clad in plaid

littleelk:

genderqueer:

xavieralexay:

Thoughts of Detransitioning - Postgender

Introspection into their life. Their transition, gender, society and privilege. Choices they have made, the effects those decisions have made and issues subscribing and relating to the male identity.

Very interesting imo.

A thoughtful video about deciding to transition and how it isn’t always obvious whether it’s the right choice or not: Carson feels that due to his age, an unaccepting family/profession, and a non-binary identity, transition might not have been the best thing for him — a brave thing to state.

The video also touches a bit on how transition isn’t an all-or-nothing, black-or-white process: there are alternatives if the negative consequences of transitioning are too strong for somebody.

DETRANSITIONING.  The thing I went scouring the web for years ago.  The thing that nobody ever talked about.  The thing I wanted to know everything about.  The how, what, why, all the feelings.

I had been on hormones for over a year before I broke down and let the questions out of the prison cell in my mind and gave them validity.  I wanted to question physical transition and that was scary.  I couldn’t find anyone else to talk to about it nor could I find much of anything about other people talking about it.  Trans people wanted to stay in their safe bubble where transition was the goal and the answer.  I almost wanted to stay in that bubble too because it seemed safe, but I couldn’t shake the misery enough to deny it and stay.

Most of the time people told me trans people ‘just knew’ and ‘it was right for them’ and I read the same story over and over and over about ‘I always knew I was a girl because I liked barbies and pink and played with other boys and then I transitioned and it is perfect because I can play with barbies and wear pink and everyone reacts to me like they should sparkle sparkle etc’ which is all well and good but.  I wanted to see my story in someone else I guess.  I wanted to see someone who sat back and thought ‘wait, why am I doing this again?’  because it was all I could think and feel.  I almost thought people would think it would make trans people ‘look bad’ if they talked about ‘it’.  About anything other than the perfect transition as a goal, and about how anybody who was ACTUALLY TRANS could want anything other than that. About anything other than ‘knowing I was this way from birth’.  About transition itself raising more questions with progression as opposed to being the answer.  About apprehension and doubting and whatever was out there in the darkness with me.  I wanted it.  

I couldn’t find it.  I couldn’t find a community for it.  There was tons of support for people who were trying to and actively accessing medical transition.  But once you were in the thick of it and had questions, there wasn’t much.  I assumed that if those people existed, they weren’t coming back to trans spaces to talk about it. Why would they I guess?  Or I assumed I was one of the only ones, because that was sure how people made me feel.  Like I failed?  Like I was failing.  Failure to transition.  Because that’s what detransition seemed to be viewed as.  A failure to transition.  Negative.  It was talked about very negatively.  It was also suggested that people who fell into these realms were ‘not really trans in the first place’.  They just made the wrong choices, and aren’t like the trans folks who are happy with their transitions.  Othering.  Shaming.  Dismal.  

Since then I’ve learned about a lot of stuff (not being binarily-identified, for one) and all sorts of things.  I remember stopping hormones at that one point, years ago when I just couldn’t find the conviction to keep going when it meant nothing to me.  If I couldn’t answer myself as to why I was doing it, why keep going?  Was it really just for the gratification of the clerk at the bank calling me ‘sir’, and what weight did that really carry for me in the grand scheme of things?  All that happened upon the cessation of testosterone was that some of my masculine features diminished.  During those years, a lot of people came up to me in person to comment on my ‘detransition’.

DETRANSITION.  It didn’t sit right with me when people would stomp up to me and casually talked about MY CONDITION, totally perceived by them and unprompted by me, like they knew the basis for my decisions or what I was going through.  All they could see was ART’S FACE/BODY/WHATEVER LOOKS MORE FEMININE so THAT MUST = ART IS FEMALE AGAIN OK.  People started using female pronouns for me without even asking.  As irritating as it all was, I couldn’t help but find it horribly interesting, like some sort of tragic sociological study where I was the inadvertent independent variable and the people I interacted with were the subjects and Conservative Lancaster County was our rat cage.

