I regularly listen to a lot of transgender stuff to help me better understand what other transpeople think, are currently going through or have gone through. Since this is an extremely small community that exploded in population only a few years ago (making it subsequently easier to compile information about this shit!), it leaves many people wondering how the hell this happened, on top of us being the politcal scapegoat for every single bad thing that is happening in the country right now, to the point that in some places it's illegal to be trans, a felony or even by proxy punishable by death! (looking at you, Florida). With all this misinformation and persecution flying about right now, I feel like, as a content creator with some kind of voice, the onus is on me to help cut through the bullshit.
So where did all these transpeople suddenly come from?
Long story short, COVID happened.
Because lockdowns happened, people lost their jobs or couldn't go out, and basically had nothing to do except sit at home and stew in their own thoughts while waiting out the shitstorm of the previous iteration of this god-forsaken administration. Without the drive to constantly move about, be it going to work or even just go outside, a lot of people were forced to introspect and realized that they didn't feel comfortable in their born bodies. This opened a floodgate of subsequent information that helped other transpeople, including myself who was surrounded by and continues to be surrounded by extreme anti-trans activism in real life, find information and resources about this. Because of the easy access to information and because of how widespread it is, it's far easier to find information for the next generation, the next wave of transpeople.
-- Just a phase? --
No. 99.99% of the time, it's not a "phase", as so many people, including my own mother, believe. It's easy to think this when you are comfortable with your own body or appearance or just couldn't give a rat's ass or are so heavily wrapped up in the bullshit that you can't imagine anyone wanting to change themselves in any way.
How someone "awakens" can vary. My awakening began because I would regularly choose female characters in video games to beat kids who claimed female characters were bad and weaker than the male characters, but then I kept doing it even when I had nothing to prove. Thinking about it even deeper, though, I began to realize I did that even before doing it as an act of defiance. This was over thirty years ago! By comparison, we moved to Texas on a passing whim because my family "got a message from God" (you said that the last two times!) and we barely got one year into moving here that my mom expressed her opinion that Texas really, REALLY sucks.
MY MOTHER IN CHRIST YOU WANTED TO MOVE HERE! I hope you get used to it, because this black hole of a domstic abuse relationship loosely disguised as a state has made it virtually impossible to escape.
I digress. Point is that only very rarely is it "just a phase". What it is, 100% of the time, is people experimenting with and exploring their gender expression to better understand themselves and how they want to be perceived by others. And that in and of itself is a journey that is taken in stages.
The common pipeline, for example from male to female, is to go to the extreme opposite end of the spectrum and dress hyperfeminine with the spinny skirts and the thigh highs, and as you further understand your place on the spectrum, the way you present yourself shifts until you find a place that is comfortable. From there, a deeper dive into the rabbit hole begins.
-- I Got Confused! --
This is a common claim by anti-trans activists, that transpeople are just "confused" about their gender. This is total bullshit. This is 80+ year old bullshit that originally began with the gay panic era in the 1950s. Back then, when sexuality was even less understood, it was believed that you could "trick" kids into being gay. In a HEALTHY environment, by the time sexuality kicks in most kids are aware of what their sexuality is. I ended up being in an extremely dangerous environment where if you were even SUSPECTED of being gay, you were killed if you were lucky. If you weren't, you'd be disappeared into a torture garage. You don't want to know what they'd do to you if you were suspected of being trans.
Even in that environment, I still had these trans thoughts. This was reflected in some of the stories I wrote at the time. Because of my hatred for the male-dominated space I existed in at the time and the fact that there was no good egg among them, my hatred for men obfuscated a budding bisexuality that woudln't properly emerge until I was 19.
But none of this is over "confusion". As fucking stupid as this staggeringly inbred species can get, we are not so dumb yet as to be completely in the dark about the differences between man and woman. Or maybe we are, because as more anti-trans laws are being passed, more hate crimes against cispeople mistaken for being trans, especially women, are on the rise.
-- Oops. Friendly Fire. --
As I have said in my previous journal, anti-trans persecution is on the rise, dramatically. We're a weird fringe group that, in the process of our self-discovery, just so happens to be tearing at the conventions of gender that this euro-centrisc global society has built itself on for the past several hundred years.
Fact of the matter is some people really are that shallow and don't even register that people of other shapes exist outside of the extremely narrow spectrum they attempt to establish, and end up NARCing on themselves and their inability to distinguish between genders when pressed. I have worked in food service across the board since just before COVID, from a tourist trap to fast food to slow food to now fine dining. I have seen people of all body types, from rail-thin flagpoles to rotund masses holding Princess Leia on a leash. Human body types are extremely varied, and it isn't so easy as to create an absolute foolproof definition on the differences between a man and a woman, and how we process such things.
