Behold! The ever-multiplying, ever-more baffling subtypes of trans:
do you ever feel like you wouldn’t have dysphoria if the world wasn’t gendered this way?
I love being trans, honestly. it’s who I am, and apart from this thing (and transphobia ahah) I love it.
but i’ve had so many questions about dysphoria. I came out as non binary in 2020, but only a year ago I began to feel very dysphoric. Now i use only he/him pronouns, I started Testosterone, I bind, I cut my hair, I changed my style. Because if I don’t do that, I won’t pass. But… I miss being girly. I miss the time when I was comfortable in my gender identity and expression, and not concerned by anyone misgendering me. I miss being able to put on makeup, wear cute tops, and have long hair,,, without being dysphoric. I have always loved my boobs! But now I bind because I know society doesn’t see it as « manly » and no one will ever call me « he » if I have a big cleavage. I’m happy with my transition, and I know that in the future (when I’ll pass more easily) I’ll go back to makeup, and long hair and cute tops. But it won’t be the same..
I don’t know if it’s internalised transphobia. Or if it’s the fluidity of my gender. I just miss having my “”feminine”” appearance (while this appearance makes me dysphoric).
I feel like, if the world was completely different, and people would easily use “he/him” pronouns to my pre transition self, I would not have transitioned. Does it make sense?
Who is this young woman?
She tells us she came out as non-binary first, three years ago. She now wants to be referred to as “he/him.”
She doesn’t seem to have been inspired by distress (on the contrary: “I have always loved my boobs!”). The trans identification came first, the distress came later.
She started feeling dysphoric, injecting testosterone, and binding. (Good reasons to think there’s a positive feedback loop here: the more she focuses on passing, the more she seeks interventions, the more she focuses on how much she needs to change herself, the more distressed she is…)
She doesn’t describe herself as being in any way gender-nonconforming. She doesn’t really tell us anything about her personality or interests, but she describes herself as stereotypically feminine (makeup, “cute tops,” long hair). In fact, she misses these things and says she doesn’t indulge in them for one vague reason (dysphoria) and one specific reason (desire to ‘pass’ and be referred to by others as he/him). Once she ‘passes’ as male, she’s eager to revert to these feminine forms of gender expression.
She makes contradictory statements. She’s “happy with my transition” but “miss[es] the time when I was comfortable in my gender identity and expression, and not concerned by anyone misgendering me.” Transition is going great! Except she feels worse, social interactions are harder…
Eight months ago, she posted elsewhere that she didn’t want to transition. Here she says that—“if the world was completely different”—she wouldn’t have transitioned. What does it mean to her to be called “he/him”? Why does she seek this, at the expense of abandoning a form of gender expression she enjoys and misses (stereotypical femininity) and undergoing interventions on her body that she until quite recently did not want at all and even now expresses reservations about? She gives us some clues. What does she mean by “I love being trans, honestly,” when she describes so many things she seems to dislike about it? What’s left is the identification itself: identification with a community, identification with not being a girl or woman, identification as being special, different, deserving of a different kind of consideration.
(I can’t help but wonder what the doctor who prescribed her testosterone thought about that exam-room encounter. What did he or she see? What did they think they were treating with that prescription? Did they ever hear so much as a fragment of this young woman’s ambivalence? Did they bother to untangle her motivations? Or did they—as Jamie Reed observed—simply “suspend all disbelief” when they walked into the clinic?)
In the comments, another young woman writes:
I feel ya! I have a whole bunch of super femme clothes set aside to resume wearing after top surgery. It's just so rough being seen as a girl all the time. But I still would've had my internal surgeries even if everyone saw me for who I am, because those parts felt wrong my whole life. I still would've gone on T because not having it was making me depressed. My body needed these changes. How I move through the world might be totally different though, if everything wasn't so binary.
Another woman—older, somewhere north of 30—writes about the struggle between presenting “VERY fem” and wanting to “look and sound more masc”:
So much trouble for accessorizing a flesh prison
There’s a desire to be set out from everybody else, to be feminine without being feminine, which is to say: when I do it, it’s different, I control what it means. It means having sex with men—but not like that.
This is the source of many frustrations with the world as-it-is. We don’t entirely control what messages we send. We cannot count on other people to respect—or even notice—the distinctions we want to draw between ourselves and everybody else who looks like us.
