I’m a trans woman - AMA

[arrall]

Did you have suicidal ideations prior to transitioning?

At times, though definitely very rarely and far more mildly in recent years.

If so, do you continue to have these ideas? More or less?

Haven’t had them at all since I started medically transitioning.

Is life harder or easier as a woman compared to when you were a man?

Definitely harder, and quite different.
Though some things may be more due to me being audibly trans (I don’t really voice train) and often visibly trans if I’m not wearing a bit of makeup & dressed a certain way.
Sexual harassment has gone from something that would happen to me once or twice a year to something that happens about weekly and sometimes a few times in a single day.

Sometimes being trans attracts chasers and can lead to some real fucked up scenarios, but sometimes I can scare them off.
I dropped my friend off at her bus the other week and before I could even cross the street. a creepy old dude with missing teeth came up to me trying to hit on me (I think, he was incoherent and probably spun out)
When I asked “what?”, he freaked the fuck out and was like “You got a man’s voice, you can’t do that to me” and speed walked away.

I’d probably avoid a lot of the microaggressions and discrimination as a cis woman, but I would definitely have a harder time scaring off rapey dudes.

The only thing I can say for certain is that being a cis man is a hell of a lot easier - going to one of my jobs (where I’m not out and have to make an effort to look male) is a real culture
shock with how some of the guys there talk when they think I am one of them.

 

[JahBeeuS]

At times, though definitely very rarely and far more mildly in recent years.

Haven’t had them at all since I started medically transitioning.



Definitely harder, and quite different.
Though some things may be more due to me being audibly trans (I don’t really voice train) and often visibly trans if I’m not wearing a bit of makeup & dressed a certain way.
Sexual harassment has gone from something that would happen to me once or twice a year to something that happens about weekly and sometimes a few times in a single day.

Sometimes being trans attracts chasers and can lead to some real fucked up scenarios, but sometimes I can scare them off.
I dropped my friend off at her bus the other week and before I could even cross the street. a creepy old dude with missing teeth came up to me trying to hit on me (I think, he was incoherent and probably spun out)
When I asked “what?”, he freaked the fuck out and was like “You got a man’s voice, you can’t do that to me” and speed walked away.

I’d probably avoid a lot of the microaggressions and discrimination as a cis woman, but I would definitely have a harder time scaring off rapey dudes.

The only thing I can say for certain is that being a cis man is a hell of a lot easier - going to one of my jobs (where I’m not out and have to make an effort to look male) is a real culture
shock with how some of the guys there talk when they think I am one of them.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply

 

[asvarohn]

i think my brother might have suppressed ideas about being a woman.
not sure.
just some comments he makes, and how he behaves and reacts when asked about it. like tell him he's acting gay and he treats it like a joke. tell him he's like a girl, and he jumps at you.

@arrall did you have moment in your life when someone telling you you act like a girl triggered a defense reaction?

 

[arrall]

i think my brother might have suppressed ideas about being a woman.
not sure.
just some comments he makes, and how he behaves and reacts when asked about it. like tell him he's acting gay and he treats it like a joke. tell him he's like a girl, and he jumps at you.

@arrall did you have moment in your life when someone telling you you act like a girl triggered a defense reaction?

I can’t say I have, but people often will be defensive about things when in denial.
He might be insecure about his masculinity at the very least.

 

[Esperighanto]

Ignore me if this has already been asked, but how has drug use (especially psychedelics/dissociatives/empathogens) impacted the trans experience? For trans people in my life, they seem to have played a big role, and they did for myself also in finding I'm uh, what I think is maybe best labeled as "agender/indifferently asexual". I always just describe it as "feeling like a ghost in a meatsuit", when people ask about my relationship to gender personally, and I found that out thanks to meditation and ayahuasca.

 

[asvarohn]

I can’t say I have, but people often will be defensive about things when in denial.
He might be insecure about his masculinity at the very least.

yes.
stupid.
like women who are insecure about their feminity.

