I’m a trans woman - AMA

[arrall]

There is a ton of misinformation on here regarding trans people and historically trans people have been a big point of contention on the forums.

I’d like to try to combat that by allowing people to ask me whatever they want, provided the questions are in good faith and not wildly inappropriate/invasive.

I am an early 20s trans woman (MtF) who has been living socially as female (at school, 1/2 of my jobs, with all of my friends, at the bar/club, walking down the street, with some of my family, etc.) for several months and transitioning medically (estrogen, no T blockers) for just under 3 months.
I first realized that I was trans many years ago at age 19 and initially identified as non-binary, then partially socially detransitioned about a year ago, and then started identifying as female-leaning (and then fully a woman) over the past several months.
I live in a fairly progressive major city outside of the USA so have been fortunate enough to avoid the repression that others face.
I identify as lesbian and have found the lesbian community here to be incredibly accepting and supportive.

 

[M!$TER-ED]

Hmm, I saw a trans female at the grocery store we were shopping at, she looked flawless, kind of too perfect to be real. On a different thread the question was posed "what is gender" from your personal experience how do you answer this question?

 

[ageingpartyfiend]

Do you intend to have bottom-surgery? If so, how consuming is the desire and at what age did it begin?

 

[mal3volent]

If being transgender is about gender why use nomenclature related to biological sex?

 

[M!$TER-ED]

If being transgender is about gender why use nomenclature related to biological sex?

Thanks, the question of gender was originally "does gender exist"

 

[M!$TER-ED]

I don't know anything about trans, so if this question seems stupid I apologize..Are trans people primarily born male who have a desire to become female, or are there also female trans who wish to become male?

 

[arrall]

Do you intend to have bottom-surgery? If so, how consuming is the desire and at what age did it begin?

I don’t intend to and have never had the desire.
My genitals are one of the few parts of my body that do not give me dysphoria.
About 21% of transfeminine people do not want bottom surgery and 27% are unsure according to the 2022 US Transgender Survey (p. 48), so the amount of us who do not want bottom surgery is actually surprisingly high.
I'd imagine that a large portion of those who do not want it are non-binary rather than binary trans women such as myself, but I do have many other binary trans woman friends who feel the same.

I don't know anything about trans, so if this question seems stupid I apologize..Are trans people primarily born male who have a desire to become female, or are there also female trans who wish to become male?

Actually, the majority of people who identify as transgender are born female (see the US Transgender Survey, various studies on PubMed, etc.)
This may be due to socialization, greater stigma, and biological males being socialized to be less in touch with their emotions - therefore less likely to realize they are transgender, less likely to identify as trans or do anything if they realize something is wrong, etc.
EDIT: THIS IS NO LONGER THE CASE AS IT WAS A DECADE AGO, THE RATIO IS NEAR 1 TO 1 NOW!
I will say that I never felt very masculine and had an inkling when I was younger (especially when I took psychedelics as a teenager) but didn't figure out what any of those feelings meant until adulthood.
Trans women just get most of the media focus due to transmisogyny - we're useful political props for the Epstein class to use as distractions whilst they fuck the world over for profit, and useful for the Christian nationalist far-right to demonize as a stepping stone to eventually re-instituting national bans on gay marriage and abortion.

 

[arrall]

Hmm, I saw a trans female at the grocery store we were shopping at, she looked flawless, kind of too perfect to be real.

This is a very common joke in the LGBTQIA+ community - you can tell who the trans women are because they look too beautiful to be real.
Hence why trans women are commonly referred to as "dolls".

On a different thread the question was posed "what is gender" from your personal experience how do you answer this question?

I don't think that there is a one-size fits all answer to this.
Gender is in many ways a social construction, and that means that what gender is varies from person to person, culture to culture, and society to society.
To me, it shapes how I express myself, how I am perceived, how I am treated, the spaces I go into, etc.

Thanks, the question of gender was originally "does gender exist"

I think that gender obviously does exist within our present society.
Gender roles and compulsory heterosexuality are unfortunately incredibly prevalent, and there isn't really any way around that.
I would like to see a world in which gender is treated as less rigid and restrictive and is no longer associated with the prescribed roles that we have become used to.

