Hey, if you are #trans and began transitioning in the 2016 - 2019 era, can you reply and let me know!
There are apparently way more of us here than I realized, and I would like to be closer friends with those that remember the before times and trans twitter and the discourses and the excitement before we all got burnt the fuck out. 😅
So, for those of us in the 2016 - 2019 cohort, how would you describe the experience or what it was like transitioning then? What are community or culture moments that stood out to you at the time? What are touchpoints for trans subcultures in the era?
I sometimes think of it as the post-“trans tipping point” cohort, given that 2015 was the supposed “trans tipping point” but did genuinely represent a moment of increasing visibility and acceptance in media and in-person communities in many places. We also had much easier access to trans healthcare as WPATH and health systems/insurance companies lowered the gatekeeping barriers to accessing HRT and other care (though surgeries were still being fought over frequently). It was also maybe the peak of certain trans social media spaces and discourse, and Trans Lit in the English speaking world was beginning to finally break out of being a niche area of literature to something cis people also read and engaged with.
@JoscelynTransient I actually delayed coming out and accepting myself partially because I'd firmly gotten the impression that the only trans women out there were already married with children. It seemed to me that to be trans (or to have an acc't on Laura's Playground) you needed to have lived an entire life before coming out. It wasn't until I started surfing Tumblr that I realized you can be a kid and know for absolute certain what's going on with you.
In 2015 my main support network was on IRC. I might call this the #girlslikeus era, which is a term I haven't seen much online at all recently, but I still use IRL all the time: "She's a girl like me."
I would not consider my experience to be typical.
I was department chair. I had to be the face of the department; I felt horribly visible during a time when all I wanted to do was to hide from the world. Even COVID didn't provide a respite in this situation.
Also, for much of this journey, I felt horribly alone. I was navigating this with almost no allies, trying to figure out a way to transition without blowing up my life. I was from an older generation, one that was very much influenced by earlier iterations of the WPATH standards and of older flavors of DSM; it all felt like a very delicate balance, to transition without wrecking everything. Combine this with events going on at work (I could wax poetic about what it was like as Chair) and the combination nearly killed me. It wasn't until late 2021 / early 2022 that I finally started to find community and really came into my own. It was amazing how rapid and how beautiful the changes were from that point, but those first couple of years were really rocky.
@JoscelynTransient I came out to my wife four days after Trump took office for his first term.
Even despite that, there was an awful lot more hope then than there is now, thats for damn sure. Transphobia felt like much more of an ignorance problem than an actual driven hate machine
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