CJ "siege" BellwetherMar 5

Does anyone have a screepcap or link saved of the interaction about a decade ago when a trans girl on reddit asked an adult cis man how often he thought about being a girl and his answer was something like "I dont think ive ever thought about that".

That interaction broke so many people and i wish i had properly secured it for posterity. My brain remembers the guys handle had Panda in it iirc.

Show threadCJ "siege" BellwetherMar 5
obligatory "man who secretly thinks about being a woman" is not a type of man thats a trans woman in the closet and "woman who secretly thinks about being a man" is not a type of woman, thats a trans man in the closet.
Show threadCJ "siege" BellwetherMar 5
this comes up a lot for me because interacting with people on the verge of figuring things out have specific complexities of the world they've built up to project/hide who they are that tends to be the same shape as everyone else in that situation so its very familiar and knowable but theres always a bit of a game of cat and mouse of trying to side step that projection to speak to the real person on the other side.
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 5
@siege
I kind of want to hang an appendix onto this idea, that some of us pre-transition transes get ourselves into a position where we NEVER think of potentially being the gender we actually are.

Like, I never considered that I was a guy. I've got no memories or wanting to be one, or the thought crossing my mind that I wasn't actually a girl.

What I DO have, are memories of obsessively thinking of myself as a girl, in a "How do I live with being a woman? How do I do girl right?" kind of endless-angst way. As if any lapse in my vigilance would make all my gender evaporate, which would of course be terribly dangerous.

I posit that's another incredibly sad tell.

I think being an enby made it complicated too. Back in the day at least, there wasn't any alternative third thing to long to be.
Show threadCJ "siege" BellwetherMar 5

@valentine yeah, like i tend to think of three general categories of trans people coming to realisation:

1. those who boldly as a child walkup to their parents and say "Hey actually im X" - this to me is like a cryptid. I cannot fathom magical formulation exists that allows the trans kid to take everything theyve been told by parents/teachers/peers and say No you're all wrong.

2. those who pubertal changes are so stark it crushes them so heavily that they figure it out.

Show threadCJ "siege" BellwetherMar 5

@valentine 2 continued: figures it out in early teen years, normally has terrible time trying to negotiate situation with parents, posts always tend to include crying in showers.

3. those who accept what they're told by parents/teachers, that they are their agab, and therefore self learn to crush any internal gender need feelings and build a cage around it, cage becomes more complex as life continues, puberty leads to more intense crushing of needs, mental health cracks begin from closet life

Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲

@siege @valentine there is a fourth group which is small but may hopefully get bigger: people who were told all their lives, by at least some of the people around them, that they are the ones who ultimately know their own gender, that being trans is an actual possibility for them. I know some kids like that.

It seems a little like the tragectory that sexuality has taken (and some of this will likely depend on where you are). Nowadays, there are a lot more kids who grow up knowing that they might be gay, that they can just pay attention to their own feelings of attraction. It's not perfect; those kids are still moving through a highly heteronormative world. But it is easier than it was thirty years ago.

Mar 6 at 1:02pmWeb
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @siege I totally agree.

I'd only add that I would love to see an increase in discourse about the different ways that gay attraction can feel from straight attraction when you're young. Queer attraction is not just about who it's aimed at -- it's a difference in vibe altogether.

Essentially, how being attracted to guys can often feel really different when you're also a guy, than attraction to guys feels when you're a girl.

That shit would have REALLY helped me out when I was going through puberty, because I knew *for sure* that I was attracted to guys. It would have helped to understand that I was attracted to them in a boy-way.

It's hard to parse out exactly what that means, and I think some people would push back if they thought the description of it took anything away from the ways women could be attracted to men.

But like, I think everyone would accept that being attracted to women is a different sentiment for a lesbian than it is for a straight man. It is qualitatively different. The same goes for a little gay boy in a girl's body, vs. a little straight girl.

My sexual orientation was set -- it was just mis-labeled due to my looking like a girl, and the intensity of it was one of the things that kept me assuming I was a straight woman for a tragicomically long time.