If being transgender is about gender why use nomenclature related to biological sex?

I think that said nomenclature (e.g. MtF) is useful terminology to use when someone is changing their body to match their gender and how they feel inside.
Back in the day, one of the SIED mods (I think @Serotonin101 or @Genetic Freak) pointed out that bodybuilding is analogous to being trans in many ways and I really appreciated that message as an AMAB trans person who used to casually bodybuild myself.
I've since used the same rhetoric to explain my transition to my cisgender bisexualish male childhood best friend, who didn't understand until I compared it to his bodybuilding.
In both ways, people are simply changing their body and their physical expression of gender to match how they feel inside, whether that is taking testosterone/derivatives to build muscle mass and become more masculine as a biological male, or to induce those changes and more as a biological female, or induce puberty in a biological male who otherwise wouldn't undergo it, or increase femininity with estrogen + progesterone (and/or T blockers) for people trying to make their bodies more feminine.
We're all doing the same thing, and if everyone is able to consent then I see no issue with it - same as with drug use.

Along the lines of that parallel, here is one of my favourite YouTube videos on the subject (under 3 minutes!) from a cisgender male YouTube comedian who I am a big fan of.

 

[ageingpartyfiend]

When did you first become aware that you were trans?

What's your thinking surrounding a minumum age-limit on hormone treatment (including T-Blocking), and also trans-related surgery?

 

[arrall]

When did you first become aware that you were trans?

I definitely felt very feminine back in my earliest memories.
I had a psilocybin trip at age 16 where I remember telling a friend that I didn't feel like I was very masculine, but the person (who was actually non-binary) wrongfully assumed I was just being insecure about my body and talked me out of it.
I took a lab of 1P-LSD on my 18th birthday and when I was about to blow at the candles, a childhood friend made the joke, "He's not a boy, he's a man now!" in some context or another.
I remember thinking, "I don't feel like a man at all" and that moment really stuck with me.
I started thinking a lot more about my identity whilst sober and I identified as non-binary for a while starting sometime around age 19 or 20
I knew that I was trans spectrum from that point onwards, but it took a couple years before I began identifying as a woman.
I even tried to re-embrace masculinity, present more masculine, identify as 'male-adjacent', and sort of 'detransition' socially but all of that felt incredibly wrong and dysphoric.

Since I started estrogen, I feel somewhat comfortable with my body and how I look in the mirror for the first time in my life.
At the end of the day, I think that people being happy and comfortable with their bodies and who they are is what is most important - whether that is a cis person hitting the gym or taking steroids, or a trans person taking HRT, or people getting surgeries or just changing their presentation with makeup/clothing/etc.

What's your thinking surrounding a minumum age-limit on hormone treatment (including T-Blocking), and also trans-related surgery?

I used to support strict age limits but I now think that such restrictions aren't useful, especially with generally reversible things like puberty blockers.
If a child strongly feels this way and is able to consent and advocate for themselves, then they should be able to get HRT or blockers just as they can get the birth control pill.
It's the same methodology that many psychedelic legalization advocates and researchers have suggested.

I used to oppose surgeries below 18 when I identified as non-binary, but I have since changed my position.
These surgeries can save lives and if there is a case where a minor is so dysphoric from having breasts or from their genitals that they are likely to commit suicide if forced to wait until 18, then they should obviously be allowed to get the surgery.
I think that these should not be as readily performed as they are on adults, but there absolutely are cases where they are medically necessary.
And to be clear, gender-affirming surgeries on children are extremely rare - an average of 1400 surgeries per year were performed in the US on children aged 15-17 from 2019-2023, almost all of which were masectomies.
This number is likely to decrease with recent legal decisions in many states.

The medical establishment circumsises infants without consent, modifies the genitals of intersex children, and administers HRT to children who do not undergo the puberty associated with their assigned sex at birth.
Why do we allow those procedures (to be clear I oppose the former two since the children are not old enough to consent) on cisgender children but not on transgender children?
Is there not a stronger argument for procedures and treatment that teenaged children are asking for and consenting to (sometimes at the behest of their parents) than for procedures performed without consent on infants and young children?
In present-day American society, the generally less controversial procedures are those that make children more aligned with their assigned sex at birth rather than those that the children are unable to consent to.
Should we not instead focus on only permitting what a child is freely able to consent to and ask for?