 

[Shinji Ikari]

"agender/indifferently asexual". I always just describe it as "feeling like a ghost in a meatsuit

I like this.

 

[Serotonin101]

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".


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.


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.


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.

I know this is a way late response (have/had some personal things going on), but I have definitely used the comparison with bodybuilding on multiple occasions.

Nowadays it should be an even easier comparison with the number of anti-aging/longevity clinics that have popped up all over the place. It's become part of the societal norm now to augment one's hormones to "match" how they want to be from an internalized view of self. And that's without even factoring in the pervasive use of cosmetic surgery/procedures on top of it. It still baffles me how the whole "trans doesn't make sense to me" mentality still exists when you have a pretty substantial population of "normal" people doing "unnatural" things to make their outsides match their insides. Quotes used at the end to indicate bigoted language often used by people "simply asking questions".

 

[Mr. Krinkle]

what are you doing tonight?

 

[Vastness]

This thread is very interesting.

I've actually never met a trans person in real life (that I know of, anyway). I've occasionally matched with trans people on dating apps but they've all blocked me after revealing they're trans, and asking if I was aware. I wasn't, ever, but also said although I probably wouldn't see us dating romantically, I'd still like to meet up and maybe be friends! Now... having just typed that sentence I'm wondering if I'm revealing some kind of innate subconscious prejudice or closed mindedness in myself.

Actually, I think to some extent it is... in my mind it isn't something hateful, or discriminatory, particularly, but maybe it is even somewhat ableist... I'm gonna be a little bit crude here since it is the internet but I think it's largely "anatomical"... as in... the technology that exists today is not capable of true intersexual transformation of adult humans to an extent that would satisfy my own flavor of heterosexuality.

Although that cannot be the only thing either because if I met some random guy who was just about to transition - in a more advanced, enlightened future - I feel like I'd still feel somewhat odd about the memory of their masculinity. So there's something beyond anatomy. But what if I DIDN'T meet them before transitioning, so I'd only ever known them as a woman? I think if they'd JUST transitioned it would be different to if they'd been born male and transitioned later, but had been living as a woman for a while... like I'd want to know somehow that they had settled into and were comfortable with their current gendered "mindset", although what does that even mean?

Are there even gendered mindsets in any meaningful sense that outweighs biologically imposed necessities and sociocultural norms...? Both of which we'd have to assume would have been surpassed to near irrelevance in the far future scenario where complete, safe, reversible gender transitioning was a mature and widespread technology. In fact in that scenario I guess the duration of the transition wouldn't matter, maybe I wouldn't even care if I met them while a man. Maybe all of this is just internalized sociocultural conditioning...

Like if one of my exes had randomly grown a perfectly functioning biological penis... I wouldn't just leave them, I'd like to think. Disregarding for a moment the absolute shock of this seemingly impossible horror scenario in the present day. So my bias cannot be purely anatomical.

If they one day decided to transition, with today's technology... eh, now that becomes a sketchy one because somehow I feel like the desire reflects a values conflict of some kind in a way that I can't put my finger on, because I would not be a fan of it, but it's not my decision, I might remain attracted to her their personality and her their mind if not her their body, which sounds like it is anatomical again...

It would also be different if it was a far future scenario where high-tech, perfect transitioner-machines transformed adult human bodies at the genetic/molecular level to make the transitions indistinguishable from "original birth genders". Because then, it's something you can try and reverse if it doesn't work out. In that scenario I'd probably either try out being a homo, or make it a fun joint thing where we both switched at the same time.

I'd think in that kind of world, probably many more people would be doing it too, even going back and forth more than once, so obviously there'd be zero stigma... which immediately invokes the uncomfortable thought, again, that how much of my current "preferences" or "aversions" to certain scenarios are just rationalizations build around externally imposed and internalized stigma?

Haha... I actually had some different questions I was gonna ask, but now I'm far more curious to hear any input or thoughts about my stream of consciousness there.

 

[mal3volent]

Haha... I actually had some different questions I was gonna ask, but now I'm far more curious to hear any input or thoughts about my stream of consciousness there.