I hope that gay and lesbian trans people can start putting their early experiences out there, so that pre-transition kids can see what they vibe with, and gain some validation from.
Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 6

@valentine

Oh yeah, as soon as I started trying to date as a lesbian, everything made so much more sense to me

@siege

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @siege 💜​💜​💜​

I can't wait to start dating as a guy! The pandemic and then circumstances kinda interrupted it, but I'm so ready. 🙌​
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @siege I think the Tumbler/Twitter "autoandrophilia" tag scenes are a gift to the era and something that would have been amazing to have 10-20 years ago.

Back when I was still discovering stuff in 2016, discourse was still about "soft boy uWu" and how problematic it was to sexually objectify us by saying we could be hot. 🙄​

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @siege I just feel really good about this era for gay trans boys. Even with all the political awfulness, just knowledge and resources and media is so much easier to come by.

It's getting harder and harder to remember or even describe what it was like to be a gay boy who looked like a normal chick, and have no internet, no ability to research anything, nobody to talk to, barely any cis gays or lesbians poking their head up, nothing. And to try and date misogynistic southern boys, and to navigate their abuses and assaults alongside the mystifying and horrid southern femininity demands.

Nowadays kids got yaoi on tap.

Problems are different, but it just feels like there is a bigger arsenal with which to fight and defend, and collectivize.
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @siege And that "soft boi" thing really fucked me up, even as recently as ten years ago in my late 30s.

I was never a soft boy even when I was a young closeded trans gay guy. I was a kinky dark goth man. And in 2016, ready to embrace that as someone almost-40, my searches exposed me to pictures and comments approving of this soft-innocent-trans-boy aesthetic in that era, that made me feel like a gross perv for who I really was and wanted to be.

It's weird to think that as recently as 2016 there was still only the tiniest first trickle of an idea that faggy dark goth trans boys existed. Even that's gotten a ton better with time.
Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   Mar 6

@valentine 1000%

I swear gay trans people have a very different experience to straight trans people for exactly this reason. When you're straight, you're criticized and shamed for being attracted to your AGAB but at least you know you're different and you process that early.

When you're gay, it's really easy for gender feelings to get mixed up with sexuality. "You don't want to be a girl/boy, you're just attracted ti girls/boys. Stop being weird about it!" My egg would have shattered in middle school if I'd able/allowed to tell the difference between attraction and gender envy. But literally everything I was told by the society that raised me was that my gender envy was probably just really fucked up attraction.

@eruonna @siege

Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 6

@faithisleaping

Oh, definitely. Though I'm still not entirely sure I know the difference between attraction, gender envy, and regular envy. At least not all the time.

@valentine @siege

Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   Mar 6

@eruonna It's still a work in progress but I think I can usually tell these days.

@valentine @siege

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@faithisleaping @eruonna @siege Yeah, exactly!

That's what I meant by the "closet within a closet."

Gay/lesbian/NB trans people have to dig twice as deep, to figure out what the fuck is going on. I'm not trying to play oppression Olympics or anything, but the hardships are different and we require different advice and clues.

Even just being told about "jealusty" -- "You feel like you want to fuck him AND be him" -- would help! It's a thing in cis gay life, but it's SUPERCHARGED for queer trans people, haha.
Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   Mar 6

@valentine So many of my highschool memories are of standing around awkwardly, looking at groups of girls and wishing I could be one of them. 4-H dances, the 3 weeks of various highschool proms where the kids showed up to church the next day in their prom clothes. Hell, half my memories of youth group as a kid are of sitting uncomfortably in a corner and observing groups of girls and wishing I could join in on the chatter.

@eruonna @siege

Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 6

@faithisleaping

uff, yeah. I did a lot of STEM-y activities, classes, camps, etc, and girls tend to be underrepresented there. Often what few girls there were would all band together. I was always drawn to those groups, sitting outside and wishing I could be part of them. And then telling myself that I was just being creepy because I was attracted to them.

@valentine @siege

Show threadesc keyMar 6
@eruonna @faithisleaping @valentine @siege I felt a LOT of envy as a stem-y kid when someone in my class got to go to a special stem camp for girls. I carried that injustice with me for decades, unsure why it felt like an injustice… incidentally, it turned out he is a trans man. We still keep in touch.
Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 6
@what @faithisleaping @valentine @siege aw, that's a sweet outcome
Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   Mar 6

@what @eruonna I always struggled at the STEM-y camps because of the social dynamics. I would go and I would be interested in the things we were doing but I was never one of the "cool kids". Some of that could be chalked up to social isolation and/or autism. But in retrospect, honestly, most of it was because I wasn't a guy.