-- How do I Gender? --
The brain is an extremely complicated process of pattern recognition. There's a reason why AI will not supercede human intelligence for quite a while.
How we perceive one another as both individuals and gender, how we store memory and all that associated stuff is such a deeply complex mechanism that anything that causes an inherent disruption in that process (be it brain damage or dementia) can manifest itself in a multitude of recognition disorders, from prosopagnosia to Capgras Syndrome. So it's no wonder so many people have a problem with, when pressed, being able to perceive gender if the subject doesn't possess extremely obvious identifiers.
To start, all humans are conceived female. Indeed most life is conceived female. The story of Adam and Eve had it backwards. The female form is the base form, and during the earliest stages of embryotic development, the chromosomes arrange themselves and whatever order they fall in, that's the blueprint of human that the body will develop. Sort of. It's far more complicated that, but let's keep it simple for the sake of this journal.
There are several ways that gender happens: Superficial, Social, Anatomical, and biological.
The first, superficial, is the one we see every day. It's the various traits and identifiers, subtle or otherwise, that we define someone as being male or female, or feminine or masculine, regardless of age, weight or body type. These aren't absolutes, hence why we can describe certain women as having a "man face", for example, or certain men to be "pretty boys" or "bishonen". This is how people will through their day to day lives perceive most of the population around them.
The second, social, is an amalgam of the above combined with various identifiers that we associate with the different genders; clothing, body language, scent, facial appearance and structure, and voice. A fully cis male, for example, can pass as a female with the proper application of makeup, clothing, prosthetics, etc. The example that comes to mind is Mrs. Doubtfire, which from what I understand won an award for best makeup for turning Robin Williams into an extremely believable old woman.
The third, anatomical, is of course penis, breasts, and vagina. These are things that we associate with male and female, but aren't necessarily synonymous with these genders. We don't go around not knowing if someone is male or female until we see what they have in their pants. This is where many cishet men, for example, will begin exploring their sexuality, because the idea of a very attractive woman with a huge penis, for example, is an exotic encounter that challenges what they believed to be absolute about gender.
The fourth is biological. What are your chromosomes? Do you even know for sure that, because you possess masculine traits, that your biological sex is male? Have you ever taken a chromosome test? More importantly, what if you're wrong? How does this change your perspective about gender and your relation to it? Chromosomes don't equal gender, and that's before you get into the genetic anomalies that are documented to exist out there in no-insignificant number.
Mind you, this is just the shallow end of the subject, before we deal with more extreme nuances like Intersex people, who by population percentage alone outnumber those with red hair. Now think about how many gingers you see, be it in the wild or in media. YEAH.
This is why idiot gorilla men with Big Ape beating on Little Ape mentality coming into government and brute-forcing hazardous laws through the legal process is... well, hazardous. It oversimplifies what is an extremely nuanced subject and, through the legal process, dehumanizes and marginalizes a significant percentage of the population, even to the point of trying to have anyone that doesn't fit that narrow criteria on either end sentenced to death.
-- The Easy Access Myth --
The biggest claim in recent years about transpeople, particularly male to female, has been that we transition in order to get easy access to victims in locker rooms or restrooms.
One of the more toxic presentations about the trans community in the public is the idea that transpeople are commonly obese, unwashed men with a beard who put on a few articles of clothing and call themselves women, if that.
This taps into the common cultural perspective of what transpeople were believed to be for the longest time in this country, mined for cheap yuks in very shitty comedies. It also calls on tropes that have been indicative in stories about sexual predators and pedophiles, being repugnant to the various senses to drive a deeper wedge of animosity into the reader or viewer, showing that these beliefs have been held, unsubstantiated, for decades and even entire generations.
The great majority of transpeople are... well, not that. Of course there are fat transpeople out there going in either direction. I know a few, personally, on both sides of the spectrum. But far greater are those who are not that, who take great care in curating their appearance through diet, exercise, dress and makeup, to pass as a woman. And that's before you consider the effects on HRT, which we will get into.
This toxic presentation of transpeople also ends up bastardizing the common preception of what men are; unwashed, overweight, monstrously ugly things that don't take care of themselves and only see this as an avenue through which to sexually assault others. This is how cismen effectively portray themselves as, and it's because of this that I re-egged myself when I was 19, even as I continued to have these thoughts about my gender identity. They don't stop, and it's not good to suppress them.
