“What am I without her?”
A young woman asks: “I don't know if those factors are classed as gender dysphoria or if they're a 'normal' part of womanhood?” and lays out her hatred of her periods, which can drag on for up to two months, and her “love-hate” relationship with her large breasts. (She also mentions, down in the comments, that her mother died of breast cancer and she fears she may carry the fatal gene herself.) She identifies as a lesbian. She enlists a variety of childhood incidents in the service of her possibly-trans identity, including dressing up like John Travolta’s character from Grease, with a sock stuffed inside a pair of boxer shorts. She says she’s autistic and “not the best at explaining myself.” She wonders what all this adds up to, if anything. And she worries: is she offending anyone by wearing men’s clothing and toying with male names?
The comment section is full of tips on how to blow past the prevarications and cut right to the answer. Don’t think about “What am I?” Think: “What makes me happy?” This is called “following euphoria.” Imagine yourself in old age: who do you see? An old woman or an old man?
Ask a chatbot to refer to you as he/him or they/them so you can see how it feels… to have a chatbot refer you in the third-person as something you’re not. The so-called ‘real-life test’ was always a joke but it’s fallen such a long way, resulting in confused young people who can’t understand why their trans identities—which fit so comfortably online where informational control is total—chafe in real life.
Ask yourself, “If you could click a button and your body would transform into a male body, would you click it?” Never mind that there’s no button.
Why not compare and contrast your experience with that of men who want to be women?
“The existence of trans women and trans femme people in general proved to me that womanhood is not in itself something unacceptable or something everyone wants to run away from. So then, I had to confront why I did.”
If all else fails, find validation in your gender confusion:
“i remember someone telling me when i was just figuring out that i was trans that may or may not apply to you: “if you’re constantly stressing about your gender, there’s a chance you’re not cis.” it was something along those lines, i don’t remember verbatim lol, but most cis people don’t spend their time thinking about what they are!”
What if liking the same things as other girls involuntarily reminds you that you, too, are a girl?
Today in my music class we had to decide what song to play for our band, and I like stuff like Burna Boy, Eminem, Hozier, Alex g, TV girl, Eminem and shi like that and I just said out of the blue Alex g kinda as a joke.
But all the girls in my band about 6 of them all started squeeling and shouting "OMG OMG I LOVE ALEX G EEEEEEEEEE!!" and I just fucking died inside cuz now i don't think ill ever be able to listen to his songs anymore without feeling like im 'one of the girls' that listen to his music and I hate feeling like a girl.
Now I just feel disgusted that I like his music, those girls have honestly just ruined Alex g and TV girl for me. And I'm not sure what makes me feel that way I dont think I'm misogynistic or sextist. Its just when I see a girls doing something I like it makes me feel like im one of them bc I like that thing and then I start to hate it.
You can remind yourself that music “isn’t gendered” (and, to top it off, “it would make sense that you would like Alex g, especially because you’re both guys.”) Or, if that’s too sensible, you can tell yourself that that’s what “cis boys of your age feel… You’re a young teenage boy, allow yourself to act as one.” If anything, you may need to work on your ‘toxic masculinity’ (advice that comes up almost as often as the need to work on your ‘internalized transphobia’) by “reminding yourself how dumb society is for deeming men as “less of a man” for arbitrary reasons.”
I feel like I’m definitely a boy. It’s been something that’s been popping into my mind over the past few years and as I’ve been exploring gender more recently I’ve come to the realisation that if I was AMAB [assigned male at birth], I wouldn’t be genderqueer. I’d just be a boy.
But I’ve been a girl for 20 years. It’s one of the things that has defined my development. I’ve been a proud lesbian, I only have close female friendships, I’ve experienced girlhood…and it’s incredible.
I currently use any pronouns. But I want to drop the she…but I can’t? She is my past 20 years of gender experiences, she is the little girl my deceased family members knew, she is my intense and beautiful female friendships, she is my radical feminism, she is my lesbianism. What am I without her?
I still want to wear skirts and dresses and makeup on occasion, but I want it to be like how a guy does it where it makes him more masculine by being in touch with his femininity. But when I do it I’m just a girl being a girl, doing what’s expected of her.
Idek why I’m writing this out. To not feel so alone? Has anyone else ever felt like this? I don’t know any other ftm or trans people I can talk to this about. Very overwhelming and confusing to explain to cis friends 😅
Love you all xx
Like most Definite Boys, she signs off with kisses.
If she were male—which she isn’t—she says she would “just be a boy.” She describes her self-presentation as feminine, but femininity is no ornament for the modern girl, for whom femininity is so often equated with being shallow or vain or forever failing to meet impossible expectations.
I still want to wear skirts and dresses and makeup on occasion, but I want it to be like how a guy does it where it makes him more masculine by being in touch with his femininity. But when I do it I’m just a girl being a girl, doing what’s expected of her.
No, the subversive girl performs femininity only after making certain sacrifices: her breasts, the public recognition of her sex. "You know those guys that paint their nails and wear skirts and it makes him seem like more of a man? That’s supposed to be me I feel.”
Still, she wonders: “What am I without her?”
There’s another way to put this question: What am I without myself? Who am I if I reject myself?
That her snags me. She appears all the time in trans narratives. She is “the girl inside my head” who cannot be neither accepted nor ousted. She is the past, dislocated. She is the body, as though ‘the body’ could ever be cut off from ‘the self.’
When does that she/her/hers break away from a girl’s I/me/mine? When do girls split themselves into subject and object? And why do girls—having split themselves in this way—so often rage against the object they’ve created, launching pathological body projects involving slicing, starving, purging, binding?
I’ve never been able to shake the very first heretical thought I ever had about trans: this is just like anorexia—except that we cheer it on. Anorexia and gender dysphoria lurk in the same breach that opens up when puberty hits. Girls plunge into it.
Ruminations promoted by a $5billion body dissociation industry are installed in the default mode network of the brains of captured females. She refers to herself as "she": the body-out-there, the objectified thing of the male gaze, internalised and re-projected as alienation from the group, to which belonging turns instantly to revulsion... when it agrees with her.
Naom Chomsky wrote about the Manufacturing of Consent. There's no slick PR job needed here -- the mental and physical assaults of transactivist dogma are enough to destroy mental and physical health, and any sense of community, by suggestion alone. All it needs is a smartphone.
These ruminations are possibly the worst I've read so far, as testimony to the destructiveness of this cult. No wonder the suicide rate rises among those who get entangled in its deadly suggestions of denial of everything you see, everything you hear, everything you feel, everything you know.
"Imagine yourself in old age: who do you see? An old woman or an old man?"
Yet almost all of them will get the problems of *female* "old age" - pelvic floor prolapse with all the the issues of pain, sexual dysfunction, and incontinence that come with it - in their youngest years. They will deal with *female* problems, not male. And then they will live with the disregard and stigma around these female problems of aging and get to see firsthand how little concern there is for female issues like this within the medical world. They can keep trying to convince themselves and each other that they aren't trying to run away from themselves, the challenges of womanhood, or the universal challenges of being human, but it's always there, and the medical and mental health fields are failing these young women by continuing to profit off the lies that they can escape all this.
https://archive.ph/2024.05.27-132049/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/05/26/trans-problems-urinary-bowel-incontinent-young-detransition/