@valentine @siege

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@faithisleaping @what @eruonna @siege Ah, the STEM camps and school tracks.

I was always so interested in what was going on, but I was often the only girl (once again, sexist geography and era, even the late-90s "girl power" thing hadn't happened yet). So I'd mostly get along with the guys, but often be subtly excluded when it came time to socialize. Or, things would get weird when they started being into girls, and I kept being into them, but they weren't into the kind of girl I was. Even STEM guys didn't want a STEM girl. 😕​

And that's not even mentioning the parts that hurt worst -- when I hit puberty and a concerted effort began to push girls away from STEM stuff, which happened even in my A-rated high school. To this day I believe it cost me a career.

And the reaction of other girls to the fact that I was often singled out to be included with the "advanced"/STEM track of classes, often as one of the only girls...the first bullying I ever received was from that. People sometimes wonder why girls "dumb themselves down" to fit in but it isn't just to look cuter to boys or whatever. It's to escape that "who do you think you are?" rage from other little girls.

Just another reason ages 10-15 were so confusing.
Show threadesc keyMar 6

@valentine @faithisleaping @eruonna @siege yeah. I have two sides in me, a very artsy fartsy side and a scientist side. I sometimes wonder if I had been raised as a girl whether I might have would have wound up going down the artsier fartsier path. I expect I would have, since I nearly did as is.

It kills me to see the same pushing happening to my kids’ generation

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@faithisleaping @what @eruonna @siege Not to go down too much of a personal rabbit hole, but it's also interesting to me how gender affected "alt" culture back then. There were of course "alternative" girls at my school, especially once the 90s started. But they still either broke into two camps -- the girls that managed to be both alt and pretty, and the girls who were like "screw guys entirely."

Somehow I couldn't manage to fit in with either group, despite having friends in both, and also with the slightly dorky academic girls, who nowadays would be the nerds (nobody openly embraced that back then). I just kind of had friends in all these different groups, but never really belonged to any.

I wish it had been possible to keep being friends with guys past about age 16 where I was from, especially the more alternative guys who were in bands and such. But it turned into a thing where I was only allowed access to those guys if I was dating someone in that scene.

So I put up with a lot of shit from bad boyfriends, just to stay in the milieu where I felt comfortable. Wish I could have just associated with who I wanted to associate with, freely.
Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 6

@valentine

Interestingly, I felt like 16 was when cross-gender friendships became more possible. Maybe not close friendships without a romantic element, but people were definitely hanging around in mixed-gender groups. By that point, I didn't know how to make friends with anyone and had kind of solidified my self-image as an outsider, so I wasn't really participating in this stuff, though.

@faithisleaping @what @siege

Show threadFaith, Purple haired feminist 🧋   Mar 6

@eruonna @valentine That didn't happen for me until graduate school. 😩

@what @siege

Show threadJuniper 🏳️‍⚧️🌲Mar 6

@faithisleaping

Oh yeah, I didn't personally have a friend group until grad school, but I saw others doing it.

@valentine @what @siege

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @faithisleaping @what @siege
🫂
Show threadzahlenzauber*in Mar 6
@eruonna @valentine @faithisleaping @what @siege I always hung out with the guys in our mixed friends group as a teenager, we even went out sometimes and I was the only girl, although none of them ever was my boyfriend. I was the odd one to whom they could pour their hearts out 🙄
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@eruonna @faithisleaping @siege That's one of the reasons I kind of hate the "creepy guy" discourse stereotype.

People have no idea what's going on inside other people. We're trained to think it's always uglier than it seems on the outside, but I've found the opposite is just as likely to be true -- odd vibes from someone can often be a beautiful thing inside them that doesn't quite know how to unfold yet.

It's no woman's job to do the labor to endure it or bring it out of course, but like, our culture could do a much better job of just not mocking and alienating the shit out of awkward people.

I know I hit the Uncanny Valley a lot as a "girl" and I could have used some grace given.
Show threadJojo Mar 6

@faithisleaping @valentine @eruonna @siege

Yeah, 6th grade I had so much gender envy that I chalked up to attraction. And it wasn't attraction at all.

But yeah I just believed everyone that told me I was a boy. I questioned it a bit around 5th 6th grade when gender envy started hitting me. But I eventually chalked it up to these weird crushes, that weren't crushes at all.