Ever since I started transitioning, I have sought to improve my appearance through better self-care. Truth be told, even at 36, I'm in far better health, both physically and mentally, than I have been in a very long time. I'm currently on a diet and exercise to improve my body shape and slim down. My goal is to get below 160 pounds and I average currently at 164. When I first made the announcement about my trans status over two years ago, I was closer to 190 because of the move out here and the constant eating out my family was engaged in. Pants and dresses that stopped fitting me began to fit again. People commonly mistake me for already being on HRT. Turns out part of the transitioning process is actually giving a damn about your physical appearance.
-- Lorenna Bobbit Time! --
Another misconception among the public that is touted very loudly by the anti-trans movement is that the first thing a transperson does is go and chop bits off. Namely, transwomen going and chopping their dicks and balls off.
Again, it's a scaremongering tactic built specifically to claim the next generation of kids questioning their gender are being "groomed" by some invisible yet omnipresent cabal changing everyone's genders for literally zero reason as part of some wild and chaotic yet organized system for undefinable goals. It's wanting the conspiracy narrative to go every which way, not contradict itself, and serve a cohesive purpose all at the same time.
-- Regrets? I regret regretting. --
Another claim is that people who transition will "regret" transitioning and will detransition. This happens... in an extreme of extreme minority and basically always in the early stages. There are more people who elect for the bottom surgery up there than there are of people who will detransition. The overwhelming majority of people who transition, near universal, have reported themselves to be happier having transitioned. Those that are less happy, daresay, tend to be so because of persecution and discrimination, and those that detransition largely do so because of financial issues or otherwise lack of access to gender-affirming care. And that can be attributed to all the anti-trans laws being passed that have made gender itself an inimical hellscape for everyone involved.
I find much of this lies around people's institutionalized beliefs that you are the same, no matter what you do, from womb to tomb. If you are fat, you will always be fat, if you are dumb, you will always be dumb, if you are poor, you will always be poor, if you are a man, you will always be a man, etc. Much of this seems to be rooted in certain religious sects like Calvinism and those inspired by it that presents your current status as an unyielding constant that cannot be altered, and attempts to alter it not only futile and impossible, but anathema to the Natural Order. It attempts to institutionalize the current status quo as the Natural Order and then pressures all mechanisms and organizations to work towards maintaining it at risk or threat of total destruction. Older generations of syndicated TV programming, where an episode's antics are undone at the end and everything resets to zero, unintentionally reinforces this idea. By extension, anyone who attempts to deviate it are naturally inclined to have regrets, more so if said deviation results in some sort of irreversible change. I see this frequently presented as Ariel from the Little Mermaid attempting to stitch her legs back together. If I had a dollar for every time I've seen yet another iteration of this, I could pay for my HRT in its entirety.
My regrets lie in not transitioning earlier in life. Way earlier in life. Like I said, I was able to put a name to these thoughts when I was 7 when the signs existed for years prior, but due to social stigmas and pressures and the fact at the 2000s were an unlivable hateful shitsewer that collapsed under its own weight suppressed these thoughts until I was 19, and then I had to compartmentalize them again until only a few years ago. I've been here since before there was anyone else here, but due to my hateful environment I didn't get the courage to speak up or even think my dreams were possible until others showed it. That's my fuckin' regret.
-- Life on Easy Mode --
This is one claim I sometimes hear, that this is somehow easy and that's why we choose this journey. Again, bullshit and lies. This isn't easy. It's an investment and one of the biggest and steepest endeavors one can engage in. An investment of time, money, physical and mental energy, reshaping and designing yourself from the ground up into what you want to become. If it were easy everyone would be trans. But they aren't, because it isn't.
Trans people experience far higher rates of sexual assault than the national average, being victims of hate crimes, higher rates of homelessness due to being disowned by family, and all that is before you deal with the legislation being proposed or passed constantly to marginalize or even criminalize our existence, equating it with sexual assault against children by our mere presence alone or pretending like being trans somehow gives us a magical edge up in sports or the work environment. The hate against transpeople is so extreme it causes hate crimes against cispeople to skyrocket.
So why do we do this? It's easy to sit there and say we should remain content in our own bodies when we fucking hated what we were born as, when you don't really think or care about your own self-image and that it's taboo to even hold these thoughts. I've lived as a guy for a majority of my life even as I knew in my deepest heart that I fucking hated it, and that was before I watched men made being male a toxic suicide pact. But more than that, I've always been fascinated with how women looked and dressed, going all the way back into some antediluvian memory hole, seeing a girl in a dress in some show and realizing I wanted to experience wearing it, too. It's about seeing a cute girl in a dress and realizing you don't just want her; you want to be her, and knowing through hard work and dedication, you can be.
