I wish it wasn’t so hard for people to keep in mind the dialectic of “there are a large number of trans people who will literally die if you cut off their access to hrt” and “hrt doesn’t need to be a big deal and it’s okay to try it just to see how it will make you feel”

And that these two statements can in fact represent the same person at two different phases in their life. The thing about being constantly dissociated from years of the wrong hormones is it doesn’t necessarily feel like anything. It can very easily put you in a mindset of “yeah fuck it I don’t really care what hormones are in my body”.

Unfortunately, a lot of the symptoms of undiscovered transness can actually be an impediment to figuring out you’re trans, stuff like “well my life already sucks, imagine how much worse it would be if I joined a despised minority group” when really transition ends up being the thing that allows your life to finally stop sucking, or at least stop sucking in a “the world is grey sludge” kind of way.

It’s kind of a constant worry of mine that talking too much about the seriousness of trans life and trans needs can make it seem unrelatable to Actually Trans people who just need to realize it. Or make them worry that they’re being disrespectful of the seriousness of real trans people’s lives by daring to imagine that they might be happier transitioning. And then if they continue to be depressed and kill themselves they don’t even get the dignity of being counted as a “trans suicide”.

This is something that continues to haunt me: how many people are dying like this without us ever knowing? How many of us are accidentally pushing trans people to the grave without ever realizing it? This shit isn’t theoretical to me, because I can remember considering suicide years before I considered transition.

I also remember people hammering me down with “you need to be respectful to real trans people” when I started daring to imagine myself outside of conventional cisgender male terms. One step forward, fifty steps backward. But I made it eventually. Hard to survive that shit and not be bitter honestly.

@aisling its hard not to be conspiratorial but part of us feels like this is entirely intentional or at least a very happy accident for the fashies

not necessarily convinced there are like fake transgirls who are secretly feds, we're just aware that a society like ours is probably empowering the most gatekeepy and abusive trans folks either intentionally or otherwise in order to prevent more people from feeling welcome in the community

@h33h33wuffi3 yeah it’s like, if you make yourself the template of trans validity, then you’ll gain the acceptance of the people who believe there is a small subset of “real trans people” and the rest are delusional snowflakes, but only as long as those people continue to believe in the existence of real trans people

@aisling I started gender transition and it feels like my life is still (slightly less) grey sludge. The space in my mind that was freed from gender dysphoria going down was immediately filled up with the already existing species dysphoria, and that one kicks even harder because unlike gender dysphoria, there's absolutely zero established treatments for it and none to be expected in the next 5-10 years either.

the curse of drawing not one, but two short straws at the body assignment lottery

@aisling When I catch that “you need to be respectful to real trans people” shit, I always give them an earful. Not only is that harmful to eggs, and also folks who are gender-nonconforming, but it’s also very damaging to everyone else because it glorifies and polishes suffering as an unalterable truth and even ultimate goal. We aren’t here to be martyrs, there is the possibility of a real and pleasant life out there, a world with less suffering. Upholding suffering as holy is directly in opposition to it, and is TERF nonsense.

@aisling all other variables aside I could have come out a decade sooner if not for those messages in particular