You sound like a biological male who doesn't want to have sex with other biological males and you're going out of your way to be nice about it. But you shouldn't have to do that. It's not transphobic to be heterosexual.

 

[Vastness]

You sound like a biological male who doesn't want to have sex with other biological males and you're going out of your way to be nice about it. But you shouldn't have to do that. It's not transphobic to be heterosexual.

Well yes that's true of course, but I think it's a little reductive. I'm not "going out of my way to be nice", I'm genuinely curious about how much of what I think and feel is innate biological instinct and how much of it is acquired by accident or design from sociocultural influences.

I know I don't have to do that - it's not something I lose sleep over - but I think, frankly, I should interrogate what it actually is I feel about things that feel innate, rather than just saying "I feel what I feel, I'm not interested in thinking about it further, and that's that", which would be the alternative approach, IMO...

I don't think I am transphobic, nor do I think it's transphobic to be heterosexual, they're entirely causally unrelated even if maybe more heterosexuals are transphobic than homosexuals.

But I do think it's possible I have some unconscious transphobic prejudices or ways of thinking about things that might be somewhat discriminatory. In a way it would be stranger if I didn't given how much transphobia there is in the world, and that I'm part of the more privileged demographic with friends who occasionally send me reels and shit basically just mocking trans people or people with unconventional gender identities. Some of them are funny and innocent enough, I'll only lightly push back on some of them, maybe I should take a stronger stance? I dunno, but there's just so much shit to care about in the world and I only have limited energy. And those friends aren't bad people or prejudiced really, I don't think in real life they'd act like that, they're just kinda sheltered and some of them ignorant, brainrotted by culture war memes...

I used to have strong opinions about trans men in women's sports (and I still have some much less strong opinions which I was gonna ask about) before I realized all the worst people on the planet had similar opinions, which really, embarrassingly perhaps, helped me to reconsider the importance of that.

Finally... tbh I thought I came up with some interesting thought experiments in my attempts to interrogate my own potential biases... Which could maybe help some other people to get to the bottom of what they really think, if they're interested in doing so.

 

[mal3volent]

I used to have strong opinions about trans men in women's sports (and I still have some much less strong opinions which I was gonna ask about) before I realized all the worst people on the planet had similar opinions, which really, embarrassingly perhaps, helped me to reconsider the importance of that.

Well, opinions and ideas should be evaluated on their own merit. I'm not going to change what I think because someone who I disagree with on other things happens to share one belief. It's annoying when you're grouped together with some doofus conservatard , but it would be a bit intellectually weak to let that affect you. And I agree we should all be more open to interrogating our biases. Unfortunately I think one of the biggest biases out there now is the exact type of social/peer pressure you hint at and the fear of becoming a pariah.

 

[Vastness]

Well, opinions and ideas should be evaluated on their own merit. I'm not going to change what I think because someone who I disagree with on other things happens to share one belief. It's annoying when you're grouped together with some doofus conservatard , but it would be a bit intellectually weak to let that affect you.

True, yeah. I mean it wasn't like the only thing for me, maybe it was a part of it, in that tbh I probably wouldn't even have thought about that 1 particular issue that always comes up if it wasn't for Joe Rogan, lol, so after he started losing the plot somehow and going full vaccine-denial MAGAtard, I did vaguely wonder what other stupid shit he might've snuck in. But I've never met a single actual woman who thinks it's an important issue (that trans women be kept out of women's sports), or is particularly bothered by the idea of "(biological) women's spaces being invaded" and all that. Granted, I don't actually know any elite female athletes personally, and probably I'm self-selecting for a somewhat "woke" crowd. But, with the exception of JK Rowling - who I did also once think was somewhat hard done by, and that people were misinterpreting her words, etc - the people with the strongest opinions about this all appeared to be (biological) men, both publicly and in my personal life. Which also seems kinda odd for an issue that only really affects women (of all kinds).