-- The Emergence Is Here --
The current era is that of self-expression and introspection. How we perceive ourselves, how we want to perceive ourselves, and how we can shape ourselves. For decades, this was inevitable. My generation and those up and coming have seen the status quo, what we have been told to believe in, at its ugliest and most self-destructive. We've had opportunities stripped from us before we even became of age, lies laid bare, economies collapsed, families ruined, all to benefit a handful of people looking to make a quick buck who we were told were infallible godkings. Meanwhile we took the blame, when we had no involvement or control in any of this.
We know better than to invest in our jobs at a company or our homes when those things can be stripped away from us due to external, deliberate sabotage. Corpos have raped the very concept of loyalty, over and over again on little more than a passing whim while expecting no karma to come of it. Home ownership has long gone out of reach for most of the country due to private equity, and higher education is increasingly proving to be a hollowed-out scam that has to compete with the abundance of free online materials.
But what we do have is interactive entertainment, and lots of it, and this is a common avenue for people my generation and younger to understanding themselves and how they want to present themselves, helped in no small part by the amount of live service games that offer cosmetic microtransactions. This is what we have left to invest in: the self. And the more people transition and are made prominent will inspire more people, across all but especially the newer generations, to transition as well.
-- So what is HRT? --
- HRT - E - Fem&Ms - Heroine - E-Bombs - Anticistamines - Anti-Boyotics - Girlnola - Edamommy - The Notorious H.R.T. - E-clipse - Nutmeg (Hold the nut) - EstroTurf - She-Nanigans - Jeannie in a Bottle - (I know these are all transfem-centric, but I'm transfem. Fite me.)
-- No, Seriously, What Is It? --
HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, is shorthand for various chems meant to help you transition. It's a broader subject than just gender transitioning, covering illegal bodybuilding practices to alleviating symptoms of menopause or even birth control, but let's just focus on the gender thing.
Human development comes in two primary stages. The first is during the fetal stages when the foundations are laid, the second is puberty. Puberty is effectively going forward with what the body has currently been programmed to do and the adult structure begins to form on top of the foundation. Hormones are involved not just in the construction, but also the maintenance. Your body is a constantly shifting and self-maintaining system that references its various blueprints to keep the overall system operational. Hormones are part of that system.
Going on HRT is commonly described as Second Puberty. Your body is now going off of a slightly different set of blueprints, modified by the hormones, and will, over the course of months or even years, slowly adapt to this new structure.
Puberty blockers are distributed to minors who question what gender they want to present themselves as as a stall until they can come to that decision and get on the appropriate respective HRT should they decide to transition. Since their HRT overrides a puberty that has yet to happen, the effects of the transition are made much more apparent. Honestly, kids today are in a far better position to transition than any prior generation to date.
It's never too late to transition; the body is always regulating itself through hormones whether you're 15 or 50, and the effects will always show through, though as I said earlier transitioning makes the changes more apparent, and the people transitioning will be happier for it.
-- So what does HRT actually do? --
It depends on which direction you're going.
Going MTF (Male to female):
- Breast development: One of the most aspired changes, and one that can take years. From what I understand progesterone can speed this up considerably.
- Skin softening
- Fat redistribution: The earliest change and the most influential one, particularly around the thighs, hips and butt, but also around the face, which is mostly fat.
- Reduced muscle mass: This can also result in you shrinking. Shrinking in height, shoe size... yes, even penis and testicle size, though there are ways to stop this. Regular erections can prevent shrinkage. One transwoman I know caged herself during the early years of her transition and shrank considerably, permanently because of it.
- Infertility: Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective), yes, it leads to reduced sperm count and potential. Permanently. If you are looking to procreate, you should consider freezing your sperm at a sperm bank and do IVF (in-vitro fertilization).
- Decreased body hair: VERY important. Take the body hair. Get it out of here! What remains will grow in slower and with a finer texture.
- Decreased sex drive: Also unfortunate, though this isn't universal. I imagine my own sex drive will be reduced to something considered almost normal. I've also heard it described that the sex becomes less physically aggressive and more intimate and emotionally connected.
- Mood and cognition: This is the one I'm most intrigued about, the way that it affects your brain chemistry, that you will sense this, and you will be cool with it. Your emotional range will broaden and deepen. This is important for those of us born men who have been conditioned to suppress all of our emotions that isn't murder, penis, meat and Big Ape.
If you are going FTM (Female-to-male):
- Remember that females are the base form of human, and it's easier to transition (or at least more noticable) to a man than it is into a woman.
