The note you found on your pillow on Christmas Eve?
“You may want to dress up tomorrow morning, sweetie…”
OMG, last Christmas my wife did something like this for me for the first time. I got gifts with my chosen name on them. I nice nightie and a few other nice feminine tops. I admit I was shocked and at the same time so giddy. I am transitioning and she is learning to accept the new me slowly.
I’m getting my hair colored for the very first time on Monday (FOR REAL). Maybe I’ll try some of these goofy poses after to see if the magic falls off, LOL.
Very sad to say I have personally experienced many of these scenarios. Most recently getting the run around at the pharmacy when trying to get my hormones prescription refilled. Still hoping someday this get better over time for all transgender persons.
You got this really weird charge on your credit card from (*)(*)? When you called to see if you could get the charges reversed they just laughed and said “Enjoy your new life!” Then you remember your wife telling you she ordered you a “gag gift” and that you would really enjoy it.
I kinda wanna talk about an important thing re: my boyfriend casting Transition on himself. It’s a thing that surprised me. (Spoiler, it is not that I am struggling to accept him as a man or that I am doubting our relationship. All is fine!)
His voice has dropped significantly, fast enough and deep enough that my ability to read his mood in his tone of voice is seriously disrupted. As someone whose last relationship was codependent and toxic*, and I had to be hypervigilant about his tone of voice, this has been very difficult and occasionally frightening. It has made my heart hurt and brought back a lot of painful memories.
Bear has nothing to do with that, and in fact has been an absolutely essential part of me recovering from that relationship and learning not to be afraid all the time, but suddenly I have lost my footing and it’s hard again in a way it hasn’t been in many years.
I was ashamed at first, and felt like I shouldn’t feel this way. Then I realized that my previous relationship is what set me up to feel this, and it arises from a wounded place within me instead of a place of being a jerk.
So I told him about this, and of course he’s very understanding. It’s up to me to do the work of unlearning those responses for him, the way I unlearned a lot of other danger signals early in our relationship. That isn’t to say he shouldn’t be aware of the issue, only that he should not change his behavior one iota because ultimately that would not be helpful to me. So we’re going to get through this together.
The other thing is that he is starting to experience the emotional effect of the testosterone. It’s taken a while, but last night he told me that he’s been feeling irritable, and a couple of times at work. He has gotten very angry, even though he hasn’t let it out on anybody and has been expressing it appropriately by listening to angry music, yelling a little bit in the car while he’s alone, or just breathing it out. This may get more intense. And so last night he came up to me and he said “Hey, I’ve noticed this new thing, and I wanted to let you know I’m experiencing it, and I also wanted to let you know that I don’t want to scare you or hurt you, so if I make you uncomfortable and this appears to be happening, I want you to let me know.” That was a really cool thing of him to do, and while I haven’t had to test it yet, I feel a lot safer knowing that I can be open about it. I really hope my prior experience of trying to tell someone they’re being scary and having them dismiss it because they aren’t being deliberately scary towards me won’t stop me from speaking up. Cross your fingers for me.
I thought I should talk about this, because I really don’t think I’m alone in this, and I want those of you who are also experiencing it to know that this has to be a normal thing. It can’t be uncommon. I’m certain that many of us who were in toxic relationships with somebody of one gender with one type of voice, move to relationships with somebody who has a different gender and a different type of voice, only for that person to transition right back into that former combination that duplicates the toxic relationship.
If you are one of the people whose partner is transitioning, you aren’t a bad person for being hurt by those memories, your partner isn’t a bad person for accidentally triggering them, what you need to do is communicate mutually about it.
If you were a partner who is transitioning, please be aware that even though your partner may know you have nothing but the best intentions, they are also dealing with a very unexpected new thing that maybe bringing up difficult memories for them. Please talk about this openly, maybe especially in advance, and make it apparent repeatedly as you go through it that it’s okay to check in on one another and communicate about this. Ideally, even if everything seems okay, you should still be checking in. As a lot of us queers grow older, these kinds of situations are going to become much more common.
Look how also for your friends who may be in this situation and maybe let them know that this is a problem that happens sometimes and it doesn’t make them a bad person.
Love you all, may you have joy in each other.
* I also want to say that when I say it was a codependent and toxic relationship, some of my behaviors were hurtful to the other person as well, and I know that he has triggers and is upset sometimes. I’m sorry about that, and I wish him healing. This was never about us being terrible people, it was about us being terrible for one another.
My autistic ass is wondering if truscum realize medicalization and gatekeeping are the first two stops on the “How do we make people like this stop existing?” train.
nope, that’s actually incorrect!
medicalization allows for transsexual individuals to undergo transition specific surgeries and go on hormones without it being considered as cosmetic. if the transsexual condition was demedicalized, insurance would no longer cover it, which would mean many transsexual people would not be able to get the procedures they need in order to live a happier life. the goal of medicalization isn’t to make sure that trans people stop existing, it’s actually the exact opposite. only dysphoric people should be transitioning. people without dysphoria will of course feel uncomfortable in their transitioning bodies, because they were content with the bodies of their biolgical sex. i’ve heard stories of non dysphoric trans people (or cis people) lying to medical professionals in order to obtain hormones, and later regretting it. medicalization is one of the only ways we can prevent transition regret.
Context: Being transgender was demedicalized in 2013. I began hormone treatment in 2016. It was not considered cosmetic, and in fact it cost me zero dollars at the point of access to get my HRT prescription - because it was covered by insurance as a necessary medical procedure to treat my dysphoria.
