@dropbear42 to be frank, there's a lot of hurt and traumatized queer people, which makes community building difficult, and a lot of these problems are magnifies in online spaces.

Honestly, the level of acceptance of queerness among my generation gives me hope. There's still a long way to go, but things are looking up.

I'm pretty pessimistic about the current political movement though, but my philosophy is akin to that of Theoden at helms deep (if you are a lotr fan): when all seems lost, you keep fighting anyway, because that's all you can do, and things might not be as bleak as they seem.

@dropbear42 hehe, your instance has 500 char limits. I have the freedom of a 10000 char limit!

Just to clarify a few things (my numbering does not correspond to yours 😉):

1. The de-medicalization push has not been to discourage medical transition, but rather to allow more options and to at least attempt to not divide the community along the lines who have had what surgery or medical procedure.

2. With regards to "transsexual", part of the problem is that for many people, they are mainly used to hearing that term used by some particularly toxic individuals who seek to invalidate trans people who aren't like them. I think most reasonable people don't have any problem with people calling themselves transsexual, especially if they transitioned at a different time, but at least for me, when I hear that term, it makes me want to check that i'm not dealing with one of the aforementioned toxic individuals (which you do not at all seem to be).

3. I think that the usage of the term transfem is not particularly correlated with a desire or not to get bottom surgery. For me personally, my desire for it varies between "it would be nice" to "I really want to have a vagina". We'll see how things go in the future.

4. I'd say that for me, womanhood was definitely my objective when I first came out. Right now, it's more of a "I want to be perceived as anything but a man", which pretty much means in general society to be perceived as a woman, but in queer spaces can be a lot more flexible. Also, this is just me, and there are plenty of people who call themselves transfem who identify much more strongly with womanhood.

@dropbear42 I was going to reply, and the got distracted... So here we go:

At least as far as I use the term, and I think this usage is the most common, "transfem" for me is an umbrella term covering trans people (binary or not) who are moving towards a more feminine gender. For me personally, I like using the term because it allows me to describe the parts of my gender that I care about without having to define whether or not I consider myself to be a woman (which I largely don't care about).

AFAIK, the term was born out of a larger desire to de-medicalize our language around transpeople and to develop language that isn't centred around our assigned gender at birth (e.g. MtF).

There have been something of a backlash to this de-medicalization by certain trans people (who are often referred to as transmedicalist) and some of these people have tried to distinguish themselves from other trans people who they consider less valid by referring to themselves "transsexual", so terms like that and "full transition" will raise eyebrows, especially amongst younger trans people who weren't around when these terms were in more common usage.

Anyways, I hope that this long rambling answer has made some sense.