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@jojo @faithisleaping @eruonna @siege I hear you.

It hurts to think about.

There are some guys I knew I liked back then, that I often wonder if they were in your exact shoes. They seemed to have some issues with how exactly they wanted to be close to girls -- to date them, or be a kind of friends that seemed to include a lot of self-reflective longing?

And that isn't even including the dudes I dated who I now know had to have been some kind of closeted gay. I was part-beard and part crush to them, and it jangled both of us in bad ways. That because of their upbringing often led to violence. 😞​

It is an interesting exercise to me to look back on the guys I was interested in, and try to parse out which ones I wanted to date, and which ones I wanted to be them or be in their friend group.
Show threadSophieMar 6

@valentine This is such a good articulation of this concept! My besties in High School were all girls, and all the girls I liked, I liked in a gay way, although I didn't know it at the time. And I'm not even sure if I can really articulate the difference between straight attraction and gay attraction because... well, in hindsight I was always gay so I never had straight attraction. I just knew that the way I liked girls and the way most of the guys in my school talked about girls were quite different.

Now I want to go see if any research has been done on the ways that queer people and straight people articulate their attraction differently, because the “vibe" of this concept seems right on, but I don't know in what way specifically it is.

@eruonna @siege

Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@sophiesometimes @eruonna @siege It would probably have to be codified in that "here is a bunch of vibes and clues" way that "you might be trans!" has to be defined.

Sexual orientation and gender is such a spectrum that no one experience or piece of evidence really ever defines anything for anyone. Fortunately I think discourse is gradually moving away from that era of trying to super-delineate things, and arguing over one group or another being allowed to claim some flavor of experience as belonging only to them.

That shouting match just felt more fierce back in the 2010s.

It still comes up in the thing @ghost_bird mentioned the other day, of people being weird about labeling a historical figure as trans. And trying to prevent as if it's inappropriate. Trying to list some vibe as part of how gay attraction feels for men vs. straight attraction to men, surely some people will feel their toes are stepped on, or that something is being "claimed" or taken from them.

But it's really not about drawing lines, and saying "this is queer attraction vibes, and over THERE is straight attraction experience."

It's more like trying to sketch out a map and fill in where the general geographic areas are, so that young people can try to orient themselves in sexuality-land, EVEN IF THEY DON'T FIT EXTERNAL IMAGES OF AN AREA'S TYPICAL INHABITANTS. It's another way of saving trans kids' lives and more important than stepping on adults' toes in discourse.
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@sophiesometimes @eruonna @siege @ghost_bird It's one of those things I feel like we as trans adults can really do a lot of good in.

Just talking openly with each other, in places where trans teens could access, about our early sexual longings or experiences and how we subjectively perceived them.

And not all trauma either, I think there's plenty of joy in there too, at least maybe in the things we had secretly wanted or loved or appreciated in others (even if envy came on the heels of that).

It would be a way to get information to kids about how trans/gay/queer sexuality feels, without the "PR" risk of talking directly to trans kids about it. And without the need to sanitize it and make it cutesy like sex info is often presented to teens.
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@sophiesometimes @eruonna @siege @ghost_bird Obviously they're mostly going to talk about it with each other, which is good.

But it could be really validating for kids and 20-somethings to know they're part of a continuum of people who have felt this way. That they're not busted or weird.
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@sophiesometimes @eruonna @siege @ghost_bird And alongside that discussion, trans culture would benefit from more talk about the weird temporal aspect of transition. About how we all kind of start over as pubescent teenagers for a few years.

I think so many people exist in pre-transition "it's too late for me" agony. When there's just no way to explain how profoundly fresh a start it can really be. Trans people actually really do get multiple do-overs of critical parts of our lives, it's weird and awesome.
Show threadErosdiscordiaMar 6
@sophiesometimes @eruonna @siege @ghost_bird I've read some really good links and blog posts about this topic over the years. I wish I'd collected them in a more organized way. Just the non-linear life of queer people. But especially when you have multiple phases of transition.

I think young people right now have a lot of pressure to discover and embody pretty much one Self. Both in a negative sense of real-names and age verification, but also a positive sense of being authentic etc.

I just want them to also know the power of self-reinvention. It feels like a dying art.