Further context: Literally nowhere in the OP did anybody say anything about who should or should not transition, or about dysphoria.
Still further context: I am autistic. I have actually witnessed the straight line from “This is a Psychological Disorder” to “We are the only ones who can properly tell who has this condition and how to treat it (and we’ll use that to conveniently delegitimize anyone who disagrees with us)” to “What exactly causes this condition?” to “How do we make people like this stop existing?”
And to top it all off, you are literally telling me stories of how medicalization failed… as an argument for medicalization.
Now that you have at least some understanding of what’s going on here, would you like to try lecturing someone who has actually been through the gates about how they work again? Or would you perhaps like to try something less embarrassing?
That also presents an extraordinary burden on trans people to solve the problem of inaccessible healthcare, having the condition pathologised in order to oblige insurers to cover it, rather than actually improving the accessibility of healthcare. At the very least this should be argued as a flawed, pragmatic solution to the immediate problem—“no, being trans is not a medical condition, but there is immediate benefit to us having it recognised as one, despite the long term harm.”
Also, ‘cosmetic’ does not mean ‘insignificant’.
The funny thing is, “flawed, pragmatic solution to the immediate problem” is exactly where this entire line of argument came from.
Gather ‘round, kids, it’s time for a queer history lesson.
So first off: Remember seeing this image in trans history posts?
That’s Christine Jorgensen. She was a pioneer in trans rights and in transition, and deserves respect for that. See, she transitioned beginning in 1949 - not exactly an easy time for queer people of any description.
From what I can gather, it appears that she always intended to be an activist about this - she spent several years preparing a documentary she intended to bring to the US. And, sure enough, news about her spread, and by 1952 articles like these were circulating.
Two years later, she would have her vaginoplasty under a doctor by the name of Harry Benjamin.
Dr. Benjamin, too, was a huge pioneer for trans rights. The treatment regimen of hormones and surgery that we know today? He developed part of it, and formalized it as a single course of treatment.
But.
But Dr. Benjamin was also a cishet man, and an authority figure. And that meant that he was phenomenally bad at knowing what trans people need or… anything about women.
You know how trans folks occasionally joke about how The System wants you to be a 1950s housewife?
That’s because “1950s housewife” is literally the template.
As a result, there were very stringent conditions on what you had to look like to be considered a True Transsexual. You had to be socially transitioned, effectively passing, not getting enough relief from hormones, wanting surgery now, and if you weren’t Straighty McStraight that counted against you very strongly.
(Oh, as an aside, this cishet man who was considered one of the greatest authorities on human sexuality? Specifically classed asexual people as not “true and full-fledged transsexuals.”)
And a key point of Harry Benjamin’s model? The “true and full-fledged transsexual” feels nothing but revulsion for her body and an immediate desire for surgery.
Now obviously this model leaves a lot of trans people (particularly trans men, who Dr. Benjamin did not work with) out in the cold. But some of us could look like we fit, if we worked hard at it.
So trans women lied. We lied our asses off to literally anybody who looked too cis or het to trust with the truth. We said everything they wanted to hear, we shared tips about which lines worked with each other… fuck, we still do this. Meanwhile, among ourselves, we were playing around with the boundaries of gender, forming connections, developing terminology… if only hyperdysphoric feminine white het trans women were going to be considered “true transsexuals,” then screw it, the rest of us were transgender.
However, what the medical community saw? Was a whole lot of trans women smiling and nodding and going “Yep, you sure do understand us perfectly, Mr. Doctor Man!” So of course this theory continued basically unchallenged for a long-ass time.
In the meantime, North American trans history basically has a generation-long gap, populated by the occasional cis doctor writing about us. You can thank Janice Raymond for that one - her work was instrumental in getting trans health care classified as cosmetic, and thus dropped by insurers.
Fast forward to 2005. Raymond’s work was finally undone less than a decade ago, but… all that gatekeeping around turning trans women into 1950s housewives? It’s had all this time going unchallenged. By now, it’s just institutional knowledge that That’s What Trans Women Are Like.
So of course, we lie our asses off again. And we use this wonderful new Internet thing to help each other lie our asses off. Which means that, eventually, two groups of people find out about it and double down hard on screwing us.
The first is doctors, who see an opportunity to build stronger gates, and thus stronger positions of authority and respect.
The second is trans women who actually are described by Dr. Benjamin’s theory. There’s a ton of social capital and easing of transition available if you just vocally buy into oppression.
And of course, since this is the first either group was hearing about it, it looked like a sudden explosion of “fake” trans people lying their way into medical treatment that these poor women desperately needed.
And thus, Harry Benjamin Syndrome was born. Its proponents actively and violently distanced themselves from the rest of us (I’ve actually seen HBSers say things like “I have a medical condition, I’m not a fucking queer.”) and worked their asses off to strengthen the gates, on the theory that they could have their treatment quicker and easier and be taken more seriously if they just got all the “fakers” out.
Over the last 13 years, we’ve made a lot more progress in trans visibility and rights - but the HBS movement has over sixty years of institutional inertia behind it, as well as a shrinking-but-still-active core of vocal proponents. And HBSers aren’t just useful patsies for cis doctors, either. There’s another group that benefits strongly from painting the vast majority of trans women as predatory fakers who are just trying to shove their way into spaces they don’t belong.
TERFs, of course. The same group who have been using tumblr as a controlled environment to figure out exactly how to pass their ideology to people without getting caught.
And that, kiddos, is how you get regurgitated Harry Benjamin Syndrome bullshit on tumblr, spewed by someone who’s too young to even remember what HBS was, in this the year 5778.