 

[asvarohn]

so what's this thing about gender anyway?
is it a physical thing, like wanting to have or not boobs/vagina/penis?
or is it more of a social thing, like liking the way others perceive male/female?
i never cared much about the one or the other to be honest. some things just are and it's up to you what you make of them.
apparently for you it's important, but why?

 

[arrall]

Actually, the majority of people who identify as transgender are born female (see the US Transgender Survey, various studies on PubMed, etc.)
This may be due to socialization, greater stigma, and biological males being socialized to be less in touch with their emotions - therefore less likely to realize they are transgender, less likely to identify as trans or do anything if they realize something is wrong, etc.
EDIT: THIS IS NO LONGER THE CASE AS IT WAS A DECADE AGO, THE RATIO IS NEAR 1 TO 1 NOW!

I wanted to make this edit to clarify that whilst over a decade ago the majority of people identifying as transgender were biologically female, as of 2019 the ratio in adolescents was about 1.2:1 (pretty statistically insignificant) for biological females to biological males who identified as transgender.
I think that socialization and stigma may still play a role, but I think that in a society without these issues, the ratio would likely be pretty 1:1.

 

[asvarohn]

it's a statistics thing, then.

 

[arrall]

so what's this thing about gender anyway?
is it a physical thing, like wanting to have or not boobs/vagina/penis?
or is it more of a social thing, like liking the way others perceive male/female?
i never cared much about the one or the other to be honest. some things just are and it's up to you what you make of them.
apparently for you it's important, but why?

I think that physical aspects (wanting your body to match how you look) play a role, but gender is far more broad than that.
There is also a big social component - how you perceive yourself, how you wish to be perceived, how you feel inside.

I never felt like myself whilst living "as a man".
I never felt masculine, and I certainly tried to compensate with casual bodybuilding, doing "masculine activities" like martial arts and weightlifting and sports, reading about different ways to relate to and participate in masculinity, etc.
I engaged in endless attempts to try to fit into masculinity in the way that I was told by society and my peers that I should.
It never worked, and I never felt like myself or felt like the body in the mirror was anything like who I am as a person.
From a very young age, I felt feminine and would often engage or want to engage in things that were seen as "girlie/feminine".
Being referred to as "he" or "him" or "male" or "a man" never felt right to me, and for a while androgynous terminology did, and then one day "she" and "her" and "woman" felt right to me.
After a while, only female terminology and identification and presentation felt right and I was no longer connected to non-binary/androgynous identification.

What is important to me is being able to live and present and act and be perceived in a way that feels genuine to who I am and how I feel inside.
For me, femininity and womanhood meet that criteria.
I can finally start to be happy with who I am and see myself in how I look.
I can finally smile when I look in the mirror and be happy with what I see there.
I can look at how people refer to me in conversation and feel like the words they are using actually correspond with who I am.
I had never in my life had that experience until the past few months.
And THAT is why it is important to me.

 

[asvarohn]

I engaged in endless attempts to try to fit into masculinity in the way that I was told by society and my peers that I should.

From a very young age, I felt feminine and would often engage or want to engage in things that were seen as "girlie/feminine".

I can look at how people refer to me in conversation and feel like the words they are using actually correspond with who I am.

so you define yourself by and make your happiness dependent on how others perceive you.

What is important to me is being able to live and present and act and be perceived in a way that feels genuine to who I am and how I feel inside.

do i perceive you correctly, then, based on your replies and what makes you happy?

 

[arrall]

so you define yourself by and make your happiness dependent on how others perceive you.


do i perceive you correctly, then, based on your replies and what makes you happy?

I don't necessarily agree with this.
I define myself based on how I feel internally.
But my happiness is absolutely influenced by how I am perceived by others.
If you were consistently perceived to be someone that you are not by virtually everyone for almost your entire life, you too would probably be affected by how others perceived and treated you.