“I wonder how many ‘I'm not like all the other girls’ kinda girls are actually trans guys who haven't realized it yet?” that 30-something Redditor—who apparently never outgrew her ‘not like other girls’ phase—mused. The responses read like a kind of epitaph for feminism. As my friend newthoughtcrime put it, the spread of trans ideology has been a mass consciousness-lowering event for women and girls who often grew up believing your sex didn’t define your personality or interests—until they changed their minds:
… I did try to push the "girls can be anything" as absolutely far as possible. "I'm a girl and I can hate bras. I'm a girl and I can hate my breasts. I'm a girl and I can feel absolutely uncomfortable with feminine complements. Being a girl only defines my genitals!!!!@!"-- 2000s me before I knew what being trans was...
Me in my childhood being a hardcore feminist: yeah I'm a girl doing martial arts! And winning against all the boys! Girls can do everything!! Yeah a girl that hates princesses and pink and purple! Yeah a girl that plays Bakugan and pokemon!! Yeah a girl and don't know anything about pop culture and celebs! Girls can be just like the boys!
Yay kid me. However... Kid me had a big surprise down the line...
I always just figured "female camaraderie" was a straight-up myth and that all girls were catty and drama-prone. My compassion towards women improved 1000% once I realized I wasn't one.
Ugh stop calling me out 😭 I was always the person who would say "well, I'm a girl and I like insert whatever stereotypically Male thing
I was one of them. I hated being a woman and I misinterpreted that as hating women, and because I needed to get away from my own femininity, I tried to distance myself from femininity with the whole "I'm not like other girls" schtick.
I was definitely one of those girls before I realized I wasn't actually a girl
With social contagion around the sides:
I realized I had a ton of internalized misogyny and worked on that, however, even as I came to understand women, their pressures, and femininity, I could never click with it. I felt like a scientist studying another species and trying to awkwardly blend in with them.
Then, my ex-boyfriend came out as trans. I started reading up on it and... Oh. THAT MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE!! 😭
the thing was, i hated both sides. i hated the "other girls" and the "not like other girls" and thought i was the only exception, along with a couple of my friends.
by pure chance, all of us turned out to be transmasc. and i'm glad i got over my misogyny because it was so embarrassing and pointless.
And there’s the idolization of gay male relationships (as interpreted by teenage girls):
I do remember the whole thing where there were a ton of ‘teenage girls’ who were like “IDK I feel like I’m actually a gay man stuck in a teenage girl’s body” that I always secretly silently agreed with and everyone was like “That’s super homophobic” but they’re all gay men now lmao
Around the time I was 15, I got my hands on the Internet, then later when Corona came and I was in no contact with my classmates, I started discovering more about myself. The "i'm not like other girls" feeling grew stronger. I learned about LGBTQ+ stuffs, started enjoying BL [boys love fan fiction] until I faced another major problem. I wanted to feel more like a guy, and also be with a guy just like the ones in read in BLs. (I liked being the male character in every game I played too) Talked with my friends, they labelled me as a "extremely fetishizing fujoshi" (Well ofc I am a fujoshi) but that made me feel worse. Made me feel like I was sinning, sort of.
And there’s the influence of pandemic-era isolation and mental health comorbidities:
I was worried that I was one of those I'm not like the other girls, girls, but also worried I was fetishizing gay men, so I was trying to burry it all because I didn't want to hurt anyone or anything. I thought I was trashy for wanting to be a boy and that I couldn't be trans because I didn't feel like "a boy stuck in a girls body" and I had no "evidence" because my depression and trauma made me forget my entire childhood, so I just accepted my suffering
When covid came around it saved me in many diffrent ways, honestly I feel bad but I'm glad covid-19 started, I've had time to deal with my physical health and and even learned I was trans, and I'm much less depressed now.
For me, my "not like the other girls"-phase turned out to actually be autism and severe mental health issues
My trans feelings were repressed for years because of depression and denial. I was mentally ill and also autistic and very different from all the other females around me. Critics should acknowledge that some girls who give a 'I'm not like the other girls' vibe literally aren't like the other girls and are probably suffering for it.
One thought overwhelms all others when reading this: Holy shit what an absolutely massive wave of detransitioners we’re about to see within the next five years.
The cognitive dissonance in these statements is astounding. It also sounds much like the tone of adolescent conversations I remember: the endless analysis of bodies, worry about wearing “the right clothes “, wanting to perform the behavior that might attract the crush of the month. I fear for this young cohort of women. They are going to be devastated when reality hits home.