So at this point I'm kinda thinking on the one hand it just doesn't seem to be very important at all, sports are just games anyway despite all the pomp and hype around them, and while I have some much weaker thoughts about it in that, essentially, male puberty almost certainly does confer permanent biological advantages, meaning there are potentially going to be some edge cases with making all sports all inclusive where some athletes have potentially "unfair" advantages... but given that it just isn't happening that men having attained close to their genetic limit as men are transitioning just to win medals and dominate women's sports en-masse (to the best of my knowledge), and I don't see any reason to think it would happen, these isolated incidents of individuals competing "unfairly" seem to be just statistical noise against a vast amount of genetic variations which are already hard to most "fairly" segregate... so really I think whether trans women can compete in women's sports should be assessed on a case by case basis, as unsatisfactory as that might sound, to some.

 

[arrall]

what are you doing tonight?

On Monday night, I was at an event at a local dive bar
Good to see you back on here, I missed you

 

[Zopiclone bandit]

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 being 100% Honest here with you & I ask my question & also make my statement in all good faith & BL knows me, I come across as "Rude" to say the least, I am BLUNT in what I say so people can't mistake what I am getting at. I NEVER intend to show Disrespect to people in what I say, I am English Working Class from a area famous for taking no shit in the way we speak so now that is clear folks..............

Owkay here goes.......

You say you are a Woman but you don't have a Cervix, if I took your DNA you would show as male, I am fully aware some people are born hermaphrodite which is a whole other thing but if you & I were both naked we would both have a penis, Prostate etc but Women don't have these things. How do you balance this in your mind?

I find "Trans" people to have a kind of Mental issue with their Ego & for some reason their perception of TRUTH has gone wrong, I don't look in the mirror any day & think I am a Dog, Cat, Lion, Zebra etc & I sure don't think I am Woman, as you said in a post "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." which to me is 100% PROJECTED EGO.

You must feel ok to wear a dress, make up, project yourself in Society as a Female / Woman, if this is right would you ever go to India, cover your body 100% each day in Human ash freshly collected from the open cremation ground & walk around naked for 8 years?
Would you ever sit naked, also covered in human ash upon a fresh corpse all night & do deep meditation upon who / what you actually are?

 

[Allylbenzene]

But I've never met a single actual woman who thinks it's an important issue (that trans women be kept out of women's sports), or is particularly bothered by the idea of "(biological) women's spaces being invaded" and all that. Granted, I don't actually know any elite female athletes personally, and probably I'm self-selecting for a somewhat "woke" crowd.

Just an observation - so you don't know any biological female athletes who'd be directly affected by competing with a biological male, nor do you know any mothers who'd rather their young daughter didn't have to share a changing room with a biological male, and your somewhat "woke" crowd haven't voiced any opinions that support respecting womens-only spaces/sports.

I suspect there is a certain bias here.

 

[Vastness]

Well yeah I am biased, do you know any personally? I'm sure they exist don't get me wrong. Christ I've derailed things into this tiresome culture war BS myself, with my navel gazing rambling.

What do you want trans people to do, just not use public changing rooms? What about the fathers who'd rather their young sons didn't have to share a changing room with a trans woman? Are they supposed to check each changing room in turn to see if anyone's in there who's gonna have a problem? I mean I've read that people have actually done this - which obviously is very fucking sad - like what is it you want to happen here, trans people to just not go outside?

 

[Allylbenzene]

Well yeah I am biased, do you know any personally?

I don't need to know any personally to recognise & respect women's rights. Tbf I do acknowledge that this stuff is part of a wider manufactured social engineering strategy which afflicts many impressionable children.

 

[Vastness]

LOL, kinda funny you'd accuse me of bias based on not knowing any women personally who care about this shit, when by your own admission you don't either. You're not recognizing and respecting women's rights if you've never asked actually asked a woman if they feel like they need protection from trans people. I think you do need to personally know some women who actually think they need the kind of protection that you seem to think they need, otherwise you're not protecting them and you're not respecting them, you're just using their rights to justify your own prejudices.