And here was the best part.  The one trans girl in the area just completely reverted to using female pronouns for me and when I said something about it she was like ‘I’m sorry, I just can’t get past the way you look now.  I mean.  And your boobs.’  Thanks.  I was often talked about this way, and people saying things like ‘well, you don’t identify as male anymore, obviously.  IMEAN I’m right, RIGHT?’  the thinking to check with me as an afterthought, and sometimes completely ignoring my answer that was the complete opposite of what they said so they they could prove a point.  I was used as a device often, to convey ‘the nontraditional’ regardless of the fact that I failed to ever make any claim to embody or stand for these things.  The fact is is that people put me there because I wasn’t following the path of transition or adhering to projecting the physical gendered characteristics they thought I should have been to seem ‘genuine’.  They read me as abnormal.  (not to say that appearing androgynous, whether intentional or unintentional, is abnormal or undecided.  I find that people just react to it that way more often, as if it’s less grounded than a traditionally binary appearance.)

Fuck, I guess you can’t transition if you’re lazy because people’s perception to how well your transition has gone seems to be how much effort you actively put into physical transition and passing.  If it were a math equation, trans cred would be directly proportional to passing ability.  I slept though class.  I GOT AN F.  I spent more time eating Waffle Crisp cereal and not passing, sorree guyz.

I didn’t find that the word ‘detransitioning’ was necessarily the right word to express how I was feeling or even what I was doing, and I found myself to be actually quite offended by people’s decided interpretations of me.  They implied that I was going back on something, mostly because THEY were based heavily on the imagery of my body’s apparent femaleness(I feel like this is a better word than femininity used to describe a physical body), and were very lacking in knowing anything about my actual identity, experience, and thoughts on gender.

It’s strange that people view transition as a straight, oneway arrow, and that anything that slightly deviates is ‘alternative, dabbling, trying out, confusion,’ or detransition.  Transitioning backwards.  How is it backwards if you’re still going forwards, figuring out what was right for you all along?  There are a lot of different ways to get there.

But anyway, I don’t really know what to call it, so I’ll stick with ‘detransition’ here because it’s in the title.  I’m always really thankful when people openly talk about this stuff, and I find it very important to reach out to others and also to talk about it so we can better understand what effects these variables (society, upbringing, age, geographic location, etc) have on us and our compulsions, drive and reasoning to transition, and how that ultimately may effect our outcomes.

THANK YOU FOR BEING BRAVE.  Thank you for people opening up and talking about these issues.  I had been waiting in the darkness for years.

littleelk, I identify with you so muuuuch on this. And this video. Ever since I started T, I’ve questioned starting it in the first place. I go back and forth every single day about my intentions to inject a foreign hormone into my body every week. I tend to get nervous about injecting, or totally fucking depressed about it. I’m taking a low dose, but that almost makes it more excruciating because the changes happen so slowly, and it’s as if nothing is happening, and I’m stuck in limbo or something. I’m afraid. I’m so so afraid of the changes that will happen to my body and how people will perceive them. I’ve been on T for, gosh…5 and a half months now…and nothing much has changed externally that directly relates to how people perceive gender. Therefore, I’m almost always read as female. I do not mind being read as female, and that’s what scares me, because there are so many ways in which I would rather have a more “male” appearance, but still identify as female. If I continue to take testosterone injections, and my bodily appearance continues to shift toward a more ‘male’ appearance, and I “don’t come out,” where does that put me? I’m afraid of coming out…because I don’t know what to come out as! Do I need to come out? Ideally, no…but how does one account for the physical changes that are associated with taking hormones? It’s like “hey y’all…I know I’m starting to look like a dude, but I don’t identify as a dude, but I kind of really identify as a woman, but really genderqueer and kind of lesbianish.” I mean,mean, that’s my explanation of my gender in a total elevator speech sense that isn’t completely accurate. And that is so fucking difficult to explain to people. Most folks have this idea of “transgender” in their heads…of transitioning from one sex to the other (I’m saying the mostly cisgendered, straight community that I end up interacting with because of jobs, etc)…but that’s not me! That is not me! In many ways I identify as genderqueer, but hold onto and cherish the roots of my sisterhood and moon cycle and earth mother shit but desire to have whiskers, a deeper voice, and no/little tits. I’m so fucking unsure all the time because of my safety. I think so hard about this all the time, yet continue to take T…mostly because I’m absolutely in love with how it has affected my body so far…especially my moods. I used to experience the most intense mood swings that would leave me either bed ridden or riding high for DAYS. I’m now much more evened out. I can’t say it’s entirely the T, because other things have changed in my life as well. Honestly, this was a complete ramble, but I feel it’s time to publicize more about this kind of stuff, especially since folks haven’t had many outlets or resources pertaining to the subject.