- Voice deepens: This is only for FTM. Vocal chords thicken and this change is permanent. The body can't thin the vocal chords safely without causing extensive damage resulting in hoarseness or even loss of voice.
- Facial hair: Yup, they grow beards.
- Fat redistribution: Kind of the opposite of going MTF, fat goes away from the butt and legs and goes towards the stomach. I get some transmen would like to be a pretty boy, but I don't get why some pine for the beer gut.
- Increased muscle mass: This is in a nutshell why athletes take steroids. Steroids are basically one type of HRT designed to build muscle. Of course it's not healthy, physically or mentally, to do this because the human body was not designed to handle that much testosterone, and it leads to a lot of... well, the symptoms of going FTM, but amplified and accelerated because of the overdosage of testosterone in the body. Stop putting ionized rocket fuel into your Toyota Prius!
- Menstruation stops. It can stop permanently. So again, if you are thinking about transitioning, consider getting your procreation shenanigans out of the way before taking the plunge (though I don't imagine anyone transitioning into a man is looking to become pregnant AKA the biggest woman-related thing you could possibly do).
- Clit growth. Who doesn't like a big clit?! Also affectionately called the T-dick.
- Skin becomes more oily. Can result in acne. It really is Second Puberty; it's just your awkward teenage years all over again!
-- Goals, AKA LET'S GET THAT FUCKIN' W, BOYS! --
When you begin transitioning, this is something that your healthcare provider, your support community, your self, or... I guess your dog, will ask you. What are your goals that you are setting yourself? If you are transitioning, you are on a journey, and journeys have destinations. Without a destination, you will wander aimlessly and perhaps it isn't gender transition you are aiming for. This is why there is such a heavy screening process even in the most supportive environment, because these changes can be dramatic and permanent, and you, and those helping you have to be absolutely certain you want to commit to these changes before you commit and sacrifice lots.
This also further pokes holes in the claims that people just forcefully transition others randomly and without thought, consent or consideration.
So what are your goals when transitioning? Why do you want to transition? How do you want to look? How do you want to present yourself? What's your body type goal? What pronouns do you prefer? Do you plan on changing your name? Do you plan on doing vocal training and how do you want your voice to sound? Do you want boobs and how big do you want them? Do you seek bottom surgery? Is this something you would consider later if the opportunity ever arose?
Transitioning is a journey that has to have goals that are at least plausibly obtainable. Not everyone is going to know what their goals are off the bat, and these can change as time goes forward; that's natural. Some, myself included, keep a reference list of characteristics, especially photos, that you want to work towards. Obviously these have to be within reason; someone tall with a naturally large build isn't going to be able to shrink down a full foot, and likewise, I, for example, wouldn't be able to be a tall beanpole with huge dense muscles (especially because HRT will shrink what little muscle I do have). You have to work within the limits that natural genetics offer and what the known effects of HRT will do for you. But articulating these thoughts will help you figure out what you want to be and what you are working towards so you, your friends and your healthcare provider know how to help you.
-- The Last Word --
Ultimately, what you do with your body is your choice. It's none of your goddamn business what someone else is doing with their body or how they present themselves. It's honestly your own insecurities about your sexuality, the fluidity and ephemeral nature of what a person is and can be if they try hard enough, and your perspective of gender norms and expectations. If you are a bystander in all of this and you don't know transpeople in real life (and statistically speaking, most normal people on the street don't or at least they don't think they do), be aware that you have been fed a lie by authoritarians and fascists, and not particularly good or talented ones, scapegoating us constantly to cover their own staggering incompetence as they drive every system they get their grubby-ass hands on into the ground.
Fascists and moral puritans with delusions of grandeur have long since hijacked religion to justify their discrimination, oppression or execution of others that don't fit within an extremely narrow descriptor on what ia an acceptable "man" or "woman". The more toxic these cultures are, the more unsustainable they are, and honestly, before 9/11 and the subsequent War on Terror happened, we were already working towards a more open and tolerant society in regards to LGBT rights. Even now, as the right wing continues to tighten the noose around our necks, more people are coming out as trans than ever before. We cannot be stopped, the costs of annihilating us would destroy the collective soul and spirit of civilization itself for zero gain, and we will ultimately thrive while those who seek to destroy us will die face down in the mud with all the other fascists who came before them.
I'm non binary and the amount of people who say "I don't care" is astounding if I do mention that the wrong pronouns were used. If I was fully transitioning (the medical effects include heart risk that I already have) I'm sure that hatred would double or triple.
I'm non binary and the amount of people who say "I don't care" is astounding if I do mention that th
