Student: Sounds fantastic.
Interviewer: Oh, does it?
Student: Yeah.
Interviewer: What about- Let’s take it one step closer, y'know more- for inclusivity here on campus, but free tampons and pads in the mens restroom for men who have periods?
Student: Sounds great.
Interviewer: Ok- You dont see anything wrong with those statements?
Student: No.
Interviewer: What men do you know with periods?
Student: I generally use- ones like in Willy T* have pads, I use them pretty often.
*(Willy T is the college nickname for their library I’ve heard.)
Alright, my fellow humans with uteruses, lemme tell ya a secret.
Menstrual cups. They are the key to never paying another godsdamn dime on pads/tampons,etc. Ya buy one, sure, it’s a bit of an investment (around 30-40 bucks) but then… you don’t have to buy any more. Ever. Unless something happens to yours/you have a kid and need a bigger one now.
And they are wonderful for the enviroment b/c you never have to throw anythin away, ya don’t have to worry about plastic wrappers/waste, so on and so forth. They can stay in a full twelve hours without risk of TSS, and they DON"T LEAK. So no need to worry about unfortunate occurrences from unexpected changes in flow.
It’s been perhaps the best thing for my monthly dysphoria ever.
For those of you who don’t already know, there is a petition going around to actually stock binders in stores (like Walmart/Kmart/Target etc.)!!!
ALSO,people who don’t bind. Please, can I have your attention?
Here is your chance to exercise your allyship. Sign this petition. It can be very, very difficult for people who bind to get access to effective binders. They often resort to harmful things (like tape) that can break their ribs or suffocate them.
Please, sign the petition. You will be saving someone from immeasurable pain.
I’m Tin and I’m a trans men in need of urgent help!
I’ve been thrown out of my house by my mom and I’m currently living in a literal barrack with my sick old dog Prince.
I do not need help for food, just to build a bathroom and the landlord said that it’s around 600€ (using the same materials as the rest of the main and only room) , I have to use a literal bucket and I don’t have a shower.
Maybe in the future, with a more high-paying job I’ll be able to afford a real house to stay in but for now with Covid and other problems I have to keep living like this.
Please donate if you can or share!
Paypal (still with dead name that I can’t change) :
While I would never support lesbian and bisexual erasure, I would like to propose a secondary meaning to LGBT, which is “Let Gays Be Trans.”
Where’s the A, you ask? Well, I would never support a-spec erasure, but I would like to propose a secondary meaning to LGBTA, which is “Let Gays Be Trans, Asshole.”
When I first read this, I thought it said “Let Gays Be Trains” and just thought, yeah, that checks out.
In more positive news, today I learned about “the overturning of the head”, an ANE ritual where your gender was declared changed by divine fiat. So, yay.
Man is asked if he knows that his girlfriend is transgender. His passionate answer goes viral.
Jade Mcfarlane and her boyfriend, Tyler, responded to a commenter over at tiktok who suggested Mcfarlene’s boyfriend would have left Jade if he knew she was trans.
Jade decided to post Tyler’s wonderful response to the transphobic comments.
Tyler says:
“First off, I want to say trans women are real women. They’re completely valid in their femininity. And the fact that people think that just because someone’s trans and I found out — or anyone found out that their significant other is trans — that [this] would take away or diminish the love they have for them, [it’s] completely disgusting to me.”
The eighth annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 10th March 2021.
After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.
If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, retweet this tweet,boost this Mastodon post, check out this post on Reddit, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks like Facebook. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 24,000 responses last year.
The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
This is like one of the things in Kate Bornstein’s gender workbook! Maybe not exactly adult-child, it’s been awhile since I read it, but it offers some prompts for thinking about other gendered identity shifts that aren’t The Big Trans One.
I’ve thought about this often since I work with young children. Childhood perceptions and participation gender and gender roles is really different than it is for adults.
Rare photos from trans history: Olympic runner and Zdeněk Koubek styles Cinda Glenn’s hair, 1936. Koubek was one of the first trans men to gain international fame after he transitioned in 1935.
this is inspiring weirdly complex emotions in me. like, it’s the fucking 1930s. I can hear the mid-atlantic newsreel voice. the fact that it plays coy with why he knows so much about women’s hairstyles, but like, as a funny surprise, not as shock and horror. the fact that it never deadnames him or uses incorrect pronouns. the fact that he looks like Mickey Rooney. idk it’s just making me feel feelings.
[ID: a tweet by username normalhoroscope that reads Every day new pregnant mothers (sic) arrive at the doors to my wizard castle asking me to place terrible curses upon their unborn children. “Come on” they say “it’ll be really funny.”]
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
[“If I have not already ruffled enough feathers, then let me start plucking: there is no such thing as butch flight. There are transsexual dudes who cheat themselves out of a full life for fear of being ostracized. There are butches who fear to live beyond male and female because dykes might assume they are guys. There are FtM-spectrum folk who have never been butch in their lives. And there are genderqueers who want nothing to do with our decades-old identity wars. But there is no butch flight.
There is, however, butch arrival: people who have tried other genders, most often femme and/or guy, who made the switch and joined the ranks.
So if more butches is what you want, I can get you butches.
Is your community short on butches? First, we need to remember economic class. Most of the butchless lesbian spaces I’ve seen, at least the ones strangely lacking harder butches, are also moneyed spaces. Butches, being gender-variant, tend to be broke.
Second, we need to help butches transition in. We must celebrate former femmes who want to dance the boi’s part. Like any dancer who switches roles, she’ll probably be more graceful than those who haven’t.
We also need to help MtF butches make the trip. Their roadblocks are (1) an underfunded, ageist, and rigorously heteronormative transgender medical system and (2) a lack of accessible radical gender education. You need to be a gender radical to grasp that it’s possible to transition into gender variance and come out as an unconventional kind of trans and/or woman, but most radical gender education is aimed only at those who already are out as trans and/or who the educators read as female. Why are there so many more flaming FtM dudes than butchy MtF women? Most of the trans-flamers started their critical feminist education among women who read them as gender-bending butches. And while they were included, this education did not welcome my untransitioned MtF sisters. So the swishy FtMs transitioned and most of the boyish MtFs assumed they couldn’t. But this is changing; every year, I see more MtFs in boy-drag, neckties, and mullets than ever before.
So what we do now is keep fighting gender-normativity in the medical system and orient feminist education to grasp that many “boys” are actually girls who are stuck in the closet. We do this, and the world will not only be a friendlier place for all genders, it will also have more butches. They’ll even be tall and stubbly if that’s what you’re into. And they won’t re-transition to male. Probably.”]
amy fox, from changed sex. grew boobs. started wearing a tie, from persistence: all ways butch and femme edited by Ivan Coyote and zena sharman
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.
aight im drunk im 22 im cis im 99% sure this is a trans guy meme but,,, i experiuence this too dont worry this is a male experience i love u all ur wonderful and strong
I meant to add captuons like ur calid and all thar shit vut i hit the wronfg button oops