 

[asvarohn]

I don't necessarily agree with this.
I define myself based on how I feel internally.
But my happiness is absolutely influenced by how I am perceived by others.
If you were consistently perceived to be someone that you are not by virtually everyone for almost your entire life, you too would probably be affected by how others perceived and treated you.

what makes you think i haven't been there?
gender is not the only thing (mis)perceived by others.

the internal feeling is a good thing, but isn't happiness an internal feeling?
and if that depends on how you are perceived by others, then we are back to saying that how you feel internally relies on how others perceive you.

 

[arrall]

what makes you think i haven't been there?
gender is not the only thing (mis)perceived by others.

maybe you have, I don't know your life or who you are.
But I do think that gender permeates so many aspects of life and society in a way that few other things do.

 

[M!$TER-ED]

Thank you for sharing, I your honest, to the point outlook on life, very refreshing

 

[ageingpartyfiend]

I definitely felt very feminine back in my earliest memories.
I had a psilocybin trip at age 16 where I remember telling a friend that I didn't feel like I was very masculine, but the person (who was actually non-binary) wrongfully assumed I was just being insecure about my body and talked me out of it.
I took a lab of 1P-LSD on my 18th birthday and when I was about to blow at the candles, a childhood friend made the joke, "He's not a boy, he's a man now!" in some context or another.
I remember thinking, "I don't feel like a man at all" and that moment really stuck with me.
I started thinking a lot more about my identity whilst sober and I identified as non-binary for a while starting sometime around age 19 or 20
I knew that I was trans spectrum from that point onwards, but it took a couple years before I began identifying as a woman.
I even tried to re-embrace masculinity, present more masculine, identify as 'male-adjacent', and sort of 'detransition' socially but all of that felt incredibly wrong and dysphoric.

Since I started estrogen, I feel somewhat comfortable with my body and how I look in the mirror for the first time in my life.
At the end of the day, I think that people being happy and comfortable with their bodies and who they are is what is most important - whether that is a cis person hitting the gym or taking steroids, or a trans person taking HRT, or people getting surgeries or just changing their presentation with makeup/clothing/etc.


I used to support strict age limits but I now think that such restrictions aren't useful, especially with generally reversible things like puberty blockers.
If a child strongly feels this way and is able to consent and advocate for themselves, then they should be able to get HRT or blockers just as they can get the birth control pill.
It's the same methodology that many psychedelic legalization advocates and researchers have suggested.

I used to oppose surgeries below 18 when I identified as non-binary, but I have since changed my position.
These surgeries can save lives and if there is a case where a minor is so dysphoric from having breasts or from their genitals that they are likely to commit suicide if forced to wait until 18, then they should obviously be allowed to get the surgery.
I think that these should not be as readily performed as they are on adults, but there absolutely are cases where they are medically necessary.
And to be clear, gender-affirming surgeries on children are extremely rare - an average of 1400 surgeries per year were performed in the US on children aged 15-17 from 2019-2023, almost all of which were masectomies.
This number is likely to decrease with recent legal decisions in many states.

The medical establishment circumsises infants without consent, modifies the genitals of intersex children, and administers HRT to children who do not undergo the puberty associated with their assigned sex at birth.
Why do we allow those procedures (to be clear I oppose the former two since the children are not old enough to consent) on cisgender children but not on transgender children?
Is there not a stronger argument for procedures and treatment that teenaged children are asking for and consenting to (sometimes at the behest of their parents) than for procedures performed without consent on infants and young children?
In present-day American society, the generally less controversial procedures are those that make children more aligned with their assigned sex at birth rather than those that the children are unable to consent to.
Should we not instead focus on only permitting what a child is freely able to consent to and ask for?

Thanks for the considered reply, very interesting.

My second question of course touches on a truly super-complex and (for some) a highly emotionally evocative issue. I get where you're coming from but don't necessarily 100% agree but that's a diversion from this thread. You do however ask me a couple of questions which I'm choosing to read as rhetorical (atm anyway) so as not to bog thread down and also so I don't get drawn in to lengthy debate this evening as my attention needs to be elsewhere