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.
@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.
@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
@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.
@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.
@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.
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.
@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 @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
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.
@eruonna @valentine That didn't happen for me until graduate school. 😩
Oh yeah, I didn't personally have a friend group until grad school, but I saw others doing it.
CJ "siege" Bellwether
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Faith, Purple haired feminist 🧋 
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